Work, work, work...

Lots of little things got done yesterday but not on any one project so it doesn't look like a major accomplishment but overall I feel really good about everything that got done.

To begin with our quilt group has a workday once a month and yesterday was it. I took the t-shirts for the next quilt that I have to make from start to finish. The majority of those are cut up now so when I am ready to work on piecing it together it will be ready. I also took the ice dyed fabrics to return them and everyone loved them. They all agreed how amazing it is that they all turned out so beautiful and different even though they were in the same dye bath tub together. What a wonderful analogy to help us to see that we are in the same large "tub of life" but what we are exposed to, when, for how long and what we do with those experiences makes us who we are. We are not like everyone else nor is everyone else like us. We don't have to come out of our experiences the same as someone else to have our unique beauty and character revealed. What we might consider a flaw is actually what makes us uniquely the masterpiece that God created us to be. So don't fret over what you can't change or fix, instead embrace it as your own unique stamp that makes you YOU.

How do you like how all of my hand dyed fabrics live together in there own glass fronted cabinet that keeps them clean?

I folded, rearranged and edited some of the stash in this case and then I added more. The last wheelbarrow load of ice dyed's got added.

They are beautiful but you know they are not truly useful until they are taken out, opened up, cut up and woven into another creation. We don't know how God is going to use us but we need to be ready to be sent out, open ourselves up to doing something new and exciting for Him. In the end it is all about glorifying Him. I am so thankful that He allows me to do something that I am so passionate about and yet use it to glorify Him.

Some other things that I have made progress on. This is a sneak peak of the quilt I am working on.

Since this is such small scale work, I am quilting until I empty a bobbin, which is a lot of quilting since the thread is so fine, and then I work on something else for a while. My goal is to put 2 bobbins a day of work into it.

I finished up the embroidery work on this also.

I have all the supplies, on hand, to make this up into a pillow for the couch .

So when I need a break today from quilting the big quilt I will finish this up. Now I am back to work, work, work. By the end of the day I should once again have something wonderful to show for it all.

Have a great day and remember that we are all in the same dye bath of life, the colors we come out with in the end will be a glorious medley of beauty.

Time slipping away...

I am sorry that there is no post for today. I had a phone call from DD related to pregnancy stuff and the time just slipped away. I have a quilt workday meeting to get to and just enough time to pack everything up for that.

Good news though. DD is expecting her second child and it will be the first grandson for us. Woo Hoo. Fun to be had chasing around a little boy again.

Have a great day and I will try to have something extra special to post about tomorrow.

A pretty picture for you to enjoy.

Another panel raised...

The second ceiling panel got raised to the ceiling and attached. The velcro idea of adhering it did not give me the smooth results that I wanted so we went to stapling it up instead. DH helped me and I am so pleased with how it is turning out. You can begin to see the cabana striped affect that I was going for.

I will finish the 3rd panel soon at which time I will be able to take down the rest of the sheets covering the ceiling and dye them, quilt them and get them hung. This will be the last major project for my studio. Don't forget though that I am still doing a clean-over in there. There will be more photos to share as I continue to go through all the storage and book cases and get them all decluttered and re-organized.

Another project that I finished was retweeking my resume and Yes! I did get it sent out yesterday. While getting ready to work on that I cleaned off my desk.
Again. Once more you can see wood . Do you want to take any wagers on how long it will look like this?

I love my office space but I do tend to let the papers pile up especially when I am in the middle of a big project like this quilt that I also started yesterday for a client.

This is C's quilt and it is a beautiful antique Grandmother's Flower Garden pattern. Those hexegon's are 3/4". The color layout of this quilt is stunning. I just love to work on vintage pieces and give them a new lease on life. I hate to see these beautiful works of art created years ago by someone's grandmother lying lost in a trunk or box somewhere. It is going to take some time to get the quilting done as it is going to be very dense, equal to micro-stippling but not micro-stippling. I do not do stippling. It will be worth it in the end to have a piece to display proudly.

Since DH helped me out a lot yesterday, I am going to be making him a vinyl cover for his new rail gun. He does competions and he would like to have a cover for this gun to use to protect it. He deserves it, he does so much to help me out in the studio when I need an extra hand.

So you know where I will be for most of the day. I hope to get a large section of that quilt knocked out and that cover. I will put on season 3 of Grey's Anatomy and catch up. Stephanie got me hooked. Thanks for lending me your DVD's Steph. On to the quilting.

Have a great day and remember to break those big tasks that seem overwhelming down into smaller steps that don't seem so daunting and keep at them. You will be successful at getting them done.

