Springing forward

The last 6 weeks have been filled with projects, let's get right to it!

Scrapbooking:  

No photos to share, but great leaps have been made!  Blurb put out a great coupon which was incentive for me to finish up the 2012 album and send 2011 and 2012 off to be printed.  Down in the art room I completed the 2004 ephemera album and began to organize the items for 2005, which lead to G's school photos, which lead me to begin her school days album.  After much deliberation I decided that the School Days Album will be limited to a 2 page layout for each year of school, all with the same grey parchment looking background paper for consistency.  I'll be working on this album alongside the ephemera albums in order to stay as efficient as possible.  I also completed gluing photos and filling out birthday information in G's "First Five Years" baby book, so I no longer need to worry about the loose photos and birthday party notes dropping from it's pages.  

Working on the school album alongside the ephemera can be a little confusing at times, as the school year spans September to June, and the ephemera albums are calendar years, however keeping the school album limited to two pages helps narrow down my options.  Each double page layout will have her school and class photo, plus a note or photo on the activities she participated in during that school year.  The more in-depth details (programs from school performances, award ribbons, etc...) will be in the larger ephemera albums.  

Sewing:

I made a tote bag for my niece (a hairdresser) and birthday card.  It ended up going out late due to a delay in the printed fabric - the image for my original fabric of choice wasn't uploaded properly by the artist, so I had to cancel that order and pick something new, which added another couple of weeks to the delivery.  

My Bird Quilt continues... two of five cardinal squares are complete. 

Photography:

I missed the pinhole group outing due to a schedule change on my end, but I did have a nice outing with G over the course of that weekend.  We headed down to Seattle Center, where G played with her Diana/Lomo instant camera combination.  I brought out my Graflex and P.120 pinhole cameras, as well as finishing off a roll that had been residing in my Holga.

G creating an optical illusion with a toy car in front of the International Fountain.

From my P.120 camera, objects appear smaller than reality.

From my Holga - I experimented with a roll of Lomo 100 purple film.  It treats warm spots as purple, and cool blues as greens, so shooting underexposed in the winter made for some green streaks in the cooler parts of the frame.  This would be a fun film to play with in the summer time.

Also in photography news... I've decided to shelve the heafty Graflex camera for a bit, and instead concentrate on shooting panoramic pinhole with my P.120, and get my 6x9 negatives from the Six-20 camera. I also want to continue to explore forest and interesting tree patterns with my DSLR, and there just isn't room in my pack to carry All The Gear, hence my decision to set aside Clunky for a time.  I'm considering 2019 calendar themes in the back of my mind as I explore these cameras.

January - the dark winter reorg

As the days begin to lengthen, and Christmas winds down to the final gift-giving stages (one last gift to deliver this Sunday!) I turn back to the chaos of the disheveled post-holiday art room and my own personal projects.

Scrapbooking:
The ephemera album is stagnant at the tail end of 2004, where I left it last fall.  I've had a couple of sewing projects to conclude before clearing the table for more paper and glue fun... however I have started following a scrapbook-centric Instagram account which is providing good inspiration.  For digital albums... I finalized the 2011 album with a still image pulled from the video of my jump from the bamboo bridge into the ocean in Jamaica.  I used some layers in photoshop to show the progress of my jump.

After one more proof-read of the text, 2011 will be ready to print.  The photos for 2012 have been sorted, edited, and I've arranged them up through about August of that year.  My photos for 2017 have been fully backed up twice, including all cell phone photos.

The jumping of timelines makes it difficult to keep track of where I am within each project... also it is startling to look at photos where G is shorter than I am, then photos where she is clearly taller, and yet they all feel like they were just taken last month.  I'm taking copious notes each time I work on a digital album, and post-it notes abound in the ephemera album. 

Bird Quilt:
Thanks to a couple of long wait times at dentist offices last month, I made great headway and completed my bobwhites for the state bird quilt:

11 birds down thus far.  Craft club meetings have picked up again, which should provide me with some good time to get through the next batch of birds... cardinals!

