Fiber Post cards

Well I am finally starting to feel better. I am low on energy but I am so anxious to get back into my studio and get started again. I joined a group of artist that are getting ready to do a group mailing of fiber postcards. I am very excited and can't wait to start getting my cards from all over the world. One of the girls is from the Netherlands. In this group we are not allowed to mail them inside of an envelope, they want the cancel mark etc as part of the artistic charm of the cards. I think I agree with that, plus it is a record as to when you received it. I will photograph them as I get them and share them with everyone. I am really interested it getting a group of fiber artist together and each taking a section of a photo and reproducing it, then putting them all together. I have seen some other groups do it and it is really fantastic. Oh well, enough dreaming for now. You can always tell when I haven't been sewing for awhile, my minds tends to keep adding projects for me.

Our Thanksgiving was really wonderful. Full of family and fun, we played cards until 2 am and laughed so much our sides and jaws just ached. Its wonderful that my family can get together, even as diverse as we all are, and really enjoy one another. My brother and I spent two days in the kitchen preparing meals and deserts and it all came together beautifully on Thanksgiving day. There are so many things to be thankful for this year.

Sick, sick, sick

Ok, I have had this stupid respitory thing for almost 3 weeks and I am sick of being sick. I feel ok but I am now coughing uncontrollably. If the bird flu hits here I am a goner. I finally broke down and called the doctor he put me on quite a few medications and I think they aren't really making much of a difference. My lungs are so sore from coughing and I dont really have much energy to do anything. Hope things get better before Thanksgiving.

Garage Sale Day!

Well today was the long awaited garage sale. I was supposed to have been preparing for it these last weeks but I waited until the night before (its those procrastinating genes). I was up early and had almost everything out by 6:00 am. The rush started shortly after 7 and it was practically over at noon. I remember back when a garage sale meant a 2 day commitment and I mean two full days. For me, it started slow, I was selling mostly large pieces of furniture and I didn't have a ton of nick nacky type things. My neighbor was selling lots of toys and small stuff, and clothes and they always had a large crowd to my one or two people. I was starting to think she was giving away homemade cookies or something to keep everyone over there. But by about 8:30 I started to get more people and by the end of the day I had sold a lot of my bigger pieces to my husbands utter delight. Our dream is to someday using our garage for a car instead of having a 3 car attached storage bin!

My newest quilt

I am working on, and have been working on, this quilt for a about a month. I haven't gotten too far due to the tear up in the house, but now that I am all back together and organized I should be sewing. I have hand painted all the fabric so far ( I will be removing the darkest leaf, I did not paint that fabric and do not like it with the other fabrics). I am painting some of the birds to look like storks and I am quilting some of the leaves seperately so they will have texture and stand out more on the piece when its done. Its a Velda Newman thing. I hope the weather gets colder and rains. I need a reason to have to stay indoors and work on it, with the sun shining I want to be outside. I have gotten most of my little annual flowers planted and we have been trimming the palm trees of their bloom pods. Wow is that a nasty job. They are really quite messy and heavy. My poor little plants underneath them get walloped pretty good as they fall. Since the weather is good here all year, except for the hot summers, we can plant flowers all year and gardens. Its really nice to have the color while the trees stand naked all winter. The palm trees won't, obviously, but most of the other trees do go deciduous during the winter. We have quite a collection of birds that visit our fountain all summer to get drinks, they actually stand on the ball and drink from the water pouring out of the hole at the top(you can see part of it on the left, this is our courtyard in the front). The other day I caught a hummingbird taking a bath in the bubbling stream.

Animated sewing

This morning as I was looking at some really different blogs I came across a blog link from the pixar studio blog. It is a flip book site. For those of you unfamiliar with flip books its how they created animation early on, it is still fun to see your drawings come to life. Give it a try at "flip book " ,I created a sewing flip book. Make a series of drawings and then click the eye and they animate them for you. Give it a try.

My quilting studio

Well, as I have been surfing around the webring of artful quilters I noticed a challenge to post pictures of their messy quilt studios and then after pictures when they get them all cleaned up. Well, I have been so torn up (see earlier posts) that I was anxious to get organized. My husband installed a closet organizer for my birthday while I was gone to the PIQS. I was so excited to get all my material folded neatly and put away. You see, I seem to have fabric everywhere, the studio, my closet, the guest room closet. My family says I have a quilting house not just a studio. So my challenge was to get it all contained into one room, wow, that was tough. It was interesting folding all those squares and while I was at it I color sorted. It looks so good, my girlfriend said I should remove the closet doors so everyone could see how nice it looks. The problem is now I am afraid to sew, I don't want to mess things up! There is something to be said for messy freedom!

Dinner

Just a few words about our dinner, wow, how romantic. We went to the The Mission Inn which is very close to us, it was so perfect. We sat outside in the court yard by the fountain and had dinner.

They are getting all ready and decorated for the "The festival of Lights" they have starting the day after Thanksgiving. Its all about the Holiday's. I love to take the grandkids and sit on the curb and listen to the singers. They have period singers all dressed and singing our favorite Christmas carols, the Riverside Philharmonic orchestra is there playing, everyone dressed to the nines. They make a big production before turning on the lights that light up all of the Mission and the mechanical dolls that are everywhere.

