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Archive for June, 2008

So Why Do I Feel So Sad?

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008

I have waited for so long for this night. I believe that Barack Obama will be the next president of our country. I will work very hard to help that happen. He gave an amazing speech and when you put it next to McCain’s lame attempt, there is no contest. We are fired up and ready to go.

I am sad because Stephanie called to tell me that Mia had an accident with Chester, their cat. She pulled him off their fence and broke his leg. They had a choice of amputating his leg or putting him down. They chose to save Chester, but it has been a traumatic and expensive evening for the family. Keep them in your thoughts.

I am also sad because of the lack of class that Hillary Clinton showed tonight by not letting Barack Obama have his night to celebrate his amazing achievement. Gloria Borger on CNN read a Hillary-supporter email saying that this “needed to be her night” and thus it was OK for her to perform the way she did.

To Jeffrey Toobin’s credit, he said “What are you TALKING ABOUT???”, saying that except for the “deranged narcissism of the Clintons” the point would be that she had lost and Obama had won and it was time for her to step aside.

Will she ever give up? Will she ever understand that she has been out done by Obama and his incredible campaign team? Have you ever seen another candidate behave in this way? Look at the class of Gore and Kerry when they lost such close elections to Bush, well, they may have actually won, which makes their class even more admirable.

She asked us to write and tell her what to do so I e-mailed her and asked her to graciously accept defeat and to move on. That made me feel a little better, not that she will pay any attention to me!

Sun Breaks and Rainbows

Sunday, June 1st, 2008

The Twelve by Twelve challenge this time around has the theme of water. Living in Portland, Oregon, my mind immediately went to rain. The best part of rain in Portland are the frequent sun breaks (an actual weather term) and subsequent rainbows. Because of my trip in May, I had to come up with an expedited plan to have my quilt done and ready to post on June 1. I printed a photo of a rainbow in a landscape on cotton. I then printed a very faded version of the same photo on organza. I did not think to get photos of these before I got into the project too far.

I cut the organza into strips of varying widths. These were fused to the background photo. I overlapped the strips to give a more watery, misty look to represent the rain. I left parts of the background without the organza overlay to represent the sun breaks. Here it is with black borders, sandwiched and ready to quilt.

This is my first version with a detail. I quilted vertical lines to represent rain. In the sun break areas, I used a neutral thread. I added some rainbow fabric to the binding to keep it from being too boring.

I thought I was done. But, no, the sun break areas just didn’t read properly for me. While I was walking the dog, I realized what I needed to do. I pulled the neutral thread from those areas and did random lines of yellow/orange thread. What I mean by random is that I did not quilt one line of thread from top to bottom as I did for the rain sections.

I hope you can see the difference. It really show in real time. I found this piece of painted cotton that I used for the back.

Go to the Twelve X Twelve Blog to see what the other eleven have done.