Busy Bees

April is always busy around here.  We had our annual stream clean up.  Almost 900 volunteers cleaned up 38 sites plus 6 river miles with the help our our friends in the municipalities, the US FWS and Missouri River Relief.  An awesome crew.  We did Earth Day events and worked with some where in the neighborhood of 1000 kids, teaching them to sunpaint and upcycle.  It is also the time when we make great inroads on the necessary paperwork and planning for the Race for the Rivers. 

To keep it interesting we had two different robotics competitions in April, a regional and the championships.  I love watching the competition, but my job was to support the team, primarily by keeping them supplied with food and drink.  The team rented an RV and tailgated for the 3 days of the championships.  That was an interesting experience.  It was a great crew of parents and mentors who all worked together to keep everyone fed. 

Most of my sewing time was spent on design work and sewing out badges.  That is a good thing.  But it left me short on time for quilting.  I did get a few finishes.  My lotus mug rug went out early. 

I was also able to put together this lap robe for a raffle at the annual Spring Tea at our church.  I put together a few gift baskets and had a blast making the buntings to go in them. 

And then the wee quilt at the top.  It was my offering for the Little Quilt Sew Vote Swap.  It will be on its way tomorrow as soon as the post office opens.  I added some of the extras including an embroidered center to my Sew Mama Sew Give away package.  That is open to anyone so feel free to leave a comment on that post.  That is all you have to do to get entered. 

On the Work Table

Finally something I can share.  A simple quilt to raffle at our Spring Tea.  The top is pieced.  I just need to quilt and bind.  you can also see some other projects in the corner.  The pink is the start of a bunting for the same tea.  The ninjas are new patches available at the Flying Monkey show in Huntsville tomorrow and soon to be in the shop.  The green fabric is for the bunting and the rest of the stack is for making dice bags.  And for the record, this is the neat part of the work table today.  There are scraps and threads and pins on the floor, piles of fabric everywhere, all of the embroidery threads I've used for the last week, random bobbins and scissors everywhere.  I am SO happy to be sewing again! 

Shamrock Quilt

This is a quilt I made for a charity raffle.  I was only able to get a couple quick pictures last night. 

It is made from one charm pack and a bit of additional fabric.  I digitized the shamrock you can see in the middle.  The rest of the quilt is quilted with a smaller version of the same.  It is about 40 x 52 inches.  I used a fusible batting for this.  It worked pretty well and held together through all of the rough treatment it received running through my embroidery machine. 

Six to Go.

My friend K and I are making shirt bags as prizes for a trivia night.  We have two finished.

Why, yes, the pocket is upside down on the gray one.  And how is your week going? 

Big Canoes

Yay!  We have big canoes at our festival this year. Plus the team has arranged for some fabulous local media attention!  You won't see much of me around here until I get all those details worked out. 

Mission: Clean Stream 2012

 

 Saturday was a beautiful day.  It was sunny until about 2pm.  The weather was comfortably warm.  The flowers were in bloom and we had a trash clean up.  Mission: Clean Stream is an annual event, coordinated by my little organization.  We were scheduled to clean on April 14 this year.  There were 1138 people pre-registered to help out.  That would have set a record for us.  Unfortunately, we had severe weather that morning and had to postpone until this past weekend.  Turnout was very light as you might expect.  Trying to cram one more thing into already jam-packed Spring schedules was just too much.  But we did have somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 people scattered across several dates and locations.  And they did manage to pick up a BUNCH of trash.  

 

Here is part of a load of metal being scoured for useable parts by our Stream Trash ARTists.  START is the brainchild of the gentleman in the yellow shirt.  He arranges to bring in sculptors to the event and they use the trash pulled from the stream to create lasting sculptures.  The sculptures, along with appropriate signage, are displayed across the county to remind folks to not litter. 

All in all, it was a very rewarding experience for the participants and a great day for our rivers and streams. 

And now that it is May and Earth Month is over, I might just be able to get back to some "want to" as opposed to "have to" sewing projects.  But I do it with a renewed sense of my place in the environment and an even stronger desire to find ways to use what I have and what I can upcycle in my projects. 

Recruiting!

It is almost Earth Day. The folks at Greenway Network are getting ready to for a big festival season. And that means SUNPAINTING!

