Finding Flowers for Mother

 Hello again Internet People!  I spent some time last night looking for tutorials for different fabric flowers and oh my gawd did I find the glory hole!  There is a wonderful woman on Pinterest who has pinned dozens upon dozens of them!  Guess where I will be spending the rest of my day? 

I never had a whole lot of interest in making these kind of things before.  Much like the yo-yo's, I thought fabric flowers were cute, but mostly pointless.  Now I am developing a new appreciation for them, especially in how I can use them in my art.  I found a book the other day when I was at Joann's buying that silk thread, it shows how to make the most beautiful fabric flowers using a set of special tools called flower irons.  Of course now I NEED all those tools, but I am trying to not go there.  I do have a tool which is similar, and has some similar attachments, so I can try some of the projects out without too much trouble, but it does not stop me from NEEDing the complete set.  At almost $200, I will do without it, but that doesn't stop me from NEEDing it either.  

So, anyway, now I am looking at all of the other ways people have developed for making pretty flowers out of fabric.  And my goodness there sure are a lot of them!  Now I just gotta get busy figuring out how to make them all, and figuring out just how the heck I am going to put them all together on this project.  I am a little concerned about the weight and stability of the finished piece.  Working with 3-dimensional applique is a lot different than flat work in the amount of support that will be needed to keep everything in place.  

I found the fabric I plan to use as the background, it is about 30" x 36", so it is rather large to start with.  I still haven't figured out how I am going to arrange all of the flowers, I am thinking along the lines of twisting, intertwined vines, rather like a Celtic knot design, with the flowers placed along the vines.  I am not going for realism, I don't want to think that hard.  This piece is supposed to be representative, not necessarily realistic, but I am still a ways off from being ready to place anything on a background so this may all change before I get to where ever it is I am going.

In the mean time I am going to go play with that lady on Pinterest and see about making me some more flowers to go with all of them leaves and yo-yo's I showed you yesterday. I hope all of you get to enjoy your day as much as I plan on enjoying mine!  Until next time ...

    

           

                                

                                    

A Lot of Rambling And A Little Bit of Genius

Hello again Internet People!  Well, it looks like this might just work, at least for a little while.  I mentioned yesterday that I thought I might do better at getting here to post something if I started earlier in the day, and here I am!  I even have some pictures to share with all of you this time.  Nothing exciting, well, unless you are as compulsive as I am about these things.  I find them very exciting, but I have mentioned before that I am kinda weird.

Yesterday I talked about how I had organized all of my thread collections.  I struggled for a long time trying to figure out the best way to store the damn things, and I have tried many different options, but these are the ones that ended up working for me.  You know those plastic drawer units?  The ones with like three drawers set in a plastic case?  Yeah, those cases are crap, but the drawers are awesome.  And since they came in a variety of sizes there are drawers available to fit almost any spool size, so that is what I use.  I keep the drawers inside of a wooden chest of drawers which also houses most of my machine embroidery supplies.

This drawer is my Rayon threads.  They are mostly used for machine embroidery but I have been known to use them for any number of applications.  Just not for construction, these are mostly cheap ass threads, they will not stand up to any real stress                   

                       

 This drawer holds my cotton threads (as well as a little drawer full of cheap ass polyester threads).  These are my "go-to" threads for just about everything.  Well, they were, before I discovered the silk threads.

This picture is an example of my obsessive compulsive nature at work.  This is my collection of DMC hand embroidery floss.  I do believe I have every single color they produce (or I did as of 2005).  I actually went online and found a list of all of the colors they made and printed it out.  I then carried that damn thing with me in my purse for months and every time I found the stuff on sale somewhere I would whip out my list, collect a few more, and cross them off the list.  I then wound each of them onto their own little floss bobbin and labeled them and organized them by colors in these great little boxes.  And that is where they have sat since.  I brought them in the house last weekend, I think it is time to put them to use.

 Here is a picture of the leaves I have been working on for the last two weeks.  I counted last night and there are 152 that are either basted or lined and ready to go.  I still have another little bucket of ones I haven't finished yet, but there are probably only about 50 more to go.

  And here are ALL of my teeny tiny yo-yos.  I have a few more blue ones I haven't sewn yet, but I think I am yo-yo-ed out at the moment.  I did find some more uses for them, so I am sure I will make a few more before I am done, but for now I am working on other parts.

