Lookie and See What I Got!

My wonderful friend back in Ohio (and not the only wonderful friend I've got there!), Diana, wove this mug rug. We had plenty of discussion about them throughout the process. So I was absolutely thrilled to get one in the mail yesterday! This is one of the "off" ones! She's a terrific weaver.

This is what I get for suggesting that she use embroidery cotton for the colors. I forgot to ask if it was 10/2 or 8/2. I can see it is too fine to be 5/2. You don't know what that means, my lovelies? It's just the size of the thread. Sewing thread is usually 60/3 or 80/3 with 3 being the number of plies of #60 or #80 cotton being twisted together. And the size of the ply is how many 840 yard long skeins of that size it takes to make a pound of spun cotton. That means that there are 16,800 yards of 60/3 sewing thread in a pound! Or 4,200 yards of 10/2 cotton, which is what I think was used to weave this. The fat navy blue yarn was probably 8/2 unmercerized (not gassed to make it compact and shiny) cotton. That's my favorite size cotton yarn. I bet I've woven miles of it in my former life as a weaver!

OK, my lovelies. I can tell that your eyes are glazing over!

Here's my latest creation. I am finally finishing my replacement aqua pages for the BookArtz February True Colors page swap. The pages coming to me were lost in the mail as were the ones on their way to my friends Susan and Barbara. :(

This is paint scraping on drawing paper, with poster paint pen purple dots, a handmade paper set of wings with Stickles (I adore Stickles!) in burgundy around the edges and black over the hand drawn veins. I used a fine white poster pen to write around the edges and put an Art Chix crown on the head of my mother's photo (taken at age 5 or 6). She's 93 now and she loves to say this: "When she was good, she was very, very good, and when she was bad, she was awful." It always makes us laugh. I talk to her every day. Chance talks to her too. I hold the phone to his ear and she talks to him. They both like it and it makes me laugh.

Here's a circular page I did for a swap on Chubbyville. (If it looks wonky to you, it's just the photo.) Shosh of Hannah Grey Dry Goods and Curiousities gave us a great deal on these 7 Gypsies blank books. I was inspired to buy a Fiskars circle cutter and let me tell you what an excellent job it does! My first idea was to do our dotty pages in lots of different dotted papers with a flower that had my great-niece Hope's face as the center. I ended up designing it in CorelDraw and drew the whole thing plus filled the spaces with varying dotty motifs.

I wasn't sure it would fit into the swap though. So I emailed a copy of it to the hostess who thought it would not be a happy choice for this one because she thought the group would be upset at having a digital page in it's book. I was SOOOOOOOO stuck for a new idea. In fact, I was stuck so long that instead of being early, I missed the deadline despite it's having been put back. But Heather accepted my pages since so many others were late too.

I must say that I'm quite happy with these. I collect rubber stamps of the word Love, so that came out of the hearts and Love drawer. The Pierrot and his girlfriend came from a downloaded collage sheet from Tallulah's. The back is a different purple dotty paper from Basic Grey with a heart motif stamped and embossed in white. I mixed a plain white Judikins embossing powder with a sparkly one I usually use to emulate snow. Then I added circles of vellum printed with my info onto the back. The fibers were ones I had in my stash from a sale at The Paper Studio in Tempe. I can't wait to get the book back!

I finally managed to get around to working on my pages for the Baby, You Can Drive My Car! Swap that I'm hosting on BookArtz. Yes, I know how late I am! So I get this all drawn out in my sketch book and then when the mail came yesterday, my friend, Susan in FL, who also has a MINI Cooper comes up with very nearly the same page! Hmmmm... but mine IS a little different. Her hubby is driving her car in the city in her picture. In mine, you can see trees and mountains capped with snow, as the car is being driven by a Golden Retriever!