Holiday Fair

Tomorrow, Dec 1, is the first of 2 holiday fairs put on by the Southern Highland Craft Guild.  Both fairs are one day only from 10 to 4.  They are held at the Folk Art Center on the Blue Ridge Parkway in Asheville, NC in the auditorium.  This is a very popular fair as members of the Southern Highland Guild are encouraged to sell seconds, overstocks etc at very low prices.  There are bargains on beautiful hand crafted pieces everywhere you look. I am selling my scarves as they are a nice gift item and seem to be popular.  I've been working diligently to get together a large inventory. I started with white silk scarf blanks in mostly crepe de Chine.  I secured them tightly in pantyhose to give a mottled effect to the coloring.  

 I have no favorites; each one that comes out is a surprise and fun to see.

 I've used many silks over the years and am slowly weaning out the silk I don't like.  China silk which is a popular silk for scarves is my least favorite as the color is not as rich.  In the pair below, the one on the left is a crepe de Chine and on the right is a China.  Both were dyed in the same dye bath but you can see a difference in the way the silks take the color.

 I have many people who love this color so I'll have lots of these on hand.

 The next two are among my favorites because of the color splitting which happens with certain colors. Only one color dye was used here and the color splits into 2 colors.

 This scarf had some color splitting but also some overdyeing as I wanted it to be more lively.

 Janice Maddox and I are sharing a booth and I think it looks quite colorful. Janice has some beautiful hand crafted pillows, small items and quilts for sale. The Christmas quilt, hanging up can be used as an advent calendar as the triangles on the first border are not sewn down; they are pockets for holding small treasures.

 When I left, many booths were not completely done but this should wet your appetite.

Lots of wonderful pottery.

and more...

 Some beautiful tiles and bowls...

There is also clothing, jewelry and lots of other wonderful items.  Please stop by and say hi and SHOP, there are some great deals.  If you can't make tomorrow, there is another fair next Saturday, same place and time with different artists.  It's a great time for all.

Gobble, Gobble

  Happy Thanksgiving - I wish you all a wonderful day with family and friends, good food, lots of laughter and all the blessings that go with this magical season.  I'll be at my daughters with my new granddaughter. I've already told my daughter to be prepared. ....when we get to her house, we're heading straight for the baby and Heaven help anything that's in our path. (-:

    I'm bringing apple pie and also making cream puffs. 

 I'm also bringing a new book. My daughter, being a third grade teacher loves children's books; so do I. Salina Yoon is one of my favorite authors for very young children's books.  Such great pictures, lots of color and cute stories.  This one - Five Silly Turkeys has an added plus of fabric feathers.

 Yes FABRIC! I'm determined that my granddaughter will develop a love for fabric and how cute is this book!

Have a wonderful Holiday!

Sorority Reunion

    It's been close to 3 weeks since I returned home from a second trip to New York, this last time for my sorority reunion.  My sorority - Alpha Sigma Beta, used to be Alpha Sigma Alpha which is a national sorority.  In the 50's, New York ruled that there were to be no national fraternities throughout the university system, and we became AEB.

    A few years back, one of the gals from the class of 61, decided to try and find as many sisters as she could to form a directory. One thing led to another and then a committee and after 2 years of hard work and fun, Joan was able to track down over 700 sisters over the course of 40+ years.  This led to another thought - to have a reunion and invite everyone.  The reunion was scheduled for the same time as Homecoming weekend. After such a long time, she expected max to be @ 50. To her surprise, 125 sisters came in from all over the US - all ages - all classes. Many of us didn't know each other but had the common link of sisterhood.  We took over the Hampton Inn - all 4 floors who joined in our excitement and joy as though they were part of our group.

We were greeted with signs and flowers in the Alpha Sig mug and I still have my mug (filled with pencils).

Lots of activities on campus but we were excited to go back to our dorms.

My first room in dormitory life.

I was a resident advisor (RA) during my sophomore and junior year so I spent 3 years in this dorm. As an RA, you had to keep your room spotless and open at all times; this was my room now occupied by a guy.  Yup, the dorms are co-ed.  Things have changed! But actually, he's quite neat and so nice to let us in.

This was my best buddy (on right) in freshman year; we lived across the hall from each other.  It was great to see Helene after so many years.

Friday night was the cocktail party. Seven from my class came in; we didn't want to leave each other's side for a moment, so much to catch up on.

Next day, we toured town, mainly to see our old sorority house.

That night was a wonderful dinner. We were all to wear red which was the sorority's colors. Some even had glitz.

It was a "sea of red" wherever you looked....

The tables were beautiful; this was my class below.

Afterwards, it was back to the Hampton Inn. We were aware of the policy of No wine in the lobby, but they shut their eyes and let us party-on, They were great!

