Let It Snow

And it did -

Big, fat, fluffy flakes that seesawed lazily back and forth as they descended without care from a stormy sky.

It snowed late afternoon so by the evening, the frozen precipitation took on the gay colors of the holidays as festive string lights shown kaleidoscopically through the soft, newly-fallen blanket of snow.

I included a photo of the table setting I made for my mother's gift out of fabric from my Gingerbreadtown collection (shown in the sidebar at right). It includes the table cloth, six place mats, a runner and eight reversible napkins. I'll be sure to include closeups of the pieces so you can see the detail in the work and hopefully inspire you to create a modern heirloom of your own!

Hope everyone is enjoying themselves during this season of goodwill and cheer despite whatever happens around us.

Mark

Megablog

I know I've gone AWOL. Life has been keeping me busy, and it won't really settle until I return from visiting family for the holidays. So here's a month's or better worth of things I need to catch up to date...

Santa's Land at the Queen Ka'ahumanu Center - the turtle with the fuzzy red hat reminds me of my logo for the holidays

One of the few pics of me - here with my sister Dana at Makena Beach

Here's Ana'ole - turtle 4 - the hatchling that I named in the contest at the Maui Ocean Center

A sea urchin spiny thingy

One of my hats on display in the gift shop at the Maui Ocean Center

A puffer fish. He's endearingly cute but was about 18"-24" long and has sharp spines on his body that spike out pin cushion-like when he inflates himself

Just a peaceful beach shot

This place has been around since the creation of the islands. It's an institution in Wailuku

They serve onion rings - tempura style - at a chinese restaurant

Sweet and Sour Chicken with Chow Fun noodles. These noodles are actually sliced like carrot sticks and made from potato dough - YUM!

An offering at the Home Maid Bakery shop

Lunch at Leoda's in Olowalu - Spicy (fresh) tuna salad on thier bread with tomato and butter lettuce. Served in a metal pie tin lined with brown paper

Some of the best fries I have ever had! With an aioli - and ketchup of course

Dana's lunch was Fried Mac and Cheese with a marinara - we both had leftovers...

On the road leading to mine, I see a long neck serpent in the grass

Wild lilikoi (passion fruit) flower

The serpent again

This is how my hats were displayed in the booth for the Haleakala Waldorf Holiday Faire. We had a great location - on an end, at the bottom of a hill and by the second entrance to the event - that really helped with traffic 

The hats are all my fabrics - Surf's Up, Seal Pups, Mermaids of Hana Bay, Hibiscus - and the pillow cases - Cotton Couture, Shell Dot and Gingerbreadtown

Mac and Cheese with Peas, please! Red pepper flakes and Kiawe smoked Hawaiian sea salt. The background is Siren Song - color Rainbow

Grilled Shell-on Shrimp  skewered on fresh Rosemary twigs

The morning of October 15 - my mother's birthday 

Comfort food for lunch - when it rains there is quite a damp chill in Haiku and a lunch like this hits the spot!

Rooster Rumble

This wasn't too violent just two roosters plucking the feathers out of one another - but what a display!

These are boneless version of the  bone in ribs I made when Dana was here. Both were preseasoned with the smoked sea salt and crushed black pepper. Next I smoked them over macadamia nut wood then glazed them with Maui Brewing Company Root Beer Bar-B-Que sauce. Last they cooked slowly to dry them out a bit like chinese roast pork.

 Another ornate rooster and hen

One of several gingerbread boy doll fronts drying before construction

Gingerbreadtown Holiday Collection

Here is my GINGERBREADTOWN collection for Michael Miller Fabrics. It was debuted at the 2011 Fall International Quilt Market in Houston this past October. It was utterly amazing to see interest in the collection a full year before it would be available in stores!


I have been wanting to do a gingerbread and holiday candy group for quite some time, and I am glad that I had the opportunity to design it when I did because I had just started teaching myself Photoshop and this incredible design tool made easy work of the project, and allowed me to design in ways I hand never contemplated before.


As an example, in the Confectionary Stripe, there are exactly 4 elements that I had "painted" using colored pencils and magic marker (my training is in menswear design and that is the preferred mediums for sketching garments). All the other elements were scanned - and by scanned I mean placing real candy on the scanner bed and creating life-like art from the images. If you'd like to take a guess which ones are the artwork and post them in the comments, I'll gladly let you know if you're correct but I'll reveal the truth ;) next week...


In addition, the scanning and manipulating of the real candy images prompted me to go one step further with the Gingerbread fabric. Knowing I could attempt to paint (this time with acrylics) a realistic gingerbread texture, and probably needed to make several samples to get it just right, I decided to "cheat"! So I baked rollout gingerbread cookie dough and scanned that too! It's remarkable how reality can be skewed through art and manipulated to suit the creator's needs!


For the Cookie Cutouts I used Photoshop to "cut out" the shapes from the virtual Gingerbread and iced it with computerized icing.


The Gingerbread House Quilt and Pancake Doll pattern shown in the right hand side bar use the collection listed above. The house is built from cutting apart the Confectionary Stripe and then piecing it together in the schoolhouse block I have designed. The pattern goes on sale the end of this month.

GINGERBREADTOWN by Mark Hordyszynski for Michael Miller Fabrics

DC5220 Confectionary Stripe

DC5218 Gingerbread

DC5215 Cookie Cutouts

DC51217 Gummy Stripe

DC5216 100-Calorie Snak Pak

DC5219 Vanilla With Sprinkles