Tammy Gilley Studios

Christmas In Stitches

 

I've been having so much fun stitching, stitching, stitching, cooking a turkey, stitching, stitching, drinking egg nog lattes, stitching, stitching, and more stitching.

I'm finding the relaxed, quiet pursuit of hand-applique to be especially wonderful right now.  It seems I have a lot of irons in the fire these days, and the ability to sit down with a bit of handwork and sort of "check out" from the busy-ness in my world goes a long way for me.

 
I've been working on some Christmas projects, just for fun.  Tres festive, n'est-ce pas?  I had a lovely (and ambitious) idea to make up a little village of these Christmas cottages.  But when I got one finished, I thought, "well, that wasn't as fun as I had hoped it would be" and I stopped there.  So.  I have a cute little Christmas cottage.  No further plans to develop a subdivision at this time.  Much less a village.

What I did find to be even more fun than I anticipated was a couple of applique projects.  I've been playing around with different applique methods for several months, and think I've settled on my favorite.  My chosen way-to-applique is probably the least fancy, the most basic...which is probably why it works for me.  I mean, after all, I'm just a not-so-fancy, pretty-basic girl, really.

I call this one "Winter Birds".  I love the way felted wool stitches up.  It's super-easy, because there are no raw edges to turn under.  But for this project I wanted to do a mix of felted wools and some other fancy (okay, sometimes I get a little fancy!) fabrics like a bit of vintage brocade, velvet, and silk.  Those fabrics needed turning-under, so this was a good little project for experimentation.  And I love the way it turned out. 

This one, as yet un-named, is mostly cottons, and entirely hand stitched.  Nope.  Not a machine-sewn stitch on the whole block.  Super fun! 

I love the primitive feel of both of these pieces, and the palettes, too.  I see a little pieced patchwork border around my Winter Birds, then making it into a pillow.  Not sure about the snowman.  He'll either wind up as a pillow, too, or I might create some other blocks and do a small winter wallhanging, which could be fun. 

For now, they are both clothes-pinned across the door to my studio, as inspiration.

Sew Thankful

Oh.  I know.  Terrible pun.  Overused.  However, it's appropriate for this post, you'll have to give me that! 

 
I've been stitching up a storm for Thanksgiving!  Sweet little pillows and art quilts, with sweet little sentiments of the season.

 

Although, they're certainly wonderful for the rest of the year, too.

I've done all of these entirely by hand, and am loving working on this small scale.  Although they're not really instant gratification projects, there is something quite satisfying about thevariety of embellishements and fabrics and even composition that made them such a joy to create.

 I utilized a lot of scrappy little bits of vintage and new fabrics including bark cloths, silks, linens and cottons, added buttons, vintage pearls, beads, and other goodies, and just sort of let them create themselves, based on what my eyes landed upon in my little glass-topped treasure tins.  So.  Much.  Fun.

 And with each stitch and embellished bit, sitting in my comfy chair, sipping tea, and listening to great music, I truly was thankful for all that's going right in my world.  I sometimes let stress get the best of me, and I forget to slow down, sit quietly in this moment, and appreciate the abundance of beauty and blessings I have every single day. 

And to be truly thankful.

Mostly, right now, I'm really, really thankful for scrappy little fabric-layered poppies...

All of this Thanksgiving goodness is available on my Etsy shop.  Sweet little nothings for cozy corners of your harvest home.

Fall Backwards

 
Fall has finally settled into the Pacific Northwest.  The trick-or-treaters have come and gone.  Daylight savings time ended in the wee hours this morning, which means I gained an entire hour of busy-ness when I got up.  I had the Halloween decorations put away, and the Thanksgiving turkeys out before my coffee had finished brewing.  Very satisfying to feel that accomplished so early in the day! 

As a reward, I fixed some oatmeal, drank my coffee, and started stitching.  Black bean soup is on the stove to simmer for the rest of the day.  Thinking about some homemade corn bread to go with it.  Anyone have a good recipe?

 
 And this is the sort of nose-to-the-grindstone deadline I love:  my In Stitches class begins on Thursday over at Joggles, so I'm winding up my lesson plan today to send over to Barb.  There is still time to sign up, if you're looking for a great project for these shorter, cooler days.  Nothing better in the evening than a good bit of handwork and a little jazz on the iPod, I always say.

In fact, I love to have several things going on at once.  I like having some sort of patchwork project at the ready at my sewing machine.  Right now, I'm finishing up a fall-ish table runner for the dining room.  It's so festive!  Can't wait to get it done.  Hopefully this week, so we can enjoy it before Thanksgiving.

