notes to self...

1. Do not sit down at the sewing machine at 10:pm and attempt to quilt.

2. Keep red wine and peanut butter on toast away from your cutting table.

3. When you attach one row of units to another, do not attach it upside down. 

4.  Keep a vast supply of seam rippers handy.  

5.  Never run out of dark chocolate. 

I got home from Houston after midnight on Monday, totally exhausted and totally inspired.
Carried home a treasure trove of fat quarters that I was dying to use immediately, but so far have only unpacked, sorted, and put them into baggies till I get to them.

Slept off the exhaustion till 9:am and then spent the morning paying bills, picking up my new eyeglasses, and dealing with a fraudulent credit card charge that was made Monday in Houston. The charge was for Spotify (huh????)  Either the hotel, the super shuttle, or Uber had an employee that liked my card.  It was cancelled immediately and they are overnighting a new one.  Damn!  Just when I had finally memorized the number, I have to start all over again. I am glad Chase is so vigilant but by the time I was done with the morning, I had lost all my inspiration.

I just sewed aforementioned group of units back the way I had originally intended and I will tackle the rest in the morning, after I am rested.  Maybe.

       

Market is over

Honestly, by 3:00 this afternoon I was done.  So Phil and I got our bags, called Uber, and came to the .airport earlier than necessary.  We're relaxing at the United Club -- with snacks and the requisite Bloody Mary.

I didn't see everyone in the world that I knew, but was happy to run into Judy Gula this afternoon, who has an Artistic Artifacts booth and is selling all kinds of intresting batiks and other things. We headed over to MistyFuse to see Iris, who has just come out with a cool new product she is introducing at Market and Festival.  Iris lives in New York City and we always ask ourselves why we don't just get together in the city. Sigh...it is crazy that we both have to travel to Houston to see each other.

Yesterday, Lynn Koolish and I had coffee and a chat, after bumping into one another in some aisle or other.  By the time I saw her, however, my hair could no longer match hers because her color is permanent. Can you tell I am having a good time?

 i also ran into Kathy Doughty, who told me that Kaffe was speaking this morning. I went to hear Kaffe's lecture about his quilt exhibit there. lovely talk and of course, lovely quilts -- both antique and contemporary, inspired by the antiques.  Had the usual fun exchange with Brandon and went bck to their booth to hang out for a while, but didn't take any pictures. 

Durig the two preceding days I had taken care of most of the business I needed to and so, spent this afternoon wandering the aisles, looking for trends. Don't know if this is a trend but it's what my eye spotted.  Someone else's trend photos may be totally different - which, to me, means there were no serious new trends.  

Almost every fabric company is coming out with a line of solids.  i think the Hoffman colors are the most captivating and the Michael Miller solids have the best hand.  Either way, you can't go wrong.

Kaffe will also be coming out with some wonderful new fabrics next year.  

 As far as patterned fabric - I seem to vaguely recall seeingl lots of foxes and foliage. If they are your style, choices abound.   A company to watch is Cloud9 Organic Cottons - sweet and beautiful.  I also feel the same way about the fabrics that Carolyn Friedlander has designed for Robert Kaufman.

I met Carolyn through a mutual friend 4 years ago, when she was a fledgling who had just come out with the most beautful paper-piecd patterns for Modern Quilters.  She has flourished and I stopped by to visit her.   She and her patterns and fabrics are simply charming.

Finally, I had been looking at sewing tables for my very small spaces both at home and in West Palm Beach.  After going back and forth, hemming and hawing, walking away and coming  back, I ended up heeding my mother's advice: When in doubt, don't.  I realized tha not being able to make a decision meant that none of them was right for me. So I will continue to manage with my computer cart at home and my bridge table in Florida.

Enough!  We will be boarding in about 45 minutes and there has been a gate change.  My suitcase is so heavy with fabric that i will have to enlist the help of a strong guy to lift it into the overhead.

I cannot wait to et back to my sewing room.

Quilt market

Such fun!  Today is the last day and I am flying home tonight. I am sure I will not have seen everything, but then again, I will have seen the people I wanted to see.  

 I finally met Sue Bleiweiss after having known her online for years. And it was great to see Deborah Boschert again. 

And I was so happy to meet Desiree Habitch face-to-face. Desiree has set up an exciting and unique new online teaching experience, starting soon -- The Fiber Art Connection.  Visit her website, www.thefiberartconnection.com to see who will be teaching.  I'll be joining them later next year, after having resisted teaching online for years.  But this is diffeent from all the rest and I'm really excited.

Desiree, Jamie Fingal (who will also be teaching on The Fiber Art Connection) posed for pictures at DesireesDesigns booth.

This really fuzzy picture (hard to focus in the Houston drizzle) is with my friend Anne Andrew, who comes to Market every year from Australia. It was so great to see her -- we had just come from dinner where we laughed our way through the evening.  

That's it for now.  I'm off to the Convention Center and will take as many pictures as I can of booths, quilts and whatever else I can post later.

heaven is...

 Green shakshuka, which I am eating as I write this.  This was day 2 in the studio, doing a major clean-up/re-org, which is another story.  Suffice it to say I am exhausted; didn't leave for home till after 6:pm

and it was eggs for dinner - but not just plain eggs, but omething that had intrigued me when I saw the recipe on the Internet.

