I’ll be working on figuring out how and what I want to quilt on a piece that’s been sitting around my sewing room for two years. I need to design – maybe – what I want to quilt for my embroidery machine. Or maybe just quilt the thing on my sewing machine.
I also need to finish the quilt that I decided to quilt by hand. Space aliens stole my brain when I decided to do hand quilting.
Why did I think hand quilting this would be a great idea?
It’s taking forever and I’m not having fun doing the hand quilting. I’m at the point where I need to get this finished before I can’t stand to look at it anymore.
I use my photography to design fabric.
No idea how this will turn out, but I think it’s an image that will yield great fabric designs.
I accidentally moved the camera and got a blurry image. Great! I can play with this and make a fabric design.
Maybe. I’m not sure the photo is broken up enough for a good design.
This could become a quilted panel.
We’ve had rain and the desert sage bushes have been triggered to bloom. The blooms only last a couple days. Then, all the flowers wither and fall off.
I played with this in editing. Note the areas of green cheese. I’m taking an astronomy class and I doubt any of the other students ever heard of the moon being made of green cheese. The composition of the moon was learned long before the other students were born. It’s a pity. They missed out on a time when there was magic in the night sky.
Sometimes, and this is one of those times, I need to look at fabric for a day or so before I decide if the fabric will work for what I want to make. What I want to make is bras. I just finished one made from cream super simplex with brown accents and cream colored lace. I’d take a photo, but there’s no way to arrange the bra so you could see all of it and I’m not about to model it. You’ll have to use your imagination. The bra fabric and lace came from Bra Builders https://www.brabuilders.com. I had asked for a spool of matching thread. They sent brown thread. So my cream colored bra has brown top stitching. If I were to do this again, and I might because there’s fabric and lace left over, I’d use cream colored thread.
I made free standing lace on my embroidery machine. I’ve checked to make sure the lace will fit on the top of the bra cup. Now, I just need the perfect fabric, and I’m not in the mood for white.
I like the fabric, but I don’t know if I like it with the lace. There’s stabilizer around the lace because I haven’t washed it off yet. It is easier to sew down the lace if I don’t wash out the water soluble stabilizer. The first time I wash the bra, the stabilizer will be gone.
I’m leaning towards this one. The fabric is more green than it shows in the photo.
I’m so tired of physical setbacks. I broke my foot in December. Foot surgery in February. Six weeks in a wheelchair. Four weeks pushing a walker. Physical therapy. Going to the gym to build up muscle and to regain strength. Fell off my tricycle, bruised my tailbone, bruised my abdomen, major scrap on my shin for which I should have gone to the Emergency Room, and I’m regressing. I feel like curling up in a ball and sleeping for a month or so.
I noticed I’ve got some blooming cactus in the back yard, so I grabbed my camera.
We’re in a multi-year drought and we’ve lost cactus.
There was more to photograph, but I am limited on how much walking I can do, and I had reached my limit. Which is one of the reasons I’m frustrated and bummed out.
It’s easy to get side tracked if you’re an artist. It’s especially easy if one of your media is photography. I was about to make myself some oatmeal for breakfast and I looked out the window. Fog on the mountain! Fog is rare in the desert. I grabbed the camera. Clad in PJs and slippers, I went into the back yard and started photographing.
Fog eating the Robledo Mountains.
Fog eating the Dona Ana Mountains.
We don’t often get rain, and it has rained hard the last couple of days.
Raindrops on Desert Sage.
Some photos aren’t meant to be pretty. I used the one below will be used for designing fabric and put nine new designs in my Spoonflower shop.
I’m still struggling to get myself put back together. After the phone pole jumping out in front of my electric tricycle and causing several booboos, owies, a bruised tailbone and a sprained thumb, I lost two weeks at the gym. Now, I have to backtrack a bit to get to where I was before I fell off my tricycle. I’m planing on getting back into the gym on Monday. This inability to do the things I want to do is frustrating, anxiety causing, and a PITA.
I’ve got the strips of fabric sewn together. Using a one-way fabric was interesting. I had to make sure all the eyes were going in the same direction.
I’ve drafted the little person. Now to figure out where the little person should be.
