i am home!! home home home!

obviously, i'm home. i've actually been home for a week now, slowly trying to get caught up on things.

it's lovely to be back with my mom, my sofie-bean, my own bed, friends and high speed internet, but it was good to be on the prairies as well. the trip was a bit ridiculous with family, and went by really fast, but i managed to spend a bit of time with a few friends, and find some time to myself as well.

i spent a few gorgeous days up at our cabin, with no extended family present, which is super rare! i picked 3/4s of a gallon of wild saskatoons and froze them, and spent an evening sitting around a campfire talking union gossip, and took lots of pictures, though not nearly as many as i'd wanted, and went o way too many thrift stores. i spent lots of time driving, breathing in the landscape.

i don't have the words to explain how i feel about the prairies. everything i try to say sounds incredibly cheesy, but oh, how i love it. i look at the sky and feel like i'm breathing it in, it sustains me. the sky is so incredible out there. and the colours are so gorgeous, the light on canola fields at dusk...

i took a bunch of TTV (through the viewfinder) photos, which i hadn't played around with much since last year. i finally got around to building a better way of connecting the two cameras and cutting out light (using scotch tape and a toilet paper tube!), and the pictures i took after that turned out much better. there are a lot of them, so i'm posting them pretty small, but if you click on them, you'll be able to see them better on flickr.


i love grain elevators! i wish i'd taken this one later in the trip, so that it would have turned out better!



this church is a heritage building now, though apparently my great grandparents were married there.




these ones were taken at the Old Church Pottery and Gift Shop up near our cabin. i stopped in there and couldn't resist buying a few pieces of pottery!









the fountain in minnedosa, mb


barn near the road to our cabin.

a small ukrainian catholic graveyard kinda out in the middle of nowhere






this graveyard had a lot of stones with crosses attached, which i've never run across before.







hopefully i can catch up on more posts soon!

more exciting (and late!) news!!

angie and durin had their baby!! (angie did most of the work of course!)

this was so very exciting to all of us mods at craftster, since she was the first of the pregnant mods to pop (one more is due in november, and then another in february - there's something in the water all right!)

warren came into the world the morning of august 4th, and hopefully he won't be toooo much of a leo!

at the moment, he's going to be the most spoiled baby in the world when it comes to handmade goods, i'm sure! (that'll change once the rest of the mod babies are born, he'll have to share then!)

i busted my butt and managed to get the majority of my planned projects done and sent before he was born - i have one more that i was specifically waiting for his name before i made it, now i just need to start it!

first, i finished up the sublime stitching julie west embroidery that i posted a long time ago by sewing them into bibs.


they were all backed with drool-resistant nylon



i LOVE how bright the sky is in this picture!!








again with the sky!










bright blue sky! i should note that i'm not JUST posting these pics because i adore the sky and the rose, but also because the actual colour of the fabric is somewhere in between the pics with a flash and the pics without. i DO have a purpose! it's actually the same fabric as one of the preggo tops that i made angie in the spring.









and i made them two sets of washable wipes, which were 2 squares of 7"x7" flannelette serged together. the brown really wasn't for poop! i didn't even think of that! i fell in love with the cowboy print, because i knew angie would like it, and then i looked for a solid that went with it. i also wanted a colour that would look good in the nursery, because i feel like so much baby stuff is so damn UGLY (packaging, etc), so i wanted to make wipes that could be kept in a basket without contributing to that!


and i made angie a shirt, which sadly did not turn out nearly as well as i'd hoped....

i scanned orange paisley scrapbooking paper, printed it onto an avery iron on transfer, cut out the letters and heart, and then ironed onto old navy maternity tank. sadly, i forgot to take into consideration the depth of the colour of the tank top, and it made the iron on much darker than i'd anticipated. you can barely see the design in the lettering, and the small baby in fetal position in the heart is pretty much invisible. plus, the iron ons acted wierd, almost like the burnt, and they stuck to the shirt. it was very weird. i love me my avery iron ons, and i've never had that happen before. i ended up washing the shirt to try to get some stubborn backing paper off.

i was sad about it, because i was SO EXCITED about my idea of having the baby in the heart, but i didn't have time to order a new tank top (and that felt wasteful too). it was a huge pain in the butt finding this one, none of the local stores had tanks left at the end of june (stupid!), so i had to order it online, old navy took FOREVER to ship it, then i had to pick it up from my US address (old navy won't ship to canada because they're stupid). i was actually hoping to get this done in time for the baby shower, but the shirt didn't arrive in time. i still think it turned out cute, just not AS CUTE as i'd hoped!

i also made an art piece, mostly as a thank you for angie and durin's hospitality when i stayed with them for the baby shower, but also because i wanted to send a "non-baby" present as well! i used a ttv photo of angie that i took while i was down there.

it's painted on a canvas, the bottom layer is kroma acrylic paints in raw umber, permanent green, titanium white, carbon black and acrylide yellow. i drew the the stems and leaves before the paint dried. the image was colour copied and transfered using kroma gesso. after it was all dry i used a bunch of different stazOn inks - timber brown, saddle brown, olive green, stone gray and dove grey. the green and brown twill tapes were dyed for earlier projects, but i used timber brown and olive green stazOn inks to make the colours more vibrant. i used saddle brown on the twill tape with writing. the little A chipboard piece has purple flocking on it, but it was too bright for the piece, so i used stone gray stazOn to tone it down a bit. the word smile was a charm, but i cut off the circle, and used ranger adironback inks in ginger and caramel to colour it. the dragonflies were brads, but i cut off the backs. the metal pieces and the chipboard piece were all attached using silicone. i think it turned out very "angie"!


before adding the extra layers. i tried the gesso transfer technique (i didn't want pure white, so i tinted it with a teensy bit of raw umber) and it wasn't as fabulous as i'd hoped it would be. the spots where it rubbed off made me sad, and the one corner rubbed off so much that i ended up rubbing more off on purpose so that it would look okay!

more ttv photos!

i was so excited about the photos i took tuesday that on wednesday i went gallivanting after my massage appointment and took a bunch more!










i really love the square image it creates, and i'm totally going to experiment more. it's a little tricky, because you can't use a flash, so you need a sunny day, but if it's too sunny, or the object is too light, the picture doesn't turn out (hence why you're not seeing any of the pictures i took of sun-bleached headstones in the graveyard!). and i need to figure out a way to hold my digital and polaroid together more easily, so that i can concentrate on focusing and the lighting instead!

but i'm still pretty happy. it was a lot of fun.