Just finished taking a workshop yesterday and today with Lyric Kinard
The Surface Design Sampler was presented by the Cotton Patch Quilt Guild in Athens. Organized by Deb Henderson, the workshop was a complete tour of pretty much any kind of technique that can be used to enhance and embellish a piece of fabric. The group was an great mix of people with all kinds do unique skills with things fiber and paint and the like.
Lyric is a gifted and very experienced fiber artist. Her knowledge and experience and her artistic view is a true talent. She communicates her instruction with clarity and thoroughness.
The class was enjoyable and I learned lots of new tricks and have a better understanding of some of the other techniques I have done before.
More samples of the work that I started in the class will follow.

After the class in Athens ended I drove to the FFA/FHA Campground in Covington where my CES Quilt Guild is having a retreat. I got there while they were eating dinner. When I walked in it reminded me of "Cheers" when Norm would walk into the bar. All of the ladies shouted my name and started clapping. There were about a hundred high school music students eating in the dinning hall and they all started clapping. I had to take a bow. What a reception!

So, I'm here until sometime tomorrow and will leave in time to get home and see the end of the Superbowl I hope.

After I get back home I will need to schedule a trip to Atlanta Sewing Center. On my way out of town to Athens I stopped there to drop off my new Bernina to have it serviced. The machine keeps telling me that the upper thread is broken when you can see as plain as day that it is still going through the needle. I was quilting a machine on my frame and had to take the machine off of the frame to get it looked at.

At Atlanta Sewing I also took time to look at their fabric for a piece to use as the border on a piece that I did in a Melinda Bula workshop in October. Well, I found the fabric I needed for the border and a couple of other piece I liked, bought them and went to Athens. That night when I started unpacking I couldn't find my piece. I had left it at the Sewing Center. When I called then the next day they told be that they had found it and that  they would hold it for me until I could come by and pick it up. That is the piece I planned to finish this weekend at Retreat. Better luck next time.

I'm having fun.

Quiltin' Jenny has been reorganizing her stash using collector comic book inserts.

Two weeks ago I ordered a case of 100 of these and have been doing the same thing. She and I are friends and both are members of the WannaBees but we have not talked about what we are doing in our studio. I read on her blog that she is using these inserts

Another friend from Fiber Art Fusion, Lynn R. had told me about using the inserts as opposed to the plastic sheets sold by Polar Fleece. In Houston last November I ordered 100 of the Polar Fleece organizers and paid about $60 for them. These comic book inserts were $50 for 1000  but I did pay $30 shipping. Quiltin' Jenny found the same inserts at a local comic book store and save the cost of shipping.

 

So far I have blown through 300 and still have fabric in drawers and storage bins.I'll probably use about 500 if I take all of the fabric out. I also have not arranged the fabric by color. I've just been putting it on a shelf just to get things off of the floor. For the first time in months I can see the floor in my studio. I still have a lot of organizing to do to get everything in place. Pretty soon I might be able to use the space as I envision it. It sure looks better.

Wes Settles in at Home

Big Brother Owen welcomes his Little Brother Wes home from the hospital as they pose for the paparazzi of family photographers.

All was calm, all was bright and then...

 the devil made him do it and Owen could no longer stand to pose for pictures the way the old folks wanted him to.
He starts clowning and before you know it...

Little Brother looses his pacifier and starts to scream.

Today, Owen decided that Wes needed the protection of a few stuffed animals, so he proceeded to surround him. If you look closely you can see a little head underneath all of those animals.

It's really important for Owen to play the roll of the Big Brother right now. He loves it most of the time.

Christmas Wishes (late as usual)

Just wanted to send everyone a Christmas wish.

Mine was great and today was the cherry on top. My daughter gave me another grandson.

Wesley Hollingsworth Parker was born at 12:42pm weighing 7 lbs. 7 oz. and measuring 19.5 inches long.  He is healthy and the delivery was easy and uneventful. Mother and baby are doing fine. Wes was cooing like a dove and was sent to have some added attention to help clear his breathing but it was just a safety thing.

Owen is a proud big brother and is excited about getting his new brother home. At least that's his story for now.

They will be going home on Friday which is Erin's birthday. What a gift!

Ginger and John and Vickie, Chaz's mom are here for another week or more. We are having great fun.

Exploring and Curiosity

Yesterday was spent finishing some details in the bathroom and clearing a path for our guests who are coming this weekend. I have been rounding up pieces of art to enhance my remo and stocking the toilet paper stash just to make sure I'm ready.

