I promised a giveaway and a giveaway I will deliver. This blog is one year old this week and what an intense year it has been! My husband has two teenagers who have lived with us every other week since we got married five years ago. This time last year their mom told us that she had taken a job in Florida. It took almost a year for her to move, the kids are now living with us full time, and it has not been an easy transition for anyone. We’ve spent the last two weeks dealing with some pretty serious crises behavior that I think has settled down for now, but has left everyone wiped out.

Why am I telling you this on my “birthday”? I think because part of what I like about the online sewing community is that I don’t have to tell you what is going on in my family–we can interact around ideas and projects and give feedback and I can escape into a world that doesn’t have anything to do with hurt kids in crises that I’m not able to fix. But I also struggle with feeling like there is something untrue about presenting myself in such a limited way and sometimes the family stuff breaks through. So this is where I am today: tired, humble, grateful for family and friends who have been bringing us meals and grateful for you all who inspire me and encourage me to take time for myself to make something beautiful.

Here is what I want to give you on my birthday. I have a set of five letterpress cards that I made as holiday gifts this year (printing is by far my favorite new skill this year) and a stack of fabric that is ready to move on from my stash and hopefully will find a happy home in your stash. There is some Amy Butler, Michael Miller, Michael Kauffman, Jay McCarroll, a random Japanese print and a couple unidentifiables, held together with a lovely piece of trim that I won on Sew Mama Sew’s giveaway day. 

Here’s how to win:

Leave me a comment telling me one of the following things. I’ll pick a winner Friday, Feb 24 after 5pm CST.

• something real about yourself (define “real” however you choose)
• a photography tip
• something you are grateful for

I do like the hand stitching details–the little “drink me” note that is tied to the bottle and the “eat me” frosting on the cake. Smoochee asked for Alice in Wonderland inspired blocks and I chose “eat me, drink me” because I knew I could manage it. Next month is my month and my theme is vintage school/office and I’m super excited to see what people make. Here is my pinterest board for the bee. Maybe while everyone else is working on blocks for my month, I should try making a more sophisticated block.

We made paper from recycled cotton pulp. You can see the big vats of water and pulp that we used to pull our heart shape pieces of paper. Once a bunch of pieces of paper are pulled and stacked between layers of felt, they go into a press that squeezes all of the water out of them (I saw it go up to 2,000 pounds of pressure), and then into a drying box. The finished paper is so soft and lovely, I just want to keep fondling my finished valentines. I would like to figure out a way to hang one of them in a way that shows off the edges.

In a week, I will be working with the artists at the press to do a four day class for my high school students. We will make our paper on Tuesday, set our type on Wednesday, and then hopefully print a folio of their writing on Thursday and Friday.

I wish I had taken the photos in this post. They are all taken by Eric Bensen, one of the two artist/researchers behind Fresh Press. The line on my valentine is from this e.e. cummings poem. It’s one of my favorites.

The truth, for me, is that life happens sometimes in a way that doesn’t leave much space for creativity. Or the space is so small, timid and rare, I don’t want to point it out to the world, lest it run away. I’m in one of those places now–when work and life and family seem to be taking up all the available oxygen in the room. I have faith that this too shall pass and that I’ll be back soon with creativity to spare.

Until then, I hope you are well and furiously making lots of wonderful things.

 I cut out fabric pieces for two stars, and have basted all of them to their paper patterns, but haven’t gotten far with the whip stitching together. I don’t have a specific project in mind or a deadline on these so they are only being worked on when they call my name.

I’ve also chosen my theme for the Hoop Up! Stitch & Send swap and am starting on my inspiration piece for that. My theme will be images of reading drawn from vintage children’s illustrations.  I found a treasure trove of images in this set on flickr. I received a lap stand for Christmas that I’m testing out with this project. So far it has been very nice to work with sitting at a table, I haven’t tested it in my lap yet though.

I’ve started a honey cowl with some lovely 50/50 merino/silk yarn that I’ve had on hand for a couple of years. It is a very easy project to work on while chatting with others or chaperoning a high school dance (as I did last night). I also finished this feather and fan scarf, which had been done on my needles for months and only needed to be cast off and blocked.

It’s been cold and grey and very busy at work recently and I’m enjoying working on projects by hand without any deadlines. There are days when I feel like I should be producing more, although for what or whom, I have no idea.  The truth is that so much of my mental energy is being used at work right now that I don’t have a lot of space left for my own creative projects. I’m trying to accept that for now and know that these things are cyclical. In the mean time I’m knitting and stitching when I can and reading a lot more, burrowed into my down comforter with the space heater on.

How are you spending the dark part of the year?