Speaking of hand sewing I figured something out yesterday that I NEED to share with all of you.  I don't know how many of you do any hand sewing, but I think most people have a basic understanding of the process.  When I learned to sew I was 10, I had little hands and the thimbles my mother had were all way too big for me, so I never learned to use one.  As a teenager I did a lot of hand embroidery on denim which is extremely punishing to ones fingers if one does not use a thimble.  I found then that band-aids worked pretty well.  The only problem was the threads and fabrics tend to get hung up on the band-aid and they become a real pain in the neck.  Okay, fast forward 30 years, I am starting to redevelop the callouses that protected my fingers, but they aren't there yet.  I ended up getting the back end of a needle embedded in my finger tip and it made a little pocket in the skin which keeps catching the needle and it fucking hurts!  I was looking online at some of these new fangled thimbles which are basically just a thick pad that sticks directly to the pad of your finger.  Now that might just work!  So I was looking at them, they wanted like $5 for 24 of them or something like that, and I almost bought them, but then the light bulb came on.  I have a whole stack of these sticky backed little silicone/rubber dots that you put on the bottom of stuff to keep it from scratching your furniture.  I bought them to put an the back of my acrylic rulers, but I found the cut out portions around the dots actually worked better for that, so I still had all the dots.  And guess what?!  They fucking work excellently!  And they are sticky enough to stay on and to be reused! And I got a pack of 24 of the for like a $1.29!  Some days my brilliance amazes me (well what really amazes me is that it took me so damn long to figure this out, but that's another story).

Oh, I should probably give you all an update on my weight gain plan, I have kinda been neglecting that lately.  I gave up on the whole idea of eating every two hours.  It ended up just making me obsess about it too much and it was counterproductive.  So I have just been trying to make myself eat something whenever i can, and eat an extra bite or two whenever I can.  It has actually been working.  I reached a low of 94.6 pounds, but the scale has since been heading in the other direction steadily.  Slowly, but steadily, and that is just the way I was hoping it would go.  I have found that if I can eat at least two "meals" a day (plus snackings of course) I think I can keep the needle heading in the right direction.  The last time I checked I was back up to 97.6 pounds, if I can just get it back into the triple digits again I will quit worrying about it.  Until then, I just have to find a balance between making myself eat something and obsessing about making myself eat something.  I will get there, it is just gonna take some time.

While we are waiting I am going to go get back to sewing and leave you all with this little gem ...

 

                                      

                         

Friday Pulse Check - Yep, Still Got One

Hello there Internet People!  I figured I better pop in over here and let you all know I am still alive.  Its been getting more and more difficult for me to tear myself away from my sewing to do much of anything else, to try to come up with something to type here for all of you has been a real challenge.  Not that I don't have a lot to say, I just don't want to spend the time typing it. I have been trying to figure out if I could work with one of those talk-to-text programs, so I could just talk while I am sewing and it would automatically turn into a Blog Post.  Since I don't have a private space in which to work I would have everyone in the house listening to every word I say.  I suppose that is not that big a deal, its not like I am hiding anything from anyone here, but I am still not comfortable with it, at all.  I really wish someone would figure out how to get my thoughts to turn to text without speaking or typing, that would be awesome!  

I am still enjoying the hell out of this hand sewing shit.  I have made over 50 of those teeny tiny yo-yos, and probably approaching a couple hundred little leaves (I did around 70 or so that are double-sided, and the rest I am hand basting the seam allowances), and I have the petals done for at least three flowers so far.  I still have no clue how I am going to put this all together, I just keep making parts in the hopes that I will eventually figure it out.

I have also still been doing a lot of reading and a lot of cleaning and re-organizing.  I sorted all of my threads this week, they are color coordinated and arranged by fiber content.  I am still fighting myself to keep from buying more.  I discovered that sewing with real silk threads is fucking awesome!  They are so silky and just fabulously wonderful to sew with and I have this overwhelming NEED to buy some in every color manufactured!  I am trying very hard to fight this.  So far I have only bought about 30 colors (that was all Joann's had in the store) of one brand, and 5 of another.  Then I fucking discovered it comes in different sizes too!  Damnit!  Seriously, this is not fair!  I NEED them all!

