so i don't consider myself too much of a suzy homemaker, but sewing, well...it's somewhat of another form of art to me.
this week i was at the international quilt festival. all i can say is wow. lots of gray-haired ladies in denim shirts, lots of sewing machines that can practically cook breakfast for you (though i still love my singer touch and sew!), some excellent teachers, some strange ones, and tons of ways to poke, burn or dye yourself strange colors.
my first class was 'making it easy with jackie.' you know, quilting really doesn't seem all *that* hard - at least the sewing part. you just have to be pretty picky about seam width and how you cut stuff, i guess. maybe they just make it seem easy to get you suckered in. ;) my class on contemporary patchwork quilts found us coloring for four hours in a freezing cold room. and i couldn't even leave early like everyone else because i was recruited into being a teacher's pet and i had to wait for everyone to turn in their evaluations. :p that night we went out to dinner and collapsed into bed exhausted. (you wouldn't think that we would be so tired, but i know i was getting up two hours earlier than i usually do!)
day two started with fabric collage greeting cards. this i can do. fussy-cutting out designs from fabric and adhering them to cards, following by stamping and embossing. my kinda stuff. after lunch, my last class was on rotary heirloom quilts. since it was a lecture, she made sure she let us know it was okay if we worked on handwork - so i did. (i'm hooked on this grandmother's flower garden thing...) mostly it was the author of the book talking about how to make sure that your quilt survives through generations. it was a lot about documentation, and which patterns seem to be passed, but i learned some stuff that i hadn't considered - like looking for genealogy information on quilts. hm. something to consider when i gear back up into that hobby again. there was also a pattern she in the book called morris garden - i think that's going to be something i'm going to work on eventually. after class, the marketplace opened. it took a full six hours to cover the whole place (three that night and three the next day). talk about huge!
one thing i noticed was that oriental patterns and such were very popular. in fact, i bought silk dye and paint. i'm such a scarf-aholic, i figure i can make my own. they also talked about overdying silk and rayon shirts to make them different colors. seems simple enough, and perhaps something easy enough to do and sell in the booth. we'll see. i also bought miscellaneous stuff - stamps to work on grandmother's flower garden on my own, some nice scissors, some fat quarters, a large piece of silk with a beautiful painting that's a remnant from a vintage obi panel. i suppose i should blame rick for the fact that a lot of the stuff i picked up turned out to be japanese in design. i'm tuned into that kind of stuff as i look for inspiration for his sumi-e painting.
on the way home we stopped by ikea. now *that* is a dangerous store for me. i think i got the last can of the blue stain that they sell. it's being discontinued, i guess, and i love that color. i also found a set of drawers that has a top (kind of like something you'd see from closetmaid - except at about 1/3 of the price). I think I'm going to start accumulating them for my study. You can see what's in them, and the drawers are even big enough to put full-sized scrapbook pages in - a must for me.
mood: tired, don't-wanna-work
music: dido/life for rent