Photography:
I had a successful outing with the pinhole group, shooting two rolls on my new P.120 camera.  I also worked with Clunky and my Holga, though I did not finish off those rolls, so they stand at the ready for my next outing.  This outing also reintroduced me to the lovely tones of Kodak Portra film, which I'd loaded due to the expected low light conditions

The other images from the outing can be viewed in this flickr album.
I should be clear to make it to the February outing as well.

In other photography news, I was given the link to a photographer who is putting together an art show in the UK for Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day.  The criteria were simple... pinhole photos taken within a 10 mile radius of your house.  I was given the green light to use photos taken within 10 miles of a second home as well as a primary residence, so I picked 5 of my favorites (2 of Kauai, 3 around my primary residence) and have turned them in with fingers crossed.

Projecting Projects

Although I knew about the expected eclipse on August 21 (it was partial here, about 94% coverage) I had not made plans for it due to the inundation of prepping for our travels.  I figured I might pick up viewing glasses at a local store at some point, but didn't write it down, so I didn't get out before the glasses were gone.  As a result, I spent a little time on the 20th creating different eclipse projectors based on the instructions for NASA.

I actually had a fun time playing with boxes, tape, and foil... I made several sizes so that we could test each one and decide which combination of box/hole size worked the best.  I discovered that the smaller the box, the smaller the hole needed to be in order to get a sharp image.  Also, while the largest box made the largest projection, it was also further away from our eyes.  

In the end, the cereal box was everyone's favorite.

We had meandered down to the lake to watch the eclipse and came across some natural eclipse projections along the way.  Also, our neighbors shared their viewing glasses with us, so we were all able to view the eclipse in various ways.  It made for a fun science filled morning.

I've been listening to the Film Photography Project podcast while working, which sometimes will prompt/inspire/instigate me to dig around in my gear and look at my old gear.  My most recent digging brought out my Polaroid Land camera, which uses pack peel-apart film.  I hadn't realized that I still had several boxes of no-longer-manufactured Polaroid film, which can be used for emulsion lifts.  Fuji makes* replacement pack film, but their emulsion lifts like a plastic transparency, rather than a gooey emulsion that adheres the way Polaroid does.

*thinking about emulsion lifts led me down a rabbit hole on the internet where I discovered that Fuji has also stopped making pack film, and the Impossible Project has no plans to re-make pack film, but I found an online darkroom supply store that apparently plans on remaking the pack film.  I wrote to them to ask about it, they say they are "still on it".  So, fingers are crossed that my camera will not become entirely obsolete after I finish my current film packs.

Scrapbooking!  I made progress!  Significant progress!  I'm all the way up to mid-November 2004 in the ephemera album and cruising!

More film photography! 

As I see that we are on the brink of a weather turn, I thought it would be nice to take advantage of the still-warm summer days and have a family outing.  We all needed the fresh air and change of pace, I think.  I did some reading and researching and found a location that was a ferry ride away (which feels like a mini-vacation) had minimal parking and facilities (which means less crowds) and lovely views on Puget Sound.  As I wandered the length of the beach working pinhole scenes, D meandered around taking some photos of his own (and discovering hidden pieces of art along the trail) while G kept herself occupied playing with her own camera and her guitar.  

Shot with my Graflex Pinhole, 3 second exposure, Ilford Delta 100

I came away from the outing with 2 rolls of 120 B&W, 2 rolls of 120 E-6, and one roll of 35mm panoramic B&W.  While I want to concentrate on larger format, I have a drawer full of 35mm film that needs to be used or tossed, and considering the variety of cameras I have to play with... it seems a waste to toss it.  So I've resolved to take a 35mm camera with me just about everywhere I go.
As for my shooting, the B&W looks to be properly exposed and developed, although I'm still getting some strange grains on my film every so often (not every frame, just once in a while)  My E-6 is off to the lab and I will pick that up next week.  My fingers are crossed on that, because although I did calculate the reciprocity correctly this time, my lightmeter was set to 100 instead of 50 for the initial exposures.  However, ISO 50 reading was only about a half second off ISO100, and every exposure was a guesstimate 2-3 seconds, so it's not precisely scientific anyway.  

