Maternity Leave

We're pleased to announce that Fiber of Her Being has gone on maternity leave. Our little family is now doubled in size and features two brand-new little girls, Amanda June and Elisa Katherine (fraternal twins).

Check back in with us in late 2009 for your art-quilting needs!

In the meantime, keep up with our family at www.AchievingConceiving.blogspot.com.

Love,
Kay

A Grand-Life in Pictures

A very special grandmother turns 70 this year, and her family has commissioned a throw quilt to mark the occasion. It features 42 pictures that themselves feature 100% adorableness.

The clients liked one of the wedding quilts that I had made, so I based the design on it. As usual, the final design depends entirely on the artifacts and photos -- sizes, the way they fit together -- but I think I got kind-of close. Above is the throw quilt and below the wedding quilt that inspired it.

Comfort in Cuddly Form

There have been lots of calls for comfort, both from the free Chemo Pillow give-away and from other corners of my life. Below are pictures of a few pillows I've come up with, as well as a new idea I had: the Hug Blanket. This is not a quilt but a simple fleece throw, with colorful arms to wrap around the comfortee. It's not as good as the real thing, but it might be the closest you can come to sending a hug in the mail.

Free Chemo Pillows

The great Jim Miller, a dear friend of the family, passed away this summer from a long bout with cancer. He followed his wife, Julee, who'd succumbed to the same villain a few years earlier. Then last week, Robert Little, a friend whose family I've gotten to know and love through Fiber of Her Being, met the same fate. And we all know about Barack Obama's grandmother dying of cancer last Monday, the day before she saw her grandson make history.

It makes me sick.

I'm SICK of my loved ones getting cancer.

I'm sick of my loved ones' loved ones getting cancer.

I'm going to do three things about it. First, I'm making a donation to the American Cancer Society for their work in preventing and curing different forms of cancer. Second, I'm making a donation to the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, for treating and curing so many of my friends and family in East Texas. And third...

I'm giving away FIVE FREE CHEMO PILLOWS during the month of November. If I can't rid the world of this terrible scourge, I can damned well comfort some of the people who have to fight it.

Chemo (or Comfort) Pillows are 14" x 14" pillows that I personalize for the recipient. The pillows feature pictures of the patient's family and loved ones (that includes pets!) and motifs and colors that they like. They are emotionally comforting and physically soft, and give people something to look at and think about while they go through chemotherapy sessions. And as two people have said, they make the recipients remember what -- and whom -- they are fighting for.

I'll be making one free pillow each for the first five people who contact me through the end of November, 2008. I'll charge you $10 shipping, but the labor and materials are on me. For more details, please see the Comfort and Chemo page of my website.

Please take me up on it. I feel the need to do SOMETHING.

(Robert's Pillow)

(Jim's Pillow)

Caps to Cap-Haitien: Before and After

My friend Lucy sent me a link to a very worthwhile project today. The Caps to Cap-Haitien Project is an initiative to send homemade knit caps for newborn babies to Haiti, as a part of a larger effort to create and distribute safe birthing kits. In addition to the little stocking caps to keep the babies' heads warm, the kits contain a plastic sheet, hand sanitizer, and a sterilized string and razor blade! As someone approaching labor myself, this seems like the epitome of "the bare minimum" necessary for a safe birth.

As it happens, I had thrown away a bunch of my husband's old T-shirts last night. There were so many that I had to cram them into the bedroom trash can with my foot. This morning, when I got Lucy's email, I took them back out.

The pictures show the before and after of the project. It took about three hours total to make forty little caps, and it did my heart good. I hope Paddington is willing to give up his hat for some little Haitian baby. If worse comes to worst, I can make him another.

Check out the Mama to Mama site, which is coordinating the homemade caps effort. There you can find a very easy pattern and instructions for making your own caps. I think this is worth the trouble, since it's barely any trouble at all, and could save some little baby's life.

The New, Hot Website

Fiber of Her Being has updated its website! Www.FiberOfHerBeing.com now features a lot more photos and a lot less jabber.

Based on a Flickr.com photo database, the new site lets you see slide shows of lots of my previous work, and lets me update it as I make new things. The result is a very user-friendly site with lots and lots of pictures, all organized in a way that makes sense.

The site also features some useful information pages (see the tabs on the left). There you can see a consolidated price list, two pages of touching testimonials, a description of the custom art making process, and more.

I am really excited about the new format and the potential to show a whole lot more artwork. Have a look and let me know what you think!

www.FiberOfHerBeing.com.

Thanks!

Kay

New Quilts

I have two new quilts to show you. The first is a baby quilt -- the first one I've ever made for our own baby (for one of the twins coming in February or March). I poured a lot of love into that one.

The second quilt is a T-shirt quilt made from a friend's collection. Because she grew up all over the world, she said, she never had a hometown: her T-shirt collection became her "home." She was unable to part with any of her shirts! So here they all are in quilted wall-hanging form. The two themes are sports and world travel -- you can see this both in the quilt design and in the logos on the shirts. The baseball and globe circles are fitted into an infinity sign to represent her spiritual beliefs and (according to me) how she can do anything and everything she puts her mind to.