Saturday Morning

It's been wet around here the last few days but this morning dawned clear and dry.

All the folks participating in our local Memory Walk to raise money for Alzheimer's research will be pleased. The Friends of the Library and the downtown merchants will be pleased as well because today is the day of their big annual sidewalk sale. I've done my running around for the week and need to stay home for a while now. Actually, I'm happy that I was able to get out and about this week without more severe consequences. :- )

I've been working on my journal for The Sketchbook Project. There are a couple of pages that aren't quite done yet and I don't want to share them until they are complete. (Now why is that? I took the Process Pledge, shouldn't it apply to the Sketchbook Project as well as my quilts? Hmm...) I can show you this one though:

It's that basic paper weaving technique you may have done in elementary school. I remember making woven paper hearts in February one year for Valentine's Day. I had to go online to find the directions for doing it though because that February was probably some 45 years ago! In this case I used a sheet of black paper and a couple of used Color Catcher sheets that had turned a soft shade of pink when I tossed them in with some new yardage.

I secured one half of the woven "blanket" to one page of the journal and folded back the other half to demonstrate that a woven blanket is reversible. Then I took another piece of the black paper, cut it to size, taped it into the journal and used it to define the bed covering we know as blankets. So now I have an example of both a quilt and a blanket in my journal.

I've also started work on the outside covers of my journal. The only real doodling I remember doing in high school - that didn't involve the names of boys I had crushes on or little hearts - was a straight line technique that produced a pile of triangles. When I thought of that the other day I also thought about crazy quilts. It was in that moment that I figured out what I would do for the cover of my Sketchbook Project journal. Participants are encouraged to decorate or recover the covers of their journals BUT you can't obscure the label with the bar code on the backside. So I decided to draw a crazy quilt on the covers of my book.

This is a piece of the back. (More has been done to it since the photo was taken.) This type of sketching I can do without too much angst. I do kind of wish I had made my "patches" bigger though. It's hard to get much patterning in on these. But that's why I started with the back. I figured I would probably learn a few things along the way and the end result would be that the front cover, the one more likely to be seen, would stand a better chance of being something I was happy with. We shall see ;- )