Thursday, December 29, 2005

Gallery opening for my brother in law


I am so proud! My bother in law Pablo Perez has a new exhibit of his paintings in Venice CA. Check out his work and this great article about him. I married into a wonderful family of artists eighteen years ago when I married my incredibly talented husband Juan.

Thursday, December 22, 2005

Felted balls

Since I can't work on any quilt projects right now I have been knitting a lot and now making felted beaded christmas ornaments. They are lots of fun to make, they feel so nice and are fun to stitch into. I would really like to start stitching with some embroidery floss on some but i don't know which of 20 boxes my floss is in.
Doesn't this iron plate make a great backdrop. It is on the wall of the entry way to the kitchen. The word kitchen is written on it with an arrow pointing to the kitchen. I am sure it was a note written on the metal during construction of the loft.
These are the balls left to be stitched.

Wednesday, December 21, 2005

Making felted balls

Jen asked how to make the felted balls. First you order some gorgeous wool roving from somewhere like Outback Fibers. Roll up little balls of roving adding thin layers of diffferent colors you like to the outside. Be sure to spread the fibers out into very thin layers crossing each at 90 degrees. Sometimes I use small balls of left over wool yarn for the centers under the roving. Put the ball into a section of pantyhose tying a knot on each side of the ball. Make a bunch and toss them in the washing machine with a little detergent and set the machine to the smallest load setting with hot water, and wash. Carefully peel back the pantyhose from the felted ball, the fibers migrate through the pantyhose pilling onto the outside during washing. If you have a front loading washer you can also do this by hand, see instructions here. I have heard front loading washers don't felt well.

Then embellish with all those beads you have been collecting over the years. Use good strong beading thread like Silamide.

Saturday, December 03, 2005

A perfect evening!

I am loving Chicago. Tonight the kids went downstairs in our building and got themselves subway sandwiches for dinner and my husband and I went out for a date. We walked a few blocks to a taqueria called de cero. When we left Los Angeles we thought we were leaving good Mexican food behind. But not so! We had fabulous tacos with fresh tomatillo salsa, my husband had a couple shots of different tequilas and I had a chelada (a corona on ice with a twist of lime and salted rim) I am not a big fan of beer, but this was great. We finished with a warm brownie topped with ice cream. Yum! Then we walked home with snow falling. A perfect evening!

Friday, December 02, 2005

The Loft

Here are a few pics from before we moved in, of course it now looks like a maze of boxes and unbuilt shelving.
This is a view of the kitchen that used to be one of the ovens in the factory. it has curved brick walls on two sides with an arched ceiling The panels in the wall above are in the wall of the master bedroom. The panels rotate so you can look down into the room below.


There are three levels with lots of stairs.
We painted the ceiling and all the duct work dark grey and all the walls white.
I love the fact that we now have a library for all our books. We painted the walls in here french grey. We will be using this room as a family room and the area that one might normally devote to the dining room and living room we will use as one large work space.

Living in a traditional house has never worked very well for us, it always ends up a big mess with projects going on everywhere. So now we are going to devote the most space to art/work space since that is what we spend the most time doing. It will probably still be a mess, but hopefully it will be more contained to one general area.

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