Stolen Pictures....

I was prancing around yesterday modelling my almost done new turquoise jacket (part of our turquoise jacket challenge a year ago) and Priscilla took these nice pictures. She told me I could share them. Here is the back of the jacket. At the bottom is some of my hand dyed salt fabrics and a piece of my marbled fabric. The diagonal piece of flowered fabric was my inspiration and I am sad I only have a little bit left (a Westminster Philip Jacobs print).

This is the front and unfortunately you can see very little of the sleeves which have a piece of hand embroidered Laotian (I believe) fabric centered in the middle. The upper diagonal piece is also a salt dyed piece and the stripey piece in the middle that matches so well is an Alex Henry (I love this fabric and bought all they had on sale at Joanns in this as well as a couple of other colorways. I still have some purple leaf beads to put on the largish turquoise area on the front.

This is the other side of the front and I think Priscilla did a great job of getting all the different views of the jacket. It goes great with jeans too!

Catching Up!

This is the most recent incarnation of the turquoise jacket I have been working on. I finally finished the left side and look forward to finishing the right side this week and getting it finally together!

I have quite a bit to blog but lost my laptop computer last week to the repair shop as I managed to pick up some very nasty virus which they are removing. Of course now I have to reinstall all my software (ugh, ugh).

Fortunately my old desktop still functions adequately (although slowly).

Marcia and Priscilla are looking over Priscilla's latest version of the leaves which is primarily in blues and a bit smaller than the Parallax version.

I couldn't help but take pictures of the gorgeous rhododendrons that are blooming in my neighbor's yard.

Again, the rhododendron. The red one is so bright in the pictures, it almost hurts your eyes to look at it! This was the pink one though. I took these pictures with a flash late in the evening and really like how they came out.

Of course it wouldn't be spring without our beautiful clematis climbing up the walls! It is covered with blooms.

Summer is Coming!

I started this jacket about a year ago as part of a turquoise jacket challenge. As I am working on quilting the lion quilt on my home machine, I picked this up to continue on and surprisingly finished the back and the two sleeves. I made some progress on the fronts as well and am quite pleased! It will be great with blue jeans. I am using some of my marbled (back lower right) and salt dyed fabrics (back lower right and top of front) in this jacket. You might have to double click on the picture to see the detail!

Today was the day to meet with our Project Iron Quilter judge, Genie Barnes, who is well known to the quilt world! She was extremely helpful in getting some loose ends tied up so a week from today the big competition will begin!!

This is a closeup of the sleeves. The panels in the middle are cut from one long strip of Hmong embroidery from Laos that I bought from Priscilla some time ago. They were perfect for this. I still have to add a little bling to outline the strips (some shiny cording or yarn) but really like the striped fabric next to the panelled fabric. Amazingly, it has just about all the colors! I will be adding a little bling to the back as well.

Marcia has made significant progress with her latest jet trails quilt and it gets better all the time!
Bill alerted us to the fact that he had stirred up the pasture when mowing where this fawn was hiding in the tall grass. This is a frequent occurrence in spring. According to Bill, the doe leaves the fawn and the fawns don't move until she comes back to get them. He commented that they have no scent to attract coyotes and foxes at this stage in their life and are safe until mom returns which she did. He or she was just so beautiful -- probably smaller than a beagle at this stage.