Valerean

I finished Oliver's Halloween treat bag just under the wire last night: The face didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped, but I thought for my first big applique it was all right. Happy Halloween!

I got the treat bags done for Oliver's parents tonight. Since I'm running out of time I kept it simple: They're already stuffed with treats, as we expect them to stop in tomorrow: Oliver's bag is the last to finish, which I hope to do in the morning. Wish me luck. :)

As I won't see her until next weekend I had to get Katherine's Halloween treat bag done first so her Dad could drop it off when he sees her today. I used two fat quarters, some polka dot black and orange fabric for the handles and lining, and kept it simple: Today I've got to finish the embroidery work on Oliver's pumpkin panel and get that pieced.

I get my photos printed through Shutterfly , which is an excellent service. The prints always turn out great, I don't have to wait forever, and they're reasonably priced. They also send me really nice freebie offers that I use to make photo gifts like mugs, calendars and tote bags. All I pay is shipping on the freebies, so when they offered me a small hardcover book for free I decided to give that a test try. The web site helps you put everything together with their online maker software. While it looks complicated I was able to learn how to use it fairly fast, so that should be a ringing endorsement. My photo book arrived today: I'd like to do one for Oliver, but I don't have enough pics of the little guy yet. Really, everything is so exciting and new with the baby I forget to take pictures. So for this book I used my quilting work as a theme. As you can see the quality is excellent: Beautiful colors, too: Very happy with the whole thing. I might start

Snapped this while having lunch with my guy, the kids and the grandkid. Three generations of blondes in my crew now. :)

I'm back to work on Oliver's first Halloween bag. I drafted and cut out the shape of the pumpkin (and this is the actual color of it; in the other photos for some reason my camera makes it look yellow): I then pinned it down to the black center block, and snipped around the edges for the applique process. I know a lot of quilters can manage 1/4" seams for applique, but I gave myself about 1/2" because I'm still a novice: Turned and hand-sewed down the snipped edges: Not perfect, of course, but I think it's pretty good for my third try at applique. I then drew on the face with a Sharpie to match one of the jack-o-lanterns from the pumpkin print fabric, and quilted the pumpkin lines with holographic Sulky in copper. Now I'm starting to fill in the features with black floss: I think it's going to be cuter than I thought.

I bought this tattered old crazy quilt on eBay. It was advertised as being from 1866, which I took with a grain of salt. It's very rare to find a crazy quilt that old still intact. Also, eBay. Anyway, it arrived today: It's mostly silks, with a few satins, brocades and velvets; 100% hand-pieced and embroidered patchwork. I do believe the top is 153 years old. Nearly all the silks have shattered, the velvets are rubbed bare, and the very fine embroidery stitches are starting to come apart. Weirdly embroidery is always the last to go on crazy quilts. There are other unmistakable signs that it was made by a Victorian-era American. Here are some: Hand-painted flowers on silk linen, possibly a hankie being recycled. I also found two other hand-painted patches; a piece of silk ribbon with flowers, and the tiniest trace of flowers on some brown velvet. Sparse but inventive applique work, like this lovely little artist's palette. Several patches of tiny petite

Maria has a good post today on how to eat in a food desert, so I thought I'd post a pic of my last haul from Scott's Farm, a coop in Zellwood. I buy for me and my guy, and also send some fresh veggie care packages to my daughter in college. I like buying from our neighboring farms and growers. For one thing, it supports the local community, and independent operations like Scott's Farm. Also, the food is reasonably priced and delicious. I got all of the above for nine bucks. In the grocery store just the bag of corn would have been ten bucks. If you have a chance, definitely check our your local farmer's markets, u-picks and coops.

We survived Nestor with only a few hours of heavy rain. Lost our broadband for a bit, but that was all. My third experiment was to applique the pumpkin with the Sharpie-drawn face and then embroider over the marker with black floss (I didn't do it as densely as I will with the full-size version of the pumpkin). I then quilted the pumpkin lines, back-stitched a stem, and blanket-stitched the outside edges. As you can see I think it worked best. So for Oliver's bag I'm going to do a bigger version of the little test piece. For this I start with a piece of card stock (folded in half before I cut so both sides are symmetrical) as a template. I'll use this to cut out the solid orange fabric for the pumpkin shape, and then cut out the eyes and mouth to trace on top of the applique once it's sewn to the black center panel.

Found this while out walking the dogs yesterday: This twig came off our big oak off the porch, so it has galls, too. These are hard and a little shiny, not that you can tell from the pic. Also, tried a small reversible applique experiment last night: It's not great for a first attempt. I'd need lots of practice before I tried the technique for Oliver's Halloween bag. So, back to the drawing board. I think I might draw the face with a Sharpie and then embroider over the marker with black thread. One more experiment tonight! Also, to cheer myself up and get in the mood for November, I made this with a free image: Since I've already outlined the book (in my head, anyway) I think I'm now ready to go for NaNoWriMo.

For Oliver's first Halloween bag I want to make a jack-o-lantern center panel with the orange solid. The problem with that is that I'm not very experienced with needle-turned applique (I've only done one little heart patch on my recycled linen quilt.) I think I'll be okay with turning the pumpkin shape, but how do I get a face on it? My solution is to draw one with a Sharpie and embroider around the edges. Since I've never tried this I needed to test the fabric first to see if the ink will bleed or wash out. Here we go. Passed the bleed test. Passed the wash test. Here he is this morning after drying last night. Success!

