Play ball !

 As obsessions go, baseball is not terrible. I'd rather listen to the radio than watch it on TV but my fellow Braves fanatic scored tickets to the game this year and invited me along.

This was my very first opening day and the Braves & the weather made it special. The team waited until the very last inning to pull off a win and the skies didn't open up until we hit the sidewalk outside the stadium!

Auditions begin

I was packing up an order this morning and these two hot tickets jumped into the river basket.             A story quilt aborning.

FaceBook - meh

All this bullshit about how FB has been using harvested data and manipulating minds. How is that a shock? When was anything ever really free, even if you ignore the ads? 

I've known this since the early 90s the first time I logged into an AOL chatroom under the name DuchessaNY.  They sent a floppy disk in the mail addressed to "resident". I wondered what the catch was and figured it out right quick, child of Madison Avenue that I am.
 
The best thing about FB? Connecting with faraway family and friends, some never met in real life. And Throwback Thursdays which seems itself to be slipping into the past.

Here, I will continue to reach out, connect and, once in a while, look back.

at hand

My friend Grace is in a new, strange and limiting place. She's working with just whats at hand. The comments tell the tale as much as the picture.

It took me ten minutes to choose these. I took the picture and tossed them back into the sea of cloth.

My biggest art challenge has always been an almost compulsive need to use every crayon in the box. Limiting my pallet has always been painful.

The black & white series from '12-'13 was a sideways attempt to face that issue. Slick me, I found out just how many shades of gray there are between those two poles. Then my life kind of came unglued and I'm still finding my way.


We made it through the storm with no trauma or damage 

Storm watch

Heavy weather always reminds me of you watching me pretending to be scared.
Your sheltering love lingers.

A shift

Changed my mind

my cloth addiction is now yours!

You knew it was coming. Just like Spring, a sale! Between now and March 30 all Fat Baggies will be $23.50 including postage to the US. As (sadly) ever, if you are outside of the US, email me and I'll let you know what the $$postage would be.

(I'll be off to FOF2018 the first week in April, so 3/30 will be my last shipping day for a while.)

 Presently picking from this DEEP and WIDE collection.  Snips of silk, swaths of lawn, pinches of flannel. Damask, linen, broadcloth, sheeting,  dismembered shirts, dresses, slacks - Stuff from back in time! All graduates of the Lawrenceville Frankenstein Academy of Color Transformation.

There are so many different pieces in this batch there will be ZERO duplicates in each bundle. I'm stuffing 6x9 bulletproof plastic bags as full as I can and still seal them.

This way to the shop!

~O~

When words fail, stitch will hold it all together.

prep

For days I have been pulling tubs of cloth from the closet. 99% are going into the wider world. This is a BIG basket. A hamper. 18" across and 30" deep, heaped to the brim! After each shot, I dug deep and pulled a fresh batch of inmates to the surface. Zoom in!  All bound for Fat Baggies and someone else's' inspiration.

 There is every possible type of natural cloth going on here.

Cotton lawn, huck, broadcloth, flannel, sheeting, gauze, linen, silk. A few snips of some poly sparkle for fun.

Have I told you lately that I love you?

learning to pace

I was going to take advantage of the strong morning light and work on Wanderer for a while but after just a few minutes, it hurt too much to sit up. Coffee and drugs are necessary. Today will be a reading and writing day.

Sweetie and I wait for the Aleve to kick in.  Charlie and I had a great day yesterday, but I bit off more than I could choke down what with getting him in and out of a car seat in the back of a two-door eight times in two hours. Soon I'll be teaching him how to buckle himself in and my problem will be solved.

But - all scrap orders made it to the post office, and Charlie was properly entertained, napped, fed and exercised. Today I pay, but it was so worth it to be in his company doing fun stuff.

hard sun

I had a little time to kill this morning before Charlie arrived. The sun coming in over the birthday chair was fierce - the trees have barely budded so it will be like this for another ten days, give or take.

I'm appreciating how my hand-dyed threads have fast and furious color changes. It makes for interesting lines.

a Contest for the Whole Planet

(and nearby galaxies if you can send me a postage paid envelope!)

I was clipping and churning the Fat Baggy bucket this morning. I'm pulling cloth from the closet that dates back to when I first started experimenting with dyes.

Much of the really old stuff is good quality cotton - I used to buy cloth, can you imagine? There is a piece that's all swirls of red and yellow - it was crammed, dry, into a three-foot x 2-inch clear vinyl tubing and the dyes poured in the opposite ends while I watched the colors travel, meet and party!

Anyway, I dropped my big scissors into the tub and while rooting around for them, came up with the treasure below. No way to know how old or where it came from. The embroidery/embellishment is too perfect so it's probably manufactured. It's a hankie, a delicate cotton lawn, and it just went bananas for the color I was slinging this most recent dye season.

Send me an email with your mailing address from anywhere in the whole wide world and, at the end of the month, I'll have a drawing and will send this little treasure to the winner. I'll have the drawing on 3/31.

shreds!

Picking orders from this large tub of tasties today with my eyes closed so I won't be tempted to re-route any of this into the river basket.

Looks like an all-day rain today, dreary as hell, but I won't complain. Waiting on pictures of the spring snow headed for my friends in the northeast. Stay snug, y'all.

traveling vs wandering

I've never had a flight canceled out from under me and never lost a bag. Both in one day? I guess the two go hand in hand. This - now titled "Wanderer" was in my duffel along with all my favorite comfort clothing. It took an extra day, but everything is safe at home, hand-delivered by Delta. Who knows where this thing (and my clothes) has been? As Charlie told me, "It's a mystery."

It was an unexpectedly fast turnaround. In NY for only two days, I beat the storm out of town! Sorry for those left behind who are still without power.