Friends

"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive...


and it is only by this meeting...


that a new world is born." - Anais Nin

I made these two little dolls out of plain muslin, of which I am growing increasingly fond of for it's simplicity. The details were drawn with Pigma pens and then painted with Japanese fabric paints. These are part of my own personal collection, but I am thinking about doing more for the shop. They make me smile each time I pass by.

Alfred's School Photo

ALFRED - (Old English for "Wise Counsel"):


Articulate and responsible.
Worries about injustice.
Enjoys solving puzzles.
Wants to be a social worker.



Alfred is currently available in my Silly BooDillyshop along with some of his other stitched School Photos classmates

If you haven't already, be sure to enter my Giveaway for a free copy of Quilts, BABY! The Giveaway is open until 11pm Sunday night and I will be announcing the winner Monday the 25th. Have a great Memorial Day weekend everyone!

Note: Giveaway is now closed!

Spell Check My Brain

This is a little art quilt I did. I thought it would be clever to take a remnant from an old kitchen dish towel that had once belonged to my mother, and machine doodle stitch the needed ingredients to make a chocolate chip cookie.

The problem is I am a horrible speller. I know this, and use, on a regular basis, my trusty Webster's Dictionary. It is the exact one that was given to me in the 4th grade and is now totally falling apart, but it has been with me for such a long time, I don't want to replace it.

However, there were no tricky words for this little project, so no need to worry about looking up the spelling of anything in a dictionary!


So have you noticed? I spelled "sugar" incorrectly! (And you know what, I always do!) Ugh!

By the way, I really do use an old fashioned SunBeam mixer! I actually have two, both from the 1930's, each belonging to one of my Grandmothers. Someday I will pass them on to my girls, so they can make there families chocolate chip cookies, too.

Eye Doctors

I have to go to the eye doctors today, and while I appreciate having the ability to be able to have my eye health and well being attended to, I can't seem to shake my frustration at knowing I have to receive those damn drops. I am of course referring to the eye drops that make your pupils enlarge to the same degree as if you were in the depths of an under ground cavern, where it would be so dark, you would be unable to see your own hand in front of your face.


Ohhh, I despise those drops! I am extremely sensitive to them, and it can take a good 12 hours for the effects to fully wear off. In the meantime, My close up vision will be all blurry, so no artwork for me today, and any light is rather uncomfortable, (and of course it is a glorious sunny day outside.) But this all is a very small price to pay for maintaining healthy vision, and for that I am willing to do almost anything. But I have to ask, why do they always wait until my eyesight is super-duper blurrified from the drops, to tell me that I may now go and select a new pair of frames?

Above is a small illustration piece I did a few years ago. It is free motion embroidered onto a piece of stabilizer. Free motion embroidery is when you set your machine stitch to 0, drop your feed dogs, and use a darning foot. By doing this you are able to move your fabric anyway you wish, giving you complete control, thus allowing you to effectively draw with your thread, (which I used a lot of!) and needle. Some day I hope to do some more of these, but it takes lots of concentration, which I seem to have an increasingly hard time sustaining!

The Green Frogs

In honor of Mothers Day being just yesterday, (hope it was a good one for everybody!) I thought it would be a perfect time to share one of my all time favorite books, The Green Frogs, which is a delightful Korean folktale, retold and exquisitely illustrated by Yumi Heo and published by the Houghton Mifflin Company.


"The Green Frogs" tells the tale of a mother frog and her two sons, who always do the opposite of which she asks of them. It also deals with the death of mother frog, in a rather unusual way for a children's book, (but necessary for the story). So if you're an uptight adult, you may have a problem with it being a children's book. (The same way that many adults were afraid that children would be adversely affected by Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are", and I have yet to meet a kid that didn't love that book!) If you aren't uptight, then I highly recommend it, whether you have kids or not! The best part of the book are Yumi Heo's illustrations, done in oil and pencil, which are rich in tiny layered details and joyful patterns. I could look at these illustrations for hours, (and I have) and still continue to find something new.