Then, I love to have a few bits of handwork in the basket next to my chair in the family room.  My In Stitches project fits the bill nicely.  I'm also working on a few little Thanksgiving decorations.  Before I know it, it'll be time to stitch some Christmas goodies!

Love, love, love this time of year!

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like...

...dare I say it?!  Christmas!!

Well, around the studio it is! 

I've been slowly cleaning out my studio.  Finding new homes for lovely vintage papers and embellishments (to make room for more fabric!  Egads!)  In my organizing a month or so ago, I found all of my vintage Christmas goodies.  Papers, trims, ephemera, German scrap.  What fun!  And I thought, rather than just package them up for peeps to buy, I'd make one last lovely vintage holiday banner, and sell the kits.

  

And, guess what?  You've got lots and lots of time to create your very own before the holiday craziness hits!  Buy a few kits and have craft night with your favorite crafty chicks!

So, without further ado, may I present the Be of Good Cheer Holiday Banner Kit. (shown in photos above) So sweet.  Vintage-y holiday fun.  Lots of little doo-dads, warm holiday messages like "all hearts come home for Christmas".  Lots of red and green vintage wallpaper bits.  Vintage lace, sheet music, text pages...all with that marvelous old patina of age.  Yummy yum yum.

I've also created the Holly Jolly Vintage Paper Pack (shown below), chock-full of red and green papery goodness: vintage wallpaper, sheet music, ribbons, vintage postcards and greeting cards, German scrap.  Oh, and get this:  pages from magazines circa 1940's-1960's!  I know!  Glamour and Better Homes & Garden.  November issues!  So there's holiday fashion, entertaining, and really great advertisements!  Plus, lots of extra little goodies, just for fun.

Use them to further embellish your Be of Good Cheer banner, or create several new banners.  The possibilities are limited only by your imagination...which I know, is boundless. 

Due to the vintage wonder-full-ness of both these items, yours will be unique in all the world.  It will have all of the components in some configuration, but images, colors, and such will vary.  You do vintage.  You get it.

And because my blog readers are my favorite-ist peeps around, here's my holiday gift to you:  sold separately, the Be of Good Cheer Holiday Banner Kit and the Holly Jolly Vintage Paper Pack are $20 each, plus $5 shipping via USPS Priority Mail.  I'm making them available at a discount for you:  buy both, get them for $35, and pay only $5 total shipping for both.  Merry, merry, ho ho ho!  Simply leave me a comment here, and I'll send you a Pay Pal invoice for the combo pricing.  If you only want one or the other, they're both available on my Etsy shop. 

  
Get yours while you can save money. 10 bucks will buy a couple of egg nog lattes!

 

Round and Round It Goes

I'm working on a round robin journal with a group of pals from Artfiberfest:  Linda, Jeanne, Cindy, and Juanita.   We wanted to keep the spark and inspiration of Artfiberfest going and growing, even though the event itself, sadly, has come to an end.

Linda lives here in Portland, so she and I got together a few weeks ago to work on our journals in her studio, before sending them off to the next round.

I decided on a quilty cover, with a combination of gesso'd (gessoed?  oh, hell, canvas pages with gesso smeared on them!) and watercolor paper pages.  I thought it would be fun to see which way people went with their page choices. 

I love a round robin project.  It's so fun to see other artists' journals, and to add my own creativity to their books.  And it makes my heart sing to get my own journal back, with pages filled by other artists.  Yummy yum yum.

 
Will keep you in the creative loop as this project progresses.  Fun, fun!

Spooktacular!

 
Didsome stitching over the weekend, in candy corn colors.

A little applique.  Playing around.  Testing techniques.  Trying different approaches.

I think I've settled on my favorite way to applique cotton to cotton.  It's been stumping me for awhile, so it feels good to have figured out something that works for me.  I've tried several different methods, but none of them felt quite right, or gave me the effect that I was after.  I'm going to go with this one for a few more projects, perfecting it a bit as I go, and I think I'll just about have it.

In the meantime, these are done.  A little bit of patchwork, a little bit of applique.  A whole lot of spooktacular fun!

 

Dog is my Co-Pilot

A change of scenery.  That's what we needed.  So, My Beloved on the Harley and Kip and I in the Pod, we headed to southern Oregon, the "Banana Belt of the Pacific Northwest" to have a bit of Indian summer sunshine and badly needed R&R.

 
My all-time favorite southern Oregon setting is Ashland.  And Saturday was the perfect day to spend there.  The sun was out in full-force, the trees were beginning their lovely fall colors, and there wasn't a cloud in the sky.  I wandered into a few of my favorite shops, but spent most of the afternoon wandering around outdoors.  The weather was perfect for window-shopping. 

