Sunday/Rainday

I have decided not to complain about the #$@% rain anymore, but that doesn't prevent me from posting a few pictures from just a few minutes ago.

Meanwhile inside the house, I plug away at the Baños house quilt. I had such a hard time actually getting started with this piece. I'm not sure why. I kept fiddling with the fabrics, refining the drawing, knowing I was procrastinating. Finally, I decided the best approach was to break it into sections, actually layers of depth into the scene, starting with the front-most layer, then the middle ground, then the far background. Here is what I am working on now—the street and wall.

I am using my watercolor crayons to add color and texture to solid color fabrics. I have been experimenting with making rubbing plates that I use under the fabric, then rub over with the crayons to create pattern and texture. See that pebbly texture on the street? I got that using the plate below that I made by gluing lentils on a scrap of mat board.

 Here is another rubbing plate I made by gluing hemp cord on a piece of mat board. I drew the pattern on the board first, then glued the cord on it. I was not particularly precise about the design as I wanted it to be obviously handmade. I liked the hemp cord for this because it is pretty firm. The resulting fabric is at the right. By carefully moving the plate under the fabric it was possible to get a repeating pattern.

I'm not sure I will be using this particular texture in this piece, but I think it will have it's uses down the line sometime. I rubbed this one with a regular crayola crayon—one of Sofia's. I will probably experiment with adding some of the watercolor crayon for additional color.

The object #3

Cast iron carp (koi) garden lantern. 

Did you know that in China and Japan carp symbolize fortitude and endurance? I didn't know that until after I brought this handsome fellow home.

One morning, several years ago, Beth and I were out on our morning walk on the Fanno Creek Trail. As we crossed a street that bisects the trail we saw a poster for an estate sale just up the street and decided to check it out. What we discovered was a very unusual little home, built around a central courtyard and filled with lovely things from around the world, mostly Asian in origin. The couple who lived there had both died and everything was for sale. Beth fell in love with a small painting of a Chinese couple and I loved the carp the moment I saw it. We paid for our treasures and continued our walk. The carp is cast iron and hangs from a heavy iron chain. I started out swinging him along by his chain, but I kept bumping my leg with the heavy piece and my arm began to ache from the weight. I changed arms, but the further I walked the heavier he seemed to become. Finally, I wrapped him in my sweatshirt and carried him in both arms like a baby—a very hefty baby. By the time we reached the end of our three-mile walk my shoulders and neck were straining with the weight and I was puffing and panting pretty hard! I stopped at a garden shop on my way home to buy an iron crook to plant in the garden where I wanted to hang my carp. Once I had cleaned him up and hung him I knew it was worth all the effort. Now he swims through our new garden. This is how he looks at night with a candle inside.

I've never seen another like it, but I found this site from England, where you can order a very similar one.

To me, previously owned and loved (I imagine) objects carry with them a bit of history and untold stories that make them much more special than something plucked off a store shelf, pristine and stickered and documented. I wonder where his previous owners got him. I imagine that he brought them a lot of pleasure and I hope they would approve of his current home.

The lull

On the radio this morning the news guy said today was "a lull between the storms." The rain will be back tomorrow, possibly even this afternoon, but for a few hours we are having beautiful weather. Today's newspaper:

It was so nice to walk this morning. I confess that on some of these awful, rainy mornings we have looked at the rain, sighed and just got coffee instead. It smelled so great out on the trail this morning—everything fresh and green. Wish you could smell these wild roses.

Even the wildlife seemed friskier than usual. Haven't seen the bunnies out for awhile.I had just said something about wishing we'd see a rabbit, when we turned a corner to find this little guy.

This squirrel has lost his tail somehow. There is but a nubbin left. He looked like a short-eared rabbit hopping along.

Plenty to do at home, rain or not. I am getting my quilt ready to send off for the "Beneath the Surface" show. Getting a piece ready to travel is always a production. I roll the quilt around a foam pool "noodle" so it doesn't wrinkle, then make a muslin bag to put it in to protect it. The people in our High Fiber Diet group have started making bags with a clear plastic pocket on the outside, so you can put a photo of the quilt in it, then those recieving the quilts can see, at a glance, what is inside. Good idea. So I did that on this bag, which also has my name and address on it.

I spent a couple frustrating hours yesterday trying to track down a container to mail it in. Really the only possibility I found was this mailing tube. I think it will barely fit inside. 

