Whatta weird day. Slept late because I was just totally wound last night. couldn't figure out this morning why the cats were stomping around all over me - ooops - no Ron to have already fed them! poor starving kitties.
Made a phone call, faxed a letter. Umpteen telemarketing calls and some more hang ups. That's getting really old. The phone rings and I was ready to say something nasty to the next telemarketer.
Nope -it's a nice fellow from Apple, in California! 20 minutes or so of phone interview ensues. Fun but nerve wracking. Guess it's one of those things that it's better not to fret about ahead of time. But! He says I'll be hearing from the fellow who is doing the face to face interview. YEAH!
Then I talk with Pat for awhile. Then I chat with Mr Merrill for awhile. Go out and try to start the lawn mower. Nope. Grrrrrr.
Ron calls from the Tetons to say hi. They're going climbing/hiking tomorrow. Sounds like it's going ok out there but he didn't expect to be on his own teaching CPR. Once he was over the shock of it, he was ok.
Even got a walk in today - so now it's time for me to hit the hay!
I took a plunge late last night and signed up for photographica. It's a collaborative photo blog. People post photos that they have taken and today there was a challenge to take a photo that someone provided and do something to it.
Since Tripod won't let me FTP at the moment, here's my challenge piece via my local ISP:
That was pretty cool - you could spend days or weeks working on a project like that, but it was freeing working with someone else's image - no emotional attachment. Let's see, what to make of it. I was actually the first one posted, probably a good thing - no pressure.
Spent most of wednesday working on NYQuilts! stuff for the meeting and it was pretty laid back. Tomorrow - lots of quilting and lots of work on the CD for the fund raiser stuff.
I wore my cool original issue Blogger tshirt today (made sure my hair was up so you could read the back too!). No one said "huh?" but I noticed people trying not to obviously read my chest, LOL.
Just part of the evil plan where people see something, see it again, hear something about it, and suddenly it's EVERYWHERE and they're thinking 'I saw something about that before...... I think I saw a tshirt one day at UPS....'
The past two days, I've been working on the web-based virtual quilt show tour for the fund-raising package. You can see the beginnings of this here
Phew! I've just finished the "sampler pages" from the 2000 show. Will do the 2001 show tomorrow. thasalotta pages and images.
Interesting having picked out the quilts without knowing for the most part who made them and then adding the maker's name etc. Only duplicated two makers (everyone is allowed to put two quilts into the show) so that's not bad at all. My goal in choosing these particular quilts was to show the range of what sorts of quilts are shown. Keeping in mind that the intended viewer of these pages is probably not a quilter and may need to overcome the stereotype of little old ladies making nine-patches in their church basement.
Written at:
12:28:32 AM
The Dyeing class was great! 7 people let loose with ziplock bags, three yards of fabric, bottles of dye and two attentive teachers.
After we got done setting up our 9 bag run of fuschia blue yellow, we basically got a little out of control. We had three more FQ's that were provided and they told us to do whatever we wanted. That was all the encouragement that we needed. I had brought a trashbag of fabric for overdyeing and discharging and people used some of that. I used a lot of it!
We clamped and rubberbanded etc but I mainly wanted some of those too-harsh black on white prints to be some other color.
I thought initially that this was all just too too too tidy and that I would never get to live out my dream of wearing white clothes to a dyeing class. I had worn a white tshirt that had the classic grease spot mid chest. FINALLY I saw some blue dye on my gloves. I swiped it across my chest. The teacher about flipped! NOOOOOOOOO! I smiled and wiped my other hand off. LOL Before you knew it, all the other students were coming over to wipe off their hands and tools on me.
After that and some lunch, most people left. Naomi, Sue and I stayed on. Naomi and I wanted to do some discharging (that's the opposite of dyeing - you apply bleach to fabrics and see what happens).
Sue was just hanging out. She consolidated the dyes and the soda ash solution. That made it seem like too much good stuff to go to waste. So we went through the group stash and pulled out all these REALLY awful donated fabrics that are huge parrots, fish, fruit or flamenco dancers on white background. I think they were supposed to be appliqued on sweatshirts in the early 80's maybe. We'd used some for stack and whack quilts and for backings.
Anyway we did quite a few big hunks of those in bright colors. Even if they come out pale, it's better than white! We figure we'll give them out as prizes to people who do the mystery quilt and challenge quilt! Hey, it's hand dyed fabric.
Meanwhile Naomi and I were working on discharge. Most of my black solids went to a brilliant red except one that was a bright green.
Sue left to meet some friends. As Naomi and I were packing up, I said I was going to take my spritzer full of bleach and hit the bathrooms. Things were very clean. I was in the downstairs kitchen wiping down the counters, and about to write a note saying - don't worry about the bleach smell, we just did a little cleaning - when I heard a funny noise and then a "MARY BETH!"
I go into this very makeshift downstairs bathroom and all I can see is water gushing over the top of the swinging door!
Naomi thought she'd follow my lead and clean the urinal in there with her left over bleach and when she flushed, the pipe above the urinal just came apart! She turned the one turnoff she could see, but it didn't stop the water! I ran around looking for a turn off and didn't find one either. Finally she rummaged behind a partial wall and found the turn off which was for the whole building. The only thing that helped was that there was a sump area right next to the urinal.
We called and someone from the VFW came to see what had to be done. By then we had most of the water mopped up. When I called our VFW contact, his wife seemed ever so grateful that we'd called to let them know about the problem.
All of this just goes to show that housecleaning is potentially hazardous to your health and furthermore that "let no good deed go unpunished" is very very true. Naomi's best comment "YOU're the one in the swimsuit - why am I the one who's sopping wet????"
Anyway, the VFW fellow wasn't at all upset, he was glad we had it all mopped up and he was already calling other guys when we left!