Since big quilting projects are out until my neck problem improves I've been looking for small ways to creatively challenge myself. Yesterday I got an interesting e-mail from Stampington that offered a free .pdf with thirty inspiration prompts. They're mostly for mixed media and journaling, but I thought I could adapt them to quilting, so I printed them out and stick-glued them on card stock. There were three I didn't like, so I replaced those with three little bits I could make into something. I'm going to try to use at least one of these cards every week for a small/one-day project. I've got four Halloween treat bags to make, so I finalized my fabric choices for those. I have to experiment with a design idea tonight, and then I'll be ready to start sewing. Oliver's bag will be first, and for his I'm using the pumpkin print and orange on the far left there.

I don't do a lot of reading for pleasure anymore. I think it's a combination of time constraints + all the research reading I have to do for work + jaded attitude toward most of what's on the market at present. The people at one of the major publishers who shall remain nameless keep e-mailing me recommendations from a newsletter I can't unsubscribe from no matter how I try; likely some sort of passive-aggressive punishment for working for them for so long. The suggested reads are all uniformly dismal literati-bent selections based on what appears to be various popular Twitter tirades. Alas, no sale to me. I'm still not a Twitter fan. The indy bookseller in town -- lovely woman -- recommends titles to me every time I stop in there. She's very much literati-minded, so every book she recs tends to be horribly depressing in some way. Took me three purchases to figure this out. I still have the last novel she recommended, and I'm actually afraid to r

My guy is out pruning trees again -- a never-ending chore on our property -- and while I was walking the dogs I noticed something weird on the trimmings he'd piled up: These little hairy tan balls were all over the leaves -- dozens of them. At first I thought it was some kind of little stinging caterpillar -- we have a lot of that type around here-- but it's the wrong time of year for those to be hatching. Buck moth and other stinging caterpillars always invade us in April. I didn't like the look of them, but when it comes to Nature I've learned that appearances can be very deceiving. I took pictures and went in to check them against the internet to see what I could find out. After about an hour of searching, I discovered they are actually growths from the trees themselves called fuzzy leaf galls. They form when a non-stinging variety of wasp lays eggs on the tree, and also deposits a fluid that irritates the tree. The tree envelopes the wasp eggs in a gall,

For National Novel Writing Month I'm going to (hopefully) finish writing Twenty-One , the StarDoc universe novel I was working on back in 2015-2016 but shelved. I have about 30K written already, so there's a good chance I can get the rest of it done in November. It also feels like the right choice. Once I started working on it I'll upload my daily drafts to Google docs and post a link here so anyone who wants to follow along can.

Put the last stitches in the scrap runner last night, so this project is done: I think it came out a bit more country than Art Deco, but I'm happy with it. Time to get to work on the Halloween bags, but I'll also being tinkering on that old ripped up quilt.

While looking for a fall tablecloth I found this poor old sad thing in the back of my linen closet: I bought this quilt at a show for a couple of bucks. The cheap black fabric patches started to shred every time I washed it, so I'm glad I didn't pay much for it. I started repairing it as the splits occurred, but soon the futility of this set in, and I tucked it away. I never throw away quilts; I always try to find a way to repair or recycle them. My challenge this week will be to find a new purpose for this disaster. Stay tuned to see what I make of it.

The moment I do the adult thing and make a sensible decision, and declare my intentions, and feel very good about myself? My writer side sneaks back to that awful website and messes up everything. Okay, so I only meant to make a donation to National Novel Writing Month, because I always do, every year, and I believe the work they do with kids is important. If I'd had a NaNoWriMo in my life when I was a fledgling I might have done more with my writing than hide it from everyone. Anyway, their crappy web site design wasn't going to keep me from tossing a few pennies in the charity pot. And then, quite by accident, I saw the graphic design for this year's challenge. It's very steampunk, very cool, so of course it would be for the year I didn't participate. So I tried again to make sense of the website, and finally figured out how to change a few things. I thought I'd try to list a project, undecided and unnamed, of course, and then I was hitting publish a

I admit, the pic that follows isn't pretty: This is sugarfree candy with a name so long I don't want to type it, but here goes: Totally Tahini Cups with Coffee Cream Filling (click on the name if you want to see the recipe). I've been wanting to try this one since Maria sent me The Ultimate Vegan Cookbook , where I found it. It calls for four ingredients, no cooking and you make them in the food processor and fridge. So how good could it be? Really, really good. Rich, too, and unbelievably sweet -- just like some decadent candy you'd get at a designer shop. I put a bit too much filling in this one, which is why it looks so unattractive. With Halloween just around the corner I might try making some diet-ok treats just for me so I don't get tempted by all the sugary stuff.

My guy kindly bought me my favorite Chinese take out the other night, and my fortune cookie offered up an interesting story starter: This sounds sweet, right? Only the first thing I thought of was an old love coming back from the dead . . . . must be October. In other lovely news, my favorite hand-dyed thread artist, Lorraine from Colour Complements , is moving her business from Etsy to her own web site. Many of my favorite sellers on Etsy are leaving due to the whole "free shipping" coercion debacle, which has also soured me on the site. To show support I did a little shopping at Lorraine's web site and got in these: I love her threads and trims; you simply can't buy anything like them anywhere. Her work makes my specialty thread box look like a treasure chest: At night I'm spending just as hour working on quilting the scrap project runner, and I'm making slow progress: I'll keep quilting the runner while I try to decide on a design for t