Santa on a Flamingo

Mad Fabri-holic Samantha keeps taunting me - telling me she's gonna post a pic of her "cheesy" flamingo Christmas fabric and then not doing it. Well, I'll show her, here's my Santa riding a Flamingo. I commissioned my favorite Tentmaker last year to create this wallhanging for a friend who is insane about flamingos. And then I had to get one for myself of course. The hangings did turn out different tho: she ended up with a golden flamingo.

I'm not going to write much - I'm in the middle of a two-day quilting class. We're learning an accurate way to piece half-square triangles. Ha ha ha, I laugh at your accuracy. I, of course, am making the units oversized and then recutting them smaller to make them wonky (and very biasy). So far I have a few of the half square triangle units done, but no bigger blocks sewn together. Not sure how I'm going to do them - I love the Hovering Hawks block, but than means more work.

Now don't faint dead away, but I'm actually using a bunch of YELLOW and ORANGE and RED along with my pinks and purples. Bah ha ha ha - gotta keep ya'all guessing. The colors are still all brights, so that's not as scary as me using Williamsburg Blue and peach or something country like that.

Of course my camera battery was dead this morning, so hopefully tomorrow I'll have it all charged up and can take some photos. Prob won't post tomorrow tho, so see ya on Friday.

Great Christmasy Gifts

These are a couple of my favorite Christmasy things in the whole world. Take a look at the Pouty Girl (who almost looks like my evil twin) made by my incredibly talented, wonderful friend Rachael Thomas.

I can't believe all the work Rach put into this - those are french knots on the lime green background and some kind of embroidery stitch for the hair - very textural. I don't know what happened between last year and this to the two bottom Christmas tree light embellishments. Don't remember the bulbs falling off and I can't find them anywhere. I hope the cats didn't eat them. At least they'll be easy enough to replace someday.

And look at this incredible Santa face jug my friend Siobhan gave me. Face jugs are a Georgia/So Carolina area folk art and the ones I've seen are usually glazed instead of painted like this.

Isn't he the greatest? What's extra special about him is that he was the only one available and Sio gave him to me anyway, instead of keeping him even tho she really liked him too. She's also the greatest.

I've been continuing work on gift bags. I know, I know, one of these days I'll get bored and quit, but right now I'm still having fun. I started re-re-rewatching the BBC miniseries of "Pride and Prejudice," one of my favorites. If I had it available, Jane Austen is definitely an author I'd love to hear narrated on a Books on CD (like lucky Bonnie gets). While I love Austen's books, they're a bit too tedious for me to read thru if I can't do something else. I was thrilled tho to see an Austen manuscript at the British Library tho (much more interesting than that old Magna Carta or the Shakespeare).

Red Christmas Trees

I'm going to show you a picture of my Red Christmas Tree quilt and you are going to look at it and say that is soooo Tonya. At least I look at it and think it's so me. But the truth is, this one was someone else first.

I've only ever made two quilts exactly to someone else's pattern. One I at least changed from really sweet white and pastel pinks to black and hot pinks, but this quilt is almost exactly like the original, and that includes the colors. Gwen Marston published the pattern in a magazine in November 1993 and I so fell in love with it that I copied it, finishing in May '94.

I'm ashamed to say that I even traced the pattern of the Christmas tree, rather than drawing out my own which would have been easy easy easy. Twelve years later, I can wing stuff like that without worrying.

What do I love about this quilt? The colors and their placement. OOh purple mismatched width borders and a RED tree on a green background. And look at the beautiful quilting design. That was easy enough to draw freehand with chalk - it's not supposed to look precise so that makes it much easier to just DO.

You start by making the curvy double line around the border and then go back in and fill in spirals. I've used this design a couple of times since.

So I copied and I learned. I still love the idea of a red christmas tree and after I'd learned Susan Shie's technique I used it to make this little guy back in 2001. Doesn't look like anything she'd make, but it does look like me.

I actually got the idea of doing all those buttons from a wool crazy quilt that some creative quilter had embroidered a giant chicken outline on and then filled with buttons. (Sorry I don't have a copy of the pic, for all you chicken lovers out there - believe me, it was fun.) I glued rhinestones on there and am thrilled they've stayed on.

