happy halloween.....

We had trick-or-treating last night. Living on the edge of town we generally don't get many...average is 2, maybe.  But on my way to the store I ran into a large group and told them to come on over....that group was a new record. We had 11 trick-or-treaters yesterday.

The ghost feet were made by the preschoolers last week.

Then I found this free online course.

I had nothing to lose by giving it a try.

Here is the link to my art teacher, tam!

You will have to scroll down to find the link to the class, it is under Art, Heart and Healing

or maybe here would be better 

I don't know how I found it myself, but I did start......

Week one was a front-facing.... face. I don't have all the same supplies needed. 

I don't have the water crayons....but I do have pencils.

I don't have a journal......but I do have some paper.

I have not done something like before, this is my first attempt.....

Well, my first attempt didn't quite look right so I painted over it with the white acrylic and started over....

this would be my second attempt

over the first attempt

 on the same paper....

Week two was altering a board book. I used an old book instead. I didn't have the supplies for photo transferring, so I skipped on ahead to part 2  (I'll do part 1 later)

We were supposed to think of a childhood trauma and Tam showed us how to draw "whimsies"

She said she was bullied as a child, so she drew the opposite...herself with a lot of friends.

My trauma isn't so awful....but I am sure several of you can identify with it......

There were 6 of us girls.....I only put the first three in my project.

When I was talking to my Mom she asked, "what have you been doing?"

I told her about little whimsies and that I needed a childhood trauma...and I thought of one.

"oh no, am I involved in this trauma of yours?" she asked.

I started laughing

Why yes you are! I explained what it was and she starting laughing.

The last picture is Crispy's self portrait from last year. As long as we have art things here, I thought I would throw this one in too.

lunch bag book....

I like looking at this blog,  thatartistwoman.blogspot.com  and on Friday when I looked..... I adored the little book she had. I couldn't stop thinking about it. I tried very hard not to think about it on Saturday.
I even took a nap.  But....sigh....I woke up thinking about it.  What else could I do but get out the supplies and start putting it together. 
I used things that I had on hand.....paint, old stickers, fabric, scrap paper, stamps and lots of glue.  The witch came from here...vintageholidaycrafts .....my printer is low on ink, so it didn't print out that nice.  I used colored pencils to make it look a little better.
My kids are too big for such things, there are no grandchildren....but there are preschoolers that might have fun with my homemade interactive book.

altered book....

I took an old porky pig counting book and added counting things. If you are visually impaired, you will be able to count the objects by feeling them.
I am stuck....I don't have,
2 boxes of strawberries
3 containers of ice cream &
7 party favors
I will go through our "junk" drawers at school tomorrow...
If you think of something, add it to the comments.

one rope mat done.....

This fabric came from my sister. It was once a curtain in her house. She thought I could use it for something...

Well I had that rope to cover....so I cut strips of it and started wrapping. I tried straight-of -grain first, then switched to a bias cut. I don't know if there really was any difference in how it wrapped. The strips were 1 inch wide....and about 22 inches long.

I curled the start of it, them sewed an X on it, this was to hold in place while I started sewing around and around. I would wrap and sew, wrap and sew. A clothes pin held the fabric in place. 

It grew and grew. It's final size is about 12 inches across. I wanted to sew something else on that machine, so I figured it was at a good stopping point.

Then...

It didn't want to lay flat. It received a heavy dose of steam and heat from the iron and that seemed to do the trick.

Flat as a pancake!

It reminds me of the old braided rugs that my grandma had in her house.

going to Max's...

My cousin Max had a Tupperware party on Saturday. She is just over the border in Minnesota. Her pantry is right out of the catalog. She has her food all organized. It was really handy too..... I could look at what she had to help me figure out what I wanted to buy.

Before I left she pulled out an old quilt that our Great-grandma, Lillian, had made for her grand daughter Kay.
It is so precious.

Eventually, when she gets her "sewing room" she would like to hang it there.
I was taking all the back roads up there and back...and drove through Mansfield by accident. This was good though. It was a chance to take pictures of our other great-grandma's grave. It has been years since I was here.

Max also gave me papers and Tabasco sauce from Uncle Hop's memorial service last month.  He didn't go anywhere without a bottle of the stuff in his holster. I set up my own little tribute for him when I got  home.

sewing today.....

It feels like not much is getting worked on around here, but really it is. Just slowly. The penguins are ready to be quilted. As soon as I get some backing, I will send it in for quilting.
I started quilting something myself .....and ran out of the thread I was using on the top. It doesn't show so well, it is a variegated pastel color. It is an old embroidered top.

  It is getting straight lines on the diagonal. When we were looking at quilts at the show, there was one that was machine stitched like this....right over the embroidery. I figure if they can do it, I can do it too.

My lines aren't the straightest and there are some sewn up puckers on the back....eeek.  But over all I am pleased with how it is looking. The top belongs to a friend who gave it to me years ago...I forgot about it.
I hope she did too. It will be such a surprise when I give it back to her. I'll show the whole thing when I get it finished.