My super-secret project is coming along, I've made it past a couple of roadblocks and set aside a couple of ideas that are just not panning out.  My plan is to get those completed soon so that I can then concentrate on my Halloween costume.  

Scrapbooking and Pinhole

When it comes to hard copy scrapbooking, I work in stages.  I spread out my images or ephemera, figure out the background color for the pages, then start to poke at the layout, add in decorative elements, make a note for the journaling, then stack the finished pages in a 12x12 holder.  At some future point I will sit down and have one long gluing session for all the finished pages, and that part of the project is relatively portable in case I want to emerge from the art room and glue pages while watching a movie in the other room.  

One of the challenges I face when walking away from my hard copy scrapbooking for too long is that it is sometimes difficult to remember where I left off, or what my intentions had been with the pages I was making.  This is made especially difficult if I've scooted the unfinished pages to the side to use my table space for some other quick project (birthday cards, plant markers, mouse ears... )  It is because of this that I tend to let the scrapbooking sit for long periods of time... because even if I could steal 10 minutes for the art room, my work space is usually so disheveled that it would take me 30 minutes just to figure out what I could spend my 10 minutes doing.

Over the past couple weeks, though, I managed to take enough time out to re-organize my work space and remind myself where I was (by laying out all my "finished - not glued" pages) and where I was headed with this album.  

Post-it notes are helpful, as my mind gets scattered in between project times.

So, headway has been made in layouts, and I now have a larger stack of pages-to-be-glued in the 2004 ephemera album.

My other challenge is that I'm still trying to *only* use the paper and supplies that I already have, which is at once limiting and liberating.  Limiting because I know that manufacturers are constantly putting out amazing and adorable page accompaniments; liberating because I'm not spending hours meandering craft stores looking for adorable and amazing page chachkies.  At any rate, I really want my ephemera collection to speak for itself and to be the decorations surrounding the photos to complete the story.

I had a pinhole outing which, at the time was quite satisfying... I felt very self-congratulatory that I'd simplified my process and enjoyed the experience of slowing down my compositions, calculating the exposures, and being "in the moment".  Then I went to drop my film off at the lab and it was finally brought to my attention that I'd exposed two rolls of color negative film, not the two rolls of color slide film that I had calculated for.  With all the effort I'd been trying to put into my process, this was a seriously ridiculous bit of oversight.  The wrappers for the film are not even the slightest bit similar (Kodak is bright yellow all over, Velvia is silver and blue)  I chalk it up to having not regularly used slide film in well over a decade, also that other than the two rolls I shot in May, I had not ever used 120 sized slide film at all.  So the wrapper alone didn't trigger any realization of the film type other than "this is not Ilford, so this is color".  I just didn't bother to read the film label and ran on the assumption that the only color film I had was slide film, forgetting that I'd tossed the last of my Kodak color negative film in my camera bag along with the B&W.

Thankfully the exposures were not horribly off... I basically exposed for the film speed, but without the proper correction for reciprocity failure, so everything is a little underexposed (outside of my 5 second exposure, which was close enough to correct).  And some of the images were experimental anyway... I'm rather happy with how this abstract came out:

I set up the tripod on the deck of the ferry on our ride from Kingston to Edmonds.  There are actually small boats on the water in this shot, but the action blurs them.  The San Juan Islands are the blur on the horizon.

After still contemplating my 2018 calendar, I ran a quick unscientific poll online to see how people might feel about a calendar with a mix of B&W and color images, and the unanimous answer was "Do it!  That would not be weird at all!" I also have more pinhole images than I had realized, because I'd forgotten that I filed my scans from my vacation with my vacation photos on my hard drive, not with the rest of my film scans.  I need to make a final decision on how I want to organize my files... either keep all the scans in the film folder and make a note in the vacation folder that there are also photos on film, or vice-versa.  I haven't decided which way makes more sense, but consistency might help me to feel less scattered.

My goal is to get a few more good pinhole outings in before the end of the summer.  The challenge is finding someone who has enough patience to hang around while I make long exposures.  While I have no problem with the idea of going out by myself, it is probably not the safest choice for me to wander down distant hiking trails lugging camera gear all alone.  

