Thing-a-day.com

So we bought this amazing piece of property, ten acres, two years ago with the plan to build in a few years. It is in the north Georgia Mountains, on a ridge surrounded 360 degrees by mountains. Our entire north view (which is what you want in the south) is protected. It’s less than 1/4 mile from a scenic overlook. Magical place.

Problem is no house plan worked for us and it. So, as usual, I did it myself. Started from scarth three times to get it right. My plan has been vetted by a house designer and most every detail has been researched and decided, so tomorrow we are meeting with the builder to give him a fat package of plans, photos, drawings, etc. so he can cost it out.

The design part has been full of elation and dread (”How the heck am I going to figure out a window plan?”) creative highs and paralysis. But I’ve been there done that so many times in my life (cried during breaks when I filmed my first TV show, “What made me think I wanted to do this?” a number of awards later and many hours of taping I’m so glad I forged through the scariness.) that I bit the bullet and kept going. No nial had been struck yet, I figured.

 It’s funny though how everything distills itself into the same thing. I am a quilt designer, with 30 books to my credit. I have stopped saying it to those who know me, but truly everything comes down to designing and making a quilt. The inspiration comes. You make a first sketch, rehearse fabric, stop, start, backwards, forwards. then start sewing. it goes along swimmingly and then you get stuck. You leave it on your design board and walk by it for days, “Please tell me what you want to be?” It does; you just have to be patient and open to it, and trusting. Sound familiar? Everything in life is like making a quilt.

And the more you exercise that creative muscle the better you get at it. (Thing-a-day!)

Although, then you step out on another limb and wobble precariously. Like having the nerve to design a house.

Here are the plan and supporting materaiss, plus my mockups for the stairs and cabinet handles all ready to go to the builder tomorrow. And the quilt–still in prgress as is the house design. The quilt has been my way of letting the house speak.

P.S. Appropriately enough, the center of the house is an aviary.

A little philosophizing:

That (this post’s title) is what this month has been about; the power of putting one’s mind to doing a little bit a day. Whether you worked on one project and made progress each day, or did a bunch of things, getting anywhere with anything requires constant work. If you touch it each day and make a tiny bit of progress, you’ll get there. When people ask me what I do for a living they are pretty amazed, but it isn’t so amazing when cut down into pieces: it really comes down to simply keeping on keeping on.

Last night at 11:15 I got into bed and cast on 116 stitches and knitted one row. It’s the start of my first knitted garment. In bits of time it will get done in time to wear for our trade show in May. The kitties didn’t want me to get and post.

I did the binding off last night. So rewarding! And I started the fringing and ran out of time. The Blue Sky Alpacas yarn is so sumptuous I want to go right into making something else with it!

P.S. Thing-a-Day was in maintenence last night. This is my Day #27 entry.

This is an easy knit, with just garter stitch (knit), leaving 7″ of yarn at the beginning and ends of the rows for knotting off. The pattern is from Vogue Knitting Scarves Two.

It’s still on the circular needles, ready for binding off. Yeah!

 P.S. This is my Day 26 entry.

We”ve had not only one, but a pair of pileated woodpeckers visiting our feeders recently. And every time I look out it seems I see a Yellow Bellied Sapsucker. So I had to add a woody to my quilt. As you can see, a comfortable kitty kept me from showing it to you on the entire quilt. I’ll put it on the fatter tree I had added. As you can see, it’s under Manny, the Maine Coon, bird lover extraordinaire.

Okay, so we may not be able to afford to add the fourth floor, the turret. If so,  a pitty since we have a 360 degree view of mountains. (Our property is less than 1/4 mile from a scenic pull off in the Georgia mountains–yes, we have mountains!) Then we’d have only three floors, a main floor media room, an aviary at the center of the house, and my fabulous studio.

 These are the blueprint printouts from Plan3D. I had invested a lot of time in using it before I learned of Google Sketchup. For a floorplan I’d go with Plan3d, but for a whole house Skecthup is going to catchup (sorry!) in usability real fast. Both have steep learning curves. What’s amazing is being able to walk through your house. That is invaluable.

This weekend I was determined to do nothing but work on our house plan so we can deliver it to the builder by my self-imposed deadline of March 1. Designing a house from scratch and putting all the details into a coherent form on paper is a huge undertaking. especially for one who has never done such a thing. (The nerve!) We’re looking for a good, solid preliminary price, then we’ll get a real house designer to make real plans. The task here is to find out if this thing costs X, 2X or 10X!

Between the living room and dining room of our house will be a bar area on the LR side and a serving counter on the DR side. Over the back of the bar/serving area will be lit open wood shelves. In the bar we have a curved tiled (I’ll paint the tiles) counter on the bar, with the back bar having our Kegerator (I make beer), a sink, beverage center, and counter. Saturday I finished up in the floor plan and worked out the detailed sheets that are below. As I said, I did nothing but work on the house this weekend (and excercise and make a fabulous pumpkin shrimp bisque and veal picatta) so I am tardy in posting this.

I included in the picture a photo of our front door, a window seat that will be in the kitchen, and the NE side of the house (studio below and DR above, and bedroom above that) that I’ve designed in Plan3d.