I'm working on my Baños, Ecuador house piece and pulling possible fabrics for it. I made a drawing in Illustrator on my computer and  enlarged it to the size I want. Now I am refining the drawing which I will use as a guide as I start cutting fabric. Working from a photo is an interesting process. It does not make sense to include every detail and good composition requires decisions and changes to be made. The "editing" process is a good challenge.

A little sketch for another upcoming project.

And, it's beginning to cloud over...

Thinking about Baños

I am getting ready to start making a new piece based on a photograph that I took back in 2003 in the Ecuadorean city of Baños. Baños, in Spanish, means baths and it is the natural hot springs in Baños that make it a tourist attraction. That, and the beautiful scenery. I should mention that this is Baños de Ambato. There is another Baños in Ecuador.

That is Baños tucked into that valley in the shadow of the volcano Tungurahua, which is actually erupting right now. It erupts every few years and sometimes gets fierce enough that the villages in its wake, including Baños, are evacuated. You can see how vulnerable the city is and how difficult it would be to escape in the event of a major eruption.  I'm sure the hot springs are related to the proximity of an active volcano.

We had a wonderful time in Baños. We were traveling with Ray's brother and his wife and on a rainy day we took an excursion bus, called a Chiva, on a trip up a canyon that featured one amazing waterfall after another. It was incredible and fairy tale-like in the mist and rain.

We stopped at a spot where you could pay a couple dollars to ride in a little box on a cable across the canyon. Ray and my sister-in-law and Emily jumped at the chance. Roy and I opted out and stayed behind to take pictures.

While we waited, we had a soft drink at a little shack there and I took this photo. It is one of my favorite photos ever! Something about the Coca Cola and those brilliantly colored local sodas just so reminds me of the everyday street life in Ecuador. You can't believe how much soda they drink down there. I always found "Inca Kola" rather amusing—as if it were the official, historical drink of the Incas!

As we were leaving Baños I took a photo of a very decrepit little old house I had been noticing and thought it might be the inspiration for a piece of artwork. Looking at the photo years later, it is hard to remember exactly why I was so taken with this particular house. It had something to do with its graphic lines and that exuberant vine growing all along the stair rails. It looks pretty sad in the photo, but there was something about it that spoke to me. I am finally thinking of seeing what I can do with it and if I can capture some of the charm I originally saw.

Label

I am at the finishing up stage with several quilts for shows. One needs to be mailed off soon. This is the part of the process that is not that interesting. I got the hanging sleeves sewn on while on retreat last week. The last step is labels on the back. Some quiltmakers and artists make very decorative, elaborate labels. I don't. I tend to do one of two things—print on pre-treated fabric with my inkjet printer, or hand write a label using a permanent pen. I kind of prefer hand writing the labels, but sometimes they are pretty sloppy looking. It is hard to judge spacing, etc, when writing on fabric. Today I made a label and had an idea for making a hand done label a little neater.

I set up the information on my computer. I used InDesign, but one could easily do the same thing in Word. I centered the text, made the elements the sizes I wanted, adjusted the spacing and chose a neat, simple font, then printed it on paper. I cut a piece of fabric slightly larger than the finished label, pressed it flat and lay it on top of the paper label. I used a couple pieces of tape to keep it in place. Then I put the parts on my light table, so the printing showed through the fabric and carefully traced it with a fine tip permanent pen.

I touched it up a bit, thickening and darkening the letters, then I ironed a piece of fusible web (Wonder Under®) on the back and trimmed the label to size. Then I fused it to the back of my quilt.

 

Here it is, ready to go. And yes, I am just paranoid enough that I obscured my address in the photo. It is readable on the actual label.

Wet

I know I've already whined about the weather, but here it is the last day of May and so far we have had double the normal rainfall for May. We are close to a record. If it continues to rain today we'll probably beat it. Yeah, it's good for the gardens—well, kind of. Flowers are blooming, everything is an incredible green, but a lot of it is looking pretty beaten down. Like these azaleas out front.

And the irises.

I think we are all feeling a little soggy and beaten down. Ray runs out to work in the garden between showers. I putter around the house. The fallen and broken trees gave Ray an excuse to rent a chainsaw, a manly tool he enjoys using. He combats the rainy day blues with good, productive work.

