Of Art Camps and Littles

Awesome pinch pots made by kindergarten class, fired by me.

Hello again, lovelies. It's no mystery that I have been gone for AGES, but I never elucidated on why I disappeared. Last summer I had an internship at Cheekwood Art and Gardens for their summer art camps. I primarily worked the ceramics camps and fired over 4,000 pieces of artistic and functional student art as well as teacher assisting classes and giving wheel-throwing demonstrations. It was a total blast! I am looking forward to volunteering on a less formal basis again this summer as I don't have the time for working 9 hour days 5 days a week this year.

And that is because of this little beauty:

Baby River, 11 days old.

River was born February 8 via c-section and she has been keeping us extremely occupied ever since. Things have begun to settle into a bit of a routine now, however, and I am looking forward to blogging again regularly and reopening the Etsy shop in the near future. I have a nice post of DIY and free printable Mother's Day items coming up the beginning of the week. Until then, cheers!

Tuesday Love Links: Fatshion!

This Love Links installation is dedicated to all the rockin' fat folks who inspire me to dress my own fat, rockin' bod with style and confidence.

“People always ask me, ‘You have so much confidence. Where did that come from?’ It came from me. One day I decided that I was beautiful, and so I carried out my life as if I was a beautiful girl … It doesn’t have anything to do with how the world perceives you. What matters is what you see. Your body is your temple, it’s your home, and you must decorate it.” —Gabourey Sidibe

Gorgeous natural hair and excellent use of color from Beautiful is Big Tumblr.

Erin Majestic Legay, blogging now at That's So Majestic (frequently NSFW), bowls me over with their personal style and fierceness with absolutely stunning regularity. 

17 Sundays is a cool Aussie streetwear brand. Check out their sale items here (this dress is included).

Caro Emerald is the plus size queen of Nu Jazz. Check out her homepage here.

Shawna is always such a babe. Check out her handmade clothing line, Chubby Cartwheels, here.

Blogger's Quilt Festival

 An old 1917 Singer industrial machine head on display in unknown museum in Washington, D.C., photographed by Corey. This was the very first sewing machine model Singer ever commercially produced!

Have you ever heard of Blogger's Quilt Festival hosted by quilter and published author Amy Ellis? I hadn't until recently. I was recently thinking about quilting possibilities for the bagfuls and bagfuls of scraps I have in my closet and looking for a wide variety of style and subject examples when I found Amy's blog and spent a couple hours perusing through past entries from 2011 and 2010 and found a lot of very pretty and inspiring works of stitch-y and functional textile art. (Go click on over and take a look! There is some really amazing craftsmanship and artwork on display in those Linky entries, from all skill levels!) You can also look through the Flickr pool here.

Of this spring's festival Amy writes:

To Participate & Win : :
1 – Write a post the week of the festival (old posts will be deleted).  Please respect my efforts and the efforts of the event sponsors, and do not offer giveaways in your Quilt Festival post.
2 – In your post link back to the festival.
3 – Share a link to your post, in the linky on the festival post.
4 – Leave me a comment on the festival post to be entered into giveaways.
5 – Visit all the other quilters sharing their quilts and be inspired!

The next Festival will run May 18-25, 2012. I've only ever completed one quilt before, and it was decidedly non-traditional (a photo of which is currently my blog background at the moment), but I am thinking of finishing up a more traditional scrap quilt I have started and entering it in the festival. The super-traditional paper-pieced hex quilt top I am still working on will not possibly be done in time, though I could perhaps apply the technique to making something smaller such as potholders.