Art Haul at Habitat ReStore

NOTE:  I am linking up with  Free motion by the River

 We have two Habitat ReStore locations here in Baton Rouge.  I love them both.  We bought a lot of stuff from there when we were flipping the houses.

They have an Art Auction every spring.  Jennifer issues $25 gift certificates to anyone who wants to participate.  You shop in the stores and create art with some things you buy.

The art then gets donated to the Art Auction and sold to build houses.

So I went shopping.  I had $25 burning  hole in my pocket.

Frank was the one who saw this fabulous frame.  It looks oriental, right?  Perfect for my Japanese Tea Bag piece.  I will decide whether it will go into the auction or I will keep it, later.  I want it, but it is perfect for the auction.

It was $3




Now, this is what I wanted to do last year, but was involved with the flood aftermath.  This year the perfect chair presented itself.  For $5 no less!

No, this is not hashish.  It is a bag of rusty nails!

Only I would want rusty nails, right?  Buck fifty for the three pounds of nails.  Got big plans for these guys.

 This is a copper thing.  No idea what they used them for, but I can see the copper becoming a mordant with rusty stuff and creating great circle stains on fabric.  Yes!

Now I have so many ideas!





And I found a Reindeer bib for Sawyer, or someone who dribbles.

I also got 3 packages of paint brushes, two nice paintbrushes and a pack of foam brushes.  Can you guess what the total for all this was?

I got 15% off for being over 55 and the whole bill was $16.58!

I could have gotten the chandelier I was lusting after!

Here is the rusting I did yesterday.  I used some smaller pieces and actually rusted it twice because the first one was not heavily marked.  This is not great but it is better.

I did see that I can do a leaf printing in the center and maybe double the impact for both rusting and leaf printing!

I am excited to get started on some ideas for the  Art Auction pieces.  I wonder how much they raise each year.  Let me see if I can find out.

Habitat For Humanity Art Progress

I was talking to daughter Carrie last night and offered her the remaining amount on  my gift certificate for the Habitat For Humanity Art Auction because I know she likes all that stuff.  She is tied up in Junior League's Hollydays right now though. 

It was lucky, beause when I hedked whn it was due, I realized I had to get my pieces to them by November 1.  That means I spent today doing some work on Habitat!

 I hot glued the metal pieces to the vinyl covered cement backer board.  I was thinking this would be a permanent thing, but it turned out to be temporary.  As I was washing the dye off the backer board, the pieces began to come loose.  This is good because I can rearrange them next time, maybe all circles and no squares!

I thickened the Procion dye with what I think was corn dextrose, but may have been something else.  it was leftover from the Ann Johnson class.   It looked like corn syrup wiith a slight golden tint.

When I was going into my dye junk, I found several slk scarves I had intended to dye years ago, and brought them along to the party.

Here is the pre-washed scarf.



               Here is the post-washed scarf.
                    It looks like glacial ice.......



Then I made a dyeing pass on the other pillow case that came from Re-Store.   It was dry when I  make the print. 

 Here is a close up of a wet silk scarf section.






And here is my clothes line.  Fun, huh?  It is  much nicer without the bees that visit the flowers in the spring time!
 I am going to Home Depot tonight to fix the clothesline problem. 

Habitat For Humanity Art

I was invited once again to participate in the Re-Store Art Auction for Habitat For Humanity. What a perfect venue for quilters, one that helps people have a home to put quilts into.  I accepted with relish!

For those unfamiliar with Re-Store, it is a wonderful, quirky, odd,  incredibly interesting place full of stuff donated by local contractors when they have excess materials.  Or from the home improvement who is updating their house and replacing cabinets, bathroom fixtures, kitchen stuff.  There are so many little screws, and fittings and washers and tiles and pierces of wood.  It is like heaven for me!!!!!  Next best thing to a fabric store!

They send each artist a $50 gift certificate with which to purchase materials.  You get to scour the store high and low, inside and out for stuff with which to make your art pieces.  You then donate your art to the auction and they make money!  I have seen some incredible stuff made from other people's junk!

And I am about to make some of my own.  Here is some cement backer board with a vinyl covering that will make an excellent base on which the other stuff will be glued.  I bought some circles, some wonderfully ridge-y strips, some squares with holes. 

I plan on gluing these pieces to that cement backer board and using it as a printing plate.  I also scored a set of 100% cotton pillow cases in a light blue that can be the fabric that gets printed!

I also found a smaller piece of PVC pipe for my shibori dyes, which I think will be the first technnique I subject my blue pillowcases to.  Just prior to the circles stamping.

I have procion dyes, which I will post later this week with some cheesecloth I just dyed.  I need to figure out how to thicken the dye so I can paint it on to the circle plate.  And I need to get a brayer.  Maybe a trip to Hobby Lobby is in store!

I am going to post this to Nina Marie's Creations page for her Off the  Wall Friday post.  Check out what others have going on as well.

