Goodbye Yolanda

For months now, you've heard me posting about all the quilts that the bees from Bee Happy (and some other special friends, too) have been helping to assemble for Yolanda's family as she battled her cancer.

At the beginning of the year, Yolanda wasn't feeling very well. Come March and she KNEW something was wrong - there were tons of tests and then it was learned that Yolanda had advanced bile duct cancer.

One day when I was visiting her, she told me that she had a lot of nieces and nephews that she wanted to make quilts for. It was ALWAYS Yolanda's intention to get better and to be able to give back to the people who assembled all these for her while she was sick, but she also quietly admitted that she needed to have her family covered in quilts if she wasn't going to make it. So the bees and I stepped up. We made 14 quilts for her family in about 6 months. (2 are still almost finished, but they're well on their way) We also made an amazing "healing quilt" that she took with her to the hospital for her many stays.  It was like a security blanket to her and the entire quilt was centered on a graphic that I made for her earlier in the year.

Yolanda lost her battle with cancer this weekend. I will miss her greatly. She was a good friend. She was generous and inspiring. For years, she has led and organized groups of people in swaps where she did all the work of cutting and mailing hundreds of pieces of fabrics - just because she loved to give and connect with people. She and I had a practice of randomly sending gifts in the mail. Yolanda was strong. I kept telling her that if there was anyone who could battle the prognosis that she had, it was her.  She never ran out of ideas for new projects and even when she struggled walking up and down the stairs in her home, or could only direct me as I sewed and cut her final projects, she kept talking about the matching Christmas quilts we were going to make when she licked this thing. Or wait, what about that over there?....

When she got sick, so many people contacted us to see how they could help. These quilts have been in 3 countries, numerous states, they've been in the mail, handed off in weird parking lots in Hollywood, they've been shuttled from Orange County to Los Angeles and back again. The batting was flown in from Colorado and Florida. They had their own box when I moved houses this year, they were pieced in the sewing rooms and dining rooms of many generous and loving women. I'll name them here as a tribute and if I've forgotten anyone, please tell me in the comments and I will correct it (don't be bashful, this is a thank you on Yolanda's behalf). The Bee Happy ladies: Lori, Alison, Janice, Natalie, Ramona, Nicole, Katie, Rosanna, Blossom, Liberty, Melissa, Kelly. Then we also got help in various measures from: Linnaea, Liz, Jennifer, Maria, Alissa, Jenn, Pam, Mary, Megan, Susan and Jeanette.  There may be a few more who sent in squares for the red and blue quilt that I don't know about... let me thank you from Yolanda!

I don't really know what else to say except to show you photos of our sweet friend, Yolanda, and the quilts that we made for her and her family, which she loved so much.

Goodnight, Yolanda. I will miss you, friend.

Endeavour

I spent most of the last few days planning for today's birthday tea party for Mimi, (posts to come), but everything stops when the space shuttle Endeavour is roaming the streets of your neighborhood....
We took a jaunt this morning with the kids to try and spot the shuttle while it was making its very slow path through the streets of LA from the airport to the sciencenter (our favorite museum - I bet it won't be as empty as we are used to it being after today!). With the kids in the car, we were able to see it across the street as it was at the Forum, but we didn't get very close. It was supposed to turn the corner at Crenshaw blvd, just over 2.5 miles from our house right during Mimi's party, so we were sure we would miss it.
But late at night, after all our other plans were taken care of -party was over, dinner date over, and the kids were off at a sleepover, we learned that the space shuttle was STILL at that corner of Crenshaw and MLK Blvds. Jay and I hopped in the car and drove the 5 minutes to the shuttle.
We were tired, but we said to each other, "this is why we live in LA!" --and it is. Cool stuff happens often and we love being a part of the city.
Still- there's something so surreal about seeing a space shuttle in your backyard... On the street you drive every day. It's amazing.

Weekend away

Just a few pretty images from a weekend away that we had last weekend. We attended a camp with our church that was not near as silent and peaceful as these images suggest... There were tons of other families there and our kids got to hike, play games with friends, stay up late, climb rock walls and challenge courses and generally exhaust their parents. But these are how good memories are made, right?
For my part, I've gone three years now - with one year off last year when I stayed home with our two littlest ones (we were a full house, with our two kids and the two little foster babes last fall) - so I remember that it feels so much better to bring sheets and handmade quilts to sleep under than sleeping bags.
Every one of our beds was outfitted this year, and that made our cabin all the cozier.

I won! (At the LAMQG meeting)

I am not sure what it is, but for some reason, I seem to be unusually "lucky" at our guild meetings. I think most of my readers and friends will agree I have been unusually "unlucky" in some aspects of my life - but for some reasons that doesn't pour over into my guild meetings.
This past Monday, it was our 3rd anniversary meeting. As they do for every anniversary meeting, our officers assembled an amazing array of giveaways. Everyone was given a ticket to put in one of four buckets.
I put my ticket into the one holding all the Lotta Jansdotter fabrics. (I'm a fan of hers and signed up to take a class with her in February, yippee!) One gal watched me putting in my ticket and said, "you know you're gonna win, you always win here at meetings." She was right! I must confess to jumping up and down when I won. Not only did I get he beautiful fabrics, I also was given the corresponding stationery set and the super awesome embroidered bucket.
Feeling grateful once again, to my guild... Not just because of what I won, though. I am much more lucky than just having won some fabric - I have won deep and beautiful friendships, love, shared experiences and inspiration from this beautiful group of people. I am rich indeed.

LAMQG - anniversary swap (what I got!)