We found ourselves with unexpected extra days of vacation this winter break and decided it was time to tackle the stairs. We had discussed building entirely new stairs, new risers, or false fronts for the risers, but finally settled on filling in the nicks in the original risers with wood putty and covering them with paintable wall paper from Lowe’s.  It took some concentration to cut the wallpaper to the right size (measure twice, cut once and all), but we managed that task and made a decision about color the first night.

wall paper prepped stairs

Once the stairs were prepped and we had decided on a robin’s egg blue for the background, we went to the amazing Community Fab Lab at the University of Illinois (trust me, the fab lab is way better than their website) where a former student of mine happened to be working and helped us print out the numbers 1-7 in both red and white vinyl and in two different fonts (total cost, $2). The next morning we gave the stairs two coats of paint and, when it was dry, moved on to the numbers.

finding mid-point of numbers

We were nervous about how to position the numbers so that they would look like they lined up (I was a fan of these stairs, but my spouse is a little more aligned than that). We decided on a distance from the wall (8″) and a distance from the stair below (3″) where we wanted the middle of each number to hit. I then marked the midpoint of each number and we commenced with a complicated measure, attach post-it note triangle on stair, try to hit post-it note with the number game. As you will see later, we ended up removing these original numbers and were much more relaxed applying them the second time.

late night fiddly number application

We lived with the blue stairs with red numbers for a couple days, but weren’t completely happy with them. They didn’t feel finished and it took us a few days to figure out what they needed.

blue and red somehow didn’t seem complete

About this time my spouse, Jay, started telling people we were inspired by Steve Zissou, which made me think we should add the yellow we had bought for the stringers (the side wall that is cut to fit the stairs) to the main stairs so we took off the red numbers, masked  a six inch rectangle on each stair, and painted it yellow.

masking for yellow paint

Once we had our yellow stripe, the only step left was to reapply the red vinyl numbers (which were surprisingly resilient). This time we eye-balled the application–neither of us have much experience with vinyl decals and transfer paper and when we first put the numbers on we wanted everything to be absolutely perfect before we pushed them down. This time, we knew that they could be removed and reapplied without too much effort, so we tacked a couple points on each number, stepped back to evaluate, tweaked their position a few times, and then pressed them into place.

finished stairs

The vinyl seems like it will stand up like a champ and the wallpaper seems a pretty safe bet as well for durability. I’m most concerned about the paint getting scuffed and wonder if it is worth a coat of polyurethane to protect our work.

basement stairs

While we were at it, we put the white numbers on the basement stairs. We both like how clean the white and blue look together so we didn’t add an additional stripe to these ones.

I just tallied up the books I read on goodreads and realized I’ve read 65 books in 2011. Then I clicked over to flickr to make this mosaic of what I made in 2011 and realized that the maximum allowed 36 photos wouldn’t cover everything I’ve made this past year. I’ve written 85 blog posts since February of 2011–when this blog was unleashed upon the world–and all of this on top of working my full-time job, feeding a family of four, volunteering, visiting family, and maintaining friendships. Somewhere along the line I got it into my head that I have a tendency to be lazy, but when I look at the numbers, it’s hard to see where I got that idea.

Some trends I notice about the things I made last year:

• I’m moving more and more towards hand work–embroidery on projects gave way to English paper piecing which gave way to hand quilting.
• I have a preference for the immediate gratification of small projects versus big quilts.
• I’m gaining a better sense of what my own style and taste are, rather than trying to make what I am seeing everyone else make in the colors and fabrics they are also using.

What I think you’ll see from me in 2012:

• Lots more letterpress. I just signed up for a Valentine’s Day card making class in the end of January and my spouse and I were talking about the next print he wants to make.
• More hand stitching. This was under the Christmas tree for me. My mom has a crazy quilt top that my grandmother pieced but didn’t finish that we want to embellish and assemble.
• Foundation paper piecing bee blocks. I’ve been invited to join the Pastiche Bee and will be jumping into the deep end with foundation piecing.

Here’s a sneak peek of some redecorating we’ve been working on over the holiday break. I’ll share more when it is finished.

What does 2012 have in store for you?

I spent another afternoon at The Living Letter Press, this time working on a print to give to my parents are as gift. The idea for the poster came from a line in one of my parent’s favorite Advent songs, King of Heaven by Jim Croegaert. He got the line from a 15th century author, William Langland. The full quotation is:

But all the wickedness in the world which man may do or think is no more to the mercy of God than a live coal dropped in the sea.

It’s a beautiful sentiment and my folks were appropriately excited about the print.

The other letter press gift I gave was a set of note cards for my sister in law who is a graphic designer by training and profession, although spends most of her time these days caring for my three young nephews. I gave her cards of several different designs and a gift certificate to work together at the letter press studio when she is next in town. She was so excited about that gift that she cried. I would share the photos, but I think she would kill me.

Don’t you love it when a handmade gift is so well received?

Finally, I made a set of three rattles that I “screen printed” (really stenciled using screen print paint) for my newest nephew, Ollie. All three are images of robots that his older brother Lucas drew. You can see the full set in my flickr stream. Ollie isn’t old enough yet to appreciate them, but Lucas was delighted to see his art on the rattles. I wasn’t able to find hard plastic rattles to put inside so substituted big jingle bells which don’t give quite as satisfying of a rattle sound as I wanted.

“You’re gonna need a bigger boat.” always works for me.

Congratulations, Claudia. I’ve sent you an email. Thank you to everyone who shared book recommendations. If you haven’t already, you can read my round-up post about the books that were mentioned in the comments. I’m thrilled that I also won a giveaway this time around (my first win on SMS giveaway day ever–and I entered the fewest number of giveaways. Perhaps there is a lesson there as well?). So thank you to Victoria of The Accidental Crafter!

*image by Weeping-Willow