Life's a beach...

So here's my latest Paintstiks project in its 15" x 15" entirety. Since it was inspired by beach glass, I thought it was fitting to bring it back to where the idea began.

I drove back to South Haven this weekend to assess the damage from last week's freaky storm. Apparently the combination of extremely low pressure, rain and high winds created the equivalent of a Category 3 hurricane -- weather rarely (if ever) seen here in the Midwest -- and I imagined the worst as I watched The Weather Channel reports of the storm screaming across Lake Michigan. But outside of a couple loose shingles and finding somebody else's screen door in the driveway, the little cottage stood its ground as it has no doubt done for the past 98 years. There are signs that the waves, which must have been monstrous, came almost 100 yards up the beach; some of the snow fences have been leveled by the sheer volume of sand blown against them, and there's flotsam everywhere. It must have been a doozy, but you'd never know it now -- the past few days have been the calmest and quietest that I can remember.

I drank my coffee on the deck this morning, in my jammies, slippers and a fleece-lined jacket. Thirty-six degrees, perfectly clear skies, and not a even a wisp of wind -- no cars, no people, no noise at all. It's the total opposite of my neighborhood in Chicago with the El roaring by, school buses, kids, sirens and car alarms -- I sometimes wonder why I live there.

Maybe it's just so I appreciate here more?

A Friday WIP...

I needed a break from my Three Sisters project, so I took another stab at making my own fabric with Paintstiks. The more I work with them, the more I like them!

This one's a little cleaner than the last one, with a much calmer color palette. I like the crisper lines better than the jagged ones -- they're definitely easier to follow.

In retrospect, I should have been more adventurous with the quilting, but that just means I have to do more of them, right?

Hoping to cut all those pesky threads and bind it today to get it off the holiday gift list...then it's back to all that pink, green and yellow stuff!

So much for the end of summer...

The weather at the beach this Labor Day weekend, in a word, blew -- both literally and figuratively. Forty-mile an hour winds and acres of stinging sand didn't exactly provide a holiday atmosphere I had hoped for this end to summer -- unless the holiday we were going for was Christmas.

Because I envisioned spending my days lazing on a sun-soaked deck with a book and a beer or barbequeing with the neighbors, I didn't anticipate much sewing time and didn't haul my machine along like I usually do. We got in a few feasts ($5 lobster tail special at the local market! Woo-woo!), but there was a lot of down time as the temperatures started to dip with inverse proportion to the gale outside.

While the frontloaders engaged in a neverending dance of plowing the street clear and dumping the mountains of sand back where it came from, I played inside with my Paintstiks.

Another sort-of-successful experiment!

I tore painter's tape to keep the fabric underneath solid and obtain a stained glass look; the edges are jagged but clean. I used texture plates under some of the colors but kept them tone-on-tone. For a first try, I'm liking it. I'll do a couple things differently next time, but I'm looking forward to getting this thoroughly dried (it needs 72 hours before I can heat set, and it has a few to go) and see what I can do with it quilting-wise.

Any suggestions?