work continues

actually, I've been pretty productive since I last got here to post anything

the bead embroidery work on this piece is complete now, so I'm moving on to the leaf pieces that go with it

since I had finished the quilting on the two big pieces I was working on, I decided to pull out and finish the last two in the shed door series

it feels good to finish a project this big -- even if it did take me over two years to do so!

next up for this series is the photography session as there is a gallery that has expressed interest in having the entire series in their space (pretty exciting that!)

so this will be the next thing under the needle

I finished putting pieces in a few days ago, and after looking at it for that long, I've decided it's time to fuse it down, put the "sandwich" together and start quilting

and since that piece is at that stage, I've been working on the concept "drawings" for the next one in that series

this is already a "did I do that?!" moment, as this entire piece is something I created in PhotoShop from bits and pieces from a number of photos I have in my file

it's time to create the "map" and start thinking about fabrics to do the fusing of this piece

this is a close up of the bottom section of the next Parched Earth piece

and this is the concept for the finished work -- you can see there on the left side the beginning of that cracked dirt portion of the piece

as soon as the background layer is finished, I'll start in on the tree which will not get applied to this until a layer of silk is put on and the first quilting done

and since I'm thinking about how I'll do that tree, I did some experimenting with some scrap fabric

a friend of mine makes her pieces by building the individual units that make them up on a piece of parchment and fuses them together then she can put the parts together

I've been thinking about that, and wondering if that technique will work with the materials that I'm using for my pieces

this experiment shows that it will

the picture on the left is the raw parts laying on a sheet of parchment, the picture on the right is the entire unit after I ironed it to fuse it and peeled it off the parchment -- it still maintains it's "sticky note" usability, so this experiment was a success!

these 4 dogs (and one more) all came out of the same litter

except for the two black ones, they barely look related!

because Gypsy is so unlike either of the two labs we have previously had, we decided that knowing just what is in her genetic background would be a great help to better training and less angst

the DNA test kit went in the mail yesterday, so by the time she's going in to have her spaying surgery in mid July, we should have a much better idea of just what we've got

meantime she continues to entertain and baffle us

(the picture on the right should be titled:  "You talking to me?")

this week's activities include my dad's committal service at Ft Logan National Cemetery tomorrow morning, a dentist appointment and a test to determine if my ongoing gut pain is being caused by a non-functional gall bladder (I've been dealing with this since February!) -- it's going to be a full week