French students create stop-motion video

I love stop-motion!

Spring Garden Tour – here we come!

Our west courtyard has been selected to be a “contributing property” for our neighborhood association’s Spring Garden Tour!  Whoo-hoo!  Too fun!  I just LOVE going on garden tours, so it is great fun to have created something that others will enjoy and perhaps be inspired by.

Here’s a “Before” photo":

And “After” – voila!  (Click to enlarge.)

The Tour is a fundraiser for the Jefferson Park Neighborhood Historic Designation Fund.  Our neighborhood has been nominated for historic status – which, if we get it, will mean a permanent reduction of approximately 50% in our property taxes!  We need to raise $38,000 to pay our half of the consultants’ fee – the consultant who is walking us through the lengthy legal process of nomination.  We’ve raised $10,000 so far!

Luckily, the event is not until April 18, so there is more time for our new plantings to fill in.

The other fun news is that I will also be selling my fabric art here during the Garden Tour and donating 50% of the proceeds to the Historic Designation Fund.  Here’s a little preview… (yet to be embroidered and quilted AND named):

Dining room at dusk, pre-solstice

Then in the morn…

Enchanted Studio: Updated Photos

Giant Quilt Commission DONE!! Whoo-hoo!

Click to enlarge any photos.

Drum roll, pleeze!!  Here, my faithful readers is the completely finished quilt commissioned by my dear friends in Amsterdam. It is a huge piece of work, clocking in at about 100 inches by 113 inches – slightly larger than a California King.  It is really quite stunning, (if I do say so myself!), AND they just love it.

It has been raining lately and it is still too wet to lay it out for proper photo-taking, so here are a few close-ups of the stunning machine quilting by Mary Vaneecke. We chose a gorgeous variegated blue thread.  Because of the strong geometry and symmetry, I chose a delicious meandering swirl pantograph.

If you want to see some of the progress photos I took as I was making this baby, click here, here and here.  And here is what the entire quilt front looks like, pieced but not yet quilted. Oh, and here is what the back looks like.

Enchanted Studio -- on the move!

Ken and I have decided to ease our mortgage payments while socking away moolah for our big move to France with a little help from renting out a room to a tidy engineer fella.  The most likely room to rent was the one attached to the hall bath… also known as… my studio!

Inside, as always, is the silver lining!  What was the “summer living room”, aka, the Arizona Room, has now become my studio!  Click here to see what this room USED to look like. This is SUCH a yummy space – with windows on two-and-a-half sides, a big ol’ woodstove, tons of plants and three times the square footage!  Who I am to complain?  Oh! Quite the contrary!

Check out my new studio digs:

 

Here, inspired by the quilt fusing workshop I took with Laura Wasilowski, I spent the weekend fusing a select batch of batiks from my stash.  Here, with the Wonder Under release paper still attached:

 

And peeled!

In this corner (below), we lugged in the double chaise from the west courtyard deck and made a great place to snuggle up in front of the fire.  It’s too cold to enjoy the chaise outside at this time of year. 

 

As our “summer living room”, the Arizona room can get purty chilly, what with the 1950s single-pane windows.  So this winter, our woodstove is sure to get a workout.  Yes! Tucson DOES have “winter.”  The mercury has barely touched 60 degrees midday this last week (oh my!), with night-time temps flirting with the freezing mark. It is quite breezy today, 20 to 30 mph, with gusts to around 45 mph tonight. 6 to 10 inches of snow is predicted for the higher elevations tonight.  Cool El Nino rains have arrived.  In January and February, we can expect daytime highs in the 40s and 50s, nighttime lows in the 30s. Not exactly what many of you are suffering, but not exactly chaise-lounging weather either!

New quilt-in-progress: Dancing Flowers

Here’s another little fused quilt I made in Laura Wasilowski’s workshop a few weeks ago in Payson, Arizona. I still need to add the border and quilt it, but here is a progress pic:

It is 14 x 14 inches.  I used Laura’s own hand-dyed fabric, which is glorious!  This is all from one piece of one of her 58(!) colorways of gradated fabric! Yum yum!

I also used Laura’s Artfabrik hand-dyed thread to give the little flower faces some detail. Here’s a closeup:

Quilt-in-Progress: Milky Way

12 x 24 inches

I’m not sure what will come next in this little quilt, but that is the beauty part.  I love working improvisationally like this – letting the piece percolate up on my design wall until “What is next?” becomes clear.