Ehlers Danlos Syndrome

My kids and myself (as designated genetic carrier) have just been diagnosed with Ehlers Danlos Syndrome. My sister Deb’s 25 year old son was diagnosed with this last fall after suffering chronic joint pain and weakness in his legs. For many years he did a lot of break dancing and martial arts and more recently extreme yoga which has damaged his joints. He is now walking with the aid of metal crutches.

Ehlers Danlos is a connective tissue disorder which presents itself in may different forms. We have the hypermobility form. Which means my family could have descended from pretzels. We are all very flexible, our joints bend beyond where they are supposed to. Unfortunately for us it means our bodies do not produce the collagen needed to keep us flexible over time and if we are not careful- early arthritis. This would explain why I can not do the Lucky Shie style of handwork, as much as I would like to do it. In 2001 when I lived in Austin my art quilt group had a four day workshop with Lucky and my thumb has never been the same. Any stress on the joint causes pain. So now I have a valid excuse for avoiding handwork and doing everything by machine.

At this point my kids are perfectly healthy, we are lucky to have found out about this so that we can hopefully prevent the damage that my nephew is now dealing with.

Alien pod thing

I love the way this thing looks. Actually I altered this in photoshop. It originally looked like this.

We used to find these on the hillsides up above our home in the canyon in Los Angeles. They grew on a vine, sometimes along the ground, sometimes hanging from a thin stem with the vine coiled tightly around the branch of another bush or tree.

The National Bisquit Company

This is a picture of our building, taken sometime between 1910 and now. We have the top corner unit, the row of three windows in the pop up section and the row of windows below.

Gallery opening for my brother in law

I am so proud! My bother in law Pablo Perez has a new exhibit of his paintings in Venice CA. Check out his work and this great article about him. I married into a wonderful family of artists eighteen years ago when I married my incredibly talented husband Juan.

Felted balls

Since I can't work on any quilt projects right now I have been knitting a lot and now making felted beaded christmas ornaments. They are lots of fun to make, they feel so nice and are fun to stitch into. I would really like to start stitching with some embroidery floss on some but i don't know which of 20 boxes my floss is in.
Doesn't this iron plate make a great backdrop. It is on the wall of the entry way to the kitchen. The word kitchen is written on it with an arrow pointing to the kitchen. I am sure it was a note written on the metal during construction of the loft.
These are the balls left to be stitched.

Making felted balls

Jen asked how to make the felted balls. First you order some gorgeous wool roving from somewhere like Outback Fibers. Roll up little balls of roving adding thin layers of diffferent colors you like to the outside. Be sure to spread the fibers out into very thin layers crossing each at 90 degrees. Sometimes I use small balls of left over wool yarn for the centers under the roving. Put the ball into a section of pantyhose tying a knot on each side of the ball. Make a bunch and toss them in the washing machine with a little detergent and set the machine to the smallest load setting with hot water, and wash. Carefully peel back the pantyhose from the felted ball, the fibers migrate through the pantyhose pilling onto the outside during washing. If you have a front loading washer you can also do this by hand, see instructions here. I have heard front loading washers don't felt well.

Then embellish with all those beads you have been collecting over the years. Use good strong beading thread like Silamide.

A perfect evening!

I am loving Chicago. Tonight the kids went downstairs in our building and got themselves subway sandwiches for dinner and my husband and I went out for a date. We walked a few blocks to a taqueria called de cero. When we left Los Angeles we thought we were leaving good Mexican food behind. But not so! We had fabulous tacos with fresh tomatillo salsa, my husband had a couple shots of different tequilas and I had a chelada (a corona on ice with a twist of lime and salted rim) I am not a big fan of beer, but this was great. We finished with a warm brownie topped with ice cream. Yum! Then we walked home with snow falling. A perfect evening!

The Loft

Here are a few pics from before we moved in, of course it now looks like a maze of boxes and unbuilt shelving.
This is a view of the kitchen that used to be one of the ovens in the factory. it has curved brick walls on two sides with an arched ceiling The panels in the wall above are in the wall of the master bedroom. The panels rotate so you can look down into the room below.


There are three levels with lots of stairs.
We painted the ceiling and all the duct work dark grey and all the walls white.
I love the fact that we now have a library for all our books. We painted the walls in here french grey. We will be using this room as a family room and the area that one might normally devote to the dining room and living room we will use as one large work space.

Living in a traditional house has never worked very well for us, it always ends up a big mess with projects going on everywhere. So now we are going to devote the most space to art/work space since that is what we spend the most time doing. It will probably still be a mess, but hopefully it will be more contained to one general area.

Chicago

We have finally moved into our loft in the old Nabisco factory in the westloop of Chicago. We have the top floor unit on the other side of the tower. I have been unpacking for the last 5 days and have not even touched anything for the studio. We have so much to do before we are settled, I don't think my sewing machine is going to see the light of day for a long time. At least i have a computer and internet access again! I felt kind of guiltly trying to check my email from the Apple store computers while we were in the apartment.

IQF Houston

Primordial Sea won 2nd place in the Painted Surface category at the International Quilt Festival!

I love going to Houston each year and seeing all my old quilt pals from Austin, as well as all the other friends I have met over the years. And I love meeting new people that I may have an aquaintance with online but have never met in person. It's pretty fun seeing all the quilts too.