We have been playing with fiber all weekend here at my house. My sister is visiting with her family and we went to the Salvation Army and bought lots of wool sweaters and wool skirts, threw them in the washer and fulled them down to make flower pins. I now have five full gallon bags of these shapes that I can sew together and then sell these at the store. This is the one I made as a demo.

Here is the one made by my niece Lizzie.

And here is Rebekah’s (my sister). I will have lots of sewing to do while watching television now. These are simple to put together but make a nice pin for a coat, sweater or hat. Mainly for winter but I’ll have a good supply by then. We had piles of lint everywhere!

Here are some more exercises from Sharon’s studio journal course. We are cutting out various shapes and then using those to make patterns or find other design elements.

More patterns from my shrunken snowflake.

Diagonal instead of square.

The other thing we did on Friday was to dye wool, some of the lighter sweaters and some scarves.

Here are the scarf results. They are a bit light and I think I will do some further layering. I am planning on trying the flour paste resist method on these.

Have you ever tried this website out? http://www.krazydad.com/kaleido/

You use photos that you already have posted on the web and then use the kaleidoscope tool. Sharon told our class about this. It is way too addictive. You can change the number of mirrors and move your photo around so there a millions of possibilities.

These are all done with recent photos from here on my blog.

Can you guess which ones are from which photo?

This last is a piece I put together when we were making patterns for our flower pin shapes. I cut out some spirals which weren’t going to work with fulled fabrics so I added them to a watercolor painting I had done several weeks ago. Off to have more fun!

Thanks to all who have commented on my book – I appreciate the fact that you stop by and that you leave a comment. Here is a sketch I did very quickly yesterday of Flathead Lake when it was about to storm. We went down to a friend’s cabin for the 4th of July and had a small storm pass through in the afternoon. We got a new lesson for Sharon B’s Studio Journal course and I read through that. But I didn’t take time to use any color yesterday – just noted the colors in my journal.

Today, I spent quite a bit of time going through magazines and cutting out small pieces of color from throughout the spectrum. I tried to cut enough for a the week’s lesson so I wouldn’t have to do it every time. It was interesting to see how many colors are available in catalogs. I don’t have a lot of magazines besides QA which I won’t cut up so I mainly used catalogs. The exercise is to pick colors for the day for 5 days in a row and work those colors out on your journal page. The page on the left shows the cut out magazine colors of yesterday – grey blues to dark blues and greens from pine trees. On the right page, I wrapped like colors of threads and yarns around a small piece of heavy paper as well as cutting out appropriate color fabrics as if I was going to take this idea forward into stitch. I also added a piece of “spruce” wool in case I was going to felt anything in the project. I found that I had no blue wool. It seems that has not been a color I have used much in felting.

Here are the colors for today. These poppies are blooming profusely just behind my deck in the back. I included a photo of them and then used my cut out magazine bits to find the matching colors. I didn’t yet take this one forward into fiber. I’m pretty sure I do not have any of the bright orange/yellow-orange in fiber but I’ll check to see.

I have been thinking about the July TIF Challenge. I think I am going to use the concept of “Half Way Mark” in terms of a journey in a landscape. The idea is not completely formed yet but will see where it takes me.

I have finished my book (present for MIL). I have decided since I have run out of time to use the book for my June TIF challenge piece. It is made from my stash and as it is a book it is a story. The story includes my MIL’s past (what is) and positive affirmations for her future (what is possible) so it works.

I started with a white piece of felt that was felted with merino wool to cheesecloth (scrim). I then dyed it with yellow and blue acid dyes which I just squirted on.

Then I embellished with small bits of wool and cut out felt flowers with the needle felt machine. I then did the leaves and stems etc. with FME. It was quite bright compared to my pages so I felt I needed to tone it down and antique it a bit.

So I dyed the whole thing in tea. The flowers were a bit dim due to the tea.

So I added a bit of Dye-na-Flow paints to the flowers. I trimmed the edges and the whole cover piece measures 11″x18″. I added a lining and then satin stitched around the edges.

I added a “frog” type closure and here it is – the finished book, finally!

And here is the first page.

It’s been a while but it’s not because I haven’t been working on anything. I have been slaving away on the book I’m making. And finally, I have completed all the pages. These are samples of the pages – I haven’t included photos of them all as there are a total of 48 and some have personal photos of my m-i-l’s and so I didn’t include all of them. This first page is a “double” page as it is in the middle of a signature. She grew up in California.

I like how this pear turned out. It is stenciled and then has details added with oil pastels. There’s a quote at the top by A. Lincoln about pear trees and patience.

Here’s another stenciled one.

Hmmm… I seem to like the stenciled ones best.

This is one of the signatures with eight pages total. I have three for the total

This one had a doodle that was supposed to be paisley but I hated it and so I just covered it with brown paint and used the stencil again.

Here’s another double spread and this doodle looked alright.

I like the pages with the gold pen as it looks good on the dark backgrounds.

Another stenciled page.

This one uses a cut out form of a bird that I drew and then spray painted with black paint. I am really happy that these pages are now complete. It was a bit of a strain towards the end trying to think of what to put on all the pages. There are lots of quotes and inspirational words. Now on to making the cover.

I did start something for June TIF but now I think I’m going to use that for the cover of the book. Perhaps the book could be for June TIF as most of it came from my stash and it does tell a story. That’s probably cheating but I think I may have to go that way as work is getting busy for the summer tourist season, I’m starting Sharon B’s class on studio journals next week and my sister and her family are coming to stay for a month. So I’ll be very busy. Excuses, excuses….

Yesterday, a friend and I went to a quilt show in Missoula which is a two hour drive away. It was fun and we went out for a nice lunch after the show. I was hoping that there would be more art quilts there as the quilt shows around here are very traditional. But I was a bit disappointed. Oh well, I spent most of the time looking at all the free motion quilting and getting ideas.