Laughter is the best medicine...

If that very familiar quote "Laughter is the best medicine," is true then yesterday I got an overdose of the best medicine out there. Between family stories after the wedding yesterday and meeting up with several of the BFF's ever for margarita night, my day was filled with laughter.

My neice's wedding was beautiful. She made a gorgeous bride and she glowed. You could tell that her handsome groom was absolutely certain that what he was doing was the absolute best thing he ever did. They are a beautiful couple.

A match made in heaven.

Do you want to know the coolest symbolic thing about the day? Stacey and Frank got married on her grandparent's 57th wedding anniversary and even better, her grandparents stood up as the witnesses for them. Isn't that amazing. Happy Anniversary Liz and Ted. I am sorry that I didn't get a photo of Liz and Ted together with Stacey and Frank. We returned to Stacey's childhood home for the reception and in good old Laurie fashion (Stacey's mom) there was good food and lots of it. You can never say you went away from Laurie's house hungry unless you chose to not eat because she is a fabulous cook and loves to do large. Another amazing woman. After we all filled up on the copious platters of food we settled down to share family stories and reminisce. We don't take enough time in our busy schedules to sit back and reconnect in this way with our loved ones nearly enough. As the party was winding down I made my exit to go to another meeting of friends. Tina, Debbie, Essie, and I met up at a local Mexican restaurant and ate, shared, and laughed ourselves silly. These are the moments that bond us together in this crazy world. We share life's joys and trials and heartaches and we come away stronger. We know someone else cares. We get solidified in who we are and what we stand for. We gain strength in knowing that there are those who love us and are pulling for us, cheering us on, or pushing us along if we need it. We have family and we have friends and that is one of the best blessings we have in the here and now. Be present for those moments. Let them shine in your memories as some of the best days.

I will leave you with those thoughts. Have a great day and remember to love those who are close to you each and every day.

New look and new adventures

You might be thinking that you are at the wrong place this morning. No you are not, we are getting a new look here at Master+Peace Studios, not only is my physical studio space getting a clean-over but so is my blog-o-sphere. I hope you enjoy the new look and please leave me any comments that you might have to let me know what you like or what is not working here in blog land. My focus has been just to keep family and friends up to date on the goings on here but I am getting ready to move forward and put this out there were more people can find it and share in my passions and to be an inspiration to them. I am working through an online blog class that I signed up for earlier in the summer but with all the traveling and other obligations I did not get through much of the information. I did have the forethought though to download all of the lessons so I could finish when the time became available or better yet when I determined to make the time to do it. So please let me know by commenting below how you like the new look, what you like about the blog, what you don't like about it or what you might like to see more of.

I got a lot done the end of last week that I need to share. First of all, I washed up all the ice dyed fabrics. I was really pleased with the results. They are gorgeous. See for yourself. These are taken as I was pulling them out of the wheelbarrow.

It is amazing how vibrant the colors are. Some more eye candy.

I have a large tote bag that was filled to the brim with all the fabrics that came out of that wheelbarrow and they are all gorgeous. Yep definitely eye candy or perhaps a bowl full of sorbet as there were lots of pastels too. I have decided that I will try to sell them at the workshops I hold and the various local quilt shows. Maybe some of the local shops would do a limited display of them. That would be cool.

The piece-de-resistance though is this beauty that I mentioned I was working on. I got it all finished Saturday evening and am really pleased with the results.

This is K's wallhanging. I love working on pieces that are to be heirlooms and this deserves that status. Here is a more detailed shot.

This shows the center star and wreath. This last detail shot shows the corner.

Of course it has to be washed to get all the markings out of it and be bound but K will have lots of time to get that done since she isn't expecting it for several more weeks.

I returned E's quilt to her yesterday and she was so excited about it. She is going to get it bound and ready to take her quilt programs that she does. She was so pleased that she had it back in time to take it to the next one.

Today will be busy. My neice is getting married this morning and there will be fun festivities to follow and I have been invited out this evening too. A friend who is away during the winter is back in the area and we are getting together for Mexican margarita night. Essie was it 3 eagles and 2 beers or 2 eagles and 3 beers? That story will be brought up tonight and laughed over again. I am sure. The fun part was that no beers at all were in the mix of that fun day together. Who needs alcohol when you can have so much fun without it and you get to remember the fun you had the next day. So today is about family and friends.

I hope you have a wonderful day and remember to be thankful for the family and friends in your life and if you say you don't have any go out and be one. Remember the saying "To have a friend you have to be a friend." Well, let's go out and be a friend today. You can always make friends into your family too.

Have a great day.

