fiberhart

Happy New Year!

Here's hoping it's a more positive year than 2008 was.

I was home alone this morning, and managed to get all the Christmas decorations taken down and packed. I also went through our Christmas storage boxes, threw out a bunch of stuff, and organized what I kept. So all that was left for DJ to do when he got home was put the bins away in the garage. I even dragged that very tall tree outside!

I also went through my closet and picked out a bunch of clothes I haven't worn in a long time and freecycled them. Shannon decided to follow suit- I was surprised at how quickly both sets of clothes were spoken for. Most of them don't fit me anymore, so why did I hang on so long? It felt pretty good to free up space in the closet.

And, at the risk of boring everyone with yet another picture of Blue Tsunami, I finished it on 31 December. Took my photos, and then used my new copy of Gloria Hansen's Digital Essentials to walk me through extracting it from the background and sharpening the image. Hopefully that means this picture of it looks better than any of the previous posts! I think you can click on it to enlarge, that's the only way you can see the hand stitching I added. It's a subtle design element, but I like the bits of texture and line it adds.



I'm wondering how I'm going to do the sleeve so it hangs perpendicular to the floor. I've never made a quilt with such wonky sides before!

I'd highly recommend Gloria's book, it is written specifically for quilters and the kinds of pictures we take of our work. Well worth the money. Now I'm saving up for a digital SLR, I've finally decided I'm outgrowing the point and shoots, even though my relatively old Canon lets me dink with a lot of settings if I choose.

Not much else. DJ is off to see if he can get help with figuring out why our dishwasher is on the fritz. I'm just hoping it isn't going to be one of those cases where fixing it is more expensive than just buying a new one. I hate how manufacturers seem to be making high ticket items to self destruct after only a very few years of use.

Now I'm back to Autumn Mountains, trying to figure out if I need stabilizer under the whole piece or if I can get away with just under the tree. Right now, I'm inclined to to try the latter. I was less than thrilled at how the stabilizer was to work with.