I love doing these journal quilts - what a wonderful way to try new techniques. For "I've Got Lips" above I first did a pieced background and quilted it. Then I drew and cut out appliques of various "lips" - with a variety of pink and red fabrics. (I had to add paint to get the right color a couple of times) I looked for as many "lip" quotes as I could find and printed them out in various fonts using ExtravOrganza in my inkjet printer. I then cut out the sayings, frayed the edges and painted each one using a fabric marker. I adhered them to the quilt with a clear fabric glue.

We started our new art quilt group this morning and wow is this going to be wonderful. There were 5 of us at this morning's meeting (2 more couldn't make it) and our purpose was to communicate what we want to achieve with this group. We all agreed that we want to stretch ourselves creatively - to learn and try different things as well as refine the skills already learned. We started a list of topics that we want to be sure to cover.
This is going to be so much fun.
I have several pieces in mind to make - first I really must finish the quilting on my Spring Whispers throw (I'll post a pic of the top) and get busy with my Hollow Cube Wall Quilt quilting.

A few months ago I made a little art quilt for my yoga teacher. It was very hard to part with it and I want to do another one along the same lines - just tweak it a bit.

I am so loving doing these journal quilts every month. Thank you Eileen (from Quilter's Studio) for the demos and the inspiration!! I'm doing things that I never dreamed I'd do (painting) and have new confidence doing things that I've done before and needed motivation to pull out of my bag of tricks again.

This one is called Energy=Color=Energy and I had fun working improvisationally (is that a word) to create a feeling of energy and movement.

We did one using Angelina fibers - can you find the angelina? This is a little reminder of global warming called "Icecap Melting"

So here we are halfway through January and I feel halfway recovered from the holidays. Actually I'm pretty much caught up except I started to really clean my home office (translation = throw out junk) and it looks messier than ever. I picked up a couple of wheeled carts from Staples and they are proving to be very useful for storing all my specialty papers, labels etc.

OK, so here's how I did on the holiday sewing/knitting prep. Most of the sewing got done; very little of the knitting. The cute hat for my great niece was finished but I did something weird and it's not getting on anybody's head - very tight carryover of color change yarn I think.

This is the tote bag that I made for Grandma Betty's caregiver.

I'll post photos of some of the other completed projects.