penny-studionotes-2

I recently trimmed off the edges on some fabric I'd printed up for napkins. Put the strips in the wastebasket, but then pulled them out. Cut some 1.5" squares and made up a 4" coaster.  I've made coasters like this before from commercial fabric I have on hand. Not surprisingly, the coaster made from screen-printed leftovers is even nicer. . .

My goal is to spend mornings in the studio, leaving other things for the afternoons (errands, desk/computer stuff). Working on the intricate piecing in Jeremy's wedding quilt is very demanding, so I've limited it to the making of one block a day, which can take me anywhere from 1-2 hours. That leaves me time for other sewing, something simpler.  For the last month or so, that time has been spent working with daiwabo fabrics, a Japanese style of fabric I've used in some other projects, for example the placemats in this post, and the dresser cover here . I love the subtle range of taupes/tans/browns, even though I am not drawn to brown as a color either in other commercial fabrics or in hand-dyeing my own. My friend Kathy decided that she was never going to use the large collection of daiwabo fabric that she had collected. I told her that if she would like to have someone else work with it, I would be happy to take on her collection. So, a sizable bin of these beautiful fabr...

I've been working steadily on Jeremy's wedding quilt , and have gotten to a point that I find myself thinking of as the editing phase.  The word "edit" is more often used for text, and I am very familiar with the text-editing process from decades of academic writing. It can be more tedious than the earlier stages of figuring out the main ideas of what one wants to say, the first formulation of those words into some kind of organized prose. But sticking with it, carefully re-considering each word, sentence, paragraph, is crucial to successful writing--writing that someone besides the author can readily understand and that will be convincing. And editing has its own pleasure--crafting and re-crafting the text so that it works to carry the message. As of August 1, I'd gotten this far on the quilt. Although it's difficult to tell from the photo, the quilt will be 9 rows of blocks, of which I've completed 8--empty row in the middle. There are about 7 blocks in ...