Sorry, guys.  I got wrapped up in figuring out a couple things on Charm City and didn’t move this post from drafts to published….

Notice anything different?

That’s right!  Miss Lola has gone topless!

I’ve hurt myself a couple of times on the roller bar and have knocked the machine off its tracks more times than I can count.  After both my customers did it last week, I decided I was going to remove the bar completely.  I had kept in on in case I had a customer who rabidly wanted to pin their top.  But now that I know how easy it is to move, I don’t ever see that being a problem.

And may I just say, I LOVE NOT HAVING THAT BAR!

One downside: I can’t use it to roll myself along the front of the machine when I’m sitting down.  I have to actually move myself with my own two legs.  Oh, darn!

Remember that post I made about the hand-dyed green I loved so much?  Turns out, I happened to have that very dye in my closet.

On Saturday, the brother and I went over to Miss Em’s apartment to un-dye the green I dyed for his Randomness of Things quilt.  It didn’t take out all the green but left a lovely shade of grey.  Which works out well, since Jon wanted a more greyish green than before.  Back when I went to Dharma, I bought a 1/2 pound of “Avocado” after attempting to describe the colors to the brother via phone.  I then took those 10 yards of fabric and overdyed them in the bathtub, making sure not to agitate it, so there would be plenty of grey spots (by brotherly request)

He says he’s happy with the outcome.  I know I sure am!

I’ve been itching to move things around in the studio for a few months.  But now, I finally have a good reason.  When all the shelves fell down, I decided to take that opportunity to move my desk upstairs to the bedroom.  I wanted to keep my personal computing separate from our public space.  That and I’m embarrassed to have people over for dinner with my paper-strewn desk smack dab in the middle of it all.  But now I needed to fill the empty space between the tall cabinets on the dining room wall.  The process went something like this:

Hmm…  a 4×4 Expedit would be nice there…  but I’m not sure one house is allowed 4 Expedits…

What if I took the one out of the studio and moved it into the DR?  And then bought those FLARKE bookcases for the bolts..  and then moved the longarm 90degrees…  and then moved the sewing table over here and then did this with the cutting table and then made a pressing station and then…..

Yeah.  I do get carried away sometimes.  Of course, when I realized that it would give me open space to measure custom clothing clients without being in the living room, I flipped the switch and started to move stuff.  Sweet Richie was nice enough to grant me his services with moving the actual furniture pieces.

The result:

I was trying to find a recipe for chocolate mousse tonight.  Not that I was going to make it Right Now but I had a craving.  In my profuse googling, I stumbled across a great blog by the fantastic Miss Laura.  Of course, one can’t simply read a single post and ignore the rest, so I spent about 45 minutes reading back.  She did a whole blogging-every-day thing in July and it has inspired me.

As anyone who’s ever paid attention to my blog knows, I have a bad habit of not posting for weeks at a time.  It’s not that I don’t think about it.  One of these days I’ll have a phone that allows me to easily blog from all the remote places that make my brain move.  In the meantime, I’m going to make my own blogging committment.  Starting now, I will blog every day until my trip to SF in October.

Now, you’re all going to hold me to this, right?

I was turned on to a great hand-dyer by the quiltart list.  Just Imagination (aka Judy’s Fabric) has some of the most scrumptious fabrics!  I’ve fallen in love with a green number that may eventually make its way into my stash.  Shhh….  don’t tell Rich!

Last night, we moved the 4×4 Expedit from my studio into the dining room.  That meant a transfer of all the folded fabric from one set of shelves to another.  He actually asked for the first time “So, how much of this fabric did you buy in the past year?”  Why the past year?  Because that’s when we combined our finances.  Fortunately, I was able to say only about 1/3.  I’m not sure if he included the bolts on the other case as part of that, but I did.  I brought a LOT of fabric into this marriage and haven’t really acquired that much over the past year.  And, I pointed out, I rarely buy anything at full price.

That’s gotta count for something, right?!

Let’s suffice to say that when Deana’s house is out of order, Deana’s brain is out of order.  Which comes first, Lord only knows.  But Deana decided to do something about her brain, hoping that the house would follow.  So, she finally gave in and is now taking speed..  I mean, doctor-prescribed-legal-amphetamines… for her long-existing ADD.

Apparently one of the side effects is talking about herself in the third person.

