And Away I Go!

I made a brand new bag for the Fall/Winter season:

I loved my Amy Butler Dorothy Bag that I made last Spring. I used it all summer long, and found the size to be very adequate: not too big to lose everything in, and yet large enough to hold what I really needed! I've quilted it, a la Emily Parsons, and this time around I added some inner pockets to corral my cell phone, my Palm, and a pen and pencil:

So, I'll let you know how good a travelling companion it is on my little trip north!



A few last pics of my patio garden before I head for the shower. My little lettuce patch:

C brought home 3 broccoli sets a couple of weeks ago (2 are in the foreground) and last Thursday he gifted me with 4 brussels sprouts sets (two are in the background):

The Cilantro is coming along famously:

And here's the Arugula:

And the little guy that started it all, my volunteer tomato plant:

I hope that those babies will be ripe by the time I get home next week!

Here's a Gerber Daisy just about ready to bloom. I think it may be gone by when I get back home. Hope C will remember to water it!!

Off to the shower!!

PEACE

Dinner on the Docks

There is so much to do in our little town of Gainesville, Georgia! Between theater, symphony, high school sports, the Nature Science Center, church activities, art at the Quinlan Art Center and at both Brenau University and Gainesville State College, and the lake (Lanier), one could be busy every minute for the rest of one's life, if one so chose!! Saturday night was the Lake Lanier Rowing Club's Taste of Gainesville on the Docks. The docks are the site of the 1996 Olympics Rowing Venue, and we are so fortunate to have them! Our friend Jay is president of the rowing club, so he reserved 4 tables for those in our church who wanted to sit together. We have such fun with this crowd!!! Restaurants from all around the area came and served bites of food off of their menus........mighty tasty, indeed. It was a BYOB affair, a sport in which Episcopalians excel!

As you can see, it was a beautiful evening:


I took this picture just looking down our table, at the hundreds of folks there to enjoy the food and fellowship:
There's Jay on the left, enjoying a joke with Sandra, and Ron, our church Youth Director Extraordinaire on the right. He is such a character and so terrific with our young adults.

Each reserved table comes equipped with a lovely mosaic candle holder (and candle) and a flower arrangement. Isn't ours gorgeous!! (There's Durwood peaking through the lilies!)

I have a great love of sunflowers and was intrigued by this arrangement across the way:

There was live music and a beautiful moon rising over the lake:

One last shot of the moon over the little tower where they called the rowing events (I'm sure there's a name for it, but I'm not a rower, so I don't know it).

I'm leaving tomorrow to take five days of Rozome Classes at ProChem with Betsy Sterling Benjamin. I can hardly wait!!!! I'm planning to take both my laptop and my camera (and my cable AND extra batteries), so I hope to share some of the week with you guys.

Until then..........

PEACE

Bead It!

I was reading Karen's blog the other day and was so inspired by her lovely fabric beads, that I just had to try making some myself! Since Karen seemed to feel that the process was pretty self-explanatory and she lives in the UK and I live in the US and I wasn't about to pick up the phone and give her a call, I googled fabric bead making and came across this site. It seemed fairly easy, so while I half-watched a Braves game (this was Thursday night, and they won), I made these beads:

Sorry, the pics are once again a bit blurry, but you get the general idea.

I think they're pretty cool and will use them on a lot of things!

Our little church dinner party was a lot of fun last night. Becky, one of our guests, brought along a beautiful silk outfit which had been painted for her by Peggy Juve waaaay back in 1981. It was such a treat to see! I'm trying to find out more about Ms. Juve now...it seems that she lives on Whidby Island, Washington. Anybody know anymore about her? Her work is so impressive!! Anyway, here's the pineapple upside down cake with tart cherries that I made for dessert:





The recipe came out of Cooking Light, so you know it couldn't have been too terribly decadent! (How many points, Gerrie?)

Now that the entertaining is over with, I'm off to play in the studio! I have several Christmas orders to fill, so need to get busy! We are going to A Taste of Gainesville on the Docks tonight (at the 1996 Olympics Rowing Venue), and I hope to bring along my camera and get some shots.

Have a great day!!

PEACE

What's Cookin'

Here are some of the results of my screen printing session on Tuesday afternoon before we headed off to the Braves' game. I really like this one, as it reminds me of our time on Squam Lake with both the blue lake and the blue sky coming through the trees:

The next two pieces remind me of aspens in the fall, or perhaps the nasty summer forest fires around Sisters and Camp Sherman, Oregon.