Rapidfire 6 Week Update

I've had this needling feeling in the back of my mind reminding me that I was behind on blogging, but I didn't realize it has been over a month.  I wondered how I could have possibly fallen that far behind, then I scanned back through my photos for my recap and realize I truly have been quite busy, and I've accomplished quite a lot over the last 6 or so weeks.  So here is a rapid fire update:

Cherry Creek Falls - pinhole shot

In early June, D and I participated in a couple of weekly step challenges, so we opted for hikes instead of trips to the gym.  One hike brought us to Cherry Creek Falls, where we paused for about an hour so that I could grab some pinhole shots of the falls.  My original goal for this year had been to collect enough color images to do my 2018 calendar in pinhole shots, however as the summer is now halfway through, I have my doubts that I'll have 12 good images to use for this year, so I'm contemplating another theme for 2018, and perhaps 2019 will be pinhole.  It all depends on what kind of outings I can get in before October.

LOTR and embroidery

I've been taking advantage of the longer days to be outside in the yard for as long as I can, which leaves me less time for evening crafting before I'm too wiped and need to go to sleep.  When I do sneak in an evening or two, I have fun with it.

ALL THE POTS.

Around the end of June we finally finished planting all the plants.  For now.

Lake Union Panoramic Pinhole

I made it to the June meetup with my pinhole photography group, which took place around Lake Union in Seattle.  It turned out to be the hottest day we've had this year (and is still the record thus far for the summer) and I found that my whole "I don't feel like shooting much in 95 degree heat" feeling is as strong in the states as it is in Jamaica, so I didn't shoot the volume that I thought I might, but I'm pleased with the images I did grab.  I finished up the roll from my panoramic pinhole camera, and my fisheye plastic camera (which had 9 year old film in it!) and ran my first roll of E6 through my Graflex pinhole.  With the help of a new app I found that calculates reciprocity failure I managed to get my first roll of E6 exposed correctly!

THE FOUNTAINS ARE DONE!

4 YEARS, so many changes, so many new ideas, so many "oh, look what the fountain store has in stock now!" moments.... I have a difficult time finding the words to describe how elated I am that they are DONE.

Embroidery on the deck

In honor of my mom's birthday, I parked myself out on the deck to work on my bird quilt (from the pattern I inherited from her mom, using the thread I inherited from my mom)  It was a lovely evening.

Photo Editing - this is from Kauai in January 2017

Due to having to drive G around to various things this summer, I've had some "sit in the coffee shop with your laptop" time, which I've been using to catch up on photo editing.  I'm nearly through with our winter trip to Kauai, which will almost bring me up to speed with all my DSLR because I've hardly shot anything this year outside of birds in my yard.

The garden is coming along nicely

Most of the vegetable starts that I bought from the local super-fancy-expensive nursery either wilted away or have simply been stunted.  The big plants you see are all from other plant stores... so next year I won't bother with the super-fancy place at all.  

A view from the back side of the garden

It might be difficult to see, but I have three laser-cut hummingbird sculptures on the wall of my garden... I bought these in the summer of 2012 and have been waiting to find the right home for them ever since.  The pots in this shot are home to three of my tomato plants that I started from seeds and thought would not survive, but these guys just didn't give up... so here they are, caught up to my other starts in height and starting to show signs of bearing fruit.  

Plant markers

I had the idea for these plant markers back in May, and didn't finish them until last week.  Unfortunately the hot glue didn't hold on the markers that were hit directly by the sprinklers, so perhaps next year I'll figure out something that lasts longer.

In scrapbooking, I just have one or two photos to add to my 2011 digital album, and my 2012 photos are nearly all edited.  I just got back to the 2004 ephemera album last night, where I'm working my way through a set of vacation photos from late October of that year.

These are the highlights of how I've spent my crafting time over the last month and a half, in between end-of-school-year events, hosting out-of-town family over holidays, and helping to teach G to drive. I've also enjoyed some much needed meditative down-time in my yard, fitting in yoga in the mornings and lots of sipping coffee while bird watching.  Sometimes I get more than birds in the yard... like this morning's visitor...