This would have been my Feb 23rd post.

Stitched my test swatch for a tank I’m going to make. It measured perfectly, so with the gauge down I can now start the tank. Yeah!

Tada!

Noro yarn and a great pattern from KnittingDaily.com

My Fickle Finger Scarf is almost done! Thanks to several days of waiting rooms.

Since our new house will be high in the trees in the north Georgia mountains, I am carrying that theme throughout the house. At the center of the house is a staircase, the kind that switches back with a landing halfway up,  flanked on one side by the two-story aviary. My idea is to make it look like you’re walking up through the woods. Here’s the inspiration photo:

I’m planning to use those lovely round balustrades (the name for the vertical spindles that march up the staircase) that delicately taper to the top as does a candle.

For my first stab at a trial I cut dowels 12″ long at an angle and sanded them. I held them up to our current railing to take this picture. We don’t have marching railing, so this is all I could do for now. (We had the wall filled in to house my husband’s humungous stereo/video system.) So, envision these marching and stained. The angle on the ends is greater than what shows here. I’m playing with making drawer pulls for the cabinets throughout the house with fatter dowels, but same angled idea.

Aha! Yes, it did need a big tree, to give the impression of looking through trees at trunk level. The small trees are what I had before; the large tree is what I added. This is more like it! I also added more leaves. I’m still thinking a batik pileated…

Here’s my reason for not posting yesterday:

Rimsky the Siberian Forest Cat followed me up to my studio and made himself at home as I prepared tree branches for the quilt. No, I couldn’t disrupt his nap to put the branchs on the quilt and take a picture. So today I am reporting two rounds of 20-minute sessions.

I had decided that making the branches brown would be better, and sure enough, it proves to be so. Today I made some leaves by first seaming two piece of fabric together, then ironing freezer paper leaf shaped cutouts onto the wrong side of the fabrcis, trimming about 1/4″ seam allowance and pressing, then gluing it to the backside.

Now I’m thinking I need real trees rather than the sapling sized trees I have now. Which brings up the question of whether I want the trees to stop within the frame of the quilt, or go past as if one is looking through the trees. I’ll mull over that. Lots more leaves to make anyway. And more birds. I did hear a Pileated Woodpecket while I was last at the property. Not to mention the Sandhill Cranes migrating overhead…

I added yet another row to the background of my house study bird quilt today. Now it’s ready for the applique!

Am making headway on this scarf I started this week. have learned knitted cast on. Learning anything takes putting time into it.

Thing-a_day was down last night so i didn’t get to post this:

The new batch of batik fabrics arrived from Hancock’s of Paducah yesterday, so today I turned my attention back to this quilt. I am hoping to get it done in time for a hanging at a quilt show in New York State at the end of March. They have requested an exhibit of my bird quilts. I wrote a book of paper pieced bird quilts, but this is quite different, so it’d be fun to add it to the mix.

I made two more background strips–the top two. And I quickly made a piece of bias for a tree just to give my brain a beginning taste of what it is looking like. I’m thinking I’ll switch from green to bark colors, but at this point, it gives me insight into how it is coming along. I’ll make one more row of background–at least that was the original plan.

Making things involves traial and error and tweaking and trying again. Even with commercial clothing patterns. Variances in fabrics, the bod it’s on and the phase of the moon converge to make finished garments often look different from those on the pattern envelope.

This blouse turned out a little differently than I expected from the drawing on the pattern envelope. (Patterns with photos show better what the garment will look like than drawings.) The elastic fell at the waist, which seemed okay starting out, but in reality it needed to be higher–at least for me. So tonight I added a row of elastic above the one the pattern called for at the waist. Better. When I make it again I’ll probbably put three rows of elastic and maybe even forget the waist and move them up a few inches. It’ll make it fall better as well.

 Moral of the story: make a trial garment. That’s what this is.

Here’s the blouse with a sweater my mom gave me. I made the necklace as well.

This is a scarf I started today so as to learn a few more knitting skills. It’s a knit/purl pattern with fingers at the edges. The fingers are made by making 5 knit caston stitches at the end of a row, then binding the 5 stitches off.

The traditional quilt made in a beginner class is a sampler. The variety of blocks starts the student off learning the most basic skills and she works her way along with a bit more of a challenge with each new block. And in the end she has a finished quilt and has made many of the traditional favorite block designs.

But samplers are looking a little, um, dated these days, so I sketched up an Updated Sampler to play with. I made up three blocks, but have decided that they need to be bigger. I’m going to redo them as 16″ blocks rather than the 12″ shown here. The larger scale I believe is one element in giving it a fresh look. It will also require fewer blcoks thus making it a faster projetc. I’m thinking I’ll stick with eight solid fabrics for the quilt, though it may need a taste of a zinger here or there. We’ll see.

Back to the cutting table…

Today I was at SoCon ‘08, the social media unconference in Atlanta from early to fairly late. So my “Thing” for the day is a little brain work. Pictured here are some of the elements involved in planning our new kitchen.

On the right are the cork flooring samples that arrived last week. The Corian countertop samples are on the bottom, with the cabinet stains above and part of my layout on top. This house is quite some creative process!