So the swatches have started coming in . . .

Below are swatches of some of my designs printed with the new Spoonflower color map.  I am  pleased. 

"Unexpected Full Moon"   

"Basket Weave"

"Beautiful Garden"

"Bee Cheater Quilt"

"Chainlink Coyote Flower"

"Cinnamon Swirl"

"Tiled Swirls"

"Vintage Triangles"

Bzzzz!

On Spoonflower, I have group of designs in a collection called Bzzzzz!  These designs are dedicated to the honeybee although you will not see the actual bee!

Carl in his outfit with his smoker.

Out by the bee hives.

I think in this picture he is adding a super to the top of the hive.

Coming back from the hive.  Our son  Jacob didn't like the bees much.

Long ago -- back in the late 1980s -- my husband, who is a patient man, decided to try his hand at keeping honey bees.  He chose the Italian strain because they were the most gentle.  He purchased two hives from a man who lived 20 miles south of us in Lawton OK.  He had a friend with a truck -- thank goodness for friends with trucks -- and they went to pick up the hives.  They had to cover the hives to transport them back.  That was the beginning.

The idea was to harvest enough honey to use and give to friends and family.  Our little sideline wasn't named Broken Foot Honey Farm until during our first harvest.

It was a cool foggy day in November.  Weather affects bees.  On cool, foggy wet days most bees like to stay indoors like people do.  But since my husband had the day off from work, he figured he might as well try to harvest the honey.  My children and I watched at a distance as Carl approached the hives looking like a white bear.  After he put some dry tinder in his smoker and started a fire, he looked like a smoky white bear.  The top was lifted off the first hive and smoke sent down into the hive. Bees began flying out but they weren't too upset because of the smoke. Suddenly the smoker went out, leaving the hive exposed and Carl standing there with no smoke to lull the bees into submission.

The bees went on the attack.  Carl yelled for me to bring him some tinder and matches.  So here are two things to NOT do if you are around angry bees: wear wool and have on a fragrance. (I had been at a parent-teacher conference at my children's school earlier in the day.)   As I got closer to the hives, the honey bees greeted me by going for my eyes.   The first thing honey bees go for are eyes. After all, what will you be able to do once you can't see?  Bees are so smart.

So, not being a calm person like my husband, I panicked, threw the tinder and matches in the general direction of my husband and started running.  The children enjoyed the show from the safety of the house.  My hair was long and the bees got tangled in with my hair which really enraged them.  In my running, I fell and broke my left foot.

Carl continued to work with the honey bees as I entertained the children.  I crawled toward the house.  Looking back, we laugh, but at the time, it wasn't funny.  The honey was delicious, and with each additional harvest, things went more smoothly.  Then we lost the hives to mites.  Nothing was done for a few years, then Carl got the urge to try beekeeping one more time.

It was 2005.  We drove to Tipton, OK, and purchased a hive from a beekeeper.  We still didn't have a truck that go that distance safely, and once you ask a friend with a truck to help transport honey bees, that's the only time you can ask that friend!  No, this time, the covered hive was placed in the trunk of our Ford Taurus sedan.  We made it home safely although we wondered for a time if this was another dumb thing that years later would give us a funny story.  We could hear the bees buzzing in the trunk.

We lost that hive.  Even the gentleman from whom we purchased the hive is having trouble keeping his bees now and his operation is big.  He transports hives all over the country -- California, Texas -- to pollinate the orchards.  His wife runs the tag agency in Elgin OK and we purchase honey from her.  This past year, though, the honey ran out in the spring.

I'm not sure what will happen if the honey bee population does not increase.  There are other insects that pollinate, but none so industrious as the honey bee.

The original is faded now so the scan didn't come through too well.  We used this logo on  our honey
and also on the greeting cards I sold in a florist's shop in Fletcher.


Here's a link to a brief video I posted 4 years ago on YouTube.  If you can listen closely -- once I quit yapping -- you can hear all the bees pollinating the corn.  Carl planted corn this year but there are no honey bees.

