All Hallows Eve • Dia De Los Muertos

Today is The Celtic New Year, the day when the veil between the spirit world and our world is thin enough to allow visitation by our departed loved ones. My altar is set for my dear friend Onnolee who passed this spring with a few of her personal items that I am blessed to have in my shrine. As well as a pomegranite, symbolic fruit of Persephone, dear to Onnolee and a glass of real good scotch. Something I know she would enjoy. There is also a place for our dog Binky with a bone for her.

an experiment

I am going to start a new quilt soon. While I am working out the design I have been trying to figure out what techniques to use to make it. I want a dark probably black background on this next quilt,so I debated if I should paint the background or dye it or paint on dark fabric. After making Primordial Sea I was not sure I wanted to do that again. So this is my experiment to see what would happen if I painted white fabric with textile paints and then dyed it. I thought two things might happen. One- the paint might not hold up to the abuse of dyeing and washing out in HOT water, or two- the cloth behind the painted areas would also take the dye and make the image dark.

This fish went through dye and washout twice and I am pretty impressed with how well the paint held up. I do not like how the image itself became dark from the dye taking to the back of the painted area though. The metallic paints do reflect light and at some angles looks good, others it looks dark. The other problem with this method is that occassionally a drop of paint may fall on the background (below tail) and cause all sorts of grief. So this will not be the method I use. When the background was a lighter shade, it did look really good. So this method would work if you wanted a light to medium colored background.

I also tried painting with opaque paints on black cloth but the coverage was not that good, it looked dull. So I will be painting this next quilt completely on white cloth. But first I need to try to finish this agave which is not thrilling me at all. I just want it done.

Yippee, Woo Hoo!!!!!!

Oh my god, I totally forgot to look at the website for Pacific International Quilt Festival today. A friend just emailed me to tell me congratulations for winning FIRST PLACE Innovative for Primordial Sea!

Beta-Blogger beware!

I am so annoyed , I fell for the blogger upgrade ploy that would let me change things on my blog so much easier without html etc. The posts are published immediately but so far that is the only benefit I have seen. Now i can't leave comments on other peoples blogs if they havn't upgraded to beta-blogger or some thing. Someone told me today that they were unable to leave a comment on my blog because of this upgrade. They really should have worked out the kinks before they offered this upgrade. And the really bad part is you can't switch your blog back! Argh!

Virtual Quilt

I have combined my cellular quiltlets into a virtual quilt to be in Artella Magazine issue 10 BODY OF ART: Passion and Projects of Universal Creation. This issues theme is about the Body, tying in with themes of Soul, Creation, and Creativity. My artwork is going to be paired with a poem by Nita Penfold called The Cells in My Body Dance.

This is a virtual quilt because all the pieces are still seperate in reality and probably would not go together quite as nicely. I played around with sizing things up and down and did some cropping to make a pleasing layout.

Progress

This is the quilting so far. Not terribly exciting, but I thought the lines running linear with the leaves would help give clarity to the agave image defining the shapes of the leaves.

New Sweater

I have started a new sweater. This time it is a hoodie from Patons made in Knitpicks Merino Style wool. It is nice and soft.











I was not so thrilled with the cable design used in the pattern so i have decided to try my own. This has been a lot of trial and error. First i wanted to use Vogue knittings embossed twining leaf pattern up the front but i found that i could not do this pattern no matter how many times i tried. I was convinced there was a type-o in the instructions. After i did a quick online search of the pattern name i found plenty of blogs with lovely knitted samples and no one mentioned a problem knitting it, so i guess it is just me.

Then i decided to use a celtic cable pattern. i found a lovely celtic cable here.
The directions for this pattern are on a chart. That was new for me, the graphed charts always look so daunting. but I have to say this one was not bad. After one time knitting the whole pattern through I found that I could read the symbols without referencing the key. When I started the second repeat i did not like the way it looked so i ripped it out and decided to connect the celtic knots into a continuous pattern. Following the chart you can work up to the 22nd row and then start again on the 7th row and it will make a continuous design. I like this much better.

Want to knit gorgeous socks?

Then you must go to Emily Parson's Etsy shop to buy her hand dyed sock yarn. Who can resist yarn like this?