Odds and Ends

I did some more snow dyeing -- tried some grape and turquoise along with the scarlet and lemon and golden yellow. We'll see how this turns out.

It has been brutally cold this week -- below zero overnight and barely making it into the teens during the day. I thought that the snow would be easy to dig up after I got through the top crust, but it's crusty all the way down -- or at least for the first couple of feet.

The snow shovel couldn't do it, so I had to find a small garden shovel and use that to hack at the snow. That warm spell ( it was a balmy 36 or 37 degrees f -- that's like 1 or 2 C) must have melted the snow all the way through, because it was like chopping solid ice. It broke up nicely after I worked at it for a while though. Yes, that's a large bone next to the tray o' fabric. It's stuck there. My neighbor's dog comes over and steals it and his people bring it back.
After all that stabbing and whacking at the snow, I was almost too tired to mix up the dyes and pour them over the frozen snow/fabric piles. Almost.

"Any idiot can face a crisis -- it's this day-to-day living that wears you out."

-Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)

After all that, I was almost a bad dog mama and almost didn't take her out for her walk --- almost...

During the Great Studio Cleanup that occurred over the last two weeks, many treasures were unearthed -- including the floor. Much forgotten fabric (actually, it wasn't forgotten, just MIA) was discovered and is now neatly folded and organized on shelves. All the goodies that make my stuff unique -- paints, powders, stamps, inks, pencils, and other cool ephemera -- are stored in labeled, covered bins and easily accessible for those midnight can't-sleep-art-projects.

Last year, for Mother's day, my kids gave me a pair of these quilting gloves. I hadn't tried them, and they wound up buried under a bunch of stuff in the months following that exalted day. My attitude toward such aids has always been a bit skeptical -- just grab a hunk of that quilt and make it move -- we don't need no stinking gloves -- but I tried them out on the challenge quilt and WOWEE ZOWEE! They WORK! Not as well as advertised, I couldn't thread any needles and scissors (and - horrors - I assume, rotary cutters) were admittedly clumsy, but they grabbed that little quilt and moved it. Very nicely. I have some much bigger projects coming up, so we'll see if they work as well with the old-fashion safety-pin basted large quilts.

So if you have a bunch of, say 35, odds and ends on the table and 34 fall off -- what are you left with? An odd? Or an end?