Most mornings I sit on my porch with my coffee in one hand, and my camera with the big zoom lens in the other.  As a result, most of my photo shooting this summer has just been of wildlife in my own back yard.  With the combination of busy week-day schedules and a great desire to just... *be*... in the yard, we've had relatively few excursions outside of this immediate view this summer.  On the one hand that means I probably will not fulfill my goal of having a large enough variety of pinhole photos to create a calendar this year, but on the other hand I'm hoping this means I might catch up on editing and posting to flickr, and if I don't collect enough images by the fall then I'll be well armed to come up with a different theme using my digital shots this time around.

Project Updates in Gardening, Stitching, Scrapbooking

My blogging has waned as the weather turned for the better this spring.  The sunshine and promise of warmer temperatures has been inspiring me to keep my desk time to a minimum so that I can maximize time outside to wrap up the largest parts of our now 4 year long yard renovation.  I'm happy to report that I met my goal of getting my properly built vegetable garden area in place as of Mother's Day Weekend.  

I had a tomato garden last year, which sort of tapered off from the boardwalk/patio path down to the yard below.  D finished building up a retaining wall for me on the far side of the garden earlier in the spring, so that by May 13th I was able to amend the soil and put my vegetable plants in the ground.

Tomato, cucumber, snap peas, eggplant, jalapeno, strawberries, and several squash is how we started.

Over the last couple weeks, while the plants stretched their roots in their new home, I worked on tidying up the final details of the surrounding area while also completing some larger projects involving the water feature and planting several pots around the yard.

My original intention had been to put at least some of my herbs into the garden space, however we overbought veggie starts, and I'm also not sure of which end of the garden I want to put perennials, so for now the perennials will stay in pots around the yard.

Herbs and strawberries on the left form an arch around the sprinkler control boxes, which covers the boxes but leaves easy access.  This weekend I'll be adding the drip lines to the pots.  The garden box against the brick wall houses our lettuce and fennel... I've been calling this the salad bar.  I might consider moving the strawberries into this box if we decide to put the lettuce in the big garden next year.

About 3 weeks of growth in the garden, the strawberry pot is protected from birds with a pop-up bird net, the tomato, cucumber, and snap peas have supports to grow, and my decorative rock and lavender is in place along the wall.

All this extra time in the garden has left my hands tired by the end of the day, so my embroidery has slowed.  I have completed two of my 4 Eastern Bluebird blocks, and am close to finishing block#3.  

As the yard work turns from projects to maintenance, I should have more time in the evenings to get in some stitching.

In the world of scrapbooking... my project room has been overlayed with short projects and supplies which need to be straightened and put away before I can get back to progressing on my ephemera albums. My digital scrapbook for 2011 is nearly complete (I need only to pull one still photo from a video clip and then spell-check the whole album and it will be done)  I've begun collecting and organizing the digital photos for the 2012 album.  The process is a little slower for this year because I  began shooting more film in 2012, and including photos from those cameras involves a bit of digging through and organizing old scans.  My current plan is to proceed with the standard annual albums until I am "caught up", then go back and do the vacation albums.  I should have more consistent blocks of time this summer to work on them, as I plan to find a cozy coffee shop where I can plug away at it while G is in her driving school.

A busy and scrambled week

No photos to share this week, unfortunately... I hope to get back on track with that by next week.

My schedule was scrambled up a bit, with meetings/school functions/games to attend every night this week, and a black cloud of deadline looming over my work desk during the day.  This cut into my project time at home, but I did make a couple of advancements.

I completed the landscape photography in Lightroom course that I've been watching in bits and pieces online.  I have many new notes in my notebook related to editing photos, and also shooting suggestions for complicated scenes in the field, and I look forward to applying my new knowledge.  I've backed up my most recent DSLR shots, and once I do the same for the other two cameras then I'll be in a position to begin editing my last trip to Kauai.

