Field Trips in Fiber - Adventures in quilting, hand dyed fabric and fiber art.

Snow Picture, vol 7, THE END!

I promise I am finally done with the boring snow pictures! These bird pics were all taken from inside the house with my zoom lens. I was about 15 feet away from the bird feeders. At least I did clean the window!

Downy Woodpecker (male)

House Finch (male)

House Finch (female) - I think

Mourning Dove

Red-bellied Woodpecker

Song Sparrow - I think. The Sparrow are very difficult for me to identify.

White-breasted Nuthatch

It was a great week for bird watching. I also saw a Blue Jay and a Fox Sparrow but I wasn't able to get a good photo of either.

Three Creative Studios - Join us for Creative Cue 2010

Three Creative Studios has several fun initiative for you for 2010. One of them is a weekly Creative Cue that will start one week from today. Do you want to exercise your drawing or sketching skills? You might enjoy participating in Creative Cue. Check it out here:

Mom's secret project revealed

You may remember several weeks ago that I was quilting a project for Mom. I couldn't show it on the blog because occasionally the recipient reads the blog.

This is Courtney with her new quilt. Courtney is my nephew's girlfriend. What we did not know is that she has been wanting a quilt of her own. James has two and I guess he doesn't share.

Courtney actually designed this quilt. She is a graphic arts/music double major and used to keep a blog. She did that 16-square arrow pattern for one of her class projects. She posted it on her blog and Mom and I thought it would be a cool quilt pattern. Mom asked if she could see the original art work and Courtney loaned it to her. Mom pieced the blocks to exactly match her art work - ALL of those narrow black and white stripes are pieced.

From there, Mom added the wavy top and bottom borders so that the quilt would not be square. I think they also added a great design element. The green and gold flying geese are done in George Mason University colors. The two other borders are music print fabrics. I think Mom made this one about as meaningful as she could!

I'm not showing the quilting because most of it is stitch-in-the-ditch or simple filler quilting. It doesn't show at all. This is one quilt that did not need to have the quilting not show. I did CC in the flying geese.

See Mom, she's very happy!

Snow pictures, vol 6

These photos were taken near the river behind our house. It's my favorite place to walk after a snow or ice storm. I love the sound of the river the birds flying around. I never go down here other than in winter. The snakes and I have an agreement: they don't come in my area and I don't come in theirs. They've held up their part of the bargain except for that one that snuck into the house. The others saw what happened and we have had a peaceful and respectful coexistence since then. But in the winter, the river is mine.

There's a little stream that runs between our property and the neighbor's. You can sort of see the water bubbling up on the right in this photo.

Dyed PJ's for my niece

Christmas is over so I can now finally show you these pajamas that I dyed for my niece. She even got matching socks! I did the same thing for her last year but the shorts were cropped shirts and she doesn't like cropped shirts. Hopefully I did better this year!