Then there is my quilt-along. The blocks were laying there, so I grabbed them and started putting them together. I can't believe how fast this has gone together. The outside stars are also sewn up into strips. All I need is the outer/inner border to put it all together. Both Karen and I have made this quilt. We traded blocks. One of mine is in hers. Her block is the middle one. Here is the link to the Quilt-along ....


My plan was to work on binding today (no school)....amazing what you can find to work on when you don't really want to work on binding.

finds at the show on Saturday.....

I emptied my bag of goodies and took a picture.....I had one rule, no Christmas patterns or fabric this year. I broke that rule when I bought Santa & Rudolf in the Photo Booth. It was too funny. The swirly stencil can be used in scrapbooking or quilts, a double duty thing. I saw Tanya make a landscape quilt on her blog using the book Accidental Landscapes. She made it look so easy.... it would be her fault that when I saw the book, I bought it. The tiger was only because we are losing our high school and they are the tigers! There is a scrap bag of dyed fabric, a  huge cut of hand dyed fabric and some batiks that said buy me when I touched them in a booth. Two other patterns that captured my attention. The blocks are small and the samples looked so sweet in the booth. Then there is the rope. Sigh. We watched a demo on wrapping fabric around it then sewing the rope in a circle using the zigzag stitch. It looked like a braided rug. Both Karen and I bought it. If we never make a place mat or even a coaster....we have some mighty fine clothes line ready to go!

A cache right outside the Iowa Events Center.....
When we walked out, I turned the GPS on, the cache I wanted to find was only about 300 feet away! We had to go for it!!
As we approached, it looked like the cache was hidden near this pair of hands. I knocked on them to see if they were hollow and they are. So I got down to look up inside. BINGO, an ice cream bucket full of goodies! It was no urban micro. It was a nice sized, "you can't miss it" kind of cache.

You can see my feet sticking out on the bottom as I signed the log book. It was really quiet on this end of the building...so I am pretty sure that no one saw us and wondered what we were doing.
It was a great day.

geocaching October 10th, 2010

Yesterday was 10/10/10. To celebrate 10 years of geocaching, we were to go out and cache, then make it the biggest logging day yet at geocaching.comThat is exactly what we did.

We went up to Lakota to do Tour of the Town a multi-cache. When I logged it, I got this "souvenir button" thing for my profile. The cache we went to was 10 mile away. It just seemed so perfect!

I don't know what tractor joe does, but so many of his pictures are off....crooked, slanted, distorted. When he snapped the first one, I said right away...."do another, just in case." So one looks shorter and wider than I am, in my opinion anyway. The other looks taller and thinner than I am, the way I think I should look.  If he could make all my pictures look like the second one, I don't think I would complain at all.

These are what we were looking for...small green containers with black caps. See it, at the top and middle of the picture?  They held the coordinates and one line of a poem that I wrote down. Tractor joe laid the twigs so that they were "X marks the spot"

Here I am logging at the final stage. The cache container is huge! It was hard to miss this one. I liked that.

Billion dollar satellites

Sure do us some good

When it comes down to finding

All that tupperware in the woods.

Beautiful day, my pics so far.....

Before we could head south to Des Moines, we had to head east. It was still early. The sun hadn't been up to long. It was the start of a glorious day here in Iowa.

Karen had a list of names and numbers of different brands of machines...we looked at all of them. We played with all of them. Doing some free-motion quilting didn't seem so hard.

This is the machine that really captured Karen's heart. Miss Melody....she sat here the longest playing with it and talking to the gals in the booth about. Karen was falling in love.

Meanwhile, I was a few chairs down sewing these pre-cut fleece squares together on a serger. The gals said to sew all I wanted....(they wanted me occupied, then they could concentrate on Karen and Miss Melody, they could see she was so close to saying yes, "I want this machine!")  The small blankets were going to be donated to the Methodist Hospital for the preemies. It was rather addicting doing this and so easy!! I still don't know why I would want a serger though. What does one do with a serger anyway??? (the yellow was more lime green)

 Even though we were "just looking"....Karen said yes to the machine! As luck would have it, we didn't have to haul the box ourselves! One of the gals in the booth said, "Dad will carry it out to your car." But we parked way up on the north end of the building. We were told that was nothing to walk. OK! Off we went......

He walked rather fast. But, Karen never left his side. She was staying close to Melody the whole time. I on the other hand was side tracked....I had to stop for one more picture.

They have windows that over look the area where the vendors are. I had to grab a picture of that....
These are pictures I have so far. I need to go empty my bag and show what fun stuff I found at the show.  But first, it is 10-10-10 today. I am going geocaching to help make today the biggest log day, EVAR. 
I will keep posting things as I get pictures. Karen still has the pictures of yesterday's cache right outside building!!