My Alzheimer mother and the silent auction

The Remember Me Quilt Guild Auction competes with the River City Guild Auction every year.  But this year REME decided to move their shindig up to July and get the jump on River City.  And let me tell you, they most certainly did!

Tonight was their Country Fair at REME.  It is a huge auction of tons of fabric, notions, gadgets, quilts, and food.  The Cake Walk was just like I remembered in Elementary School!  And I stayed away from it!

I did win $128 in stuff at the Silent Auction and bought about $13 in stuff at the table.  But never did I win anything in the  30 or so Door Prizes they gave out.  I just don't win those things! 

And I picked up a whole cloth quilt to learn hand quilting.  I have been wanting one of these and have nearly bought one for $79.99 several times in the last few years.  Here was one for $10!

My friend Jo Paula won the First Prize for her Bonnie Hunter Pineapple Blossom Quilt!  She was totally excited!

Valerie racked up some nice fabric batches to start her stash with.  Now that she is quilting she needs a stash.  When she was collecting her winning stuff, she came to me with a totally puzzled look on her face.  She was holding a bread basket that she won but had never bid on.  LOL.

It reminded me of when we brought my Alzheimer Mother to the Michael Young Fest.  I guess I can tell this now.   I bought $10 in raffle tickets and gave them to her.  I told her to find some things she liked and drop her tickets into the buckets next to the items.  She wandered around the room happily dropping tickets into buckets.  I stopped paying attention at some point. 

All of a sudden i realize that she is taking tickets OUT of buckets and putting them in OTHER buckets. 

I can tell you that there were a lot of really confused people who won stuff they never dropped tickets in for.  We still laugh about that one.

There are so many ways you can have fun at the Quilt Fairs and Auctions.  And if you want some good laughs, I will lend you my mother!

glen

Got this from Ami Simms at AAQI

I have three small quilts in the AAQI auction right now.  7145, 7145 and 7184.  They are individually dedicated to my mom, my Aunt Edith and Ann's Aunt Millie.  Three wonderfully old women who had Alzhimer's Disease.  My mom still is battling it, but losing ground each day. 

As you know, the Alzheimer's Art Quilt Initiative auctions small quilts during the first 10 days of each month. Well, our August online quilt auction will be a "hum dinger." We're going to be auctioning off 20 quilts from the first traveling exhibit, "Alzheimer's: Forgetting Piece by Piece." The selection includes quilts by Diane Gaudynski, Sue Nickels, Mary Stori, Marsha McCloskey, Nancy Brenan Daniel, Melody Crust, Mary Stori, Elsie Campbell, Debbie Bowles and others. Please see our home page for details: http://www.alzquilts.org/


This will take you to the page for the Quilt Auction:

http://www.alzquilts.org/quiltauction.html

This site is to the auction hosts to bid on August 1st:

http://www.benefitbidding.com/listings/categories/index.cfm?category=965774286

If you can think of any other way to promote this very special auction have at it: web page, FaceBook, guild newsletter, other online groups you belong to....it's all good.

Again, thank you for helping us make a difference, one quilt at a time.....or in this particular case, one blog at a time.

Ami : )
Founder & Executive Director, Alzheimer's Art Quilt Initiative

More than $552,000 raised for Alzheimer's research since January 2006. Help us make a difference...one quilt at a time.

Auction Wins

Last year I won big.  I mean BIG!  Like over 50% of the baskets and over $200!  Jessie won the other half of the baskets but she was supporting a Quilting Husband as well.  Frank won’t pick up a needle or rotary cutter.  So it looked way worse for me. 
I resolved not to win as much this year so my take was a bit smaller.  But I did get a few interesting things. 
At 2 of my 3 guilds we have a birthday table.  During your birthday month you bring in a small item.  They sell raffle tickets for 25 Cents each and I usually purchase $2 worth each month.  So I never ever ever win anything!
At the Big Auction at River City last night I purchased 10 $1 tickets and dropped them into ten different baskets. Whereupon I won 5 of those items!  I got two fabric shopping bags with two pkgs of batting each, A red/white/blue tin of FQs and a group of 13 FQs tied in a ribbon.  And I won one of the red/white/blue baskets from the silent auction for $14.  It has a pattern, about 6 yards of red and red stripe fabrics, and 2 yards of blue and white stripe fabric, and about 4 other red and blue  fat quarters.  The box is a thread box that will hold about 15 spools!  Can't beat that with a stick!
The Remember Me Guild Auction will be when I am on the cruise!  And I was so hoping to be able to go to that one. 

I got a new quilt magazine in the mail today, Frank just brought it to me.  I am going to take my bath and cuddle up with it after I finish with y’all.

So nighty night…………Gotta check out Fons and Porter!
glen:  I am still reveling in my Stash Manicure glow.  It was a wonderful experience and I want to thank Madame Samm for allowing me to be a part of it!

PS:  Don't you love the dishwashing detergent in that picture?