Julie Zaccone Stiller - High Fiber Content

This is the final blank square available on Susan's "Flower Power" exquisite corpse, the final Corpse I got to work on for Round One. I had the edge of Nellie's and Carolyn's work peeking out to give me clues, as well as the corner of the adjacent square (forgot who the artist was). The colors and patterns showing gave a little clue about where to take my work on this piece.
Also, Carolyn wisely included a small amount of dark red seed beads that she had used on her piece, I went ahead and incorporated them into my bead work and they really help to pull our two sections together.
Under the needle. Applying some tulle net to cover up the Angelina fibers.
Free motion quilting around the flowers.
The flat work done, now it was time to add some beading, which I took a lot of pictures of!
Do you recognize the fabric from my recently created skirt?
I happened to have the exact same fabric as Carolyn used, so I made sure to put some in the design, right up against the edge that adjoined her square. Out of all the fabrics in the world, it was a nice coincidence, eh?


You can see the dark red seed beads here, on the left is Carolyn's bead work that was showing, and then mine towards the right.
I also re-used some of the fabric I had turned into fusible fabric for leaves for Vero's Exquisite Corpse, there was lots available in my fusible box.
This is how the whole piece looked after I was done with it. My square is uncovered since it was getting sent right back to the originating artist, Susan.
A good shot of my piece overall, showing the edges of the other squares and how I overlapped/abutted.
I tried to tuck the fabric I was using under the edge of Nellie's work to have it leave no trace of the background, almost successful!

I felt I was fairly successful in integrating my final square into the existing work.

Here is another one of the True Colors books that has passed through my hands, we're almost done with this round robin exchange. The theme of this book originated by Misty Frederick is Forest Floor .
We got to do one page, which was nice thick cardboard/fiberboard (no buckling problems!), mine had an existing rectangular cutout to the following page. Visible here is part of a green fiber labyrinth page which was very cool. I made a kind of foldy-door that covered part of the window.

Finally I got to use those coppery leaves I've had for ages, along with some watercolor crayoned paper, brown tissue paper, magazine pictures, words from the phone book "forest floor", a foresty kind of playing card in greenish photocorners.

This month, of July (eep! July already!) for Self Portrait Challenge the assignment is SKILL. Showing in self portrait format what we are skilled at.

For the first week I decided to go with showing off my clothesline skill. Yes my friends (I got that from hearing too many speeches on NPR from John McSame), I'm a champion clothes pinning out champ. Nothing falls off into the dirt weeds grass flowers below.

This year I'm trying harder not to use my dryer to save energy (and not heat up the house during the summer). We do however run each line-dried load through the dryer just on air for a little bit, otherwise we'd have too much Zelda hair on everything. Plus everyone complains about the crunchy towels otherwise, geez, buncha wimps!

According to Project Laundry List, if everyone used a clothesline we could save 6-10% of our energy usage in the US. That's huge! Sure it takes a few extra minutes, but not that much really, and I will confess it feels like a connection across the years to my immediate and further into the past ancestors.
I'm out here every day almost, once or twice in the morning, once in the afternoon. A lot of times I pause to check out the butterflies or hummingbirds.
And I also look over the fence to see what is rustling in the underbrush. Which is usually one of our cats or occasionally Zelda, sometimes it is a wild rabbit or quail though.

I don't have many others to compare myself against as far as this clothes pinning thing though. My husband will do it occasionally but he just throws everything over the line, no pins, hoping for the best. At least he's helping, right! I surely do appreciate that. Guess I better teach my two boys how to do it, since they're so interested in all things environmentally friendly that will be my in, not the oh boy it is fun to do chores, that one never seems to work.

It is finally time to start our weekly visits to Camp Joy, our local organic bio-dynamic farm where we are part owners. Well participants in the CSA anyways. CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture, you pay a lump sum before the growing season begins, enabling the farmers to buy supplies (seed,etc.) and then you get a weekly basket of whatever the farm produces over the season.
Camp Joy also has a flower share where you can get an organic bouquet every week, so far I haven't been decadent enough to spring for one. Mostly because I'm so self-deluded that I'll be growing *plenty* of flowers for as many bouquets as I want from my own garden, riiiiight.

So here are my Passionate Purple blocks back for the final addition of the 3rd circle. Aren't they looking great? Especially compared to how they looked at the beginning in April, with just the purple background, almost boring even though there are all those luscious purples. Jaye and Adrienne both have great fabric stashes and even better fabric sense, so it is fun to see what they choose to pair with which fabrics.

I'm soooo curious to see how they will all look when chopped up. We've decided on cutting the blocks into 4 triangles, which makes for a very versatile unit to play with.