Okay, better change the subject, I am getting way too worked up and I might just go shopping if I don't.  So, anyway, I have been cleaning and re-organizing all of my art supplies, trying to get the stuff that I want to use in the near future into the house and the shit I have no intention of using out of the house.  I have been trying to make my world more user friendly for me, of course that means it becomes a little less user friendly to everyone else until I am done.  I have stacks and piles all over the bedroom again.  I had them all cleaned out once, but there are new ones there now.  I am still trying to figure out how and where to store some of it.  Like my big stencils, what the fuck do I do with them?  I took all the little ones (8 1/2" x 11" and smaller) and put then in page protectors so I can keep them in a big three-ring binder, which is completely full now, but the bigger ones are a pain.  I will probably just go hang them on a hook out in the sewing room again, I don't think I really need them in the house anyway.  

And that right there is probably one of my biggest issues when it comes to getting organized, trying to determine what really needs to be in the house and what doesn't.  I have an extreme attachment to all of my art supplies and I want them ALL within arms reach at a moments notice.  That is NOT even possible, but I seldom allow reality to interfere with my obsessions, why start now?  I will find a way to get the vast majority of it within easy reach, I always do, I am pretty fucking resourceful that way.  Its funny, I always say I could fill up a 10,000 sq foot warehouse and still feel cramped, but I have spent the vast majority of my life having all my art supplies crammed into less than 100 sq feet (sometimes way less than that!) and I have always managed to do just fine.  

Well, I NEED to get back to sewing, and it looks like I have some work that I will have to get done first, so I am going to sign off from here again and get busy.  I will work on doing better at posting more often again, maybe this idea of posting in the morning, Before I start sewing, might get me back here more often.  I'll let you know tomorrow if that works or not (If I don't post tomorrow, it didn't work).  

Until next time ...

                                      

                             

I Found My Bliss!

Hello again Internet People!  Mother is still alive and kickin, I have just been obsessing on my newest adventure again.  The last time I posted I talked about a 3-dimensional butterfly applique I was working on creating.  She is not quite finished yet, but she has inspired a whole new adventure that has been consuming all of my available time and energies.  

I'll start at the beginning.  Here is the butterfly:

 I haven't attached her body yet because I am planning to use that to attach her to the quilt.  She will also have some further embellishments before she is complete, but I enjoyed making her so much that she inspired me to start on a monumental undertaking, all done by hand.  

I had really forgotten just how much I love to sew by hand.  I was twenty years old before I touched my first sewing machine, and I had been sewing for ten years by then.

The machines do make it faster, and I do enjoy sewing on all of my machines, but there is just something so soothing, so blissful about sewing by hand.  

I mentioned a few months back that I couldn't figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, because no one had ever allowed me the opportunity to pursue my own interests.  Suddenly there was no one standing in my way any more and I was completely lost for direction.  Well, I think I have found my direction.  I cannot remember the last time I have felt so damn good, mentally and emotionally anyway.  My fingers are sore, and I am a little stiff from spending too much time sitting here on my bed, but I am so freaking happy its almost scary!     

So, I figured, if I am having this much fun I might as well just go all in.  I am still working out an overall design plan, but I have started creating some of the pieces for my new "monumental" project.  As near as I have determined so far, it will be a very large, very detailed, flower garden scene.   I started by tracing out circles onto fabric to create "yo-yo's".  Now, I should mention that I have avoided making Yo-yo's all of my life, I never liked the damn things very much.  Yeah, they are kinda cute, but they are usually rather large and often rather pointless, so I avoided them.  Until now. 

So here are a few of the dozens and dozens of circles I have traced and cut out.
 The finished yo-yo's will be used as centers for the larger flowers and as tiny flowers themselves, like for forget-me-nots.

 And here are some of the finished yo-yo's.  I put the dime in the picture to show you the scale of the madness I have immersed myself in.                       

 Yes, the little tiny purple ones are kind of a challenge, but I am still having a grand time.

 Last night I cut out patterns for leaves to go with my flowers.  Rather than trying to fight against my own nature and try to draw the damn things, I just took a piece of sticker paper and started cutting.  When I came up with a basic scale that I felt I could work with  I cut out a bunch of different leaf shapes and then peeled the paper off the back and stuck them to the sides of a cardboard cereal box. And then cut them out again.  Then I traced around them on some pieces of my hand dyed fabric and rough cut them all out.  I think there is about a hundred of them all together.  It is my intention to sew some of them flat to the quilt, and have others that will be able to stand out from it.  So, I will turn under the edges on some of these, and some of them I will line with another piece of fabric, sew around the edges and then turn it right side out. That way they will be finished on the backside too.  I am still working out this process, but I am having fun considering all of the possibilities.  

