Rainy Day Creativity

The day started out partly cloudy and it took until almost one o'clock for the partially mowed grass to dry out enough for me to get out the mower. Then, before I could get the second half of the front yard mowed, the rain began. Nothing heavy, but enough to make me decide to save the rest of the mowing for another day. With Bruce at work, the afternoon is "free for me" time...no football, no baseball...no TV at all, just the sound of the rain, the birds, and the insects getting ready for fall weather to arrive.

So I decided to start with a little culinary creativity...nothing fancy, but an easy, quick late evening meal for the inevitable Sunday Night Football game...Buffalo Chicken Sliders. The recipe is from a Kroger coupon flyer we got in the mail around Super Bowl time last year. So easy, but so good, too!

 

Ingredients: 1/4 c. butter, 1/4 cup honey, 1/2 cup hot sauce, one rotisserie chicken (shredded) , red onion, lettuce, slider buns, blue cheese or ranch dressing, celery sticks

Heat the butter, honey, and hot sauce in a pan until the butter is melted and the honey is dissolved. Add the chicken. Heat through.

 

 Fill slider bun with buffalo chicken, top with onion and lettuce. Serve with celery sticks and dressing. You can add the dressing to the sandwich, too, if you like.

 My personal suggestion: Use Frank's Red Hot Wings Buffalo sauce. It was the "secret ingredient" in the original 1964 buffalo wings made famous by the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, NY. Yum!

Once tonight's dinner was safely stored in the refrigerator, I decided to pull out a long-neglected art quilt that I started several years ago when I took a summer workshop at the Dayton Art Institute. The instructor, quilter Cathy Jeffers, does some pretty amazing work, so check out her website! Anyway, she invited me over to her house last weekend to pick up some fabric and other art supplies that she was donating to my art room. Wow, I do appreciate that!

While I was there, she pulled out some quilts she's been working on and then she asked me...the dreaded question...so...have you ever finished that mermaid quilt you started during my workshop???  Sadly, I had to admit to not quite getting to the fabric finish line. So today, I got out the quilt and my sewing machine...and discovered that I was not as close to finishing as I had remembered. Here are a few close ups of some areas, but there is a lot of work still to be done!

 

Actually, I'm a little bit glad that I hadn't finished the quilt because now I have a fresh take on the project and some new ideas for how I want to finish it up. Expect a progress report soon...I hope

Projects in Progress

During the last few weeks of August, I was able to work on a few ideas for coloring and embellishing a collection of silk scarves in a variety of sizes and weights. The scarves are white when I get them and the first step is to wash them all to get out any sizing or residue on the fabric. After that comes the fun of dying and painting the scarves. It's a messy task, so my goal is to have all the dye work completed before the cold weather sets in. I can easily do the hand-painting, stenciling, and beadwork in the house later with a minimal amount of mess.

One technique I'm using is quite simple, but makes an elegant scarf, especially on the heavier weight silks. The scarf is first dyed a solid color. The dye is then heat set to make it colorfast and the pattern is added using either stencils, as in the picture, or by hand painting with metallic fabric paints.

Some of the scarves are a very light weight, semi-sheer silk and lend themselves quite nicely to sponge painting techniques, which give them a watercolor appearance. This is my first attempt at adding a simple beaded fringe to one of these scarves. It's a little more time consuming, but something that I can easily do while watching "Project Runway" or just about anything on HGTV! 

 This scarf didn't quite work out the way I planned, but the result is still interesting. I first wet the scarf, then sponged and brushed the silk paints randomly on the surface. After that, I sprinkled salt crystals on the wet surface, sprayed water over the salty surface, and let the salt react with the dyes.

 

I'm thinking about adding some beading fringe to the ends where the color becomes softer...or would that be too much with all this color and pattern?