One of the things I moved got me started thinking. You know that can sometimes be dangerous.

When Jackie and I got married a friend that I taught with gave us two chairs out of the restaurant that her husband had recently closed. These bentwood chairs were very beautiful in design. They were bentwood barrel chairs. In the early 90s I recovered the seats with a blue-green decorator fabric.

Out of curiosity I decided to look for information about them on the internet so I did an Image search using Google. I find that it is easier to find exactly what I'm looking for if I can find a visual image that is posted on a website. That usually give me pretty accurate results. I typed in "bentwood barrel chair".

Right there on the first page was a photo of two chairs exactly like mine as far as design but a different color. I have painted the rails on mine an ivory color as an accent. The ones listed on the internet were stained brown over the whole surface.

here is the link to the site that I found.

The chairs were made in Polland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and a few other Eastern European countries starting in 1869 by Jacob and Josef Kuhn and John Mundus using a technique for bending wood that was invented by Michael Thonet. In 1869 Thonet gave up his fight for the patent on the bentwood process and Jacob and Josef Kuhn took the patent and joined John Mundus and together they manufactured bentwood furniture until 1924. Sometime later Thonet became a part of the company which still manufactures furniture today. Their makers mark is stamped on the rim of their chairs as well as a paper labe attached to the seat bottom.

This piqued my interest and so as the hands on the clock creep toward 1am, I go back to the basement to investigate.

There, underneath the edges of the fabric I had stapled into place when I recovered the seats was a label like the one I had found images of on the internet.

Are mine worth that much money? Probably not, but I don't care. I am going to keep them. I'm just glad that I didn't take them to Goodwill.

Party Week

This has been a week of parties and eating. It's been fun but this crazy rush of eating frenzies has got to end.

The week started with my big event of the year for CES. I was responsible for coordinating the meal, decorating and serving about 70 quilters. Each member who attended brought something to add to the meal. We did a "Stone Soup" and Salad Bar. I spent most of the day on Sunday and Monday preping and getting the soup stock ready. On Monday I made an edible arrangement of red, yellow, orange and green peppers, leeks, cucumbers and onions (pictured above). Erin came over both days and helped. She washed spun all of the greens for the salad bar. We prepared iceberg lettuce, red lettuce, romaine, and spinach.

To tie in with the Challenge Quilts that we had made the previous month, I chose to call the party "Celebration of the Greens". For the decorations I decided to use my collection of birdhouses. I also whitewashed an old gate that I had stored in my basement. That became a backdrop for gardening things. I collected small potted plants, gardening tools, a wreath made from vines, gardening gloves, pine straw and potting soil along with some gourds and a vine basket. It made a nice vignette at the entrance for the food serving area.

As the ingredients came together we made a pretty good soup. Our biggest problem was trying to get it hot in the crock pots we were using to serve the soup. By the time all of the ingredients were added the soup was a little "fresh" as my mother used to say (meaning, it needed more seasoning). The Salad Bar was very successful and we ran out of some of the greens.

After two rigorous days of being on my feet I was feeling the pain. On Monday I had scheduled a follow-up appointment for Tuesday morning with my podiatrist to check on my plantar fasciitis. In the mean time I had developed an ingrown toenail. So early Tuesday morning I was sitting on a surgical chair having surgery on my toe.

Tuesday night I was sewing labels on blankets at church. We made 100 blankets that will be delivered to Pine Street on Saturday by a group from our church. We also got two new sergers and I helped set one up and get it threaded.

Wednesday I spent most of the day at the Alpharetta Adult Activity Center working with a group of quilters who are making the Raffle Quilt for our CES guild. We had about a dozen folks and about half of them were sewing while the rest of us were pressing and cutting and whatever else we could do since I am not good at paper-piecing.

I took some of the fabric home so that I could practice my paper-piecing in the privacy of my sewing room. I succeeded in completing one block on Wednesday and another on Thursday. Not that it took that long. The first one took a little over an hour and the second one took about 40 minutes. At least I was successful this time.

Thursday the WannaBees had our third annual Holiday Brunch at P. F. Chang. We had a great time getting caught up on the latest with everybody and we enjoyed a great lunch.

After lunch I made a trip to Intown Quilter to use a Groupon that I bought several months ago. It was to expired at the end of December so I needed to use it or loose it. I found a few more fabrics that I can use in the quilt I am making for my grandson who is due in a couple of weeks.