Here are some kids at a recent festival making their sunpaint fabric. We usually have HUNDREDS of kids come by and play with our paint and things. Most of them are able to come back and get their fabric to take home as a souvenir. Some don't make it back and some simply donate the fabric to the Sunlight Quilt Project.

You see, while the kids are painting with our volunteers, we are talking to their adults about the problems associated with invasive species. One of the biggest problems we have around here is bush honeysuckle. It is a huge problem because it crowds out the native plants that grow in the forest floor, creates pathways for predators to get to songbird nests and may even add toxins to the soil that prevent some native species from growing.



That brings us back to the pieces of fabric that are left over from our festival events. For the past several years, we have given the fabric to local quilt guilds. They have assembled quilts which we then raffle. The money raised goes to support our invasive species education and eradication projects. Last year we used funds from the Sunlight Project to purchase special tools called honeysuckle poppers. They make it easier to get the plant out of the ground. We have been using these tools at several removal projects throughout the Confluence Region.

You see, that is the origin of the Sunlight Project name. We use sunlight to paint the fabric and removing bush honeysuckle brings sunlight back to the forest floor.

It is time to get started on the project again. We are looking for a quilter or group of quilters who will be willing to donate their time and the extra materials (batting, backing, quilting) to make a quilt. We have some fabric available now and will have more at the end of April. We need to have the quilt ready for display before our annual Race for the Rivers event at the end of August. We start selling raffle tickets as soon as the quilt is ready and the drawing takes place at our annual meeting in late October or early November.

Let me know if you are interested in working on the project.

On the Work Table Today

Last year I made embroidered tote bags for the winning table at our little trivia night. For some strange reason, I decided that I was going to make crowns this year.

One down, seven to go. I'm not sure I'm going to have the patience to make all 8 of these crowns. The paper mache wasn't easier than I had expected and one layer was sufficient to make the paper forms sturdy. but I have no idea how to proceed from here. I have a grand notion to do some sort of paper collage over the top, but I haven't done anything like that and am not sure where to start. Plain gold paint would be too boring. I'll do a couple more and perhaps something will come to me. Any suggestions?

Beyond that, is this just too dumb for words? I mean who is going to want a trivia queen/king crown.

Strange Winter

 Hello to visitors from Hand Made Parade.   I'm linking to this since it is one of my favorites and I don't have anything new to share with you this week.

Early in the summer I was asked to participate in a local group effort to make quilts for the Alzheimer's Art Quilt Initiative. These ladies have been making quilts to donate for this project and many others over the past few years. I was very excited that to have them include me.

It took me a long time to figure out what I wanted to make for my little quilt. I looked at pages of past quilt donations and current quilts for sale, trying to get a sense for the project. The diversity is incredible. There is no standard Alzheimer's Art Quilt. They are simple, complex, traditional, modern, art, disease related, seasonal, you name it.

I've read a lot about the disease and have peripheral knowledge of folks affected by it. I haven't had to confront it in a personal manner. In thinking about it and how it seems to affect people I kept coming back to two ideas. It mostly affects people who are in what is sometimes referred to as the winter season of their lives. The disease seems to wipe away the form and structure of their lives. I kept picturing a strange winter where the beautiful patterns of life drift off into formless static. That is what I tried to represent with my little quilt.

I have been working on it off and on all summer. The deadline was the fourth Monday of July. It turns out that a few others were not quite ready then either. So I still have a chance. It still needs to be washed and dried. I am waiting to hear if I am to put a label on the back and what it should say. And then there is the form to fill out to go with the submission. But I can get that done now. The hard part was getting it finished.

It languished away in my portable projects bag waiting for me to finish the binding. I started with a solid blue, but the fabric wouldn't cooperate and the quilt didn't like it so I kept putting it off. Thanks to a little incentive from this week's Iron Craft Challenge, Finish a UFO, I went to my stash and found a nicer fabric. From there it was a simple matter to finish up.



The details. The quilt measures 10 x 7.5 inches. It is made of muslin and quilter's cotton. The piece is hand embroidered and hand quilted with an assortment of quilting threads and pearl cotton.

Update: Tossing this one in at the end. The colors are all wackadoodle because I was trying to get a decent picture of mostly white quilt. I'm putting it here because is shows the stitching and illustrations some of the transition between the swirls and the static.