mending and making

I did get out of the house on Sunday. It was sunny, no wind, and the dog wanted a walk. First though I cut back the frozen shrimp plant and the confederate rose, had already cut back all the ginger, even though the stems were still green and you aren’t supposed to cut dead stuff back until all danger of frost is gone but I couldn’t stand looking at it. Besides, both those plants are hardy and the shrimp plant would be monstrous, or more so, if I didn’t cut it back. Hauled it all over to the burn pile. Plenty of other dead stuff, the orange cosmos and the white philippine violet, to cut back. And the banana trees which is a real chore.

I still haven’t put my sewing machine away and over the weekend finished putting new elastic in my polartec pants, patched two pot holders (because I’m cheap and really they still had their padding, just the outside fabric was worn away or burnt) and then I worked on this:

I bought these two panels of Hmong reverse appliqué so long ago that I can’t remember where I bought them or when, didn’t know what I wanted to do with them, just knew I wanted them. Since I don’t carry a purse and some of my pants don’t have adequate pockets or pockets at all I finally decided to make this little bag with them some time ago and sat down and did it Sunday. I lined it with some of the blue Egyptian cotton sheet I’ve been patching my other sheets with 

and finished it off yesterday with the grosgrain ribbon. I’m pretty pleased with it.  Now I’m ready to start on Robin’s blanket so I won’t be putting the sewing machine away any time soon, just push it over to the edge of the table to make room for the blank watercolor bookmarks which I woke up thinking about yesterday morning.

All this sewing has had me looking through my tub of fabric scraps left over from all the sewing projects I’ve done with the grand girls, teaching them to sew and whatnot. My FB feed has had a lot of textile art in it lately. There was a time when I thought that would be my artistic medium. I’ve been sewing since I was nine and took a textile design class my last year in art school but then four years of life happened and I stumbled on etched glass and that was it. Now that I’m retired from the glass arts, I’m thinking about that tub of scraps and what I might do with it all. I’m also interested in bookbinding, making little art books. I’ll have to see if the new bookstore can order a beginning bookbinding book.

Believe it or not, I was complaining about the cold Sunday and today I have the door open. That’s how crazy our weather is, how quickly it can change.

A note on the chandelier: I did an image search which turned up one that’s almost the same but with only 4 lights instead of the 6 mine has from an antique dealer priced at 3,800 euros (about $5,000). Not Dresden after all but Meissen, circa 1900. The reason I thought it was Dresden is because my mother had an envelope with a couple of the leaves in it that had broken off and she had printed Dresden chandelier on the envelope. I had searched for Dresden chandeliers before but never found one similar. Now I know why.