New Year's Resolution?

Around Thanksgiving, I posted a couple of pictures of my neighbor's yard when their tree shed most of its leaves in one afternoon. The neighbors were at a UK ball game and missed it all and by the next morning the leaves had lost their bright yellow color. I printed a picture on a June Taylor Quick Fuse Fabric Sheet and made this little quilt for them with hand-dyed fabrics and beads. It's about 12 x 15.

I've also been making more postcards. Everyone who went to the firefly camping trip in the Smokies in June got a postcard with the firefly fabric.

Sarah got me a couple of wonderful books for Christmas. The Uncommon Quilter has ideas and instructions for small art quilts using plastic, paper, surface design, and fiber.

1000 Artist Trading Cards has many wonderful pictures of artist trading cards, which measure 2.5 x 3.5 inches, so they're a little smaller than the 4 x 6 postcards. The pictures were compiled by the editor-in-chief of Cloth Paper Scissors and Quilting Arts Magazine. No directions here, but the pictures are more than enough inspiration.

All this has turned my thoughts toward a New Year's Resolution of making a postcard every day. This isn't an original thought, by the way - I've run into a blog of someone who does exactly that. There are some advantages, but the biggest one is in the personal growth area. (I know you're smiling, Jess.) From time to time I look at quilts in Quilting Arts magazine and think I'd like to try something new but I'm reluctant to start because I don't quite know if it would work out or a large quilt is so complicated. A postcard is just a little expenditure of time and energy and money and it's no big deal if it doesn't work out. Not to mention, I'd have a good-sized stack to take to an art show at some point.

I think I'm going to give it a try.

I posted holiday pictures of most of the family, and here's one of me. I think Steph was helping me figure out what was wrong with my camera, which sometimes just looks white or black on the screen instead of showing the images that would be in the picture. The review works fine, and if I go ahead and shoot, the picture just comes out black. We thought we had it figured out, but it's still doing it from time to time. It's the Sony DSC-T10 with the slide-down lens cover - if anyone has any suggestions, let me know.