A little bit of this, a little bit of that

Puttering about and working on a lot of different projects (so this is new?)

The purple beads are all in now -- yippee

Today I will begin the green fill

rollin' right along!

In order to make the flowers I want to use on the bird house, I needed to create some new colors.

In the left hand picture we see the yellow roving (stuff I bought pre-dyed from a place on line) and some of the freshly washed Jacob Sheep fleece.

In the right hand picture is the result of letting both of those "steep" in a vat of Berry Blue Koolaid for half an hour.

Lovely spring green and a really nice robin's egg blue. I'm thinking about putting some of the red roving that I have on hand into the vat and see if I can get a nice color to do violets or pansies with.

Quite a bit of time has been spent on this project the last couple of days.

I have finally gotten all of the numbers and letters set up, and I did a second version of 3 of the 4 suits.

These colors are definately more interesting than the first ones were.

So now I can do quite a bit of work in the photoshop program merging the letter and number files with the suit files to create the cards --- except for the face cards of course, which all have to be drawn by hand as each one is different.

Good progress being made here!

Remember this?

After spending a lot of time the last couple of days with the books on printing, dying, stamping, etc., on fabrics, I'm feeling real glad that I didn't get a lot more done on this project.

Why? you ask.

Well, it's like this -- the background is the color I want to use -- the idea was to use that whole split complementary color scheme, but this is another of those cases of having to "settle" for something that was actually available because no one else sees what's in my head to create it for me.

So what I'm thinking about doing is making some of my own rubber stamps --- using erasers, a scrap of left over wood and an exacto knife (I know, I know, be careful with sharp objects!) --- something small (about 2 x 2 inches) that I can stamp fabric paint onto the purple with to create something that looks like a "field" of fallen leaves that I can then applique over.

I have plenty of that purple fabric (I bought a yard and need three 10 inch squares for the finished project), so why not experiment!

I'll keep ya'll posted on the developments

Meantime, Nurse Elphie was in charge of keeping an eye on the DH yesterday.

She sat right at his feet, just lightly touching him for most of the day.

(and here we see my slowly improving skills at "doctoring" a photo -- or 2 -- by adding a drawing)

time to go make breakfast!