Not Just Another Pretty Face

     The planet does not belong to the human race alone.
                                                                 --- Martin Saller

Elephants and pigs, two of our planet's most intelligent species, much abused by humankind.  Today kicks off a week of elephant appreciation.

The emotional life of elephants is deep and varied, ranging from happiness to sadness and depression.  Physical contact is important - they often rest against each other or touch one another with their trunk.  They are similar to humans in regards to love, loyalty, and familial bonds, and they deeply mourn the death of a family member.

Elephants have different vocalizations for pleasure (purring), pain (rumbling), loneliness and boredom in captivity (moaning squeal) and anger (hiss.)

Making It Mine - Knobs

Making It Mine is a series where I show an item I bought, then changed in order to make it more to my liking.

Five years ago I bought this small dresser with the knobs you see in the front.  They were fine for awhile.  Seems like everything is fine for awhile.  But after a few months, I made new knobs.

Here it is with the new knobs I made.  Basically, I glued beads, buttons, ribbons, and trim on a plain white knob.  Between the drawer front and the knob is either a small piece of fabric or paper.

Heart buttons; fabric background.

Both beads and buttons.  The background is paper, now faded from what used to be bright yellow.  I should replace it.

See that teardrop-shaped, gold-rimmed bead on the right?  That's the same kind that I used as the umbrella tip on my R is for Rain quilt.

 

Two buttons, furry trim, paper backing.  Again - I should swap out that faded paper.

The house button is also on R is for Rain.  I had forgotten it was on this knob.

Here you have a clear view of the white knob that is the base on which all the gorp is glued.  This has just two buttons - the large pink flower, with an orange/pink one glued over the button holes.

Kaffe Fassett scrap in the background.

Two buttons - orange square and a cute sand pail.  Trim circles the white knob, backed by fabric that has no intention of fading.  Ever.

Three buttons, nice and simple.  That paper used to be lime green.  

 

From this view, you can see more of the trim - sometimes I wrapped it on the shank of the knob; sometimes I glued it along the edges.

R is for Rain

I finished a quilt yesterday.  Our quilt guild is having a challenge where you make a mini-quilt with a theme that starts with the letter "R".  I've wanted to do an umbrella quilt for a long time, and I recently (and accidentally) unearthed some forgotten charm squares with a rain theme.  Rain + umbrella = works for me.

The squares were given to me a few years ago.  I had enough to make one nine-patch for the front, and another for the back.  The quilt is supposed to be 12" but because I used charm squares, it came in a little larger, at 14" square.

I put the darkest square in the center, then fused a 4-section bright yellow umbrella over them all.

Umbrellas have pointy things at the top, so I found a pointy bead to use up there.

You can see that each of the umbrella sections is a different fabric.  I just dug through my yellow scraps until I found four that looked good together.

I machine stitched the fused edges, then tried a succession of different handwork until I found one I liked.  I settled on chain stitches since they looked like a drop of water, then added a seed bead at the top of each one for some sparkle.

The bottom of the umbrella is edged in bugle and seed beads.  At the pointy ends, I stacked two sizes of beads to look like the spoke ends.

Tucked under the umbrella, seen through the distance of the stormy grey sky, is our destination: a happy place.  Sun shines down on a cute little pink house, flowers in the garden, and a dog in the front yard.

The quilting is sheets of rain falling down.  I hand-stitched the binding, not my usual machine stitching.

The back. 

With all the embroidery on the front, the back wasn't as neat as I would have liked.  I tried to carry stitches where I could, but there still remained enough visible ones.  I had a plan to make a big fat cloud label, big enough to cover the mess.  But that would have covered up too many of the cute squares, so I made a downsized cloud instead, and told myself to relax about it.

From the Vault - House Quilt (Summer Blocks)

"From the Vault" is a series in which I show older quilts I've made.  The House Quilt was made in 2003 and has four rows - one for each season.  That wasn't the intention when I started, but I made so many house blocks that I had to organize them somehow.  We've already looked at the winter blocks and the spring blocks.  Today we'll look at the summer row.

Going from left to right, the swirly black print is the outer border, and the fish in the lake is the first block.   I quilted fish shapes in the water.

Camping in a tent.  There's a "Gone Fishin'" button stuck in the ground in front of the tent entrance.  Two canoe buttons float on the lake.

Kind of a weird, me-not-getting-it-right flying geese block for the pine tree.

Summer means the barn doors are open.  Button cows walk out the door; chicken buttons roost in the open cavities above.

Barns draw insects, and they're flocking around this tree next to the barn.

Fourth of July sky with loop-de-loop quilting.  Large feathers flank the sliding doors, for no logical reason.

This is the bird house.  Maybe that's why the feathers are next door - they flew the coop.  Three bird buttons (purple, pink, green) sit on the house, and quilted birds fly by.  

Outer border on the right means this is the end of the row.

Three seasons, one to go.

Hearty Peace Pillow

On the lookout for more ways to use up my fabric, I thought I'd make a pillow for a friend of mine.  She and I are big fans of peace signs, and she liked the fabric I used on this lampshade.  I had leftover fabric, as well as all those pillow forms (aka furry pillows on clearance) that I showed you last Monday.

I call this the front, because it has a border.  It has a border because the heart fabric remnant I was working with wasn't wide enough.

This is the back, and the fabric that was used as a border on the front.

This is a coordinating pillow that I bought earlier this year from Target.

 

This is the flip side of the Target pillow.  So you can see it wasn't an original thought of mine to have peace signs on one side and hearts on the other.  But when you see a good idea, you have to go with it.