Summer Ends

What a beautiful weekend! I'm heading out in a few minutes for a drive into the Poconos to visit a friend and sit by her pond and spin. The wheel is still in the car from my spinning group's meeting yesterday, where I spun the blue with purple and teal mohair batt. It's really quite beautiful. I'm excited about the way the blending turned out. In fact, all of it was the result of a swap switch we made a one of our meetings a few months ago. I'm also going to take up my spindle and the batts for the tropical fish. The humidity and temps have dropped the last few days around here and it's always cooler in the mountains, so I'm looking forward to a wonderful day.

I finished Alive Guy for Josh. He wanted a negative image that was about 4 feet high and 5.5 feet wide and he left the rest to me. After listening to your suggestions, I went with painting it on black fabric. I stitched the sides about 1" in from the side and am allowing it to fray. The top has a casing where we stuck in a piece of screen door molding to hang it with. The bottom is the selvedge so there is no finishing. I bought some fabric paint but then I looked at that squeeze bottle and knew I wasn't going to squeeze the whole thing! Right at my feet was an almost finished can of ceiling paint from my previous painting (sometimes not putting things away is a plus!) and pulled out a little stencil brush and started to scrub the paint into the fabric. I wanted to a get an open, uneven look and that was super easy to do :-) After it dried I went around and outlined it about .5" in from the edge with an opalescent white that has a little dimension to it. He's thrilled and promptly took it over to West Chester to hang it up. If I ever get lonely for the little guy, Alive - not Josh! - I have this to remind me of him! Now I remember why I have all those ugly vinyl tablecloths! Actually I can scrap it off with a fingernail so I'll just scrub it off with a little nylon scrub pad.

Off to the mountains!