More work to be done and already done.

I had a new customer drop off a quilt for me to finish. It is a t-shirt quilt and I am to quilt it and bind it. It is pretty big at 88X106". That is the 2nd quilt dropped off this week. Things are picking up again. Woo Hoo.

I went out to take a peek at the ice dyed fabrics. There is still a layer of ice in the center that needs to melt but they look like they are going to be gorgeous. I can't wait to pull them out and gaze upon their loveliness, then to wash, dry, iron and fold all that loveliness. Another woo hoo.

For the rest of today I am going to work on my studio clean-over, then this afternoon I am going to make a trip into Boardman, with Tina, to pick up 3 bolts of bamboo cotton fabric at Joanne's Fabrics, that they are holding for me. That will give me plenty to work with for a little while. Another woo hoo.

The backing fabric for C's quilt is done and ready to baste together. I worked on K's quilt while the other was dyeing, washing and drying. I got a good portion of it quilted. It is going to be stunning. It is a wallhanging taken from Alex Anderson's Neutral Quilts book. Very elegant, understated and gorgeous without any quilting so I know the quilting can take it over the top to spectacular. I hope I can do it justice. So far so good.

As far as the clean over is going this is what I got done yesterday. Along with all the fabric dyeing that helped clean out one full shelf in one cabinet I sorted folded and organized 2 boxes of monogrammed linens that had been sitting on the floor in front of my hand dyed fabrics cabinet for a good year.

See the 2 boxes on the left side of the picture? Those 2 boxes are now this.

and this.

That bottom shelf holds all the linens that were in those 2 boxes. I'm loving it. Another big woo hoo for the home team. This studio just might get organized after all.

Now is the time to get back to work. I still have that big to do list to get done in which this studio clean-over is just a small part of. Let's crack that whip and get back to work.

Have a great day and remember to be thankful for the unexpected. You never know where it might lead you.

A step backward while making progress...

I am excited about everything I got done yesterday. I will share the before pictures of the studio clean-over as I finish each area. So you will have to follow along to see the transformation as it will take several weeks I am sure to get everything done but then I will have a truly functional space with everything put away. Grandma Briggs' favorite saying was "A place for everything and everything in its place."

I had help with this step of the project. The hanging of the quilted ceiling panels. Let me tell you why I needed these. I had (operative word there) a finished basement studio. The ceilings were drywalled and everything was good. I loved working in my studio. Then we had an electrical problem and DH tore the ceiling out to fix it. Enter the dark light absorbing ceiling that made me want to cringe everytime I went in there. Not very conducive to creative work. So I hung white sheets on the ceiling as a temporary fix. I wanted something else but what? as DH does not want a permanent ceiling in case of other problems. He wants to be able to get to any area so he can fix it. Ok. So my solution: quilted ceiling panels that can be taken down if need be. So I have 2 panels done and most of a 3rd one. This is the before and the after once one panel was hung.

Before.

and After.
Here are some close ups of the quilting on the panel.

The next panel to go up is a light blue same as the wall color. I hand dyed it and I am going for a cabana stripe effect. I think it will be really cool. This project will definitely be a work in progress for some time.

I did go get my groceries which then required me to debone a rotisserie chicken to use in our dinner. It turned out great. Yummy. Easy skillet chicken enchillada.

On with the rest of the work I got done. I dyed a new backing for C's quilt after speaking with her. She wants me to surprise her with what I do so can't tell you about that till later. As I was cleaning up stuff, I found a full bolt of the bamboo cotton fabric that I use for dyeing. Score one for the team. Woohoo.
I also made room to put away some of the things that were sitting around on my floor. You can't really tell that much was done since once you start one of these types of cleaning projects everything looks much worse before it gets better. You know that "It looks like a bomb went off in here." kind of moments.

Another thing I got done was to mark K's quilt so I can start quilting it. It is going to be phenomenal. I can't wait to work on it. Did I ever mention that I just love quilting custom pieces. It's my favorite. Love, love, love it. C's piece and K's piece are going to be a dream to do.

So my plans for today are to do another tub of fabrics using the ice dyeing technique. I found lots of scraps (while cleaning) that will get a second lease on life. Score 2 for the home team. Once those are reclining in the ice bath, marinating in the juices of color, I will wash up C's backing and get that quilt basted together and will work on getting some more organizing done. Sounds like a full day. I better get going then if I am going to get everything done that I want to.

Have a great day and remember to do kindness today and be thankful for the mess that you have to clean up. It means you have been blessed enormously.

Thanks Heather for your help. I couldn't have done everything yesterday without it.