How excited was I when my friend Jennifer picked my scrap bag for the anniversary swap with LAMQG?
First of all, everything Jennifer makes rocks. (She's kind of amazing) and second, I was allowed to specify what I wanted... And I totally knew what I wanted. For years, I've been meaning to make myself a really cute bedside book caddy... But I've been working on so many projects for other reasons and people, who has time to make something really useful for herself? Even if it is something I'd use every day? I read every night before falling asleep and you know I'm a bespectacled gal- fumbling for my glasses in the morning ... So I wanted A cute place for all of those things...
And Jennifer did NOT disappoint! She's kind of the unofficial queen of the spiderweb quilts these days, so it's fun to see she found another way to use a block (love it!). The whole thing is just super awesome... As is the little zippered pouch that goes with it.
And actually all the scraps weren't even mine to begin with... I'd forgotten to bring a bunch for the swap and it worked out really well for me that my pal Lauren, of Sew Modern, brought a huge bin of free scraps for us to dig through that day - I dug and look at the reward!

LAMQG Anniversary Swap - for Latifah

I can't wait to show you what I got from Jennifer in the LAMQG anniversary swap but in the meantime I need to show you what I made for Latifah.

Latifah specified that she wanted a pillow for her couch. She gave me a bunch of scraps left over from the workshop we took from Sherry Lynn Wood this summer and I had a great time making this for her. The hand quilting was a final addition that I'm so glad I did.

The funniest part about making it was that I made the quilted part first and then realized that no pillow was the exact size that I had made so I had to make my own pillow form as well. Not that big a deal - I went to a discount store and bought a regular pillow sized it down and then re-stuffed it.
I'm halfway tempted to make one of these for myself now, except when do I spend that kind of time on myself?

Clementine's quilt

This summer was the summer of so many babies born to close friends. Another one of my pals, Alissa, recently gave birth to baby Clementine! (who not only has the cutest name ever, she's kind of amazingly adorable....)

Well, baby Clementine, OF COURSE, needed a baby quilt... and my sewing machine was packed up all summer (as you know). So along with Amy's baby quilt - and Crockett's quilt - both quilted by hand... I had to make C's quilt. Only I started it after I had packed everything up, and thus had to hand piece the strips for her quilt. Yolanda had given me some really great precut strips a few months ago - remember the bag that I made for her when I was in Hawaii? (which she has with her every time I visit her in the hospital!)... well, those were the cool colored strips - these were the warm ones she gave me.

This entire quilt is hand stitched - except that I used a machine to attach the binding to the quilt. I was so excited to bring it over to Alissa - who is not only a guild member friend, and fellow mommy, but also a neighbor.

And as a bonus, I got to hold baby Clementine. She sent this cute pic of baby and quilt to me.

collage class - the first few weeks

Collage class started up again at Art Center. It was an interesting decision for me to try and figure out if I could go take the class without Franklyn as my teacher this time around. His passing left a major hole. It was especially noticable the first class. But Mary, who is also an amazing (and much less moody) Art Center professor - has been good for me.
She has each of us working on numerous small projects - one each week - which will end up quilt-like by the end of class. The funny thing for me is that I have years' (I'm not exaggerating when I say at least a decade's) worth of collected and half prepared materials for collages. Before I ever took collage out here in Los Angeles, I had a couple of amazing years of classes in Chicago as a student at the Art Institute continuing education program. I was even in a collage guild there.  I was in a certificate program, with an advisor and everything, and then had a baby and fell off the educational wagon for a few years- though my art never disappeared. Nor my love for collage.

Anyhow - all that comes together with my personality and makes my putting work together a really speedy process. In a way, it seems speedy - because I often leave class with 2-3 wet, finished pieces each night. I was feeling guilty about that for a while, but then I had a few thoughts... 1- my quilts, especially the hand quilted ones - take MONTHS to finish. Many of them take over 40 hours of work. So it's not that I am afraid of working hard or involved hours. And I'm an impulsive person - this is the good side of that! and 2 - the materials I have been using lately have been years in the making - I have about 100lbs of supplies that I bring to each class - many of them are treated materials, that I work on, put a layer of paint into - sew something onto - and then shove it back into the "file" to be used at a later date. Which means that it's not actually only 20 minutes to put together the piece - it's hours of work, paint drying, etc - just spread out over months.
So I'm feeling less guilty about that. Franklyn never liked how quickly I could work - but Mary doesn't frown on it. I've been told by many of my art teachers that I am PROLIFIC. I think sometimes that is meant well and sometimes it's looked down on as an artist. And I know that to be true for me from my very first foray into art. I never make one of something - I always make at least 5. I need that for my brain to settle.

I've recently come to understand that I am most definitely ADD. And not in the "can't focus" way - but in the "hyper-focus" way. And that's just the way I am. It explains why I can't ever sit still, why I am easily distracted, why i have to have something to do with my hands even when I am watching tv and why I do a billion things at once. I'm okay with that.

All that to say, here are some pics of the works I have recently done in the first few weeks of class. By now you know that I am in love with the red and brown color families - words, signs and quotes, silhouettes, books, my kids' artwork, my husband, travel, iphone photography, my children, scraps of old textiles and wallpaper, poetry, and trees. So there are some basic themes that continue to surface. I like to think, though, that each one of these is different enough. Some of them are explorations into my grief of the past year. Some of them are me being thankful for what I have - a healthy family, a new beautiful home in an amazing neighborhood, a marriage that is epically wonderful. I hope you can see that all coming through as well.

"dreaming"

"to be choked with tears"

"I'm remembering"

"it was all there"

"i wanted to be alone with you"