Anyway back to my dinner. As we sat, just enjoying each other he pulled out a small box, again, seems every five years I get one of these! I opened it to find a beautiful tanzanite and diamond ring he had made for me. He had the jewelers bring in stones from New York to look at and selected the finest 4.26 karat tanzanite to have mounted with diamonds. I loved the tanzanite after our cruise to Alaska and I saw all the stones up there and learned that the mines were almost depleted and it was becoming rarer. Wow, what a guy! We spent time talking about the story behind the ring, and I decided that I was going to type up each story that went with each ring. This way, when the ring gets handed down to one of our girls and then to one of their girls it will travel with the love story behind it. Its more than the value of the ring, its the story behind the ring that I love so much. I think I will hang on to him for another 25!

Our Anniversary

Today is our 25th wedding anniversary. Wow, I can't believe it has been that long. I am more in love with him now than I was all those years ago. There is a lot to be said about living together through all the hard times as well as all the good times. It brings a relationship to a special place, of maturity and trust and gives it a warm glow.

We are different than most of the couples we know, we still love to goof around and have public showing of lots of affection. We haven't grown apart or away from each other, we have only grown closer. We still love to spend time dreaming of our future and setting goals. Our relationship, I feel, has been tested by fire and emerged on the other side more beautiful, refined. In our time together we have faced, like many other couples, birth, sickness, financial stress, joblessness, college tuition, rebelling teenagers, but by far the hardest, ongoing test has been the drunk driver that changed all of our lives forever. You see, in July 2000, a week before my daughters 24 birthday a drunk driver decided to try and pass a semitruck on a blind corner and hit my daughter, headon. That nano second would forever change the course of all of our lives.

It ended up having a far wider reaching effect than I ever could have imagined at first. I will go into that someday, but not now. For us, it has been learning to salvage our lives as a family, as a couple, and for me, as a caregiver, a mom, a wife and as an individual. I think it, in itself, redefined who we all are. When you experience this type of grief you either turn away from people and choose to grieve alone or you reach out. I often did both, but at night, after an incredibly stressful day, full of major medical decisions, not know if Jennifer would live or die, wondering if we had made the right decisions or not, I would fall into comforting arms ready to hold me and protect me from the world and he would tell me that we would make it through. How can it get any better than that. To know, deep in your heart that even when it seems your whole life has been pulled out from beneath you, that there is a safe place to fall. A refuge in all the trauma.

I am a Christian and I have a very strong faith, but we were at a place of feeling prayed out. Sometimes even feeling as though God didn't hear us. I faced everyday in the Lord's strength but I ended it curled up in my husbands arms where sometimes I could find sleep and other times I couldn't. It is truly during these times in our lives when "the rubber meets the road" that all the things that we believe in and know are challenged. Somethings never make it through, like friends, some family, parts of our lives, often our health. Statistically, most marriages, like 95%, never survive this type of traumatic event.

I feel blessed to have gotten this far and not like we just barely survived, we survived big, we are so good. Our youngest daughter said that she didn't know if she could ever find a husband when she compared them all to her dad and wanted her marriage to be as good as ours. For my husband the hardest part was the fact that we lost our freedom and us as a couple. When we married I had 3 kids under 5 that he took on and raised as his own, Jennifer was the baby at that time. We never had "couple time" and so in 2000, when our youngest child together, Melissa was in college full time and all the others had moved out, did we feel that we were at the beginning of our new life together as empty nesters. That all the years of sacrifice and being homebound were now going to open up for us to traveling etc. Instead, we are now learning how to try and be both a new family and make "couple time" when we don't have the luxury of leaving Jennifer by herself. But we are making it happen, its challenging but we will keep plugging away at it.

This morning, after church, we all went and had brunch together, tonight just Randy and I are going to get away and have dinner together. We will reminisce, as best friends do, about our last 25 years, the good and bad and plan for the next 25 years. We will sit and talk and hope and dream together, just like always.

Murals all safely shipped

Well I got all the murals finished and packaged and delivered to the shipping company that is taking them directly to the model homes in Northern California. I am glad to get that off of my plate so I can get back to some of the quilts I am working on. I have posted a few pictures of the murals. The rubber ducky room actually has 3 rubber ducks in different poses. The rabbit room has two rabbits, the other is asleep under a sunflower and the last room, animal crackers has two loose animals that go along with the wagon.

I owe, I owe, so back to work I go

Well, its Tuesday and I need to get to the murals that I have been putting off due to all the confusion and tear-up going on in the house. Yesterday was a terrible day but got better as it went on and ended up a blessing. Bible study got to meet back in my familyroom on the new floor! The builder had a cleaner come in and clean all the shutters and furniture as the movers put everything back into its place with utmost care.
Currently, I am doing a set of graphics for some homes in the Sacramento area, I am doing a rubber ducky babies room, animal crackers, and bunnies. I am so far behind that I will be painting most of today and tomorrow and then cutting them out for shipping. Then I have another set due the first week of December that I need to start on. Many of the projects I have for the year have gotten bumped to next year, which is nice for the holidays but tougher on the cash flow. I find that it happens more than not at this time of the year. One year I expected everything to move to the following year and didn't start painting only to find out that everything was due, wow, what a scramble that was, 10 projects with several murals each due all in December and I was trying to move. I am so glad that year is over. A few pictures of my familyroom and kitchen with a mural I painted on tumbled marble above my stove top.