Next, I’m auditioning thread.
I think this one is going to be both hand and machine quilted. I’m thinking about how I can quilt barbed wire between the bars. I’ll outline the little person and the bars by hand.
I hit a sale at Superior Threads and my latest batch of thread arrived in the mail today.
Some of the thread is designed for hand quilting. Some will be for the embroidery machine. Some will be for the sewing room.
I’m having a peripheral neuropathy flareup. One of the sure antidotes to the pain is to make art. I had a major depressive episode Monday, and saw the beginnings of a quilt in my head. Or maybe it’s the beginnings of a painting. I’m not entirely sure. I thought about how bipolar disorder, or any DSM-V label, separates the person with the illness from the rest of the world. Like the time I listened to a woman clearly old enough to know better talk trash about someone who had bipolar disorder. When I told her I have bipolar disorder, she literally backed away from me. Gotta watch out for those mental illness cooties.
I dug out my box of fabric and started auditioning fabric for this quilt.
This usually takes a long time. Today was not usually. Today, the fabrics jumped out of the box and insisted on being put together. I was careful about values. How many times have quilters gotten out fabrics and then realized every fabric was a medium value. The red is medium bordering on dark, but I didn’t find a fabric I liked better.
Start here:
End here.
I”ve been playing around with moon shots lately. We’ve had partially cloudy skies and I wanted to get some of the cloud feeling into the shot. The shot, without any editing, is the top photo. I shoot in RAW rather than JPEG. Current thinking is that because modern sensors are so much more sensitive, there’s no need for RAW. RAW files are huge and take up a whole lot of room on the hard drive or the external storage. I don’t use the cloud. I don’t trust the security and someone dumping child pornography into your cloud account can net you many years in a federal prison. Worse, because cloud users don’t own the cloud, the feds don’t need users’ permission to run barefoot through all the person has stored. Because the user doesn’t own the cloud, the user’s standing to contest the warrant or warrentless search is likely nil. Translation: if the feds find child pornography in your area of the cloud, you’re screwed.
The RAW advantage is the sensor records far more detail than JPEG. That advantage is critical when doing nature photography and you have only what nature has given you to work with. When I adjusted the exposure, the background was revealed. The photo is a whole lot more intriguing than the sky was when I took the original shot.
I’ve been playing around with photos in editing with the intention of using the final photo to design fabric. Lately, my Spoonflower shop has gotten a lot of traffic and I’ve had some sales. You can find my designs here: https://www.spoonflower.com/profiles/deb_thuman
I’ve been designing fabric and putting new designs in my Spoonflower shop. To design fabric, I take photos – usually nature photography. Then, I use an editing program to play around.
These are the photos for the designs I created this morning.
Some of these designs look a little different after I finished the designing and proofing process in Spoonflower.
I saw the surgeon on Tuesday, and my foot is healed! No more boot! I can’t walk around barefoot. I need to wear arch supports in my shoes – something I’ve been doing for years. Now that I’m able to walk again, I’ve developed new pains. I’m so used to sitting or being hunched over a walker, that my hips and lower back need help. Part of the problem with wearing a boot is that no matter what I do with my shoe on the non-broken foot, my legs aren’t the same length. I’ve got an appointment with my chiropractor in two weeks to get everything aligned correctly.
Being able to walk again, I took some moon shots last night. There’s a tiny sliver of a moon. I used a long shutter speed and moved the camera around. I merged. two shots in editing and then started playing.
I have been using ketamine through Mindbloom for a couple years now and I’ve made great progress healing from an abusive childhood. One of the things Mindbloom offers is something called Integration Circles. These are zoom meetings led by a facilitator and offer peer support. What happens in the circles is confidential, so I am limited in what I can share.
After listening to one member speak, bells, whistles, lights and sirens went off in my brain. I thought about the idea of a container for feelings that I had suppressed and which were surfacing. I’m working on an idea to make a fabric box to contain these feelings. I’m not sure I can get into my sewing room – it’s not a walker-friendly room and I’m still using a walker to get around while my broken foot continues to heal.
I’m at the thinking about and sketching about stage of the design process.
