Home again

I was lucky enough to be able to get in a quick trip to Alaska again. Unfortunately it was a "QUICK" trip. The weather was beautiful for the most part. We did get a big rainstorm daily, but it lasted only 20-30 minutes, then the rest of the day was great. June 26 was summer soltice. The longest day of the year. While the daylight on the Kenai isn't quite as long as in Fairbanks, we did have long wonderful days. This photo, is a shot of the Russian Orthodox Church in Ninilchek, a Russian fishing village. Want to guess the time of day it was shot??? It was 10:30 PM. Yep, at night, can you believe that? :-) Even harder for me to believe was that we never got back to our rooms until almost midnight the entire time we were there. I wasn't tired then, but now that I am home, I am dragging anchor (tee hee). It is going to take me a couple of days to catch up here.


A friend of my son's just bought a boat and took us our Halibut fishing in Homer. Here we are headed out of port. What a treat that was for us all. The day was perfect and we found the best fishing spot in the world. Everyone caught their limits in just 45 minutes. It was exciting fishing for sure, as soon as the first pole was in the water we had a fish "on". I of course caught the babies. I know somewhere some mom is really mad at me, but the eating is going to be great. Mike (my son) was very happy with his catch, the largest of the day.


Even found some time to act like fools. My favorite past time. Here at the Pratt Museum, Ruth and I decided to play peeping toms. And look what we found peering back at us...Tyna!!! Notice the lack of Mike who was a little horrified at how his mother and her friends were behaving. It is always a good thing when you can embarrass your children for a change! :-)





Hope you have a good week, and get a chance to "peek" in on someone special yourselves!

Wow Wow!! Is this the coolest thing you've seen? This arrived a few weeks back from my internet swap from the Quilted Table. Sue made this beautiful runner for me. I just can't say enough great things about it. I love it, love it. She also included a wonderful little goodie package with it. If you haven't participated in the Quilted Table Yahoo group swaps, you don't know what your missing. Rumor has it, in the next one we will be sending fabrics to our swap partners for them to create something out of and return to us for Halloween/Fall. What a fun idea. We will send 12 fat quarters of our favorite's, they will create with them, and send us a finished table runner. Any leftover fabrics becomes property of our partners. A great way to make something in their favorite fabrics and extend our own stashes. Win Win, isn't it! I have a link on my blog to join up, so please do so, and get in on the fun. We have a great group of gals involved in it. If it sounds like I am repeating repeating myself, I am. I am just so excited with this group, I have to spread the news! And if swapping isn't your favorite thing to do, they also offer free monthly table runner projects that you can download and make for yourself. All you do is post a photo when it's done so we can all admire each others interpretations of it. Please take a minute to look over our group and join in on the fun.

My real job has taken over my life lately, so I have not been able to finish as many projects as I hoped to. After next week, I hope to start sharing some more projects with you all.

With any luck the rain will stop too, and I can get back to my favorite fabric dyeing! The season is already 1/3 over and I have only been able to play 1 time! :-(

Happy stitchin

Autumn Sun

While most of us are getting ready for the upcomming summer, I have just finished up my Autumn Sun Jacket. I do mean just. Probably 10 minutes ago! :-)

Last month was a very busy month of classes. Two quilt classes and this jacket class. I am thrilled with the end results of this jacket. It was a bit of a beast to put together. Nothing too hard, just lots of hours of paper piecing, but WOW was it worth it.

The pattern is from QuiltFashions.com out of Albuquerque New Mexico, For those interested. They also have a great Kokopelli jacket in the same style, that looks like it is considerably faster to do.

While the summer sun will be heating us up soon, I look forward to fall, when I can wear my new project. I am going to consider this as a jump on my fall projects! Probably the first time I can actually say I got something done with time to spare!

Now about those Christmas projects. I suppose I need to get those lined up and get a plan in action too. But it is just JUNE... Hummm I have time!! :-) Maybe

Dyeing time again

A sure sign of summer, time to break out those fabric dyes. I am 3 years into this madness, and I can hardly wait for the summer sun to show, so I can get all my supplies out and start playing again. It took me 2 years to actually cut into my treasures. They were so pretty to look at. The perfect eye candy, but I made the leap last summer and, WOW, I sure do like how they work into projects.

I've been searching thru my treasure trove of patterns that I have downloaded from online, and found one that I decided I just had to dye fabrics to make. I needed 4 fabrics of each color group ranging from dark to light. The perfect dye challenge.

For this I used the same bucket for all 4 fabrics. I just added another layer of fabric and soda ash every 10 minutes. What I ended up with was 4 shades of the same color. Some had better results than others. I am thinking it is because some were purely 1 color of dye mix. The raspberry was rather surprising. The bottom layer was very dark and almost purple looking, and the very top layer was a light blue. A perfect example the different colors in that dye mix.

The colors I used for these fabrics as as follows top to bottom.
#18 dark purple
#46 brilliant blue
#6 deep orange
#4 deep yellow
#29 bright green
#65 raspberry

Dharma Trading is my favorite place to order thru. I am awaiting a delivery of some new colors this week.

Here is a little teaser for you. Just what do you think I am doing with this??

Stay tuned, I think you will be a little surprised!

Challenge Quilting

Have you ever had a piece of fabric that was soooooooo ugly, you just didn't have any idea what to do with it, yet you can't seem to part with the goofy thing????? Well, this was my issue when this piece of spotty brown stuff was "gifted" to me years ago. It was course and rough feeling, not quite like burlap, but close, and so darn ugly that it intrigued me enough to hang on to it for years. I found it again and decided that it was time to use it, or loose it. After some thought, a pattern for a sweatshirt design surfaced and the idea of the wall hanging came to life. I had all the fabrics in my "stuff" to complete this thing accept 1 piece for the overalls for baby bear. I did have a nice plaid print but it was a very bright black and white plaid, which was not going to work for this. So I put on my thinking cap. I have tea dyed things in the past, so I thru a piece of it, in tea. It tinted a little, but it wasn't dark enough, so I tried coffee dyeing. That didn't really do much for it either. I was bound and determined to not go out and buy anything for this ugly fabric thing I was about to embark on, so I opened up the cupboard and searched for something to use to make this fabric darker. Ah hah, there it was Soy Sauce. Nice and dark. I soaked this piece of tea and coffee stained fabric in soy sauce and Yahoo, it worked, the perfect shade I was looking for. Who would have guessed. Now here is where the lesson begins. Let me start with "DO NOT DO AS I DO", do as I say, and forget this stupid method. Yep it worked, but when I decided that the fastest way to get this thing dry and ready to use, was to press it. Well...

Not sure if any of you have had the opportunity to smell burning soy sauce, but it ain't one you really want to experience. Can you spell NASTY? There was a thick layer of smoke hanging over my sewing room, that burned your eyes, not to mention the horrid mess that was left on the bottom of the iron that took forever to scrap off. Even "iron off" groaned about cleaning up that mess. What was I thinking? A drive to get some fabric dye might just have been the best solution after all.

I am happy to say, that after the mess was cleaned up, I was delighted with the end results, but they will not and I do repeat, NOT be repeated ever again by me. This wall hanging is one of my very favorites though, and is one of the three that I will have hanging in the library.

Hope you all have a wonderful Memorial Day weekend. Please don't spend it trying to prove or disprove my soy sauce dyeing experience. Just trust me on this one!

:-)