I'm also keeping track of the tulip bloom up in Skagit Valley (they have a handy website with regular updates!) The tulip festival has been on my photography bucket list for a while, so my fingers are crossed that I'll make it up to the valley this Spring.

During my "sit and wait for someone" time this week, I continued work on the embroidery project.  I'm now on the 4th and final American Goldfinch square, I'll take good photos once they are all complete and ironed.  I bought new embroidery hoops which do a much better job of holding the fabric firm than the old wooden hoops do.

I found some plastic containers that are just the right size to slide into the cube organizers in the art room, so I bought two packs and they are currently sitting on the floor waiting for me to have the time to reorganize my embellishments.  In the short term, this will delay my scrapbooking progress, but in the long run it'll make the rest of the ephemera albums go quickly.

Embroidery, sewing, and schedules

I signed up to attend an online photography seminar on Friday morning, which prevented me from my regular blog update.  It turned out to be more informative than I thought it would be, but I couldn't spend the entire day sitting at my desk for the live broadcast so I ended up buying the download so that I can watch it on my own schedule in bits and pieces.  So the study of photography continues, though my editing progress is still on hold.  Within this seminar, Art Wolfe talked about how he sometimes develops books over the course of years, gathering a large body of work and then finding a common thread throughout his work to turn into a book (as opposed to going out into the field specifically with one subject in mind until a book is done.)  This sounds like the "photograph everything and put it together later" philosophy that keeps me going out in the field with ALL the lenses so that I can take advantage of ALL the opportunities.  I realize this is the approach I take with my calendars, and that if I go back through my history of images I can apply that same approach to putting more books together in the future.  This would also give me the opportunity to re-edit past images using the new tools I have at my disposal without necessarily feeling the need to re-edit ALL the images from the past (just the ones I intend to print).

Once again this week, the photos I have to share are poor quality snaps from my phone.

We experienced one of those "emergency" sewing projects earlier this month when the original puppet created for G's school play turned out to be far too small.  G and her friend had hand-sewn the original, and were under a tight deadline to come up with a replacement, so I volunteered to take their pattern and sew it on my machine at home.  It took me less than an hour, and saved them several hours.  The puppet was top-heavy, so after the next rehearsal I helped to reinforce the head/front arms with a combination of a wire hanger and pipe cleaners (one tends to get inventive with little time and zero budget), G put it on a platform that matched the stage floor, and through the magic of theater lighting, made the puppet "crawl" on stage without revealing that it was basically on a giant spatula.

I managed to finish a decent amount of embroidery this week, with all the time I spent sitting and waiting for G during her drama and sports events at school.

Though they are the same birds, the patterns are unique in the feet and a little different in the wings.  I haven't looked to see if they are printed differently, or if the patterns just didn't transfer completely, but my philosophy is that each bird within a species is unique anyway, so the goldfinches do not need to match exactly.

In health news - as the weather warms I've been injecting walks on the days where I don't go to the gym.  I have a new pair of trail shoes for hiking, so I've been breaking them in with short (30-40 min) walks through the woods near my house.  Last week I encountered a couple of deer in the forest.

When it is pouring down rain, or trail conditions look too poor, I'm sticking with yoga indoors, which I've increased from just sun salutations to standing strength routines.

The weather was sloppy and wet over the weekend, which kept me indoors and gave me the opportunity to make headway on my ephemera albums.  I felt a great sense of satisfaction to finally pull out stickers that I'd purchased nearly 13 years ago to use for the scrapbook pages of a specific event.  I also discovered that the way I've sorted my embellishments is frustrating - the boxes are all solid and deep, so I end up opening up 7 different kinds of boxes and laying them out on the floor to dig through.  I don't even know all the things I have because most of this stuff came from Mom, and since I didn't choose to buy it I don't have a memory of picking it out.  To that end, I've purchased a bunch of clear containers that should fit inside the cubby system currently in the art room, so that I can re-sort things and label the containers as I did my stamps.  Having wider, shallow boxes should make it easier to paw through all the embellishments, and it will also get rid of a stack of shoe-size boxes that I've had to shove in a corner of the room.