This is how far I’ve gotten. I’m thinking about a box with a lid. The lid has a flap so I have a way of keeping the feelings contained. I’m thinking that if I cut the stiff interfacing into individual pieces, the fabric with interfacing will be easier to fold into a box. The sketch shows a cube, but I wonder if I want to play with a rectangle instead. I’d like to be able to use my embroidery machine for the design on each side and the lid of the box. To keep the box closed, I’m thinking I’d like to use a ribbon on the flap. The ribbon would wind around a button keeping the box closed.
Once I get the design worked out, I will need to determine if I can get into my sewing room. Then, it will be a matter of auditioning fabric and sewing the box.
I had a less than wonderful dyeing session. I thought I was doing things to eliminate freckles. Instead, I got more freckles than I thought possible in the three tee shirts I dyed.
I used three new-to-me Procion dyes from Dharma Trading: deep purple, hydrangea, and shiitake mushroom. I doubt over dyeing will eliminate the freckles. The shiitake mushroom shirt is beyond rescuing. Jim suggested I use it as a workout tee shirt. That idea has possibilities. I’ll be picking out specific embroidery patterns that express where I’m headed and work out goals.
The other two, I’ll embroider and just wear them. I’ll call the freckles a design element and try to convince myself I meant for the tee shirts to come out like they did.
I put six new designs into my Spoonflower shop. These are the original drawings. Once they got uploaded, I could arrange them on the fabric several different ways. It’s amazing how different the designs look on fabric and on the original drawings.
I finished another bra. This one has free standing lace that I made on my embroidery machine. Even after washing out the stabilizer, the lace is pretty stiff.
I was having a depressive episode, so I made Brady some bandanas.
I finished sewing this one this morning but I haven’t yet photographed the finished bandana.
I made another wild moon shot by taking several shots and doing a focus merge.
This is what the moon really looked like.
I woke up in pain at 4:30 AM. The only reliable pain killer for neuropathy is art, so I went out and shot the sunrise.
Going outside has caused a major allergy attack. I’ve taken two decongestants and an antihistamine and I’m still feeling miserable. Bleah.
Finally, after wearing ill-fitting uncomfortable bras for 60 years, I’ve got a bra that fits. A bra that’s so comfortable that I forgot I was wearing it. And the straps stay up!
I used a Pin Up Girls pattern, and paid attention to everything Beverly Johnson said in the Craftsy Bra Making class.
Because I’ve always had a problem with the band riding up in the back, I thought I was doomed to have sagging breasts. Beverly said in her class that if the band rides up in the back, use a double layer of power net. Worked like a charm. I moved the straps closer to the center in both the back and the front and now the straps stay put.
That was so exciting, I decided to make another bra using the lace I had made with my embroidery machine. First, the iron spewed black stuff all over one of the cups when I went to press a seam. Next, the sewing machine kept deciding not to move the fabric when I sewed. Except it didn’t happen all the time. Then, I sewed the elastic on the wrong side of the band. I started to rip off the elastic, and decided it was time to give up on sewing and do something else.
I’ve ordered mesh fabric to make lingerie laundry bags. Nothing ruins a bra quite as fast as the straps and wires getting wound around everything else in the washer.
I’ve got lace made for three more bras, two bra kits I ordered from Bra Builders, and enough fancy lace to make another half dozen bras.
According to the instruction manual, I’m supposed to use my machine regularly because letting it sit for weeks on end without using it will gum up the guts. My machine gets used regularly. Even more than regularly.
I started playing around with thread and patterns just to see what I would get.
Here’s a group of Laurel Burch designs. I need to snip threads in the snakes. I love the cat. And the fish.
One of Brady’s new bandanas. Or it will be once I sew the edges. I used a Laurel Burch design.
Brady’s other new bandana that needs to get the edges sewn. I love pink flamingoes. Seeing a pink flamingo in the wild is on my bucket list.
Mood Fabrics just released a new free pattern for a sleep set. I’m not interested in the shorts, but the camisole type top is intriguing. But it needs lace. So, I bought some lace patterns. This is one of them. I think it would be nice for a neckline.
Deb's Art 