The recipe called for chard, which I didn't have, and jalapeno, which I also didn't have. So I used laticino kale and dried hot peppers.  I did have fresh spinach, eggs, garlic, oregano, and cumin (which I can't cook without).  In fact, if I had to choose the five ingredients i could not cook without they would be garlic, onions, lemon, cumin, and (random, depending on the recipe).

Yum.  I feel so much better now.  Time for a cup of tea and a tiny piece (or two) of something sweet.Then, fortified, I will go back to my sewing room and either continue quilting the piece I need to finish, or leave it for tomorrow and play around with something else.  At this late hour (well, late for me) I have to decide between rotary cutter and sewing machine.

  

In the meantime, I have been quilting the piece I've been dithering about for a few weeks.  I suspect I am not awake enough to continue this tonight.  But here is a bit of it. You know me -- this is about as free-motion as I get. LOL.  But even using the edge of the foot, it is far from accurate or perfect. Eh - life is too short to worry about accurate or perfect.  I am neither and I like it just fine.

I am off to Houston for Quilt Market on Oct 24.  Today, for the first time ever, I actually made a list ahead of time of the booths/vendors I need to visit.  I am only there for 2-½ days and time is of the essence.  For decades, I have been using the same batting and have been very happy with it.  However, this time around I would like to test a few different battings from some other manufacturers.

If this is my big excitement, you can imagine what the rest of my life is like).  Change is good -- or at least, experimentation. 

On second thought, I am not going to sew - I am going to go to bed.  Tomorrow, another day of cleaning and throwing out - and reorganizing what I am keeping.  I may actually be able to take a photo or two of the studio. We'll see.  It always looks worse before it looks better.  Just like life.

picking up the pieces

I have several pieces in pieces, if you know what I mean. Aujourd'hui, je suis en train de décider quoi faire aver ces morceaux.  As usual, I am taking pictures as I go along, then rearranging, then photographing again until I am so confused that I wonder if I'm being too nit-picky and that in the end, it won't make a difference.

Back to the random units I was working with a week or two ago. For days, I have been playing with a different idea and different arrangements.  Yes, no, yes, no, maybe, maybe not.  I will spare you the umpteen possible arrangements I've experimented with since I abandoned the white background.   

Monday night I finally decided to work with a hand-dyed pale yellow background (which doesn't look very yellow here) and, as they say, "stick a fork in it." Enough! If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. But I have to finish it and move on. Now that I've put together these random, not-exactly-the-same-size units. I'm posting the two formats  here as a way of thinking out loud and looking them from a distance.

This reminds me of why I started a blog in the first place, a little more than a decade ago.
It was a way for me to get back from my in-process work and look at it in a small format. And it is still useful, all these years later. 

Yes, it's deliberately  off-kilter -- that's okay with me. But I see something from this distance that bothers me, which didn't when I was standing close to it.   Good!

I am finally working, after a long dry spell.  I have a show coming up next month with two artists in other mediums.  The exhibit is titled "Old is Good" and we were invited to show the progression of our work from where it started to where it is now.  I have sleeves to sew on two pieces that have never been exhibited, but since I am not a tv-watcher, this is not an appealing activity.  Nonetheless, over the weekend I have to get that act together.

I also have to go print scarves for my open studio on Nov. 8th. That's next week's activity -come hell or high water.  But for what is left of this week (it's half over) I've got to tackle a few more pieces in my sewing room as long as my ideas are still sprouting.

Past my bedtime!

take a walk with me...

 Now that my brain is less foggy and I'm feeling better, I am finally getting around to posting a few pix from a little jaunt to New York City last Saturday.  We attended a bar mitzvah in the morning and afterwards, it was too nice a day to just go home, so Phil and I decided to hop the bus into the City and wander around.  We saw that there was some kind of street fair in Chelsea, so we walked down 8th Ave. from 39th St. to 23rd to see what was what. It was perfect walking weather, so we got our 10,000+ steps in

No, this is not a museum, but the main post office for New York City at 33rd St.  Gorgeous building, not unlike the old and beautiful Penn Station that they tore down to put up a monstrosity.

This was the first time I had noticed the drop-dead gorgeous Art Deco brass doors of the Manufacturer's Trust Company - later known as Manufacturer's Hanover (aka Manny Hanny). The construction interfered with my photo, but that's the way it goes.

 The street fair was mostly food stalls with a few craft stalls and some street performances.   Uh - Proactive Aloe Detox Water?  The emperor's new clothes.

This violinist and his tux had seen better days.

I love their rhyming motto.  

Broke our hearts that we weren't hungry. We've been to their place in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn. You have to drive or bike there; there is no subway.  Their lobster rolls are iconic - we've been there.

..

I thought this woman looked wonderful in her red, orange, olive.green dress.  

Collecting bottles and cans so she can pay for her dinner.

About 3:30 we needed to sit down, so we went into the espresso & gelato place.  I had an iced expresso con panna. The gelato was not for me -- too sweet.

Around 4:00 the dancers from the Joyce Theater across the street came out and gave a lovely, graceful performance.

After the dancing, we headed back uptown.  As we were leaving the street fair, we noticed this restaurant and I had to have a picture. Uncle Jack's steakhouse and sushi bar?? What kind of a combination is that?  Too funny.

We stopped at my favorite International Foods market and stocked up on  spanakopita, taramasalata, real Greek feta, taziki, and halvah for dinner at home.  I've been noshing on the leftovers all week.