This little sidewalk cafe outside Ashland Springs Hotel was very inviting. 

Opened in 1925 as the Lithia Springs Hotel, it's right in the middle of everything in downtown Ashland.  It was later named the Mark Antony Hotel, playing off the famous Ashland Shakespearean Festival.  It had become quite run-down in the 1980's, I think, and was threatened with permanent closure.  In the late 1990's a couple purchase the hotel and gave it a beautiful renovation and restoration.  It is now on the National Trust for Historic Preservation register as one of the Historic Hotels of America.  And it is lovely.

While toodle-ing around in the Pod (with the top down, naturellement), I spied this message on the side of a lovely church.  I had to pull into the parking lot and take a photo.  Just the reminder I needed. 

Back in Medford, I visited old neighborhoods and haunts, drove past my family's old house, and another that my grandmother designed and my grandfather had built for her.  My grandparents were business owners there for many years.  This is a building that my grandmother designed in the 1950's near downtown Medford. 

All too soon, it was time to load up the car and return home. 

We took the long way, meandering up curvy highways, through forest and farmland, avoiding as much of the freeway as possible.

Oregon has about 50 covered bridges, and this one is near Canyonville.  It's in a beautiful setting, and the water in the Umpqua River below is so, so clear. 

I can't remember where we were when I shot this out my windshield, but it's pretty typical of our drive from southern Oregon into the Willamette Valley.    Beautiful open fields, surrounded by thickly wooded forests.  

And here's my co-pilot, keeping me company, listening to my stories and nonsense for hours and hours. 
 

Slowly, Gently

Coaxing the muse.  Inviting her in for a bit of play, a little patchwork.  Three-inch log cabins.  So cute.  Making them soothes my soul.  Quiet work. 

 

Seems to be my M.O. right now.  Slow, quiet work.  Is it the change of seasons, I wonder?  My to-do list is long and daunting.  So.  I'm ignoring it.  I just can't quite face it right now.  So many ideas.  So many plans.  But no motivation to take action on any of them.

 

Which leads me to believe they are the wrong ideas.  And the wrong plans.  Am I forcing this?  Is it really a lack of motivation or some cosmic message from the universe that I've gotten off track? 

 

Such deep thoughts for only my second cup of coffee this morning.

 
In the pages of my journal, the recurring theme is transition.  Sort of like the photo of me when I was 9 or 10 at Four Corners in the southwest: my feet in Colorado and New Mexico, my hands in Utah and Arizona.  I seem to have my feet firmly planted in the past, while my hands are reaching for the future.  Part of me ready for what's next, the other part of me afraid to move on. 

 

So, I sit here quietly making my little log cabin blocks, trying to be present in this moment.  Taking deep breaths.  Not hurrying through anything.  Just.  Being.  Here.  Ruminating on some ideas that haven't made it to the to-do list, because they are a little raw, not quite baked.  But fun to think about, because it's "the good stuff".  The big picture, dreamy kind of stuff that a big to-do list and too many plans force to the back burner, when really, they are just the projects I want to be working on now.  So part of this slow, quiet work is allowing those dreams to come into sharper focus, and I can actually see them taking shape.  Becoming possible.  Wow. 

And that brings me back to this theme of transition.  Merriam-Webster has this to say:

 ¹tran·si·tion

Pronunciation: \tran(t)-ˈsi-shən, tran-ˈzi-, chiefly British tran(t)-ˈsi-zhən\

Function: noun

Etymology: Latin transition-, transitio, from transire

Date: 1551

1 a : passage from one state, stage, subject, or place to another : change  b : a movement, development, or evolution from one form, stage, or style to another
2 a : a musical modulation b : a musical passage leading from one section of a piece to another
3 : an abrupt change in energy state or level (as of an atomic nucleus or a molecule) usually accompanied by loss or gain of a single quantum of energy

 

Yes.  Definitely.  I feel a passage from one stage to the next.  (If only I could get my feet out of Colorado and New Mexico!)  But it's definitely there.  I am standing at the door.  And stitching these little log cabin blocks is giving me the respite I need before crossing the threshold.  I need a little fortification.  A little peace and quiet.  I'm feeling pulled to do work, to create, that really feeds my soul.  Upon reflection, I see that a lot of my work in the last year, while I've loved it, has been done in anticipation of what the market wants, what people will purchase.  And less about what is good and pure and unabashed, run-for-your-life, passionate kind of work.  It's not that one is better than the other.  Both serve a purpose, no doubt.  But as I stand on the welcome mat at this doorway, and peek through the little peephole, I catch a glimpse of wonder-full-ness.  That these two parts are not separate, not mutually exclusive, but can create one really fantastic whole.  It's not a new idea, to be sure.  I'm not discovering any new worlds or curing cancer here.  But I think I am finding my own way in the world.  Hoping to bring a little joy to people around me through my art, and to myself as well.  It's not rocket science.  It's just a lifestyle, a journey, a peace I want to find.