YouTube video I posted about honey bees

Su_G's Designs on Spoonflower

When I first saw the design "Manly Lines of Chalk" on Spoonflower, it immediately reminded me of the abstract artist, Paul Klee.  The vibrant colors combined with the design really came together.  Su has several other fabrics along this line that be coordinated with this fabric.   I ordered a fat quarter of the design printed on Spoonflower's Kona cotton.  The colors are very vibrant.  Check out the rest of her designs on Spoonflower.  Her shop can be found here.

Throw pillow made from Su_G's "Manly Lines of Chalk" design on Spoonflower.

Something New on Spoonflower -- Pillow Poetry

It was with great trepidation that I posted my latest offerings on Spoonflower this afternoon.  Trepidation because this time my new collection "Fat Quarters Collection" contains not only my designs based on my artwork and photographs, but also my words.  I have written stories and poetry since I was small.   Recently I wondered if perhaps some of my written creations would work well on fat quarters, a nice size for pillows. As I said in a previous blog entry, creating is wonderful, showing one's creations is risky business for I think all of us who create -- no matter what format -- view our creations a little like our offspring.

Fabric and some designers on Spoonflower

When I was small,  there was a department store, JC Penneys, located in the old Capitol Hill section of Oklahoma City. In late July my mother and I would drive there, walk down the stairs, and, in the basement of the store, were beautiful bolts of fabric.  Late July meant school would be starting in about a month and we were there to pick out fabric for my school dresses.  I could take a long, long time . . . probably what seemed like forever to my mother . . . deciding on what designs I wanted.  More importantly, though, was how did the fabric feel?  

When I found Spoonflower, I ordered one of the sample swatches books.  Lovely textures, especially the organic cotton sateen and the organic cotton interlock knit.   If you are involved with fabric, you are a tactile person too.  I used to do handmade papermaking, but making handmade paper is physically intense and the energy to do it has faded.  I still have quite a stash of handmade paper, though, and I enjoyed the years that I did it, taking workshops and sharing my craft.

There are so many imaginative, creative, talented people currently contributing to Spoonflower.  When I look at the designs, I feel like I can see a tiny bit of how that designer looks at things.  That is what art is, isn't it?  A manifestation of what is inside a person coming out.  It's a brave thing to do -- to create and let other people seen what one has created.

Here are some fabrics I have purchased recently from designers on Spoonflower:

I'm currently working on a pillow using designer Su_G's fabric design Manly Lines of Chalk. 

From left to right, back row: My Garden by Nekanen; Johnny Bump Ups by Beebumble; 18th Century Karakuri Tea
Serving Doll by Zandloopster.  Front row, left to right: Pick Me! by whimzwhirled and FlowerJournal II by weavingmajor. 

These images were taken out in my little house, Summersgaze, where there is only natural light, and a morning light at a northern angle at that.   I did not use a flash.  The colors are much more intense to the naked eye.  Maybe I should have used a flash, but I've provided links to all the fabric designs so they can be viewed in detail.

Summersgaze in Summer 2012

Who was the person who first uttered, "Life is what happens when you are making other plans."  (Was it Paul McCartney?  Not sure.)  In between life, this is what has been going on at Summersgaze.

First, my husband and I have been in the process of repainting the tiny house.  The poor wood is so thirsty, it drinks up the paint -- pumpkin -- so it's taking more paint than we had originally planned.  Still, it is coming along.  We got the three major walls finished yesterday, with just a few touch ups remaining.  Here are some pics:

Saturday 1:  Out of paint.  The east side is done, but we still needed to finish this south side, then begin on the north.
These tiny houses are great for experimenting -- my husband wanted to try his hand at installing
solar panels.  It worked!

Saturday 2:  Out of paint again.  At least all three major sides are completed save for touching up.
The porch will be the next focus.  Since I want the porch to set everything else off, I'm still thinking
about colors.  But I do know the door will be a shade of turquoise!

Clouds of Stars

Oklahoma summer sky

On Spoonflower one of the designers I follow asked me how I manipulated my Oklahoma summer sky photograph into Clouds of Stars which can be viewed in my Spoonflower Collection simply called Stars.

