Art Quilts at Play

Today I received my copy of Art Quilts at Play by Jane Davila and Elin Waterston. I am honored to be a contributing artist to this book with a collaborative found object project and a fiber art postcard. Art Quilts at Play is wonderful! Loaded with many ideas, techniques and inspiring quilts.

Baby It's Cold Outside!

Here is Rose wearing her Winter finest. When I asked my son if her ensemble went together he said "Why are you worrying about it now. It never seems to bother you when you wear it." It is part of my going to feed the goats chore outfit :) Come to think of it I feel a bit jowly wearing the hat too! It has been so cold here the past couple of days. 11 degrees below zero when I woke up this morning and it is supposed to get colder yet tonight.

Christmas Present

For Christmas my art friend Jill Shulse made a family portrait of me with my dogs Rufus, Valentine and Ziggy. She added our heads to a vintage picture and enhanced it ala' Jill. I am so lucky to have such a talented and good friend. (That gives presents :) This will be the first piece of art to add to our bedroom. Check out Jill's link to see more family portraits.

Hardwood Flooring Project

Wednesday night Mark & I tore out the carpeting in our bedroom. When we built our house we bought the cheapest grade carpeting. Kids were young, plus we always have always had dogs. Our 5 year carpeting was now 14 years old. Time for a change. Thursday my sons Aren, Casey and I started on the flooring. My job was to lay out the boards and cut the end ones to length. I love construction work. I even worked for a construction company for a couple of years doing clean up of the sites. Our whole upstairs has hardwood maple flooring that we removed from a school that was about to be demolished. I paid $50 for the lot at the auction. The boys are experts at hardwood flooring as they were only 8 & 9 when they helped to pull nails out. That year in 4th grade Casey won the lumberjack contest at school for pounding nails into a board. All the joints had to be cleaned before it could be laid down. They were filled with varnish and lots of glitter! The original finish is still on the floor, not pristine, but full of character. I wasn't as ambitious this time and bought flooring that was already prefinished. A pneumatic floor nailer was another luxury this time.

Thursday night Mark and Casey had 1/3 of the flooring done and on Friday we finished it.


Sunday we finished putting the trim around the room. How exciting, I like the new room look without furniture and stuff. Sunday night we put in the main furniture. I plan on taking my time decorating to enjoy the process.

Auction Winnings

Sunday I went to an auction. I needed to get out of the house. Too much cold and snow, very little sunshine here. It has been awhile since I attended one. I just love the thrill of it all. Too many auctions results in too much stuff though. It was a relatively safe one for me to attend because there was only clocks and some clock parts. I was good at this one. I only bid on items that I had planned on with the exception of one mantle clock. Box lots of dismantled clock parts - perfect for me as I don't like to wreck antiques even for arts sake. I stayed the whole day waiting until my boxes went up for bid. I spent some of the time taking pictures of a wonderful variety of old clocks - about 100 pictures. I'm hoping to use the clock pictures for collage images. Free entertainment!

I hope to make a lot of assemblage pieces with my loot.