Over at the Rainbow Scrappy Challenge, light blue is the color for the month. It is also time to consider layouts for blocks, count blocks and essentially get all ones ducks in a row. So to speak. For the origami cranes (or swans), I counted colors and direction and found myself low on right facing cranes. Since I had already made some light blue cranes, I decided to fill in some missing colors.

 Apparently, during my time away from sewing, all my skills migrated south. All six cranes were born with severed neck syndrome where the triangle at the base of the neck is sewn in the wrong direction. To make matters worse, I did not notice the severed necks until each crane was almost finished. Well, now they are finished...and so am I.

I found my sewing machine! The Rainbow Scrappy Challenge is wrapping up soon, so I thought I would take inventory. It turns out that I have no purple fish, no pink fish, and very few medium and dark blue fish. For some reason I have over 16 red fish and another 16 yellow fish. Apparently the kittens have strong color preferences for their snacks.

And today was the second day of having my heat pump replaced, so Mr. Piggy was more than willing to model the new scarf...although he complained that it was a bit too long for him. He did agree, however, that the scarf was quite cuddly straight from the dryer.

I am sorry to disappoint you, but my absence from this blog is NOT because I went off and adopted a couple of kittens.

I thought Tommy Cat was a task master, until my brother came to visit for a week. (P.S. I named my cats Tommy and Jimmy after my twin brothers). And like most families, we had lots of miscommunication. For example, I had a list of projects to get done around the house. I interpret a list as "pick one" and think about it. And apparently my brother thinks you're supposed to work your way down the list and actually DO all them! I must have missed that memo.

In any case, my house is a vastly improved habitat PLUS I am now free to return to my slothful ways. And on that note, I did get some weaving done and finished the teal log cabin scarf. I used a new method of securing the warp to the loom and it didn't work very well, so the scarf is about 10 inches shorter than I intended. The photo shows the scarf before finishing which should make it quite soft and lovable.

This is the first time I got drunk...that is, made a drunkard's path. This quilt was made in 1983 when polished cotton was the new in. I was also experimenting with a new polyester batting that was supposed to be light, but lofty. But instead replicates the saggy baggy elephant.

I still like the concept behind the quilt, just not the execution. I'm also inspired by Tim Latimer's recent experimentation with the drunkard's path. And, okay, it may just be that I have a crush on Teddy.

But I am showing you this early treasure because Vicki W. thought she might be forging on alone down the drunkard's path, without realizing that some of us are professional procrastinators and haven't even gotten started.

I've been busy lately keeping up with my brother. But I did get a chance to make up a final batch of kitten preserves. Unfortunately, as you can tell by the contents in the last row, some teddy bears jumped in trying to save the kittens, and that sealed their fate.

After the endless purple towel, I decided to weave a simple chenille scarf. And now I remember why I enjoy weaving.

And for quilters, I should mention that this pattern is called the log cabin. It's made by alternating light and dark threads in the warp, and then doing the same thing in the weft.

And just like with patchwork, I'm not using enough contrast. These two colors look they are light and dark to me, but when woven together in this pattern, they come off medium blue, because they are really a medium light and a medium dark. Similarly, with my legos quilt, I have not used enough high contrast--really light, really dark--so when the patches come together I'm just getting a mass of medium bright. But I have plenty of more legos blocks to make so I'm hoping to turn that ship around.

I am working with Fenella Belle at her McGuffey studio to print fabric. Our goal is to print repeat design fabric with dyes. There are a lot of moving parts so we thought we should just open the hood and play mechanic. Although we didn't have a silk screen with an appropriate design repeat, we used one of my old screens to test a method for registration. Although we set up the registration, we experimented with overlapping. We also tried a couple of resists: the first column of overlay leaves is washable glue and the second column is opaque fabric paint medium. The photo shows the fabric before the dye was rinsed.

This is the fabric after it was rinsed.

Here's a closeup showing the washable glue resist. We tried speeding the drying of the dyes with a hair dryer but this apparently set part of washable glue into the fabric. At least that's what I suspect happened to make it work so well in some areas but not others.