All of the above pieces resulted from several sessions of dyeing, overdyeing, discharging, and then finally screenprinting. I am very pleased with my results and can't wait to make something out of them.

I love sleeping in these little silk camisoles that Dharma often offers up for sale. They are so comfy. So I decided to dye up just one more to add to my collection. Do you think they'd sell on my web site?

Here is a silk charmeuse scarf that I attempted a few complex cloth techniques on. The background fabric is really a lot darker than it appears here - more of an olive/khaki color. The character is Chinese red, not the fucshia that appears below.

We are hosting our church Foyers group here tomorrow night, so I've gotten busy making some lamb curry, which is one of my favorite dishes. Sorry about this blurred photo, but here's the beginning of the curry......can't you just smell the garlic, onions, celery and peppers sauteeing?



I've added the apples, which I find to be such a pleasant surprise when you come across them in your curry!



And here's the finished product with the lamb and plumped-up raisins visible:

I'll let the flavors in my concoction meld for 24 hours then thicken it up a bit and serve it over some yummy jasmine brown rice. MMMMMMMM!

PEACE

GOOD Morning!

Ahhhhhhhhhh, breathe in, breathe out: cool, clear, very fresh air indeed! It's a lovely 57 degrees here this morning....and as you can plainly see, it's a grand new day!

The Canada Geese have come to say good morning.......and the reflection of the trees across the lake is almost perfect. It's wonderful to be alive!

My volunteer tomato plant is thriving in its adopted home:

I think it must be a grape/pear tomoato:

And here's my beautiful basil, hoping to accompany some tomatoes and mozzarella somewhere:

Aurugula anyone?

I had just a bit of "studio time" yesterday (to do some screenprinting - maybe pictures tonight) before we headed out to the Braves/Marlins game. It was our last game of the season - not the Braves' last game, but ours to attend. Our Rector Doug and his wife Judi went along and we had a great time. C caught a ball in batting practice and gave it to Doug, since today is his birthday. Happy Birthday Doug!!!! And then the Air Force paratroopers landed on the field in the pregame festivities:

It was a beautiful night for a ballgame, and I hate to see the season coming to a close. However, our Braves did beat the Marlins 4-3, so it was fun for the locals!!

PEACE

Paris Thief

OK, the title of this post has nothing to do with the beginning of my writing, but please bear with me.

Dave, Kristin, Marley and Tucker came to visit this weekend. We were amazed to see how big Tucker had gotten in just a few weeks. Take a look:

Isn't he adorable?

The three boys had a great time playing out in the backyard, although Barker really isn't into playing with toys, as you can see here:

Tucker is all about the toys...he who dies with the most toys wins, right?




And it looks like little Tucker has won!



The duck was the big hit of the weekend......he made a rather obscene quack when squeezed, and Marley delighted in running around with it dangling from his mouth, so as to taunt his baby brother!

I have finally uploaded a lot of our pictures from our vacation on Squam to my Flick'R site, so if you go over to the Flick'r badge on the right side of the blog and click on it, you can then click on "Your photos" and then on "Squam 07" and you'll get an entire slide show of our week in paridise. Hope you enjoy it.





This was sent to me by my good friend Barbara, and I thought it might give you a chuckle:

Paris Thief

A thief in Paris planned to steal some paintings from the Louvre.

After careful planning, he got past security, stole the paintings and made it safely to his van. However, he was captured only two blocks away when his van ran out of gas. When asked how he could mastermind such a crime and to make such an obvious error, he replied, "Monsieur, that is the reason I stole the paintings. I had no Monet to buy Degas to make the Van Gogh."

(and you thought I didn't have De Gaulle to send this on to someone else.) Well, I figure I have nothing Toulouse!

PEACE

The View from here

...or, what I'm looking at these days, or perhaps, what is on my nightstand:





The New Yorker. This cartoon was in a recent issue and gave both of us a chuckle, since Barker is a great lover of tummy rubs:

This was the view from my sewing machine at 7:30 this morning:

With such a distraction, who can sew?

