I spent a long weekend working on my red and gold project. I really enjoyed myself and stitched till my fingers hurt. I’m just not so sure I like what I’ve done. I’d remove the beads, but it’d leave holes.
I plan on making it into a book jacket, so we’ll see. I think I’ll put it up for a week or so and have a look at it again,then.
Yeah, I know, that’s Brad’s job, but I’m talking about Angelina fibers. I bought a few packs of it at the needlearts extravaganza in Statesville. I experimented with embossing the fibers with a rubber stamp and iron:
This snowflake stamp wasn’t “cut” deep enough to work well, so I chose what I hoped would be a better one:
I’ll post a photo of my winnings when they arrive! I’m very excited!
I personally am having a ball, sitting home, stitching and watching the ACC tournament. Whew, Carolina had me worried!
On a more serious note, the 8.9 earthquake in Japan and it’s consequences have me worried, too. One of the moderators for the Crazy Quilter’s International Group lives in Sendai in Northern Japan. She has yet to be heard from, but prayerfully, her power, phone and internet service are all out. The military is fine so the couple of former students I have stationed there should be okay. Another couple are working and going to school in Hawaii. They both have good science sense. One of them is a geologist. I think they’ll be fine, too.
This beauty is blooming outside the house where I babysit. I wonder how these blossoms would look printed on fabric and embellished? Or maybe appliqued on a green blender background?
Yellow beads or French knots? Martha Stewart recently aired instructions on making a “burned silk flower.” Hmmmmn? Coral silk? Gold or yellow Angelina film for the stamens?
Check out this wired and beaded dragonfly: It’s part of an entry by Katherine Delicato in Evening Star Design’s “Enchanted 2010 Challenge and Contest.”
This parrot for example:
I could use the butterflies from this one:
and of course, the hearts from this one:
and this one for the alphabet:
My favorite food in this world has got to be cake, especially a good birthday cake, iced with thick, swirly buttercream and decorated with fancy, frothy dangerously colored fru-fru. And don’t talk to me about, “Oh, thank goodness, it wasn’t too sweet.” I want that full of confectioner’s sugar, feel-it-rot-your -teeth-sweet frosting. Yum!
I’d like to learn to decorate cakes, too, so much so that a couple of years back, I set out to collect all the Wilton Yearbooks from as far back as they were published. Of course, it starves me to death to look at them, and I usually head out for the Lowe’s Foods Bakery/Deli, the one over at Winkler Mill Road that has the lady that does beautiful work and piles that icing high, high, high! I’d buy one of those little “cakes for four” and eat a good 7/8ths of it myself.
I had to stop that because together with watching every cake special on the food network, I put on a great deal of weight. I resorted to keeping a container of Betty Crocker Frosting in the fridge and just grabbing a couple of spoonfuls during a cake wars commercial.
Lucky for me, I’m just not good at cake decorating. I get nervous, and my hands get all warm and sweaty and it melts the frosting and makes it too runny. I don’t like spooning the icing into those bags either. I wind up with multi-colored sleeves. Otherwise, I’d be broader than I am tall, and probably suffer from adult onset type 2 diabetes.
I do, however, appreciate a cake that looks and tastes good:
My daughter ordered this one from Elizabethan Delights (Charlotte, NC.)
She very wisely requested a small “smash cake” for PJ. This is what he did to it:
