Somewhere between red, green, and bananas

Need to clean today. We're getting a king sized bed to replace our queen because Dane likes to sleep either in the middle of the bed, or horizontally, and the cats take up whatever room is left.

The piece I'm working on, the Diet Quilt for lack of a better term, is waiting for me to add a soft quilter's flannel backing to it to give it some substance before I start any hand-quilting or surface embellishment. Once I removed the paper from the backs of the squares, I realized just how thin some of the fabrics were. I'm going to incorporate some of the soft wool sweater pieces, and I'll see what interesting little tidbits I can find in the box of scraps that dear Mary has sent me.

I'm also drinking a lot of tea, first because it's on my diet, and second because I'm saving the used tea bags and drying them out. There's a lovely project that teaches how to use the teabag paper in the latest Quilting Arts magazine (which also has an article in it by the lovely Denise Aumick, whose blog, Wild Thread Studio Art Quilts, is listed to the side.)

It seems whenever I have free time to work on a project, I feel almost paralyzed and can't actually start. And then when I'm trying to sleep or I'm in the middle of something else, ideas hit me hard and I long to run to the spare room and either get started right away, or find my journal and sketch out the idea. Invariably, I always seem to be away from my journal at these times, so perhaps I should strap that thing to my head. It can be a very stylish hat.

I did get Teesha Moore's Journal Book Set (found here) and it has such lovely full-color representations of some of her very beautiful journal pages. I expect to get lots of inspiration from them, and possibly come up with some techniques as well to achieve similar ends. I feel that one very effective way to learn is to study, emulate, and create a version of beautiful work to get a handle on techniques and styles. By no means am I condoning stealing another person's work or infringing on any type of idea-ganking. However, I do feel that you need someone to be a role model before you can be one yourself.

Here is Lando being silly.


Untitled from Cindibee on Vimeo.

Looking towards sunset

I have been quite neglectful in saying pretty much anything of late, to which I heartily apologize. I had/have three tests this week (already finished two) and have been studying my crafty little behind off. (I believe crafty behinds are particularly sparkly in comparison to non-crafty behinds.) Spring Break is next week, so my professors felt it necessary to pack everything into this week because we all know how drunk and irresponsible college students get over Spring Break. If anyone attempted to take a test after vacation, you'd see a lot of permanent liquor-induced amnesia.



So, there was a wonderful project presented over at Monica's journal, Girl Gone Thread Wild. I'm sure quite a few of you have not only heard of it, but participated in it. I was planning to send in more than one square, but the one I made was a lot more time-consuming than I expected. I used a thick green quilting thread to wrap the edges of my square (which can be seen here, precisely 22 contributors down) and it actually took close to a few hours, probably because of my self-inflicted need for near perfection. And because I joined the charity very near the end, I didn't want to risk missing the March 1st due date and so I just sent off my one square.

Besides studying and making a tiny 2x2" square, which you would think wouldn't suck up an entire week and some, I've been attempting to get a normal amount of sleep. I suspected for a time that I was pregnant, due to odd sleeping, odd random bouts of passing nausea, and some very weird dreams where I already birthed the baby and had to figure out how to tell Dane I was pregnant in the first place without his head going 'asplodey. I realize dreams are no definitive indication of condition, but I was just having so many and was seriously considering, when paired with the random nausea, if it was my body's overt way of saying "Hey! Guess what! Your college career is f*cked!" Turns out the nausea was most likely caused by the sleep dep.