By the way, I've been having an ongoing discussion lately about "name-dropping" in blogs. I happen to like knowing where people got their ideas and inspirations from. I'm not saying "ooh, I'm special I know who this person is" I'm saying "Wow, this person really influenced me and if you don't know who they are, then you should check them out because you really might like them too."

Christmas Houses

So this is it - the very first liberated, wonky house quilt I ever made, way back in 1996. I started out using Christmas fabric that I no longer liked or even hated. Hey, I was trying out a new technique, didn't want to use fabric I'd hate to waste... As I grew more confident I started throwing in purples and fabrics that I actually loved. So for me this is a weird combination of good and bad. Does make me realize that if you only use fabric you like, you have a much better chance of liking the finished product.

I was proud of myself for figuring out how to make the snowman. Easy but complicated all at the same time. I started out with three squares in graduated sizes and added background fabric to each of the corners to make "circles." He's a little pointy - but he works. This is the first quilt I ever decided to not worry about squaring up and making the edges all straight. I used a ruler and rotary cutter, but only straighted it about 2" at a time. It looks good that way.

I've been sewing up gift bags. Here's one that can be used for any occasion. Well, okay hubby wouldn't be too thrilled to see it for his birthday, but you know what I mean. It's a batik fabric and I fan quilted (spiral pattern) using a variegated pinks n whites perle cotton. In the end, you can barely see the quilting, which was hard enough to do through the batik. I guess the fabric is still the star, and that's not a bad thing.

We actually had a few days of good clear skies here, but it's back to eye-burning today. Yesterday my sweetie (who works Sunday thru Thursday - the standard work week here) and I went to the 10:30 am showing of the new Harry Potter film. Oh boy. Dark, dark movie and not just the lighting. I forgot about that.

I was rather amazed at the number of small kids in the audience. One I'd have thought it was a bit too much for them and two, they were Egyptian. Unless they spend a whole lot of time watching tv, how much English do they really know? They're not old enough to read the arabic subtitles. There was definitely some talking (translating?) throughout the film but it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be, plus it wasn't as hard for me to tune out as speaking in English would have been.

Boy did my knees (both of 'em) object to being cramped up in the theater. I had to lean on hubby to get out of there. Am I 80-yrs old or what? In general tho, my problem knee is doing really well - definitely much better than it was pre-surgery.

Last night we watched "Christmas in Connecticut" in which Barbara Stanwyck plays a WWII era Martha Stewart - the best homemaker in the world. Or is she? We followed that with "Shop Around the Corner" a Christmas movie with Jimmy Stewart that was the inspiration for "You've Got Mail. " Yes, we were movie bingeing yesterday.

Santa Riding a Camel

In July 2003, my sweetie and I packed up practically all our belongings and proceeded to live out of suitcases for the next six months. Lots of fun for so many reasons.

Here we were in Egypt and it was much colder than we were expecting, setting aside the fact that we'd expected our belongings to arrive earlier. So besides not having the proper attire or blankets, the biggest problem for me was not having any of my Christmas stuff. You know me, I LOVE decorating for the holidays, especially when they're spent far from home. Makes me feel settled. Like where I am IS home.

Luckily I discovered that some of the enterprising Tentmaker Appliquers here have made all sorts of creative things for the expat/tourist market. I went on a bit of a buying binge. First off is a wallhanging with Santa riding a camel:

Isn't this great? Notice the itty bitty pyramids there on the bottom right. This really appeals to me cuz I try to collect Santa travelling in unusual ways. (Still trying for that sleigh drawn by kangaroos, but I'm definitely on the wrong continent for that.) I love Santa's face - very simple and folk-arty.

Muhammad was sweet and made up stockings really quickly for my sweetie and I.
That's my name in arabic at the bottom (so they tell me). I love the scale of this one better than the one above - all crowded in and more details in the sky. And of course the sky is BLUE not neutral. Just so you can get a really good look at it:


By the way, these stockings are HUGE.