Rayen

Last night I sewed on strips of the peach moire satin as sashing for my art quilt panels. The color is perfect, and it looks a little like the view from an old window (if you squint.) Now I have to pin this together with the batting and backing, and then I'll be ready to quilt.

Nagusame is a free YA story I'll be publishing online for my visitors. To read the first part, click here .

May your thoughts be as light as a feather, and as beautiful as morning dew.

I finished the embroidery work on the fourth and final panel for my summer art quilt. I'm happy with how the eco-dyed twine came out as an embellishment. It took a lot of pins to hold it in place while I tacked it down, but I enjoyed the process a lot. This is the arrangement of the panels I decided on for the quilt top. I intended to use the green tie-dyed fabric as sashing, but turns out it's a bit too green and loud, and it leeches the pretty rose tones out of the panels. Instead I'll use the vintage peach moire satin for my sashing. Stay tuned to see how the assembled quilt top looks.

I'm cleaning out my vintage quilt collection this summer, but I'm having a hard time parting with some of the pieces. This crib quilt is one I found at a show many years ago, about fifty years old, made of polyester lining fabric, cotton and muslin. The quilting, piecing and binding attachment were all done entirely by hand. The string blocks are very haphazardly pieced, and the quilt wasn't squared, which made me think it was made by a child or someone just learning how to quilting. It may have been made for the arrival of a new baby girl in the family. I really like the imperfections of this quilt; that and the colors make it so charming. The maker's choice to use dark green binding was also a little odd, but I like that, too. It's a happy quilt.

It's rainy season now, and recently a powerful thunderstorm blew through here. I couldn't work on the computer, so I spent an hour out on the porch listening to the rain. I love storms, and how fresh and cool the air grows, and the way everything green seems to shiver with delight. I used to take pics of water droplets for an online group some years back. I still like to capture rain water in all its forms, although it's always a pain to photograph. My little maple by the porch looks especially pretty when it rains. I took those feelings and colors with me into my work room and put them into the latest panel of my summer art quilt, and came up with this feather-stitched mandala.

I'm making progress with the last panel for my summer art quilt. I've attached the fabric elements, and now I'm working on the embroidery. I decided to use some avocado-dyed cotton twine as an embellishment by couching it with gold holographic thread into a spiral. Despite being very thick the little patch of faux leather wasn't as tough to attach to the foundation fabric as I thought. I used a carpet mending needle and some variegated perle cotton to outline it with a blanket stitch. Since it's going to be very difficult to embroider the leather I decided to use a wee vintage brooch as the embellishment for the patch.

We will be able to gather without fear. I hope.

Some years ago I discovered Colour Complements , an online shop that sells hand-dyed embroidery thread. Lorraine, the proprietor, is an amazing color artist and creates the most beautiful threads I've ever seen. They're also very high quality; I've used them for years and I've never had a single issue with dye bleeding or fraying. Thanks to Lorraine's influence I've been much more creative with my needlework. I keep a little treasure chest of her threads and take them out whenever I need inspiration. All of the thread I used for this panel came from Colour Complements. If you're in the market for hand-dyed thread, you won't find any better elsewhere.

I finished the third panel for my summer art quilt. I'm very happy with how consistent I was with the feather stitching. Now working on the fourth and final panel. After the embroidery work is done on this piece I'll start assembling the quilt top. Stay tuned to see how it turns out.

I'm petsitting for my favorite person, and I decided to move her birds to this window spot in our living room. From here they have a nice view of our back property, and the bird feeder where the cardinals, wrens, blue jays and (unfortunately) squirrels hang out. They'll also be able to see us more frequently in the main part of the house.

Happy Father's Day, Dad. I miss you.

Back in February I opened an account on Twitter to dip more of my toes into social media, and decide if I want to do online promotion once I start publishing my work. I've met some nice people, and I like the creative textile artists I've met so far. The k-pop and k-drama fandom communities are also fun. I don't feel I fit in with the writing community there, but I haven't found anyone who is like-minded yet. It's still early days, too. I've always had mixed feelings about social media, especially as it seems to be very political and aggressive these days. I also don't want to deal with too much attention right now, so I'm keeping a low profile. As always I want to create content and see what others are doing rather than attract followers or promote myself. So far I like it, but we'll see.

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” ― Søren Kierkegaard We think so much about the past and future that we often forget to live in the present. I'm certainly guilty of dwelling too much on the past. I used to tell myself that I needed to learn from the mistakes I've made, but regret isn't much of a teacher. It's impossible for me to separate the negative emotions from the events that inspired them. Like everyone I've also tried to fix my past in my head by thinking "If I could go back and change what I did, I would . . . and then this wouldn't have happened." As if with my current knowledge I could have prevented the mistakes. If that were true, I think I would have no one and nothing in my life now; I'd be living in a cave somewhere. And I'd be miserable. The present has its daily challenges for me, but it's also peaceful now. I'm no longer being held as an emotional hostage by the

I finished the embroidery work on the second panel for my summer art quilt. Going in expanding circles is one of my favorite meditative stitching methods. I had a general idea in my head for placing the fabric elements for this panel, but with the stitching I mostly improvised in the moment. This is the fabric composition for the third panel, which I'll get started on now.

Using most of a bleach pen and about a dozen color grabbers I was able to remove about 75% of the yellow dye migration and 90% of the green dye migration stains from the vintage double wedding ring quilt I'm restoring. It's still shedding dye, believe it or not, although not as much as it did during the first laundering. I do have to stop trying to remove the dye stains now, as a few of the more fragile pieces of feedsack in the patchwork are starting to wear from the exposure to bleach. This is why chemical treatment is so dicey with older quilts. I've also created a bit of repair work for myself. Honestly, I don't mind. The quilt looks a hundred times better than it did, and I feel like I did my best to rescue it.

For a very reasonable price I picked up a small lot of quilt blocks from an estate buyer, which is something I do now and then to get pieces to practice on and study. These are fairly contemporary, I think. The patchwork is very good, so the maker must have been experienced. These two pieces were the main reason I chose this lot. I'd like to make them into a runner for top of the wall counter in my kitchen.

I finished embroidering the first panel of my summer art quilt. Since this is an abstract composition I'm the only one who knows what it means, but I will say that the spider web is definitely a spider web. :) Embroidering the web with hair-thin holographic thread was particularly difficult to do, and took me a couple weeks. My couching isn't the best, but overall the effect is what I wanted. I do love my little pearl spider. I'm working on the second panel now.

Our little gardens are still thriving. I've harvested enough basil, oregano, chives and thyme to last the rest of the year. It's way past strawberry season now, but ours are still producing every week. The artichoke is doing well, too. We've picked all the radishes, but the basil is still producing so much I'm going to start drying some for the neighbors now. The pole beans also didn't get the end of their season memo. I'll pick these and cook them up for dinner tonight. So much fun.

I selected one section of the heartbreaker quilt to treat with a bleach pen, and then I washed the quilt with a color grabber. I did this twice. After both treatments and washes the grabber sheets came out the same color: yellowish green. Yep. The quilt is still shedding dye. Here's how the treated section looked after the second wash. Here's a side-by-side comparison of the treated section with an untreated section. The bleach pen worked better than I thought, and while it didn't do much for the yellow migration stains, it lightened the green splotches a lot. So I'll keep at it and see if I can clean it up a bit more.