Our Big Announcement......

Do you remember seeing the post on December 12th as we showed off how "all official" we were looking?

OR

How we may have lost someone in the photo below on December 17th?

OR

The wonderful piles of color and texture, actually it seemed like mountains of the "stuff".

This was the end result of all that work!  We just had to lay it all out to see how it looked before we packed it all up.  This mountain of bright color is our first order shipping to our new DISTRIBUTOR.  That's right, you read it correctly, our burlap is being carried by a distributor!  All of this product will be available through them as soon as they receive it and get it loaded online.  This also means that their sales representatives will have our color card and we will send them a small sample of our burlap to show shop owners when they visit.  They can reach so many more shops then we can so we are excited to see where this leads us. 

It filled 10 boxes! Funny enough we were told this is a small order.

Just Another Christmas Snippet.....

We had a wonderful holiday with family, a few vignettes added to the holiday for me.  Last year just before Christmas I lost someone close to me, this summer I recieved a few wonderful gifts of the toys he shared with me, they brought back wonderful childhood memories of Christmas' long ago.....

Christmas Eve...Already?......

Does this year seem to have flown by for anyone else?? 
This little chalkware Santa showed up in a "box lot" bought at a sale, he is so cute.  The book Velvet Eyes is a 3-D Christmas book that is mine....yup, it's lasted all these years and is still a favorite.

 No Santa here, but that little tree is one of those things I just couldn't leave behind at The Back Porch Mercantile in Knoxville, TN when we visited earlier this month....it reminded me of the bottle brush trees of my childhood of which I only have one vintage one.

 Does anyone remember these candy containers....he really needs to have Santa's bag replenished....

I need to do something with the finish of the mantle and these bookshelves surrounding it....a paint job maybe???  Anyway I couldn't resist making this pic look even more vintage.

Wishing you a fabulous Christmas and prosperous New Year! 

Holiday Snippets.....

I'm going to apologize now for not posting yesterday and for the short little snippets I will be posting for the next few blogs, but with the holidays, large dyeing fest we are doing and time with the grandson....this is all that can be managed.

Here's that little burlap pillow that was shown a few blogs back in a chair with a contrasting texture.  It is the only one that managed to get sewn...maybe after the holidays........

Santa's are one of the many collections that have found their home with us, standing Santa's, sitting Santa's, Santa ornaments and some I've could never have imagined.  These are just a few of the ornaments.....

Thanks for stopping by....HoHoHo!

Our Take It Easy December........

If my memory serves me correctly "we" were going to have off the month of December or at the very least we were going to do as little as possible....hmmmmm....
Me thinks someone didn't understand what that really meant.

 There could be someone in there and we wouldn't know it....

 so I got into the middle just to be sure....

 rats nest or yummy texture....

 See this is why I think someone lied to me......or else it's no rest for the wicked

 Yeah, but do we need to keep every little piece of fiber????

 This makes me swoon, but is that because I'm dog tired or because it looks so yummy!

That's all I got folks, back to the dye studio for me and the merry elves.....

We seem to be getting all official......

We are in the middle of a MAJOR dyeing batch which will have us running ragged for days.  Our plan is to put on the music full tilt and sing our ways through the days.  We'll see how far that gets us before needing some liquid refreshments!!

In the meantime, we've gotten asked many times over if we had color cards for our fabrics.  So we took time this Monday and made a few to see what we thought.  We couldn't believe how official it made us feel!  We have an absolute blast dyeing our fabrics/fibers but this just seems to take it to a new level.  We'll have them available now for our customers next year.  Here's a peek at 2 of them....our burlap and osnaburg.....

Crazy....right?

Side Trip.....

Last week we took a small road trip to Knoxville, TN to move my hubby home, of course "us girls" needed a little inspiration so we took a side trip to The Back Porch Mercantile.  We had a great time in this wonderful little shop...of course we made a couple of purchases maybe you will spot them later this week in our holiday decorations.  Enjoy the eye candy and I need to get back into the dye studio.....

Dimensional Silk Hankie.....

