Mystical State

Thanks to everyone for their nice remarks about my "party pics"! One down, two to go.

I've been keeping pretty busy, and a fair amount of that has been quilt related.

I prepared entries for two shows/contests. I'm very accustomed to the whole slide taking process for entries, but haven't sent many digital entries yet. Both these shows required digital pictures. I wasn't happy with the digital pictures I already had for one of my quilts, so I decided to take more. Unfortunately, the only assistant available at the time is three years old. I thought about Emily's post about taking pictures in the shade on a sunny day (as opposed to an overcast day), and had what I thought was a great idea. I'd lay the quilt flat on the ground, and take the picture from the balcony. This would also get around the fact that it was windy that day. Here's a fabulous photo of my setup.

This might have worked, except that it's very difficult to take a sharp picture of something when you're hanging halfway off of a balcony. No tripod means no go! I guess I'll have to stick to hanging up quilts for photography.

I've been noting the onset of fall.

(Backlit leaves in my front yard)

Mostly I haven't been posting because I'm in that mystical state where you're working on a quilt and that's pretty much all you can think about. In the last few years this mystical state has been quite rare, so I'm going with the flow. Here's a very exciting shot of the washout of some purple fabric.

I dyed a 10 step gradation of purple for this quilt about 5 years ago. I was sure I'd washed it out quite thoroughly. When I went to cut out the deeper shades I decided to wash the fabric one more time, just in case, and I'm glad I did. I don't get what happened here, because I know I washed the fabric quite a few times the first go round. I know the dye is no longer reactive here, but I didn't want it to bleed into some of the surrounding colors when I block it.

This picture sort of sums up my inspiration for the quilt - lavender asters in the fall. It's a traditional quilt, but one I just need to get out of my system. Don't look for pictures of the quilt anytime soon, as it's the biggest quilt I've ever made, and will take several more months to finish.



And of course, it's time for Socktoberfest!

I've got quite the collection of socks on the needles, so I'll try to take a picture of them and post details later this week. (Lolly took a picture of them at Knit Nite that shows how many there are.) I'm going to try and finish two socks this month, so that I'll have a total of three finished pairs.