Valentines stuffed: Hearts and crafts for a very cold day

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      When I go to New York City, I love to drop by Purl Soho and The City Quilter to collect ideas and good fabrics. The other day I Googled something like stuffed fabric Valentines, checked Images and may have added blog to the search words. I found a variety of hearts and thought I would start off with what looked like the simplest. Nothing is simple, I always find out! The Purl Bee site offered my first effort and Molly's instructions are super:  http://www.purlbee.com/valentine-heart-pins/  Thrill yourself with other ideas at this site.

       As an elementary school student I was permanently impressed by the idea of assembly lines. And as you can tell by my photos, I cut out lots of hearts to sew and opened DMC floss to cut both ends of the opened loops to create 18" threads for my embroidery needle making sure the eye was big enough for the thread and the point sharp enough to penetrate the felt.  I used pinking shears, a sturdy needle threader and stuffing. I found I could make these hearts in 10 minutes, stuffed, with safety pin attached from the one 18"thread. There will be enough string left for some x0x0's and I (heart) U. Wish I still had an elementary school student who would enjoy passing them out to classmates. I watched old movies while I stitched this coldest day in years in Boston. Abby taught me it is also good to listen to Craftypod.com, craft podcasts, while I work.

    The last big snow day I cooked ebelskivers, filled with dollops of applesauce, but I was more restrained today. The are deliciously puffed and stuffed as well!

Route 64: a birthday card journal quilt

   Sometimes I think I spend all my time celebrating. Tonight we are taking out my painter friend Kathy for her birthday and her husband for his retirement. I was tired of my usual Comic card and decided to make a journal quilt about the 64th birthday. This year Kathy is all over the place...at home in Sharon, at her studio in North Adams, up in Montreal at one of her grands. The bonus is seeing lots of leaves while she celebrates and hangs several art shows.I got her Defining Moments in Art and Rembrandt: See and Do Children's Book for her grands. Kathy loves Rembrandt and painting to opera music.

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    The birthday girl used to paint lots of fish and trees but the paintings at her website this year are more abstract or more about the brushstrokes and the paint. I still think of those fish, and I thought it serendipitous that I would go to Catch of the Day at Abby's blog to see the new felt fish she posted...and that I would have an e-mail from Alice about the paella pans at TJMaxx which would be perfect to gift the retiring professor husband, a good cook and lover of seafood. He will have more time to create romantic meals. Evidently, according to Alice, the  paella pan achieves the crust on the bottom that is supposedly one of the most delicious parts of paella. 

    The fabric of Route 64 is perfect for postcards for our recently departed guests from Texas who drove up to see the changing leaves. Must make those next.

Homemade craft kit as a gift

    Trilla had a big birthday this year and her daughter flew her home to hear Joan Baez (who at one point lived where I live now). Of course I could not compete with such cleverness, but knowing Trilla is a book lover, I took Abby's advice from her  June 28, Weave a Rainbow blog to make a gift kit from a pleasurable craft. I had loved making Neal's bookmark and happily found a design attributed to Virginia Woolf or Vanessa Bell (see the beautiful Bloomsbury Needlepoint: From the Tapestries at Charleston Farmhouse by Melinda Coss), I mailed Trilla a Comic Life birthday card with the idea, the canvas, needle and threads to sew. What I enjoyed about the Bloomsbury pieces, was that the people didn't fanatically stitch everything perfectly exactly balanced, but perhaps made up the designs as they went. Coss thought this might be a design for a pen holder or an eyeglass case. But I am into bookmarks and Trilla is a supreme reader, writer and clever friend. Comic Life is an inexpensive software I use all the time. (click on links to read more and photo to enlarge)