Thursday night I attended the Alpharetta Historical Society Holiday Party. Another feast!

Friday morning was the annual Holiday Party for East Cobb Quilt Guild. We had our usual meeting with the addition of installation of new officers and some other business and then Show and Tell and Golden Scissors and finally another feast!

Friday night I met my friends Ruthie and Alan at Ichiban for dinner. We looked a pictures of their new grandson Charlie and I showed them the latest pictures I had of Owen and Jonas. Again, another feast!

Today I went to a funeral for Sarah Letchas, the mother of Arthur who is the mayor of Alpharetta and also a member of my Sunday School class. She went to have some stents put in and died either prior to, or during surgery. It was a real shock.

Whew! What a week but it's been fun and filling. I have got to get myself settled on a regular diet in order to control my diabetes. At least the blood glucose number tonight was better than it has been since I started checking it. That's amazing after this week of feasts.

Over the past week when I wasn't partying I was working on some pieces to use for my exchange with other Fiber Art Fusion members at our party on Tuesday night. The photos you see here are what I have finished and I will choose one for my exchange. These are made from some pieces of quilted fabric that I did to practice my quilting designs. They were dyed, painted, and stitched.

Sad Weekend But Thankful

In my opinion, one of the most tragic things that can happen to someone is to loose a child.

The past few days in our family have been filled with emotion due to that very tragic event in our lives.

My son Biff and his wife Kate were planning for the delivery of their second child by C-section tomorrow, December first. The day before Thanksgiving Kate went to her OBGYN for a routine checkup. The routine became far more unreal as she was examined and the nurse listened for a heartbeat. After a few moments of curiosity the reaction became more frantic. There was silence where there had once been a steady heartbeat of an embryo of a little boy. Nameless at the time the embryo had ceased his existence.

Kate's call went out to Biff who was working over half an hour away. He quickly made his way to the doctor's office not knowing the fate that awaited. Kate's next call went out to a very close friend who was also pregnant and due a couple of weeks later than Kate. She was sitting in the waiting room of the same office for her appointment to see the doctor. She was able to stay with Kate until Biff arrived.

Kate also called Erin and Erin called me to report the shocking news. Now, if you know Erin you know that she is an emotional person. This emotional propensity is magnified by the fact that she is also pregnant and due to deliver her baby at the end of December.

Later Wednesday the doctors did a C-section to deliver Theodore Mulhollan.

After talking with Biff several time over the next few hours he and I decided that I needed to go to Durham. We decided that it would be best for me to wait for them to get home and that I would go on Saturday.

Jackie's sister, Ginger, is in Durham for a few weeks visiting her new grandson Luke. Her husband John had just arrived to spend Thanksgiving with them. She and her family visited Biff and Kate on Saturday afternoon and took dinner to them. I arrived a little before eight o'clock.

Their emotions were very calm. Kate had written on Facebook about how she had focused on how thankful she was and not so much on what she had lost. They seemed to be in a pretty good place.

The greatest realization to me was that this process is one where there are no directions. You just have to take it as it comes and follow you heart. I think that they were doing a pretty good job of doing that. Everyone has their own way of dealing with something like this and there are no right and wrong ways to work through it. You have to take you time and make your decisions as you go.

I know that this will be with them the rest of their lives and there will be some very dark days, but I hope that the we will be able to find peace and comfort as we go.

One of the little bits of comfort we found on Thursday was with our longtime friends Don and Eileen and their girls and their families. We have been friends since we moved to Atlanta in 1973. For years when I kids were growing up we would have monthly dinners with their family and we have shared many things as friends and family. We established many traditions which our children now carry on with their children. It's a beautiful thing.

In addition to our traditional activities on Thanksgiving we were also able to seek advice from Eileen and Katie who both have had experience with loosing a child. Eileen delivered a stillborn baby prior to having her three girls. Kate gave birth to a son who survived for a couple of months after his birth. This gives them a viewpoint that helps to offer us comfort.

One of the moments that we are grateful for was offered by Katie. We were standing by their car as they were leaving and we were all sobbing when Katie said, "Well, we all know that Miss Jackie was there to give him a big hug when he arrived in heaven. You know that was probably the first time that she was someplace early." She was known for being late.

As I go through each day I will be thinking about Biff and Kate and their son Jonas. I hope that they can find peace in living and that they will continue to be very thankful for the life they have together.