 
I am welcomed.  Open.  The.  Door. 

Happy

Isn't it funny how all of the sudden it turns from summer to fall?  It seems to happen overnight.  Suddenly my toes are freezing in their flip-flops, and clogs are required footwear.  With socks in the morning, only to shed them after lunch when the sun warms up the afternoon.

 
 Instead of opening the windows wide, wide open in the morning, I only crack one or two open for a bit of fresh air. 

400-count sheets are replaced by 800-count sheets.  The cotton blankets are laundered and put away for next spring, and the heavier blankets and quilts come out of the linen closet to cozy up under.

Of course, I still eat ice cream.  Only now, my scoop sits on top of hot, homebaked apple crisp.  Pumpkins and apples take the spots of peaches and strawberries at the farmers market.

The days get shorter, inviting me to curl up in my favorite chair with a cup of tea and a little bit of stitching.

Chez Moi

If you've gotten here via the Quilting Arts virtual studio tour, and even if you haven't, welcome! 

 
There's lots going on in here, so sit back, kick off your shoes, have a cup of tea, and take a lookie-loo around my cozy little nook.

 

I'm very fortunate, because I have a room of my own, as Virginia Woolf advocated.  I love having a space where I can go to stitch, design, cut and paste, or just relax.  I have lots of treasures throughout my studio that inspire me.  Photographs, art journals, stacks of fabrics, cans of colored pens.  My studio makes me happy, happy, happy.

 

I call this Command Central.  Phones.  Dayplanner.  Computer.  Coffee.  Perfect.

This is my cutting table.  Best purchase I ever made.  Love having a place to stand up and work.  Keeps the tight shoulder muscles at bay.  It's not always tidy in here, and I often have to clear my tabletop in order to cut fabric or work on a project.  I know that would make some people a bit crazy, but I work really well amidst the flotsam and jetsom of my little corner of the world.  Until one day I don't.  And then I have to tidy up around the studio, put things away, get organized.  Then I can get back to work.  I've always worked this way.  Lots of messy productivity, followed by a quiet period of organization and planning. 

I like having little places to put little things.  Little cabinets with little shelves for little jars of buttons.  Little chests with little drawers for little beads and baubles.  It helps me stay organized, which is a feat unto itself.

 

This was my dad's computer desk.  It was a basic 70's brown stain.  I stripped it, restained the top, and gave the base a very green and shabby painted face lift.  I'm so happy with the way it turned out!
 
 

 This is a portrait of my mother as a young girl, painted by my great Auntie Jean.

An antique upright chest of drawers where I keep all sorts of goodies.  Each drawer is filled with vintage jello molds, and each of those holds little bits of bootie to create with.  Sometimes I just open a drawer for inspiration.

This antique spool chest came from my mom's sewing room.  I love having it in mine now.

 Just a peek inside the drawers...

 

A place to stitch.  Of course.

 
 Rick rack.  Yummy yum yum!  The case is an antique display case for hair nets.  Love it!

On my sunny windowsill.  Vintage toothpick holders.  Pretty, pretty.

 And, oh, how I love vintage seam binding...

...and vintage ribbons.

 Pretty little things on a shelf.

 

One can never have too many supplies!  Because I'm a quilter who also loves my art journals, I need a place (and supplies) to do both.  It makes for some tricky space planning, and I seem to throw it all out into the hallway and start over about twice a year.  I think I've got my studio organized the way I like it now.  Check back in six months.

 

This is one of those old mirrors from the 60's I'm guessing...the frame is plastic!  It was painted cream with gold highlights...I know you know what I mean.  Got it at a junk store for $5, brought it home, and gave it a banana green paint job.  Fun, fun, fun!

 Just another view of my cutting table.  I always seem to reduce my workspace by quite a lot with all the things I like to have in front of me when I'm working.  It works for me, though.  Love to have my things around.

 
I use the shelves above my cutting table for pretty things.  I found it was sort of a hassle to climb up over my table everytime I needed something there, so I re-arranged.  Pretty things in plain sight.  Books and tools on a shelf in the closet.  (No, I'm not giving tours of the closet.  You know why.)

This is where the bobbins live.

And no studio is complete without an Emergency Station: hand lotion, seam ripper, and a dish for M&Ms.  Oh, and an Eiffel Tower eraser.  Naturellement.

Thanks for visiting my little studio.  I loved showing you around.  Come back and see me any old time.  Cheers!