I took this photograph and loaded it into an on line photo and drawing site called Sumo Paint.  On that site, pick Filters, click and on the drop down and Distort will appear, click and more choices appear.  To get a star effect, I click on Kaleidoscope.  I sometimes use other effects before I take the photo on into Kaleidoscope.

I learned about Sumo Paint on the Spoonflower Fabric Designs Flickr group.  It's an easy to use program.  HOWEVER, within the last two weeks, I've been receiving cautionary warnings which pop up from McAfee virus protector about using this site.  I got a free app for Sumo through the Google Chrome store and put it on my Google Chrome browser.  I still get a brief warning from McAfee, but now I can access Sumo again.  I'm not sure what the issues are.  I just thought I needed to put that out there so users can be aware of this.

Spoonflower patches to the rescue again.

My daughter is a busy mother of three children, the oldest being 7 and the youngest an ornery 2, with a 5 year old in between.  She was in a rush the other morning cleaning, and as she later said, "I don't know why I was using bleach while wearing a good skirt."  The bleach splashed onto her black skirt.  She asked me if I could think of something to do and I thought about what I'd done with my Fossil bag.

I looked through my Spoonflower test swatches and found "Seems Like Old Times."  Since it's a pattern in repeatable squares, I clipped out one square with the pretty lady.  I used one of those squares that Spoonflower sends out with the printed fabric and used that as a backing.  Between, I put in a bit of quilt batting and sewed it up, using a top stitch across the small square.  I had an antique button just looking for a home and that was sewn in the corner.

You might have guessed by now that the buttons scattered across the skirt are where tinier drops of bleach landed.  Of course, looking at the photograph of my handiwork through the eyes of the camera, I could have done a better job of stitching.  To the naked eye, though, the skirt looks really cute.  I hope she likes it.

The lady in the design is from a scan of old sheet music that was purchased at an estate sale in the 1980s in Miami, Oklahoma.  The sheet music is from before 1920.  I included the lady in a collage I did a few years ago.  I chose the name for the fabric design. The sheet music the image was scanned from was not the same song as the title of  my design.  The look of the sheet music lady just reminded me of the song's performance by Diane Keaton in Woody Allen's "Annie Hall."

Carson

I have a collection of designs simply called "Carson."  Carson was the last name of my grandmother's grandparents.  If any of you have ever done any genealogy research for any length of time, you might have discovered, as I did, that even though I never met the individuals, the more I learned about them, the more I felt like I knew them.  A photograph of Lovina Jane Record Carson and her husband, Thomas Riley Carson, appears on my blog, Genealogy ending in Cowley County, Kansas ; more information about her can be found there.

My fabric design collection, "Carson"   on Spoonflower is dedicated to Lovina.  She was a milliner and she taught piano lessons, in addition to raising her children and helping her husband run their farm.  My grandmother gave me Lovina's travel trunk.  It traveled with her and her husband and their baby boy from Peoria County, Illinois to Cowley County, Kansas in 1874.  I am not sure exactly how old the trunk is but I date it on her travel date.

"Carson Star"

"Lost in Thought"

These two photographs show the design on which these fabric are based.  This lady rests on the interior lid of the travel trunk.  The first design, "Carson Star," is a crop of a detail  of the photograph of the lady.  The second design is a mirror repeat of the lady herself.  Both these fabrics work well together.  The fabric shown above is Spoonflower's Kona cotton.

Cinnamon Swirl

Bamboo blinds with morning sun shining.

Bamboo blinds manipulated with photo editing

Some designs I'm not too sure about until someone makes a comment.  In fact, you can tell this by looking at the name of the collection -- "Regrets, I've had a Few!"   Cinnamon Swirl is one of those designs.  One morning the sunlight was filtering through the lowered bamboo shade in the dining room and I took a picture. It was really quite lovely and I wondered what a fabric design would look like using that photo.  I uploaded the photo to Sumo Paint and fiddled with it until something showed up that I liked.  With Spoonflower's mirror imaging, the resulting design was something I liked. (Regarding Sumo Paint, for about the past week or so, there have been issues with that site.  It's an easy to use site and I read about it on the Spoonflower Fabric Design group on Flickr.  I'm not sure if the Sumo site has been revamped or what.)