Papering the Cradles

My friend Marcie and I enrolled in an online art class in June called “Mixed-Media Girls with Cori Dantini.” Cori is an artist and fabric designer. I have some of her fabric in my stash. She and Marcie are also good friends. I am taking the class because it’s good to get out of one’s comfort zone once in a while. Thank goodness for Marcie, though. I don’t think I could do this without her help and encouragement.

Our “homework” fell by the wayside over the summer due to our schedules. Last Thursday, I went over to Marcie’s house and we sat and worked together. She is a bit ahead of me, but that’s okay. I am at the part where I am “papering the cradles.” Cradles are wooden frames—think canvas for painting, but wood—and we are gluing vintage papers onto the cradles in preparation for the next steps. We were supposed to collect a variety of vintage papers like old books, magazines, sheet music, etc. This part was a lot of fun, and I got four cradles papered:

Marcie also found this paper for me a few days ago. I can’t wait to try papering a cradle with it:

Now that the cradles are papered, I am supposed to draw my girls on them and add ink and watercolor. “Finding my people”—i.e., finding my drawing style—took a while. Drawing definitely is not second nature for me. I am happy with how my sketches evolved, though.

I had an old book of embroidery patterns that I thought I might use on my cradles, but I liked some of the patterns so much that I am going to embroider them instead. It’s time to start getting embroidery projects prepped to work on this winter.

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The priority item for yesterday—after spending three hours getting the blog coding straightened out—was making and attaching the binding to the Ritzville quilt. That sale is in five weeks. I had to set up a second table behind my sewing machine to hold up the bulk of the quilt while I attached the binding because it’s a huge, heavy, king-size quilt. The next step is to sew down all 432” of binding (by hand). I can sew down the binding on a 60” x 80” comforter in two or three evenings, so I expect this will only take a week or so. It’s a white quilt with white binding. I’m going to wrap it in a sheet and make sure that my hands are perfectly clean before I start working on it.

Today is going to be devoted to working on the Big Sky Knitting Designs website. I want that off my to-do list this week. And I won’t get much done while DD#2 and her friend are here, because I’ll want to spend some time with them.