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.

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!

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.

Chicago

We have finally moved into our loft in the old Nabisco factory in the westloop of Chicago. We have the top floor unit on the other side of the tower. I have been unpacking for the last 5 days and have not even touched anything for the studio. We have so much to do before we are settled, I don't think my sewing machine is going to see the light of day for a long time. At least i have a computer and internet access again! I felt kind of guiltly trying to check my email from the Apple store computers while we were in the apartment.

IQF Houston

Primordial Sea won 2nd place in the Painted Surface category at the International Quilt Festival!

I love going to Houston each year and seeing all my old quilt pals from Austin, as well as all the other friends I have met over the years. And I love meeting new people that I may have an aquaintance with online but have never met in person. It's pretty fun seeing all the quilts too.

Smokey skies

My daughter took these photos tonight at sunset. The fire in Burbank has spread across the hills unfortunately in this direction creating a lot of smoke. All the ash in the sky refracts the light and created a spectacular sunset.

Packing?

We close on our house in 16 days. I am procrastinating. I realize I really should start packing stuff I don't want movers to pack. So saturday night I pulled out a box and started to pack it with jars of dye. Next thing I knew I was pulling jars back out of the box, mixing dyes, hanging soda ash soaked fabric on a peice of twine strung between my shelving and a cupboard, and pouring dye over it. This was much more fun than packing. I have now dyed about 12 yards of fabric this way. I guess I really do need to get serious and start packing the studio.

Michele's quilt

This week we had Laura Wasilowski as our guild speaker. What fun she is, I never saw our guild laugh so much with a speaker, people had tears rolling down their faces. She is absolutely delightful. My friend Michele Pusateri and I took the workshop. I enjoy taking a workshop once in a while to see how other people do things, and to have a play day with other quilt pals. But I never do the sample, I don't want to make a quilt like somebody elses. So I just had fun playing with Lauras beautiful hand dyed fabrics and started making leaves. Michele kept telling me she had just the spot in her house where this piece would look great and that I was making it for her right? I came home and quilted it. It was so nice to work on something. I have had to keep my studio clean for the last few months for showings while the house was on sale, and I havn't worked on anything quilt like. Plus stress is not real good for creativity, I have been knitting instead. So I figured I would give this to Michele, she has been a good friend the last two years. And a fellow rabel rouser in the quilt guild, you see we had a hidden agenda to bring in all art quilt speakers while we were in charge of programs. I am so bummed that I won't get to see the speakers I booked now that we are moving.

Laura took this picture of Michele and I in front of one of my favorite mexican restaraunts La Cabañita. I wish I had thought to take my camera and get a picture of the three of us. I don't carry my camera with me enough.

I am going to miss my view

This is the view from our upper balcony in the canyon where we live in Los Angeles, California. In the two years that we have lived here we have seen deer, lots of hawks, owls, lots of lizards, two bobcats and we hear coyotes yapping and howling at night. There are mountain lions too, but luckily we have not seen them. I feel hesitant to even say that I have sold our house for fear it will fall though again. I am crossing my fingers and my toes that it will go through, we are supposed to close on October 12th, just two weeks before Quilt festival in Houston.

The good and the bad

The good news is I have an 8 page artist profile in Quilting Arts magazine this month. I am thrilled to be featured in such a fabulous magazine.

The bad news is the day before I left for Chicago our house sale fell through. The people who bought it brought their teenage sons (17 and 19) to see the house and they didn't like it. So the couple removed their offer. If the kids held so much sway with the purchase, they should have shown it to them before making an offer! Ugh. So our house is back on the market. We did have a great time in Chicago though.