Artistic Heaven!

I've been really lucky the past three days. I have spent the majority of my time on my artistic pursuits. Here in Bavaria, everything closes down for four days for Easter. All businesses, offices, etc were closed on Good Friday. Stores were open short days on Saturday and, of course, on Easter Sunday everything is shut up tight. No restaurants, no stores, nothing...except churches, of course. Yesterday was Saturday, so we went out shopping for milk, bread, etc anything we'd need until Tuesday. We're not even sure if stores will be open on Monday. Most businesses and government offices are closed, but we're not sure about stores. We do know that our favorite restaurant is open, so we're going there for dinner tomorrow night.

Anyway, on to my artistic pursuits: I finally finished and bound my first embellished quilt. It's black and white with beaded flowers on it. I am horrible about taking pictures of things, but tomorrow is going to be picture day, I promise! I also worked on another black and white quilt that I'm going to give to Bob. It's only going to be about 54x60 or so. Just enough to cover him up.

I also painted some fabric, which was very messy. Probably didn't have to be so messy, but I'm messy when I'm happily creating stuff. I painted some white on white and then used oil paintsticks to do rubbings with some of my patterned rubber stamps. I did a bunch of different rubbings just to test out the technique. I like it and think I will incorporate it into some wall quilts. I'll post pictures of that, too.

Finally, I just got done playing with another technique that I am really liking a lot. I got the idea from the book Stitch, Dissolve, Distort With Machine Embroidery . I've been keeping a lot of my tiny scraps, thread ends, strings, things too small to be used to construct a quilt. I sandwiched all these goodies between water soluble stablizer sheets and free motion machine stitched all around. Then I soaked the pieces in water and came out with very interesting freeform pieces that I can embellish further and use to decorate wall quilts or use for wall quilts themselves. It's definitely something I want to experiment with more. Right now, I'm using Aquafilm as the stablizer, but I'm going to experiment with some Solvy stablizers next time. I like Aquafilm, but it is a little goopy when I'm trying to wash it out of my pieces.

That's it for tonight. Gotta get my beauty sleep. Tomorrow I need to do my mountain of laundry, but otherwise the house is clean. That means more time for play time!

Pictures tomorrow!