The Early Works

Here are a few of my "early works." These are three of the pieces I made for my Dad and Mary. They still have them hanging in places of honor; isn't that sweet? Above is a Prairie Schooler I did for my Dad. He was in the Navy and now has a sailboat. He loves the sea. I still love this piece very much. I think it is one of my favorites.

This is a sampler I made for Mary. I guess I have loved samplers for a very long time as this was made in 1990.
I believe this is one of the very first pieces I did. At the time my Dad and Mary had a sheep ranch near Mt. Shasta in California.

While on vacation with my Iphone I thought that my new Sony Cybershot had become obsolete. So, while these pictures taken with the Iphone are serviceable, I am glad to see that I still need my new digital camera for pictures of needlework.

The Book Project

Ingredients: Tab, old books, adoring and smart father, Zutter Bind-it-All Version 2.0, time, patience (provided by said father), inspiration, and love of ephemera.
Several years ago I ran across an old book that had been turned into a journal. Ever since, I have been on the quest to make my own. Research was done, time passed, interesting books were gathered, conversations were had, and finally it was the right place and time to proceed.
Let me say at the outset that this project would have never come to fruition without my Dad. He is a genius at measuring, spatial thinking, and craftmanship.
My Dad deconstructed the books in a manner that preserved the entire book.
He made sure that the pages came out so that they could be used.
I brought four books for our trial run and they turned out fantastically. Above is the book my friend Noreen picked. These are our prototypes. Eventually what I want to do is add blank pages (using plain paper, patterned paper, old maps, etc.) and then use my stamp collection to add journal prompts. There are so many old books out there with great covers!
My Dad and I are going to try to work out a system whereby I send him the books, he does the hard work, and then I decorate them up. I do believe that I will always leave the covers as they are orginally; they just look great exactly as is.
Here is the team; Jacobs and Daughter. We had a great time and I can't wait to keep working on this project. Thanks Dad!!!!

Cut up Apples????

I know, I know! I have been gone for weeks only to return with a picture of cut up apple pieces???? What kind of return from vacation post is this? Well, we only have my PC to blame. It is running at the speed of a person entrenched in quicksand....very slowly in other words. I only have the patience for one picture to upload because they are all turned this way and that and straightening them out would take hours!

So, here is a picture that was right side up. It is a good picture of my vacation to Bainbridge Island because I never ate so many apples in my life! You must know that I do not like to eat fruit. Yuch. Boring. Anyway, out in Washington my Dad's wife, Mary, cut up apples in these little pieces and low and behold, they were really tasty. I don't know if it was the shape or the type of apples, but it was really fun to eat apples this way. We had "john-a-golds" or something like that. I came home and tried to recreate this great snack with a Gala apple; and yuch. It was not good at all. I am going to have to go to the grocery store and really look at the names of the apples.

I had a really wonderful trip. I would like to show you a day by day picture-log; but that does not seem possible with the computer issues. I will try to catch you up with a random picture or two a day.