I took advantage of a brief, rainless window a couple days ago to go out and arrange some rocks along one of our new paths.

As Ray has been digging out front we've noticed how many round, smooth rocks he digs up. River rocks. It makes me wonder if our yard was underwater at one point. These rocks are far more smoothed than the ones in the bottom of the creek. We've been setting them aside and I am using them in the landscaping. The landscaping progresses. It will be a long term project. These log rounds were set aside before Ray started splitting the rest of the two trees cut earlier for firewood. They will be little tables or something for outside.

Some things really love the rain. The rhodies and clematis are drinking it up.

My favorite rain plant is the lady's mantle. The raindrops sit like gems on the leaves and the bright yellow-green flowers add a lot of pizzazz to the scene.

And, of course, the weeds are thriving.

Dennis Hopper

 

I was sad to read that Dennis Hopper died today. He was in some of the most iconic movies of our times—Giant, Easy Rider, Blue Velvet—but my favorite was Hoosiers. His portrayal of the alcoholic father who found new meaning for his life was heartbreaking and heart warming. An unforgettable performance. 

Rest easy, Dennis.

Central Oregon

The STASH group went to Black Butte Ranch this week for our annual retreat. For quite a few years we have gone to the beach, but back when we first started "retreating" we went to Redmond, Oregon where my friend and one-time relative (she was once married to my cousin) Jeanine ran a fishing lodge on a bluff overlooking the Deschutes River. Jeanine is a trained chef and she fed us the most divine meals and the views from the great room and deck were spectacular. She and Dick, her husband, burned out on the lodging business and moved to The Dalles, so those wonderful retreats became a fond memory. While I enjoy the beach, I am, at heart, a mountain girl and thought it would be fun to head east again. The rest of the group was game and we easily located a house to rent at the Black Butte ranch resort.

We left the dark and stormy Willamette Valley hoping for better weather on the other side of the mountains.

At the top of the Santiam Pass we found snow. This area was burned in a huge forest fire several years ago, thus all the black trees. We arrived at the ranch in the late afternoon and found our little cottage in the woods.

Very pleasant and comfortable. Over the next two days we relaxed, did handwork, talked, laughed, read, ate, drank, savored the pine-scented air and filled our eyes with the beauty that surrounded us. On Thursday we drove into the little town of Sisters, visited the famous Stitchin' Post Quilt Shop, found ice cream and wandered the boardwalks of the kitschy, but certainly charming, wild west movie-set-like town.

The first evening we decided to walk the mile or so to the golf course restaurant. The weather was cloudy, but pleasant and it felt great to be outdoors. Gerrie took this picture of me taking pictures. Beth and Reva are up ahead.

I took pictures, but Gerrie took many more than I did, with her fancy new camera. She got some great photos that you can see on her Flickr site here.  Here are a few of my pictures.

It was a wonderful three days. I look forward to this time with my friends all year. I even got a little work done.

Hanging sleeves hand-sewn onto three quilts.

It's not a door knob!

 

There was nothing to indicate scale in my "object" photos from yesterday and several people were convinced my mystery object is a door knob. No, it absolutely isn't a door knob! It is flat on the bottom, with a carved starburst pattern and far too large and heavy to be used as a door knob. I believe it is nothing more than a paperweight, and perhaps, as Christine suggested, designed to sit in the sunlight and refract light into rainbows of color. I need to find a place to put it where it might get some direct sunlight. Most of our windows face north and south, which won't work very well, but I'll move it around.

The object #2

This object is not only quite a beautiful thing, but it is a mystery, and I love a mystery! What would you call this? A crystal paperweight? A cut glass paperweight? It measures about 3.5" in diameter, is about 2.5" tall and is quite heavy. It appears to be hand-cut. The facets are not perfect and vary a bit in shape and size. I have searched the internet and can't find anything quite like it.

The mystery, you ask? The mystery is how and when and why it ended up in the bottom of the creek that runs through our property. That is where Ray found it last summer, along with a tall, square bottle. And no, this is not part of the bottle. I'm quite sure of that. It was very dirty and I cleaned it up as best I could. You can probably see that it still has a little creek residue firmly attached in spots. The bottle is much worse. How long was it in the creek? Why was it in the creek? I doubt we will ever know answers to those questions. I can't believe it was tossed away as something worthless or no longer wanted. To me it is magical and feels like such a gift.