It was pointed out that after IQF I did forget to do a post on turning our "silk hankies" into a dimensional vessel, soooo....since we were busy yesterday moving my hubby back to Atlanta after his ten months' in Knoxville, TN this seemed like a wonderful opportunity.  This vessel only took one package of the Autumn Splendor silk hankies.

In order to stiffen the hankies I used Atelier Gloss Medium & Varnish, some copper colored skeleton leaves, metallic thread and our hand-dyed Sari ribbon.  I used a concrete planter placing the treated hankies inside the planter, the problem encountered was that it took forever to dry and I do mean FOREVER....partly because of Atlanta's humidity, but also the concrete retained the moisture...duh!

Hand stitching was used to embellish the vessel after it was completely dry. I used a simple running stitch, backstitch and French knots.  Notice that knots were not hidden or imbedded they were left with long tails, looking like fringe/tassels.

Take a close look and I think you can see the imbedded skeleton leaves.  They are very subtle, I really thought they would show just a bit more than they do.

This photo is taken from the bottom up to show our hand-dyed sari ribbon that I ruched and couched to the exterior to give a bit more texture and interest. Ends were not tucked in...they were left to fray...I love the texture.

Hopefully I will get the other vessel that I've been working on done so I can post it.  Those who stopped by Open Studio's during Quilt Festival absolutely loved the Angelina that was imbedded/encased in it.  The glitz is wonderful.

Burlap in Flight.....

This little guy has been on my mind for month's, he was supposed to be done and introduced in Houston at IQF, but once again I just didn't make that date.  Sometimes we just go out to lunch at Chili's and brainstorm....I know odd choice, but it works for us to be away from the studio, no distractions and things just come to us.  When we brainstormed for Houston we came up with way too many ideas and some of them just didn't get done...him being one of them.

This morning as I washed out several batches of our hand-dyed silk hankies and perle cotton, I mulled over the best way to approach how to make him.  I pulled this pile of burlap out, decided to go with scraps versus the red right off the bat, got to save that for creating more once I'd worked out the kinks. 

When we conceived the idea of creating a burlap bird we planned for him to have wire legs, so I knew he needed to have a gusset so that legs have some place to fit in.  Recently we were walking through a shop and saw bird ornaments, I just knew an ornament was what he needed to be at this time of the year.

 Every time you try out something new you learn a lot....today I learned that working with Burlap in such a small item is harder than I thought.  Oh I've got lots of tips for you.  Edge stitch all pieces before sewing the body together, the tail is impossible to sew right sides together, then turn right sides out...soooooo....the tail wound up having a cotton facing that I could slit, fuse back together and then be attached to the bird.  Sometimes a girls gotta do, what a girls gotta do.

Love how the little guy turned out....now I can use the red and  make more for our Christmas tree.  After watching the Cardinals playing in our yard this weekend they will be perfect, hopefully they will not drive our puppy crazy. 

Turkey Day...Welllll......

Yes, yes I know it is turkey day, but since we celebrated with family last Sunday I changed up the menu....we had Lasagne today.  Last year my grandson declared his great-uncle's turkey better than Grandma's (and I wholeheartedly agreed) so...since he cooked again last Sunday and we all enjoyed his efforts (he has been informed that he is officially the Turkey Day cook from here on out), I decided NOT to waste my time with all that kitchen fuss.  The plan was to photograph the pan of  Lasagne and post the pic here, but we all raced to the kitchen when the timer went off, eating our fill and freezing the leftovers for the busy weeks to come.  Must say I feel totally stress free, very unusual for a holiday.

Figured I'd show you what I have achieved since Tuesday, I can actually use the table and find stuff.....

See even my sewing assistant has plenty of room, he's even dressed for the holiday season....

Look what I found sorting through all those piles, old greeting cards that I meant to turn into gift tags....so since I didn't need to spend the entire day in the kitchen I had time to use Sissix Vagabond die cutting machine and a Fiskar tag punch to be "green".

Ahhh!  What a wonderful day....easy to feel thankful.