and so it goes...

Have you ever felt like your muse has chronic PMS?

Maybe if we all pooled our money we could get her a gigantic bottle of Pamprin and then she would leave us the hell alone when we are in our studios.

Yesterday she was lovin' me. The ideas were falling out of the air like Leann's overripe moldy cherries. I was feeling pretty good about myself, here's what I managed to put together:

The paw print mini art quilt is my block for Breaking Traditions. I'm doing mine about Bernie Berlin's no-kill rescue, A Place to Bark. I wasn't quite sure how I wanted to do the block because I'm not a cutesy kind of gal (quit smirking, some people might not know that yet) so I wanted to do something with a homey comforting feeling. Its all wool fabric so it has that effect. And it kind of keeps with the the rescue, its animal related - even though its sheep and not dog but they are all on the same side so its good.

After the paw print piece, I was really in tune with the botany theme, which is good because I want to make a bunch of pieces for the exhibit coming up that the fiber art group I belong to is putting on later this year. The little blocks with the ginkgo on it are the 6"x6" charity blocks I mentioned in my last post. These are linocut prints that I carved and printed on fabric.

I obviously still need to stitch the snot out of these but they are started and that's 80% of the battle for me.

I also got another piece put together with another linocut I carved and printed on fabric. I feel all gushy and maternal about this one since I printed the bird in the tree image and flour resist printed the background fabric.

*sigh* A few stitches and my baby will be all grown up.


And last but not least, here is something I'm way happy with. I'm calling it Nature's Couture.

Not stitched but wicked fun to make. (Apparently my camera is also hormonal. I have no idea why this photo came out so crappy but I'm not asking anymore.) I like this one so much that I'm currently trying to find three more dress forms so I can do the other three seasons. (This one is summer.) So far I've found one resource and they are telling me it will take 3-4 weeks to get them. I'm hoping to do better, the internet is a big place, someone else has to carry them.

But wait, my friends, it didn't stop there. I did an image search in the evening yesterday for more plant junk, this time on a more abstract wavelength. I found some extremely cool pictures, got permission to use them, printed out what I wanted, picked out backgrounds annnnnnnnnnnd......that's where I should have begun randomly flinging Pamprin around the studio.

The muse got cranky and I've hit a slight block. I plan to poke around on the internet some more tonight and see if I can outsmart the wench. I've got ten small pieces sitting on the studio floor and the damn things will be to a stitching stage by the time I'm done with vacation.

The thing I'm struggling with on these is that they are demanding to be more simplistic in nature. I start to twitch if my art quilts aren't weighted down with twenty pounds of embellishments and require a crane to be transported from venue to venue.

These new pieces aren't having it. So I have to figure out how to let my Virgo obsessiveness relax a bit.

It hurts.

I'm hoping to have a brilliant flash of genius tonight and fly into the studio, drop kick my cranky muse and put together some more work. Wish me luck, I think she knows karate.