I fully expect this project to take months, or even years to complete.  I am even accepting of the fact that I will probably start and stop this project many time before it even gets to the stage where you all can start to see what I am envisioning.  That is all okay.  It is also okay if I completely and totally obsess over it and finish it in a few weeks.  Where ever it takes me will be fine.  As I said from the beginning, this is going to be a grand new adventure, and I hope you all enjoy the journey because I know I will!

Taming the Hoards

Hello Internet People!  Yes, I am still alive.  Apparently I just needed to take some time away from the world for a while, and that is just what I did.  For the past couple of weeks I have been lost in my own thoughts. In my last post I said I was going to go read some books to try to find some new inspirations, and that is just what I did.  Well, that, and a lot of cleaning and re-organizing.    

So, now all of my fabrics are once again organized by color and theme, and most of the ones I hope to use in my Art quilting are now inside the house, and almost easily accessible. I still have tons of embellishments and crap to go through, but I am making progress.  For a couple of days there my house was looking rather "Hoarder-esque", with stacks of boxes and piles of stuff everywhere with only small pathways to walk between them.  It is starting to get back to normal (which is to say, the hoards are less obvious), but there is still much to be done.

I did find some inspiration for a new project as well.  It is actually an amalgamation of several projects and ideas I was looking at, and I am really excited to give this a go. I am a great fan of three dimensional applique, where the objects stand out away from the background, and I have been trying for years to wrap my head around how I could do something like that.  I think I have it figured out.  I am still in the development stages, but I really think this might just work.  My test subject is a butterfly.  I have the pattern pieces ready, so hopefully, if this works the way I have envisioned, I will have pictures for you in a few days.  

But the biggest reason I have not been posting here, or even very much on Facebook recently is that I have another new idea that I am kicking around in my head.  One for which I do not have all of the necessary supplies already on hand. (The Horrors!)  So, I am now fight an overwhelming compulsion to go shopping!  Since I seldom leave the house, I do a lot of my shopping online.  So, if I stay away from the computer, I am far less likely to spend any money.  And since I really don't have any money to spend at the moment, I have been avoiding the computers as much as possible.

I am not sure if I can explain this other new project idea to those of you who have never seen it before, I have been looking at it for two years and I am just now starting to figure out how it works.  Basically the idea is to take ribbons, strings, yarns, and other fibers and create a new fabric from them.  Its not weaving, the fibers are held together with stitches.  I have some ideas I want to play around with, but I need fibers to work with.  Now I have found lots of places online where I can buy all kinds of beautiful fibers and stuff to use, but they all want actual money for the shit.  I am thinking a visit to a few of the area thrift stores might be more cost effective for sourcing the supplies I want.  So I am trying to push this project to a back corner of my head for a while until I can get out and have a look around at what might be available on the cheap as it were.

For now I am going to go try to figure out how to put this Butterfly together with the least amount of heartache and frustration.  If I am successful, I will return with pictures.  If I am not successful, I will probably return with a whole new project in mind.  

                                 

                                 

I Finally Finished Something! Sort of ...

Hello again Internet People!  The long lost crazy lady has returned from obsessive-compulsive land!  My gawd I almost got lost in there this time!  Fortunately I have made it out alive (barely), and now am planning my next sojourn.  I have mentioned before that I am a glutton for punishment, haven't I?

So what was I obsessing over this time?  Yep, that reverse applique project.  The one that was supposed to be a "long-term project", yeah, its done now.  It only took about 8 days, working about 6-8 hours a day on it, so only around 50 or 60 hours of tiny stitches.  It was a LOT of fun though.  I had honestly forgotten just how much I love to sew by hand.  Yes, it is extremely slow and tedious, but for whatever twisted reason, I enjoy the hell out of it.

