Last year Spoonflower.com had a contest to design a fabric based on a recipe. I chose to do a design based on one of my grandmother’s recipes, and I wrote about it in this earlier post. My grandmother, who we called “Gockoo”, did lots of cooking and baking, and kept a handwritten journal of all her favorite recipes.
The fabric was designed to be a repeating design, but I thought it would also be fun to make a version that I could turn into a small quilt. Continue reading
Another week, another Spoonflower fabric design contest. The theme for this contest is Australian Animals. So many great options it was hard to pick — kangaroos, wombats, koala bears, emu, platypus, Tasmanian devils… I googled Australian art and was inspired by the Aboriginal dot paintings. I thought I’d try a modern take on the dot paintings using kangaroos and geckos.
I’ll go through the technique I used in Adobe Illustrator to create the multicolored animals. 
I started by drawing outlines of a gecko and a kangaroo. I wanted to keep the outlines pretty simple since there would be a lot of detail inside each animal.
Daffodils mean the arrival of Spring, but they also always remind me of my father. Every year he would divide and replant the daffodils forming the border of our yard and the adjacent woods. Over time there were literally thousands of daffodils which would welcome us each Spring
We’ve had crazy weather in northern Illinois this winter–warm and no snow–and I’m almost surprised the daffodils aren’t already blooming. I took this photo this weekend (mid-January). These flowers (I don’t remember what they’re called) are usually one of the early bloomers in Spring. I’ve noticed that they’ve been trying to bloom since mid-December (which can’t be a good thing). After a particularly warm, wet few days, the weather turned back to normal for January and the poor flowers are coated in ice.
I just completed another donation quilt for the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative (which has raised over $883,000 for Alzheimer’s research and awareness).
Like many of my recent small quilts, this one started with a photograph. I took this photo of a daylily in my yard after a rain, so the petals were still damp.
I’ve completed my latest quilt Urban Sunset. In this earlier post I talked about creating the quilt top, and all that was left was adding the quilting.
Here’s the completed top.
Color On Cloth 