decisions, decisions

I hate getting stuck on a piece. Somehow it becomes so wonderful in my head that I'm afraid of messing it up...most of my pieces I liked better during the making than after they are done. Not that they are all messed up, just that when in the moment it can go in any direction, when I can take it anywhere I want to take it, I'm more enamored of it. Of course, the side effect of this is that I have no problem with selling my work--most of it anyway. There's a couple of pieces that would have to sell for an unreasonable amount of money for me to part with them.

But how to quilt this piece...lately I've been doing a lot of close quilting, geometric shapes alternating with organic shapes, filling in the space. I'm kind of tired of that. So I just dove into this piece, and started with where I knew I wanted stabilization lines. The rest just grew from that, and once I started, I didn't have problems continuing with it.

Also lately, I've been quilting as a kind of middle step rather than a final step in the process. I've been adding hand work that seems to look better if the thing is already quilted. This particular piece is going to have some raw edge applique on it, too.

I splurged a little lately, too. When I noticed that I had written 100 posts, I wanted to save them and decided to get a book made from them. Blog2Print will go and find your blog posts and put them together for you. The result is either an ebook you can download for $2.99, or a slickly printed paperback book--mine was around $35; it varies with the number of pages. One thing to watch out for is that there are some missing jpg's in mine, I didn't edit it carefully enough.

For a while my go-to guru for jpg questions has been Gloria Hansen. She has been very generous with her help. And now she's put together a great book that answers all the questions--Digital Essentials. Right now it's on sale for 10% off, but it's well worth the investment if you need help preparing pictures of your art for the web, for juried shows, for whatever. She also designs great websites if you're looking for a designer.