Thanking and remembering our service men and women.

wallet replacement

 A few months ago fellow friend/quilter/blogger Coral and I made a trade.  She gave me a beautiful cut of painterly looking fabric in return for a case I had made.  I immediately started this wallet with the fabric and finally got around to finishing it.

This is similar to the design my friend Sharon and I had made before, only this time I tweaked it again slightly for my needs.

There are lots of interior pockets and slots held together with accordian sides.

An outside pocket for extra stuff and all of the shoppers cards that can really clog up a wallet.

Oh, and making a wallet or something small is great quilting practice if you are just learning.  You can work on a small quilt sandwich which is much easier to manipulate than something large and important.  Then when you are done, just cut it up to make your smaller item.

You can see where this piece was quilted before assembly by looking inside the pocket.

A little bling and

and a magnet complete the project.

simply bright and shiny

With nothing but rain, clouds and fog in the forecast til next week; I went to work on brightening things up and made some shiny, new earings!

These beads are vintage and I remember feeling a little guilty about spending so much on them.

(...i mean it wasn't a fortune, just more than I usually like to spend on hobby beads...) 

The round beads are cool, they change color depending on how the light reflects. So one minute they can be filled with amber, pink and orange and the next blues.

In this pair below, you can see one is reflecting the pinks and the other blues.

Nothing vintage here just simple faceted rondelles in colors I love.

thanks for visiting!

:)

weathered treasures

Today is the Fiberactions quilt reveal day, our challenge theme was embellishment.

I went in a totally different direction than I normally do.  In fact this is my second piece because I decided my original piece was too similar to work I usually produce.  I love to embellish with fancy threads, beads and lots of bling.

This time I used my treasure box of finds.

 

There are a lot of fun things stitched on this quilt. I won't go into all the details of the pieces but most have a little history.

The fabric was taken from a vintage Christening gown.  I don't know anything about the gown, but my guess is, several babies wore this gown over many years. Above you can see some of the tiny patches of hand stitching, I left them as is and didn't cover or hide them for the most part. 

To make my embellishment piece even more special, I used vintage threads to attach the items. My friend Sharon gave me a vintage sewing box awhile ago and I used the variety of threads from inside.

Above is the Christening gown before I cut it apart. I still have a lot of the fabric left for something else.  Below you can see the lace that is in pretty good condition, comparatively.

Below you can see the hand-stitched pleats. I like to think; who ever put those pleats into the gown would have been happy to know that her hard work lives on with my weathered treasures.

Head on over to the Fiberactions blog and you will be sure to find a lot of colorful eye candy and bling!

just for fun. . .

. . . yesterday we made the trip to Syracuse to pick up my son from school already. 

This year flew!

  It was rainy, cold and drizzly in MA but when we got further west it turned out to be a beautiful day and I was wishing I had brought a camera.  Then I remembered my phone has a cool camera feature,

so when I wasn't driving I played around with it.  I took some pix out the window of the beautiful landscape and then of campus when we got there.   

weathered treasures

and you'll have to come back and see what this is all about.

a peak . . .

. . . at a finished project intended for a book.

. . .of a Fiberaction piece

 (the reveal is May 15th and there is still much to do)

. . .  of a sketchbook page.

(i think i'm going to transfer this to silk and try painting it, here i've used colored pencils)

. . . a pencil sketch . . .

. . . and then painted to try with Lesley Riley's Transfer Artist Paper.

. . . and that's just a peak at some of the stuff going on here.