I broke down and bought Lesley Riley's "Quilted Memories" a few weeks ago:

What a great book! Lesley has helped me a great deal with image transfers on fiber. I love the book and was delighted to see pieces by several folks that I know, including my friend Rayna Gilman, and Jan Girod from Fiber On a Whim.





I'm also drooling and daydreaming over the wonderful fiber art in these little gems:











And then for a little late night reading, just to get the creative thoughts out of my head and let me rest a bit, there's Somerset Maugham. C's book club read "The Painted Veil" this summer, so I read it and we both watched the movie. Then I was hooked. So now I've bought just about all of his works and am slowly but surely enjoying each and every word! What a treasure he is!







I couldn't resist tucking this one last picture in:

I'm sure that my cousin Eva, in Sweden, will recognize these photos that I've transfered, since she sent them to me. They are both of my mother but curiously enough, I had never seen them before Eva sent them to me, in the form of a lovely book which she had created. You see, my grandmother had sent the photos back to Sweden years ago so that her parents and siblings could see their neice and nephew, and then they got tucked away in my cousin Sune's attic. When Eva was helping clean it out, there they were! I'm so glad that she found them!! The top picture is one of my Mom from school, and the one on the lower left was taken when she was much younger, with her mother, father and brother (he is pretty much cropped out of this picture). So, you can see just a tease of my journal quilt!

What are you reading these days?

PEACE

Rainy Days

It's been so long since we've had a good old rainy day that I don't quite know how to react or what to do!! So I'm lounging at the computer but will get my act together here shortly!

I haven't blogged for a few days because there hasn't been too much to blog about, and I've been consumed by finishing up my Journal Quilt, which cannot be photographed until after the whole collection of jqs have been aired in Houston. So, you'll just have to wait. It was so therapeutic for me, and I was very pleased with the end product.

We saw this bumper sticker in Atlanta the other day and it gave us a chuckle:




Here's a cute pic of my great nephew Kosta Kim, taken by his GrandMa Molly:

Am I really old enought to have a Great Nephew? I remember my Great Aunts and Uncles, and they seemed VERY OLD to me!! I have yet to meet this young gentleman, but can't wait! Isn't he adorable?!! And how nice just to plop down on a rug and take a nap!

You may recall the "complex cloth" table runner I made a few weeks ago. Well, I didn't have time or the presence of mind to also make napkins, so I got busy this week and did that. It was so much fun. I spent about 8 hours in my little dyeing studio, playing around with complex cloth and a few other projects! What could be finer? So here are a couple of pictures of the napkins:

The very nicest part, was that I knew what I wanted to do in my head, and was actually able to produce it on fabric with dyes. That doesn't happen too terribly often for me! Does it for you?

This is a piece of charmeuse that I was playing around with, using some thickened dyes. I love the watery effect:

So that's it for today. Hope you have a great weekend!!

PEACE

Emmaus House

Today I tagged along with our church's Outreach Committee on a trip to visit Emmaus House in the inner city of Atlanta. Emmaus House, a ministry of the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta, was founded in the mid-sixties, and provides "hope and hospitality" for those in this neighborhood. I was a member of our outreach committe for years but recently retired. C was its chairman for several years, but is now just a veteran member, who loves anything to do with community outreach. Several years ago Claiborne Jones, the Vicar and Director of Emmaus House, spoke at our Wednesday night program, and I have been interested in taking part in their programs ever since. They offer so much to both the elderly and the youth. I want to get plugged in, but just don't know where!

Here's their beautiful sign along the corner of Hank Aaron Drive and Haygood Street........just a few blocks from Turner Field.

Stephanie Coble, their Assistant for Volunteers and Facilities, explained to us that their wall along the sidewalk used to be covered with graffitti, so they redid it with painted blocks and handprints of the kids who frequent Emmaus House. Isn't it lovely!



I was quite taken by this cross at the entrance to one of the five buildings on their campus:


Here's a closeup:

That pretty much says it all, doesn't it?!!

This is a beautiful tapestry in their chapel:

Another beautiful piece in their chapel:

Here we all are outside of the house:

With all of that touring around at Emmaus House, we'd worked up an appetite, so it was pretty much unanimous when somebody (was it Faye or C?) who suggested we drop by the Varsity for lunch:

YUMMMM:

That was my lunch - plus a diet coke! (Fortunately I couldnt' quite get through the second slaw dog!)

Here's what my friend Durwood had:

PEACE