So I started working on it last Sunday, around noonish.  You may recall (if you cared) that I already had it all set up and ready for stitching.  I decided to put the whole thing in my big Quilting Hoop to provide myself with a more stable work surface.  It turns out that that was a really good idea!  As was my incredibly anal basting of the two pieces together.  If only I had taken the time to hunt down some better quality fabric to start with this would have been a truly awesome piece.  But I didn't, I used the cheapest fucking crap I had, so as much as I enjoyed creating it, in the end it is pretty fucking pointless. I am hoping it will stand up all right as a wall hanging eventually, cause it really will not stand up to being washed.

Here is my progress as of last Wednesday:

 And this is what it looks like now :                  

                          

I don't know if you all can zoom in on it well enough to see all the imperfections, but I just cannot escape from them.  From a distance it does look pretty freaking cool to me, but I still think it is crap.  This is what I mean when I say that my perfectionism fucks with me.  Its okay though, I learned a lot of valuable things in the process of completing it, so when I do another one, maybe I will be able to finish it without thinking it is crap.  And I very much want to do another one (or a dozen!)!  I will definitely be using a higher quality fabric next time, the cheap stuff has its uses, but reverse applique is obviously NOT one of them!  I probably would have been fine if I had reversed the two pieces of fabric, doing the cut work and the stitching on the batik fabric instead of the black.  Oh well, like I said, I learned a lot, and for me that is the only thing that really matters.

When I finished it yesterday afternoon I figured I had better put some of that obsessive energy to use doing something a little more, important, I guess would be the word.  So I cleaned my bathroom.  And I do mean I cleaned it obsessive-compulsively.  From the ceiling down, everything is shiny sparkly clean.  It was a little beyond time for doing it, but it is done now and I do feel much better.  Next I need to tackle the kitchen, but I don't think that is gonna happen today.  All that obsessing seems to have caught up with me and I am freakin exhausted!  I did manage to start on the cleaning of our bedroom last night as well and I think that was what did me in.  I knew I needed to just sit down and rest, but I just kept finding more things to do!

I think I will take the rest of today off, maybe try to read some books or something.  I haven't been doing very well with the eating thing while I was obsessing over the applique thing, so my energy reserves need a boost.  I lost another pound and a half, that is not the direction the scale is supposed to be going!  So, I am going to rest today, and get back to eating, one way or another I have got to find a way to get the scale moving in the other direction before I get blown away by a strong gust of wind.  We get those here a lot, so I really can't be taking any chances!

 

                                       

                                       

Fighting Perfect

Hello again Internet People!  Sorry Mother has been M.I.A. the last couple of days.  You remember that "long-term" hand applique project I shared with you all last week, yeah, well, at some point around noon on Sunday it became my newest obsession.  I had to do a little modification to the design because I am a dumbass and used cheap ass fabric for the black part and it is unraveling like, well, like cheap ass fabric.  So, this is going to look like shit when it is done, but for some odd reason I have this compelling need to finish it.  I guess I need the practice anyway, and fighting against cheap crappy fabric provides ample opportunity for practice.  Practice ripping my hair out.    

I have come to the realization lately that my "perfectionism" that I thought I had brought under control through my extreme laziness regime, is still running rampant inside my head.  And you know why?  Because I can't fucking see!  My eye sight limitations require me to get extremely up-close and personal with my work, and when you work that closely with anything you are going to see every fucking imperfection standing out like an inflamed wound.  No wonder I always thing my stuff is crappy, if I looked that closely at other people's work they would probably look even crappier than mine!  But I don't do that.  Its funny, I know a lot of quilter's are that way, and I would venture to guess that other artists also fight against that perfectionism crap.  When I look at a quilt or other piece of art from someone else I NEVER look for the imperfections.  It doesn't even occur to me to try to find them, but I can list every single flaw in every single piece I have ever produced.  Most of which no one else can see, even when I point them out!  

So part of the reason for continuing to work on this project even though I know it will never be anything but crap, is forcing myself to confront that perfectionism issue.  And as bad as I think it is, I will bet that no one else will ever notice there is a damn thing wrong with it.  I mean, if I was to enter it into a quilting competition or something like that, they might figure out how bad it really is, but no one else will ever look at it that closely.  

I really just need to fucking relax and stop trying so damn hard.  The whole concept that I might ever be able to earn a living with my "Art" is just too stressful, I put too much pressure on myself and that never turns out well for anyone when I do that.  So, fuck it.  I am done with that idea.  I am never going to be able to "earn a living" at anything, so I am done fucking trying.  My husband just better out live me.  Otherwise I am totally screwed.