This week has events I need to attend every night, which means my craft time will largely be distributed throughout my "waiting for G" times.  I'm looking forward to less overlapping and a more steady schedule beginning next week.

Back to my Stitching Roots

As I drove out to drop off my second roll of Konstructor Camera test film this morning, I thought back to how long it has been since my first roll, and how long ago I made my original post to this blog, and how long ago I made my most recent post... and I realized how much time has flown by.  Although I've had a decent amount of time taken up with school field trips, a cold running through our house, a last minute vacation, and some major house organization/spring cleaning, I've found some balance in project completion during some of our rainy evenings.

Two of the largest hurdles I overcame were a long-standing scrapbooking project as well as a long-standing sewing project.

Scrapbboking: I have finally finished gluing and assembling the hard-copy scrapbook for 2003

My photos sat in boxes for years, then I slowly picked at designing layouts and left those sit in another box for years waiting to be glued.  These were the Final 4 Pages waiting to be glued as of March 2016.

What is next: My digital albums for 2004 - 2008 are completed and printed.  My 2009 and 2010 albums just need a few details and proofreading done, then those will be ready for printing.  While I continue with my neverending dream of being "caught up" with scrapbooking digitally, I will begin the companion albums of ephemera starting with 2004.

The stuff is laid out, and in theory these books should go faster as the event details are already printed in the digital albums and I'm just making a few pages per year.  However... I'm feeling mildly  burnt out on scrapbooking at the moment.  I've left 2004 set out on my project table, however, as a reminder than I need to dig in and pull this stuff out of the mud in which it has been stuck for 12 years.

Sewing:  Back in 2006, my husband had to have a second knee surgery and spent his recovery in the easily accessible family room. While he spent a month on that level of the house, I decided to redecorate our bedroom as a surprise for him when he triumphantly returned to being able to take the stairs with ease.  The main focal point of that redecoration was a wall hanging I'd made to hang over our bed.  I had stitched and quilted the entire hanging, however I was running out of time and rather than make him wait to return to a proper bed, I pinned the binding onto the back of the quilt so that I could hang it for show.  The plan had been to take it down and stitch the binding properly the following week.

We moved out of that house in 2012, which is when I finally took the wall hanging down.  I vowed to not hang it in our new house until I'd properly stitched the binding and added a sleeve.  Last fall one of my neighbors decided to start up a crafting club, so I dug the wall hanging out of my U.F.O. box and brought it with me as my first Craft Club project.  On March 25th, 2016, while my husband was out of town, my wall hanging made a triumphant return to the wall (properly sewn and hung this time!) as a surprise for him to come home to.

What is next:  I bought several patterns and panels to play with from a fantastic fabric store on Kauai, and have since gone to work on a few of them.  I've finished the sashiko stitching, piecing, and quilting on one and am currently stitching the binding.  Photo will follow in another post.  I've finished the applique and sashiko of another pattern:

I did the turtle and wave applique by machine by attaching it first with double sided fusible interfacing and then stitching around the edges.  It is effective, and helpful given that my wrists were constantly hurting at the time I decided to undertake this project, however I'm not as fond of the outcome of that style of applique compared to hand stitching.  After I completed the applique, and when my hands felt better, I completed the sashiko by hand and then appliqued the circle onto the background fabric using a more traditional "cut the circle out of wax paper and fold the fabric over it and stitch by hand" method.

About halfway through the circle, I remembered another machine applique technique I've used before, where I sewed the pieces onto fusible interfacing right-sides together, then cut the interfacing and turned the piece right-side out (sticky side of the interfacing down)  This effectively turns the 1/4" seam allowance for you and makes it possible to iron the pieces down to the foundation to be either hand stitched or machine stitched around the edges.  I have several other applique patterns that I'm debating about trying this method with.

In the long term, I have another larger project idea simmering on my back burner which involves taking one of my inherited quilt patterns from my grandmother and creating a quilt with each state bird represented in embroidery.  The smaller projects, however, give me a sense of accomplishment and are allowing me to regain my old sewing chops while I begin to consider the math of how large of a quilt I would end up with, and to study some quilt-as-you-go options.