The Day after Christmas

It has been a quiet day here today. Never left the house or studio all day. We had such a nice Christmas day, with our family. I feel very blessed. I could regale you with photos of a table piled high with food and candles and the good dishes, but you've seen plenty of those photos today. I know I have. Ray and I gave each other a new printer/scanner for our office. Not exciting or flashy, but oh, so nice to have.  When I got my new laptop this summer suddenly our perfectly functional inkjet printer and our scanner were obsolete. Wrong kind of connectors for the new equipment. Irritating and wasteful in my opinion. The new machine also faxes—or it would if we had a telephone line, which we don't. Why fax, anyway? I don't know why people are still faxing things. Scan, attach, email. Does this not accomplish the same thing? Anyway—I do like the new machine and it uses the kind of ink that can be printed on fabric and made permanent.

I got a little studio time this afternoon. I am working on the valentine-y piece, which I am making to submit to a themed show about ritual.  One of my rituals is making Valentines every year. I send them instead of Christmas cards. I am working on some ideas that include some of my usual techniques as well as trying some new ideas. Here's one:

I am adding some couched cording by machine. I found that I could not keep it under control if I just freely stitched over a cord that I was holding in place, so I tacked the cording in place with some clear, washable glue, then free-motioned a narrow zigzag stitch over it. I like the way it is working.

I have fused many hearts onto a neutral background and I want to fill in and give some continuity with some of the free stitching I have been experimenting with, so I made a little sample to try it out. I wasn't sure it would work on as large a piece as this will be.

There will be a lot of ground to cover with this busy little kind of pattern.  Too much? Maybe. I think I like the way this is becoming a piece that is strongly about fabric and pattern and stitching. Sometimes I think I get too far into painting and shading and manipulating in a way that doesn't do justice to my materials and craft. This is a direction I want to explore more fully.

P.S. I love your comments, but I am really getting tired of all the spam comments coming through, especially by essay writing services. Are others of you being inundated with this stuff?