Calling it Off

Today's "postcard" is the hood of Aaron's frog costume.

And thinking of that - as most of you know, I started out 2008 with a goal of making a fabric postcard every day. I've been pretty faithful, and I figure that I've made 250 of them. I've learned all kinds of techniques that I otherwise wouldn't have tried because, after all, it was only a postcard and if it didn't work out there was little investment in time or supplies.

Now, in early October, I'm calling a halt to the one-every-day. It's kind of hard for me to let go of something that's served me so well and it was a goal, after all. But as I mentioned before, I feel myself pulled to try some sewing, real follow-the-instructions sometimes-using-a-pattern sewing. I don't know where that came from, but I'm gonna try it. There will still be postcards from time to time, and still lots of quilts, but there will also be pictures of other projects, like hopefully the feet for the frog costume tomorrow night. And some heirloom projects. Maybe it's that new machine calling me. I'd thought of it primarily as an embroidery machine, but it does have a wealth of stitches after all. And it's big enough that I can go from embroidery to sewing without taking off the embroidery arm.

What I learned tonight is that I don't know much about fabrics, having mostly dyed what I used for recent quilting. I went to the fabric store, which is big, by the way, and part of a chain, and asked for handkerchief linen and batiste, not really sure what either looked like. I struck out on those, as well as on wash-away basting thread and wash-away stabilizer (not Solvy.) I substituted other fabrics that I thought might work for my project, surely they'll be ok. Maybe I'll have to order the rest online. The thread and stabilizer are for an online class where we will be using digitized quilting patterns on the embroidery machine. If I can get this figured out, it will be huge. I'm picturing feathers and cables, all done by machine.

Steph, Nora, Aaron, and I went to Frisch's tonight for a quick dinner. I got off work early today and it was a good day to do it. Here's a picture of the before-food crayoning