Merry Christmas!

Oh come, let us adore Him.......Christ, the Lord!

Merry Christmas to you and yours.  I wish you a creative, fulfilling, wonder-ful 2012.

Jenni

5 more sleeps til Christmas!

It's December 20, and yes, I am ready for Christmas.  It doesn't look like it will be a white Christmas here : (  

I have been doing a bit of piecing, for the 2012 swaps, RRs and challenges on the CQforNewbies group.  These three pieces will be ATCs (Artist Trading Cards, 2 1/2 x 3 1/2").  It's a good challenge to work on such a small scale.

In the middle photo, the fabric in the bottom centre is silver, the camera made it look purple....

We are doing a Celebrate Life challenge.  This is the 10" block I pieced for that:

We are choosing our own themes for this challenge, and mine is Laughter.  Each week for 6 weeks we will receive a challenge stitch to incorporate into our block.  I pieced a gray and black block to represent the difficult year I have had in 2011, and I plan to do the stitches in bright colours to represent the moments of joy and laughter which sustained me during the trials.  I am looking forward to challenging myself with some new stitches and stitch combinations beginning in January.

In March there will be a Spring is Sprung theme Round Robin.  Here is my basic 12"  block for that:

I love the happy colours of this block, and I plan to put some dragonfly beads on here, as well as lots of flowers and perhaps a bird in a nest.  

Tonight is Craft and Chat at the library, so I will be taking along these blocks to baste around the design area, and embroider on the ATCs.  I need to do some repair work on my denim CQ jacket as well, and I'll bring along the Aurora Borealis quilt in case I have time to do some hand quilting on that.  I'm always amazed at how much I can get done in three hours, when I have organized my work ahead of time and I'm away from the distractions of home.

Have a wonderful day, and do something creative this week!

Project Updates

I have been working on several projects in the last few weeks, and have a few update pictures to share.  I had fun with these wool felt Christmas trees, made from a kit I bought at Joggles last fall.  They have a slightly different kit this year, but with the same great value and clear directions.  They stand about 10" high.

Here's a closeup of one of the trunks, made from paper clay and painted with acrylic paint.  The snow is made from Snowtex, and sprinkled with diamond dust glitter.  I love the way these turned out!

Progress continues on the black/bright colours quilt, which I have now titled Aurora Borealis.  I have pieced the top, added plain black borders and black buttons, and I'm now hand quilting with rainbow metallic thread.  The quilting is to add interest and movement to the quilt, so it won't be very densely quilted.  

I am also knitting and crocheting hats and scarves for the Mustard Seed in Edmonton. They will need lots of warm clothing for homeless people when the weather gets cold (and it is not unusual to have -40 Celsius temperatures in this part of Alberta in winter.  That's 40 below in Fahrenheit, also know as "bloody cold"). I'm not that accomplished at either knitting or crochet, but I have found lots of easy free patterns on about.com.  I am using yarn that was donated by a lady from the local online garage sale on Facebook.  I like the idea of knitting warm clothing for people who truly need it, using yarn that has been sitting unused in someone's basement.  I may get some small scrap quilts done for the Mustard Seed as well.  I have several "crumb" quilts on the go, made from my smallest scraps and mostly hand pieced.  They are randomly pieced, no pattern, and a great way to use the bits that are usually thrown away.  

I'm off now to make some broccoli and cheese soup for dinner, and I hope to get some more quilting done on the Aurora Borealis project.  So nice to have a warm quilt on my lap as I stitch!

Orange RR Block

Yesterday, I received Toni's Round Robin block.  Here's the "naked" block:

The silky butterfly fabric in the bottom left corner was coming away from the seam, and was beginning to fray.  So the first order of business was to secure the fabric with clear thread.  Later I covered this seam with hand-dyed braid and added a few beads.

This is the block after my work:

And here are a few closeups:

Feather stitch with seed beads.

A small patch on one edge got a simple running stitch variation.

Three shades of orange embroidery floss - cretan stitch, cross stitch, french knots.

This block doesn't need to be mailed out until January, so I am way ahead of the game on this!  But I better get back to those wool felt Christmas trees......

Fun website - check it out!

I spent a bit of time today playing with wordle.net   It's a really fun website that takes the text you enter and creates word clouds.  You can then customize the word art by changing the colours (look up hex colors in Google to find a chart of the hexadecimal colour codes - I found one I like at http://www.december.com/html/spec/color.html), layout, font, etc.

To give you an idea what these word clouds look like, here is the first one I created.  I entered the URL of this blog, and it made a wordle of all the words on the blog.  The more often the word is used, the bigger that word appears.

And here's a screenshot of one where I changed the colours and layout, and removed some of the words.

I think this web tool could have lots of applications for mixed media art.  I'd love to hear how YOU would use these word clouds in your art.  Leave a comment!