Bon voyage

to me! I know that I have been delinquent in making blog entries of late. I haven't done anything new in my studio and I have been getting ready for my trip, which starts tomorrow. I am going to Panama and Costa Rica. My travel companions will be my sister (again), Claire and Terri. We fly to Miami, leaving JFK airport at 5:45 AM. I'm getting picked up at 3 AM, oh, my! My plan is to go to bed at 8PM with a sleeping pill, set my alarm for 2 AM, which is plenty of time for shower, shampoo, blow dry and makeup. Actually I am setting 2 alarms, just in case. We change planes in Miami and then fly to Panama City where we spend two days. Then onto a small cruise ship (only 90 passengers) for 6 days on the water, including going thru the Panama Canal. We end up in San Jose, Costa Rica for two days, then home. It's a short trip, but it will be a welcome break from this cold winter here in the northeast.

Hopefully I'll be taking lots of beautiful pictures of flora and fauna and getting inspiration for future quilts. So check back on Feb.1 to see some trip photos.

Sparkle, sparkle

I think it was over a year ago that I went to my first big bead show with friends. It was quite an experience and since I am such an impulse buyer I bought way too many beads. Most of them have been languishing away in the drawer sending out guilt vibes every time I went by, so this weekend I got some of them out and put together a necklace. It's 54" long and can be worn double or triple. It is made up of Venetian glass beads, lemon citrines, tiny gold filled round beads, some square green garnets, Swarovski crystals and lots of tiny bugle beads.
You don't see the clasp because it isn't on. My crimping skills are dismal and the last necklace I worked so hard on fell apart at the second wearing. I was so bummed out by that incident because the beads were irregular pearls that were very difficult to string. I'm going to get some help with the crimping and ending of this one so that doesn't happen again.

I went to Chico's yesterday for some pants and they had so many costume jewelery necklaces that were very pretty. They cost much less than the beads for this necklace and they were already made. Makes me wonder how much more of this I want to do.

New Work

Lest you think that I have been frittering away my time (well, I guess I've been doing my fair share of that, too), here are two sneak peeks at a piece I just finished. I can't show the whole thing because I am entering it in a show where the entries cannot be previously published.
It uses a wonderful piece of hand dyed fabric by Linda Salitrynski, my own hand dyed fabric, a little bit of my rust dyed fabric and some commercial Dupioni silk.

I love the patterns in the hand dyed cotton and had a hard time deciding how to quilt it. I finally went with following the patterns in the fabric and I think that worked. Now I have to get this and another quilt onto a CD and get it in the mail.