October Break

Jim and I just got back from a few days in the San Francisco Bay area. We went to museums, saw movies, ate Ipswich clams at Woodhouse Fish Company, walked in a redwood preserve, visited a goat farm and had dinner at a haunted restaurant in Moss Beach. It was a great few days and we are trying to maintain that vacation feeling until it's time to go back to work.

At the California Academy of Sciences:

At Purisima Creek Redwood Preserve:

Goat cheese with edible flowers from Harley Farms in Pescadero:

Last breakfast in Pacifica:

Another Cat Step

Today I finished painting the printed cat postcards. Each one is a bit different and will have some more embellishment once they've been quilted.
I did finish one completely today since it has to get in the mail bearing birthday wishes to a dear friend tomorrow.

Next Step In One Small Project

Here is the next step in my snowflake coasters project. The paint is cured and I took the freezer paper off. My intention was to go a bit further with them this weekend by adding some machine and hand stitching, but my sister came for a couple of days and brought my youngest grandson, so it was off to the Sea Center to hold some sea cucumbers and pet a shark followed by beach-combing for shells and cool rocks. I can work on the snowflakes next week.


I will have to come up with something extra creative because I overshot some of the freezer paper in a couple of places on the copper pieces and got some paint in the wrong places around the outer edges.


These seem to be calling out for some glitter and beads, but I'm not sure beads are a very good idea on the surface of a coaster. Seems that might make the glass that was set on it tip over! Kind of destroys the whole point of using a coaster in the first place.

A Few Small Projects

A couple of weeks ago I decided to start working with the book Drawing Lab for Mixed-Media Artists by Carla Sonheim, hoping that some directed projects would get my creative juices jumping. The first exercise is drawing cats and this little feline is so cute that I made a screen out of it for printing. Today I printed a green background out of an older screen on some hand-dyed fabric and topped it with my cat. These will become fabric postcards.

There was so much of the purple/black paint left that I grabbed one of my clean up rags and printed a couple of my other screens on it. The clean up rags that result from my dyeing and painting days are usually some of the best fabrics I have. These are some cool turtles and one scary Halloween spider. They'll get cut apart and used separately. Don't know exactly how they'll get used, but something fun will come along.

Another thing I started today is a little project from the new Quilting Arts Gifts magazine. Cut out some snowflake stencils and used some Shiva Artist's Paintstiks in copper and white to fill them in. Now to wait a week for the paint to cure before the stitching starts

The Return of Pedro

I know I've been away from my blog for a long time, but I haven't been having a very creative year, so it didn't seem like there was much to share. This post still isn't about anything I've made, but many of you know about the great cactus stealing caper in last August and I thought you might enjoy this follow-up.

Now, when I chased after the machete-wielding thieves, I scared (yeah, right) them so badly they dropped one of the stolen chunks of cactus as they ran away. Jim dug a little hole for it, stuck it in the ground and crossed his fingers. Yesterday we came out of the house to discover that one of the fuzzy little nubs that had appeared on the top of the cactus had bloomed into this gorgeous flower:

Here's a closer photo:
And here's a very close up showing a little worker creature, doing his job and getting drunk on pollen:There are two more nubs on the top of this cactus, so hopefully in the next week we'll have more of these large, beautiful flowers. Those creeps chopped down our San Pedros, but these cactus are coming back and we've got the best parts!

A Fiber Artist Raises Money for Haiti

The following is a copy of a blog post by my friend, Susan Italo. If you are interested in her offer of one of her original jackets in exchange for a donation to Doctors Without Borders in support of the Haitian people, please contact her directly at her blog (wildonionstudio.wordpress.com).

The devastation to Haiti is unimaginable to most of us, the Wild Onion household included. As an artist, I have racked my brain trying to figure out what to do to help. After 911, I made 10 quilts to send to various agencies to comfort those affected. For the people of Haiti, it seems to me that what is needed is medical attention.

I am offering an original Wild Onion Jacket, with the entire proceeds to be donated to Doctors Without Borders. If you would like to buy this jacket for $175, please email me. I will accept a check, made out to “Doctors Without Borders” in the amount of $175. I will pay the shipping to you. We all win– you get to donate to a worthy cause, and so, in a way, do I. Plus, you get an original Wild Onion Jacket to wear or give as a gift!

Here are the specifics: this is an original Wild Onion Jacket, created with love from 100% cotton fabrics, quilted with 80% cotton, 20% poly batting for warmth, stability and cuddliness. The easy fit jacket is a size Medium, fitting a size 8 – small 14; the length is upper thigh, to cover the derriere. Machine wash and dry– how easy is that!

Fun with Painted Shoes

Today, after our regular Fibervision meeting, several of us stayed to experiment with painting shoes. We were led by the intrepid Linda Cassirer who leapt right into the joy of shoe painting after seeing Margot Silk Forrest and her book Sassy Feet! featured in the Dharma Trading Company newsletter. Linda generously shared her paint, her observations in the first few pairs she had painted, and her goal in apparently wanting to paint everything in her home which is currently in a neutral color. A couple of fellow Fiberettes had seen Margot at the Wearable Arts Connection meeting last year and were inspired by her, so knew we were in for some fun. Too bad Lucilla and Susan I. couldn't be there with us today.

The top photo is the group result of our afternoon (you can double click on the photo for a better view) and the second and third photos are the shoes I painted. Mine started out with plain black leather uppers with a very dull light jute for the wedge covering. In our enthsiasm, we forgot to take "before" photos. These shoes were provided by fellow artist, Anne Braddock, who found a couple of pairs of shoes at a second hand store that just cried out to be transformed and brought them along. I won't be wearing them because they are a smidge too small for me and she won't be wearing them because they do not fit her definition of comfortable.

Anybody interested in a pair of hand-painted, size 9 wedge shoes with a 4" heel?