Bella Dia

The Softie Awards 2007

Have you heard? There's a great event going on called The Softie Awards.  It's the brainchild of my good friend Terry and going to be an annual event.  Check out the rules here and also look at all the wonderful entries so far at Flickr.  A distinguished panel of judges will narrow the choices down to five in each category (thankfully!) and then the judging will be turned over to the public to determine the winner; sounds fun, huh?  While your at it, check out Terry's blog too, Softies Central.  She's a huge fan of softies with several books coming out soon and besides that, one of the nicest people you'll ever get a chance to know! 

Inspiration Collages

Weeding through my magazine piles, I've made some more collages of favorite pictures and images that inspire me. Maybe they will inspire you too!

Fabric Panels: How To

Gosh, you all are so sweet! Thank you for the nice comments about my new studio - if I could, I'd have everyone over for tea, lemon scones, and crafty conversation :)

My fabric panels are super simple and I wanted to share how I made them. The inspiration was what many of us face when we have fabric we love but can't bear to cut it - what to do? I used foam core, double stick tape (I like poster tape especially or ones available for scrapbookers) and wall putty to put them all together. Cut your foam core to accommodate the piece of fabric that you are using. Make sure you have about 1" to 1 1/2" of fabric to fold over to the backside.

Place the double stick along the edges of the foam core, gently pull the fabric over each corner and press down onto the tape, and then working from opposite sides, gently pull taut the fabric along the sides and press down onto the tape.


I used wall putty to put them up so I wouldn't have a bunch of little holes in the wall. It also makes it easy to move them around and take down if you want to use a panel as a background for a picture; see here.

If you don't want to wrap the fabric around (or there just isn't enough fabric to do it) then put the double stick tape along the edges on the front and press your fabric on. You might need to neaten the edges a bit.

I think it would be so cool to create a whole quilt on the wall with the panels butted up next to each other, don't you? There's actually a ton of stuff that would be fun to do using this method. If anyone gives it a try let me know, I'd love to see!

Red

I didn't take nearly as many pictures while on vacation as I had intended to. For one thing, it's really hard to take a good picture while holding a camera in one hand and a Mohito in the other ;) We spent a day in Las Vegas and one of our goals was to see the Wynn casino and hotel, Steve Wynn's new baby. My goodness - what a feast for the eyes! I didn't expect it to be so full of color and used in such a whimsical way. This is a picture of some hanging lantern-type light fixtures. I wish I had gotten a better picture of the colorful floor mosaics throughout the casino but low lighting and hustling children through didn't give me a lot of time for setting up a good shot.

Blue skies smilin' at me, Nothin' but blue skies do I see

In the town where my grandmother lived there were two elderly sisters, Catherine and Cornelia, that lived together in a big white turn-of-the-century home. If I remember correctly, one of them had been married but their husband had passed so they lived together to have someone to grow old with. I always found them fascinating when we would go pay them a visit with my grandmother. They always seemed to have some sort of project going on but two things stand out more in my memory. At Christmas time, they made these gorgeous ornaments by covering styrofoam balls with sequins, beads, pearl-headed pins, velvet ribbon, and other trims that I'm sure they'd been collecting forever. The other thing that I remember were the african violets that they raised in their kitchen. They probably had 60 to 70 plants on an old baker's rack rigged with some special ultra-violet lighting. Every color and variation of colors that you can imagine! I think that's where my love for african violets came from and I have always had my own little pot of violets in my kitchen windowsill. The only thing I do for them is water only from the bottom, brush fuzz and dust off their leaves with a soft paintbrush, and give them bright sunlight and they've always done well and bloomed for me. These are also where I got my inspiration for my violet pincushion :)

Some more blue for blue day:

blue flowers
I planted these last year and I can't remember what they're called. The flowers are tiny, pea-sized, and look like forget-me-nots.


blue belt in karate
My 7 year old took this picture and I really like it.

mountain lake
I get lost in all the shades of blue here.

Black & Gray

the river
This is a picture from last summer and honestly just about the only picture out of the 5600 I have in iPhoto that fits the color scheme for today. If I get the time I'll go on a photo walk and see if I can find any other black/gray inspiration to share.

Brown is Me

If I were a color I'd be brown.
For me the perfect brown is a Hershey
chocolate bar and that's what I had in mind when I was choosing a new paint color for my house; you can see a picture of it over in the Flickr set. I find brown to be such a comfort, homey and warm, solid but not boring.

This is a picture of my daughter taken a
few years ago all dressed up for the rodeo. She's wearing a vintage skirt that I found for her earlier that weekend at the twice-yearly flea market. The horse print on it is kind of a raised cream velveteen and it's trimmed in cream colored fringe. She's a horse-crazy girl that loves to swirl and I love her :)

White Karate Gi's

Ahhhh, isn't it so nice to get back home after a vacation? We had a wonderful time but I love being home and getting back to our regular routine. I missed the internet and sewing and furry little animals everywhere. We were in the Las Vegas area where the temperature was over 100° every day so a lot of time was spent in the pool and we all came back with some color after our winter whites. I'll have more to share later this week; the desert landscape and city lights of Las Vegas provided lots of inspiration.

I still have a lot of catching up and settling in to do so Stephanie and Mav's color week works really well for me this week. I missed out on the last round so I'm excited to participate this time. You can see the rest of my pictures over at Flickr if you'd like.

Inspiration Collages

#1

Yeah for January!! More and more, January is getting to be one of my favorite months. The kids and I have been working really hard decluttering the house and cleaning, cleaning, cleaning! I'd love to have a tag sale here on my blog of some of the things I'm ready to part with if I can get it togther while I'm still in the mood. I haven't done as much crafting as I would have liked but after getting rid of a lot of the post-holiday clutter I'm definitely moving in that direction. One of my goals for the year is to expand on my shop offerings and I've got some fun ideas that I can't wait to get started on.

I've been going through my piles of magazines too, tearing out pictures that I like and that inspire me. Instead of leaving the torn pages in a pile like I usually do, I've been creating "inspiration collages" in a large wire-bound black journal. So today, I'm sharing some of the pages with you...

#2

#3

#4 and #5

Cutie Patootie

Aaack! Isn't this the cutest?! It's a little birdhouse box filled with cherry blossom cookies from Too Good Gourmet. They have tons more to choose from and they're only $6 a box. I think they would make great party favors too.

Or maybe one of these for a bloggy friend? This one is filled with snickerdoodle cookies.

Need a little more cute to start your day off right? Check out Cute Overload - the most aptly named site I've ever seen!