Weekend activity

First- Old Business.  Sort of a public service announcement   ---

If you have a window behind your sewing machine, please be on the lookout for any cats who have come by to watch the birds!

On Friday this week, I packed for retreat- only three more sleeps!!  We were all close to dancing with anticipation at the guild meeting Saturday. Like Christmastime for "old" ladies. 

Yesterday I had both kids, one at a time.  Sort of a tag team Oma day.
Jon likes to play with Play-doh, and the cups it comes in!

When Kiara got here, she thought she'd like to "make a craft".  So I gave her several options and she chose to make a quilt. Not for her stuffed animal, as I had thought, but for herself!  So she picked out fabrics and simple pattern- after I showed her some pictures of beginner quilts.  I did most of the piecing, but she did do some of the sewing!  This is her sewing around the edges for the "envelope" finish we did.

And here she is with the finished product!  It took us about 6 hours start to finish.  

 Needless to say, Oma was pooped at the end of the day. 


Someone showed these on facebook, and I had to try it.  The smaller one was just to see if I could crochet a ball.  The letter doesn't show well, so I'll have to fix it.  These are f-bombs you can throw around when shouting the word might not be appropriate. 

I've seen so many posts about gun control in the last few days.  Sadly, even with the body count going up and up, I doubt much will change anytime soon.  New York enacted new laws 5 years ago (I think), but did not put in place a mechanism for ensuring gun-owners replaced the higher capacity magazines with the smaller ones, or that all AR types are registered. No one is going door-to-door.  There's just too many guns and too many people who think the second amendment means they can have any gun they want and as many as they want.  I don't get it.  Most of these mass shooting victims have been children.  Are their guns really more important than someone's child?

I am grateful for:
My own little ones, may they be kept safe!
A cinnamon roll I just remembered was in the freezer.
Three more sleeps!
Warm feet.
My husband is not a picky eater.

Winter is the time for finishing things!

In winter, I am inside.  I should probably get more done than I do, but I do finish a fair number of things between the holidays and the start of gardening season!

This week, I finished the last of my "Dill weed" projects.   Below is the picture I posted when I started, and here is how they look now.  It was meant to be an exercise in embellishing.  But for me it was also an exercise in interpreting/ abstracting something I have seen.













 This one is sort of a close up of the flowers, with the eyelash yarn representing the foliage.

This one is an interpretation of the oblong shape the blossoms take on when they are seen from the car on the side of the road.  

 And this one is really abstract- more about the fact that a group of these flowers has many sizes of circles and the way they play together.  When I added the beads, I sort of thought of the flowers as being torn apart in a wind storm.

 All of the fabrics I used were hand dyed by friends, or hand painted by myself .  It was fun to USE some of those "special" fabrics at long last.


 I also used one of my hand painted fabrics on the Paisley Feather Zentangle piece from the class with Laura A Cunningham last October. It's finished now! She suggested making it into a bag or pillow, but I don't want to cut it up just yet.  I still need to get a better picture of it.

Did you DO anything to resist this week? I'm not sure I did.  It might be time for another postcard barrage.  It's nothing that will change the world, but every piece of mail that goes into the White House is catalogued.  I like the idea of historians noting the number of letters and cards telling this particular president how much people were against everything he stood for!

I am grateful for:
Quiet winter days.
Cinnamon Oreo cookies which my boss provided at work.
Elastic waist skirts and pants (see last item :-)
Texting, which allowed my son to be there with us for the Superbowl last week.
Accepting limitations.