Free Book Download from Robin Atkins

If you like or love beading, you've probably heard of Robin Atkins. She and her brother are world-renown beaders who create amazing works.

Well, on Robin's blog this morning she is making available for free download her first published book from years back! Check it out here.

Some of Robin's beaded buttons are on page 46, and the basic beading stitches are around page 50. Download it while you can.

Mountains

Here are the Mountains, finished but without a border yet. I always have a hard time figuring out the border when there is sky in the piece. Another color around the sky "cuts it off" I think. What would you do?

Here's what I did with the last art quilt I made with sky...


This border never felt quite right to me, but I couldn't see cutting off the sky with another color.

I'll put the mountains on the design wall and ponder for some days or weeks before finishing it.

String Mountains

For about a year I have had a sketch of a mountain quilt or wall hanging using the string method, and last night I finally started putting the quilt together.


I had to figure out block size and number of blocks, lay out the foundation fabric and then mark each foundation piece to show where sky and mountains would be. The direction of the string pieces also had to be marked on the foundation fabric. Numbering each piece helped, and I had to distinguish between mountain 1 and mountain 2. Doing all of this preparation made the fabric construction amazingly easy.


I still have one more block to make but this wall hanging has turned out so much better than I imagined...



The hand-dyed sky fabric really makes this quilt, I think. This is a very basic mountain quilt, but I have lots of other ideas, so I think this is the first in a series of mountain quilts.

Tomorrow I'll finish this top and it will become a sample tomorrow night for my Stretching the String program (lecture) I'll give to our home quilt guild, the Cotton Patch Quilt Guild, in Athens, GA.

Let's Hear it for the Man

Bill, my DH, has been working on rust dyed fabric for a while, but he just started wrapping it around canvas...


He made this set to hang in our entrance hall. Here are close-ups photos of the one on the left that seems to have "eyes" everywhere...

Can you see the eye or eyes in the top 1/3 of the piece?

There's another eye above this section that looks like Native American design...

And this one that wraps around the side.

I really enjoy this piece which looks like water reflections.

I'm trying to talk Bill into opening an Etsy shop to sell his pieces.

Happy Mothers Day

BAD Deer

We have a deer trail through our yard because we don't have a fence, so the sweet beautiful animals like to graze in our yard, but this weekend they went TOO far!

This is our new peach tree with 3 peaches...

We had about 15 of them the other day...before the deer; this poor peach is half eaten...


...and here's the rest of the pathetic tree...

Poor baby, she didn't have a chance. They ate almost all of the leaves too. Hummmmm

A Photo of Our Soldier and Sunday at Southworks

Here's a photo we found this week of our soldier son in his troop newsletter! We're not getting any photos or phone calls this deployment, so this one was a big deal for us. It came as a PDF file, so I had to print it off and take a photo of a photo to show it to you, ha-ha.

We took a drive over to Watkinsville, GA, on Sunday to visit the Southworks Art Festival. We enjoyed some jazz music and the many artists at the show. My favorites are the potters, photographers and fiber artists. My lovely friend Beth Thompson had an altered photography booth, and another friend, Nancy York, was manning the bookmaking booth where she had some pieces.

Here's one of our purchases (top center)...

I found the small "moon over the mountain" pottery plate (my name for it) last year at Southworks and I was happy to see the same potters there this year so that I could buy another larger version to display on this hutch. The potters are Triny Cline & Mike Sherrer from north Georgia and you can find their website by clicking on this link.

Margaret M. Hunt: Artist and Teacher

On Friday our quilt guild offered a class with Margaret M. Hunt on using Portfolio Oil Pastels and SetaColor textile paints on fabric. It was wonderful!

There's nothing like a laid-back class with lots of creativity. I brought photos that I thought would work well for ideas...


This was Madeline Hawley's lovely piece...

Madeline is a certified quilt show judge in our quilt guild. Nancy and Margaret are looking on.

These are Frances' pieces...



All of these pieces were made with the oil pastels, and later in the day Margaret did some demonstrations on how to create "Skydyes" with Setacolor paints...

If you're looking for a fine teacher for a workshop, Margaret is a catch! Click on her name at the top of this entry for more information.