I've not been entirely idle

I thought I'd start the year with a new cushion cover and having got Carol Taylor's "Art Quilt Design" dvd for Christmas it seemed a good idea to have a go at Carol's technique. She creates the background cloth by bonding fabrics (different weights of fabric) onto a calico/muslin ground. That's okay I thought, I have lots of bits of sheers, velvets, silks, furnishing fabrics etc I'll have a go. Nope... I had lots of fabrics but not enough of anything to create a piece big enough for the cushion I had in mind. What I did find lurking though was a pack of dupion silks in various shades. Carol cuts out the squares and rectangles and throws them effortlessly into a homogenous whole - me, well it looked like the dogs dinner. In the end I did end up with something fairly useful. Next step is to couch yarn round the shapes the couch more yarn on top of the whole thing in circles. Time to try out my new number 43 foot for the Bernina. It worked a treat on the outlining but circles I found more difficult. This is a bit of the larger 26" square I made. By the time I'd got this far (it takes far more time than you realise) I'd had second thoughts about the circles. In fact about the whole cushion thing. What was I doing even contemplating putting couched yarn on something that would get pawed by the dog and thrown on the floor by the men of the house. I must be nuts. Now what was I going to do with it?

Not a problem, I turned some of into my January 'Doodle' theme postcards. I call them "Not Quite Crazy Doodles"

Don't know about you but when I doodle on paper I have a tendancy to create shapes, squares, circles, triangles etc and fill them and their edges with pattern. I rarely doodle faces or houses mine tend to be floral or geometric patterns. I really enjoyed doodling with threads to create these cards. So much so that I shall make my January Journal Page for the Contemporary Quilt 2010 challenge this way and use up a bit more of my 'cushion cover'.

My postman brought me cards with the same 'doodle' theme from Doreen, Jennifer, Chris and Cindy.

These are Cindy and Jennifers cards, they have created zendoodles.

Whilst Jennifer and Doreen have doodled with machine embroidery.

Last month's theme was 'Poem" and I was unable to show Lorna's card as it arriving after I'dleft for Austria. The Owl is a wonderful bright pink and her background is of threads under a layer of sheer then quilted. It looks much nicer in the flesh.

I'm sure many of you will have made resolutions but this year I've not done so. I only last a few weeks anyway before I break them. What I have done though is challenge myself to get to know some of the software I have on my pc better. I've had Electric Quilt for quite some time and upgraded last year to version 6 but have done very little with it. To this end I've enrolled on two courses with the Quilt University. My second challenge is to get to grips with Photoshop. I'm not too bad with Paintshop Pro and its a good jumping off point for Photoshop. However I'm slower with it and instead of working my way through the difficulties I go back to Paintshop. Last, but not least, Keith and I have enrolled in a digital photography course at the local Art Centre. We have to do our homework before Monday night - take 20 to 30 photos changing the f (focal length), make a note of the changes then take them in to show the tutor. So far I've taken 3. Tomorrow we're going out for the day to do our homework.

Over on Julie's blog she's having a give away for her 600th post. I love the work she is doing at the moment and one of her quilts has been used in the advertisement for the Northern Needlework show later this yhear. Head over to her blog and have a look.