The bricks around campus were beautiful.

We were to leave on Monday (hubby and I) but left on Sunday morning. The reunion was over by then but we also needed to be one step ahead of Hurricane Sandy which we barely were.

It was a weekend that will stay with me forever. There is nothing like reconnecting with old friends and going back in time if only for a weekend.

PTA Fun

We had our PTA meeting last week at Gen's house, always fun and full of ideas. There's lots of talking and laughing amongst us, hard to hear it all. On the ride home, we usually get filled in on what we missed.  Mary B created her very colorful sneakers with markers - Clever!

 Linda Cantrell has been working on her version of memorable moments in history. They're all accurate; Linda did her research, only one part which is questionable. Every event features a Boston Terrier in it hmmmmmmm. Now Linda owns 5 of these cute little doggies and maybe they convinced her they needed to be part of the story. Below is the first Model T and Amelia Earhart with her dog.

 The Boston marathon and the story of the first woman to ever run in it; notice the dog ahead of her.

 And Woodstock, one of my favorites.

 Done in album form, you can see every block on Linda's Facebook page. Just when I think she can't possibly come up with another fabulous idea, she does!

 Mary S. showed us her beautiful beaded felt piece.  Mary created all the felt herself as well as dyeing it before starting in on the beading.

 And this next piece using deconstructive screenprinted fabric which is very hard to work with.  Mary did a wonderful job putting her twist on it. The leaves are beaded and really lovely up close.

 Kate W is on a mission to finish all her UFOs and she's made quite a dent in her stack.  I love this piece below; she draw a design on fabric and filled it in with crayons, thought that was interesting and very effective with the shading.

A fun day.

Long Arm Quilting

Fiber Junkies met this week at the home of Kate Weston and welcomed new member Gen Grundy. Our meeting was to learn some of the basics and explore the possibilities of this wonderful machine.  Kate has the full size machine. I've played with them a little bit at quilt shows but we had lots of time to experiment at Kate's house. Gen is trying her hand at quilting on a baby quilt I'm making for my grand-daughter.

 Kate, who is so knowledgeable and a great teacher showed us how to line up and straighten the quilt.  She does this constantly throughout the process so the quilt is nice and straight when it comes off the machine.

 Here is Val working on my piece - right now it's straight line quilting in the ditch.  I'll go back and do free motion work inside each block.

 I thought this was really interesting.  Kate uses huge and very strong magnets that she can put on fabric to hold it to the machine (black strip in back).  This can eliminate the process of pinning the edge of the fabric to the fabric strip on the machine.  I'm not sure when this is used, but in this case, we wanted to set up a piece of fabric temporarily to practice on before quilting on the real thing.

 And here's Val working on her beautiful piece, it's wonderful to see in person.

 Here is the quilt we were playing on - not done yet.  I have to say using the long arm was so much fun. I love free motion quilting and doing it this way where you move the machine head instead of the fabric was really appealing and easier for me. Maybe it's because I have a tremor in my right hand and have better leverage holding onto the handles of the machine.

It was wonderful fun, thanks Kate for a great day!

When is a library not a library?

There hasn't been too many fiber related things going on around here with all my reunions and trips. 

I've had 2 reunions in New York 2 weeks apart. It was a whirlwind of fun and emotion.  My first reunion was high school.  Hubby stayed behind while I flew up to La Guardia, rented a car and proceeded to drive out to Long Island on a friday afternoon during rush hour!  What was I thinking? It was one scary trip. I forgot that New Yorkers don't let you switch lanes and they like to honk their horn a lot....sooooo, I wasn't able to go exactly the way I wanted. My GPS kept "recalculating" and at one point, I really wanted to throw it out the window at one of the honkers. Okay, I've vented and it was a wonderful weekend despite the trip on friday.  One of the things we did was to walk through our old town of Farmingdale, NY.  It was beautiful and not one building the same, well except for the bank and the library.  They are the cornerstones of the town, standing on each corner, almost identical and the architecture amazing. The bank had been turned into law offices and the library

 well - a cafe, now called the Library Cafe.  They kept a lot of the original woodwork which I love.

 They also kept the upstairs balcony area which was always featured that way - only filled with books. It still has the same old rickety stairs going up to the top.

 They did add a carousel horse, another thing I love.

 And a view from the balcony area where we ate.  It thrills me to see old towns that keep their original buildings intact - especially ones as beautiful as here. A bit of refurbishing can add so much charm and sometimes make it even better. More important, we can revisit our past and relive some of the happy memories that took place there.

 Reunions are wonderful; they give you permission to be a kid again and reunite with wonderful friends.  To my left, my best bud Val from 5th grade and on the right my best bud Audrey from 2nd grade.  We were also in Brownies together - what a great night!