In other news, Miss Scarlet took first place at the New Braunfels show (wheeee!)  Pictures may or may not be posted, depending on if the speed dosage is high enough to make Deana remember that she wanted to post pictures.

Now, question for you, dear readers…  does it now make sense why I can’t remember to post except in spurts and that I forget to read forums and other blogs for two weeks at a time and then do so in a massive burst?

I have that Discovery Channel commercial song stuck in my head, thanks to R and this morning’s xkcd.  I guess that’s better than the Mame theme song that was in my head when I woke up this morning.  The last thing I remember of my dream was a big dance sequence a la the Mame musical.

Oh, it gets better   Yesterday, while on the time-trap-that-is-wiki-my-love, I started out with Google Page Rank and ended up on Rickrolling.  And proceeded to buy Rick Astley’s Greatest Hits on iTunes.  It’s danceoriffic!

In quilty news, I got Gratuitious Use of Bling designed.  Spent about 6 hours in Illustrator yesterday and I’m going to warn you now, that its name doesn’t give you any indication of it’s coloring.  Kinda like Rick Astley’s voice

The blue diamonds will be dupioni silk, the pink and brown are quilter’s cotton (the pink hand dyed) with some of the pink covered with thread trash and then silk organza or tulle (haven’t decided).  The outer pink border will have beads, sequins, crystals, puff paint, paint, seashells, charms, and buttons.  The big brown area will have shiva paint sticks and metallic fabric paint while the green line you see will be stem stitch.  Using the green vine as a base, I’m going to make pink (I think) flowers with foil, solvy fabric, needlefelting, tyvek, angelina, and silk ribbons.

All on only 20″x20″

To make the center part, I’m using half-square triangles.  I want to make a whole sheet at a time to eliminate much fraying of the dupioni, so I had to draft my own triangle sheet.  I couldn’t find any for 1.5″ finished size, unfortunately.  If anyone’s interested, I’ll post the pdf on my site and link to it here.

So, it’s pretty obvious that I’m going to have something in the wearables division.  I think it will probably be Scarlet, since I don’t want to rush Peacock.  Hopefully, she’ll come into the show having done well at New Braunfels and Bernina University.  I still haven’t decided whether to enter her into PLAQG.  I guess I’ll decide that today.

Otherwise, I want to enter the max (3 quilts) and only had one entry decided/planned until last week.  That was Gratitutious Use of Bling.  The ladies over at MQR gave me a great list of types of quilt bling and I’m getting very excited about it.  It’s a miniature (meaning less than 24×24) so it’s got to be a very precise and careful use of the bling, so as not to overwhelm.  Sketches are still being made and will be shared when complete.

I was going through a number of ideas for a large pieced quilt and a wall size quilt.  I really want to show off my quilting in these entires, so it’s imperitive that they be condusive to that.  I started going through my wish list of patterns and found one big pieced quilt that had actually already been started.  It’s a pattern I tested for a designer last year and made some of the blocks with the testing.  I wanted to finish the top as a gift for my friend Anjea but was waiting on permission from the designer.  Now, after starting the work, I find that it may not be a gift after all.  I’m getting really attached to it.  I hope Anjea doesn’t mind.  I like the pattern and will probabaly still make it for her, but I don’t know if it will be this exact one.

I drew it up in Illustrator.  Wanna see the plan?

As for the wall quilt, I’m still mulling over ideas.  It may be a wholecloth.  It may be an art quilt.  I just don’t know.  I’m starting to get frustrated with myself.  But I really want to have a third quilt in the show.

Original post date: June 8th

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=Ott2y_g0QxQ]

I had to share.  This is my first attempt at using the video feature on my camera and I didn’t realize it had sound.  Guess it’s a good thing that I had a good song on!

Doesn’t that look yummy?!  It was.  Right after I took this picture, I heard an ominous noise from my desk area in the adjacent dining room.  This is what I turned around to find…

All the beautiful organizing work I had done on those beautiful shelves — gone!  They completely pulled out of the wall.  We used the right wall anchors, but I guess it just wasn’t a strong enough hold.  I’m going to take this as my chance to move my desk upstairs and out of the public areas.  It bothers me to have to clean my desk every time a customer or guests come over.  It’ll just be easier to have it upstairs.  And then I can keep the shelves!