Another Bird's Eye View

I am working on a second piece to submit to "Bird's Eye View". This one is also a scene from an airplane window, though drawn from imagination rather than a photo. I have always loved the way fields seen from above look like a patchwork, and how many different shades of green they are, depending on what crop is growing in the field. So this piece is as much a study of greens as it is a landscape. It makes me think of the farms in SE Idaho where I grew up. That area was really high desert and mountains that has been converted to rich, volcanic farmland with the magic application of water. This is where those "famous potatoes" come from, as well as sugar beets, wheat, safflower and many other crops. Above you can see all the pieces fused in place. I used many of my collection of green solid fabrics and used my pastels and watercolor crayons to add additional color and texture. I discovered a nifty way of making that dotty pattern. Tomorrow I will give you a little more info on that part of it.

Below you can see that I have started quilting. I am using variegated thread to add even another level of color and texture.

Green rubber boots

These boots were a Christmas present from Ray. Today I wore them for the first time. We went out to the garden center yesterday to look at bare root fruit trees on sale and got carried away. We came home with a small truckload of stuff for the yard, so today we went out in the drizzly rain to decide where it was all going to go. Understand, I don't do much actual planting, but I help with placement. Ray is really the brains and brawn behind the landscaping, but I'm glad he asks for my input. I think he has a little tendancy to line things up and spread them out too much. I favor grouping and staggering. We compromise and it seems to work out.

One of the things I love about living in the Northwest is that even in the midst of winter—January for goodness sake!—there is still green and even now things are sprouting buds and coming back to life. The rain keeps it all looking shiny and clean and the moss dresses up even the inanimate objects with zippy, brilliant green touches here and there.

Walking through the garden center yesterday, at one point I stopped in my tracks and could not walk away until I found the source of the most intoxicating fragrance. Sarcococca. Wonderful! We bought two and carried them around the yard today imagining where we would most like to enjoy that perfume. Sitting on the new, not-yet-finished little patio, walking up the front walk? Serendipitously, Kim wrote about sarcococca on her blog yesterday. We were on the same wavelength. Her photo of brown hydrangea flowers looked just like the one out front here that I feared was dead. But today it has green buds on the stem.

Right now the yard is a jumble of stuff, but it will all come together. It is all potential.

New plants to planted.

These will turn into something.

I came in the house and couldn't get my boots off. I'm serious. Could. Not. Get. Them. Off. I pushed, I pulled, I stepped on the heel of one and tried pulling my foot out. Nothing worked and I was beginning to feel a little panicky, like when you can't get your head through your turtleneck, but it has gone far enough that pulling it backward threatens to rip your ears off. (This doesn't happen to you? Well, your head isn't as big as mine, I guess.) I finally called Ray and he pulled them off. This is a problem I need to figure out. There must be some aid made for this purpose. Let me know if you know what it would be.

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My friend, Ginny's husband Chris has gone to Haiti with Medical Teams International. He is an orthopedic surgeon, whose skills are urgently needed there. People are dying from complications and infections from broken bones. Incomprehensible. One of the Drs on the team is keeping a blog that you can read here.

We love the faces

Joan continues to post her wonderful stitched faces. Laura has been posting faces. I just found a bunch more to post. Here are a few more of my own faces.

Fabric portrait of my grandmother Hazle, on her graduation day.

Detail from "Judith's Garden" now part of the Thomas Collection of Contemporary Quilts

"Passion and Pain," my Frida Kahlo portrait for the Twelve by Twelve project

"Patron Saint"

"Red Earrings"

The faces below are culled from my photographs—inspiration from all over

Masks on the wall of an Ecuadorean hacienda

Masks in an Ecuadorean market

Painting by Oswaldo Guyasamin

Pastel portrait of my daughter by my son-in-law

Pre-columbian, Mexico

Pre-columbian, Mexico

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Busy working on some new work that I will post here soon.

So sad for the people of Haiti and everyone lost and injured. A friend's husband who is an orthopedic surgeon is on his way to do what he can. Knowing how helpless most of us feel, it must be so gratifying to have a skill that is needed there and be able to go, though I can only imagine how difficult this will be for volunteers such as Chris. Keep good thoughts for all those volunteers. I don't need to tell you they need money, but also blood. Donate if you can. Reminds me that one of the best books I have read in recent years is Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder. It is about Dr. Paul Farmer and his work in Haiti. Really wonderful book. I recommend it.

Faces

I have been watching the small quilts that Joan Samuelson has been posting for the last few days. They are wonderful faces. I love faces in art. I create a lot of faces. Here are some of my quilted faces:

I think a lot of people think drawing or painting or sewing a face is very daunting because it is all about making it look like a real person. Nawww—that's what photography is for. To me it is about how you abstract the idea of a face to create personality. A face can be expressed in just a few simple lines or in great detail. Quilting a face is tricky. There is the danger of making the face look wrinkled and aged when not intended. I deal with that by doing minimal quilting on faces. I love examining all the vastly different ways artists portray faces. Aren't they fascinating? They say the human face is the most compelling image there is. I find a lot of great faces in Latin American art.

A painting by Ecuadorean artist, Cristobal Gonzalez Guzman

Another Ecuadorean, Eduardo Kingman

Pre-columbian, Mexico

Print of Che Guevara from photo by Alberto Korda

Seen on the street in Taxco, Mexico

I am thinking about faces I want to make.

The problem with calendars

Every January I have the same problem. I feel like I need some kind of personal calendar to keep track of things—meetings and appointments and trips and obligations. Something I can carry with me, in addition to the one hanging on the wall in our office. Ray, of course, has the perfect solution in his iPhone, but I can't justify, nor do I really think I want one of those.

I have been through the gamut of personal planners, those big, fat leatherbound ringbinders that hold everything you ever knew or thought you knew, plus a pen and a ruler and calculator. I have tried pretty spiral bound books with beautiful photos on the pages facing each calendar page. I have spent some years just winging it with scraps of paper stuck in my wallet and a good memory. I have found that I am just not a Dayrunner® kind of person. Anything that bulky eventually gets left at home or rattling around the backseat of my car. I have had the best luck with the cheapo little pocket planners that you buy at Rite Aid Drug, but they get pretty beat up and dog-eared after awhile in my purse.

The other day I happened to be at Rite Aid and noticed all the calendars were half price, so I picked up a little purse-sized planner. Then I came home and made this little wallet/cover for it. Maybe it won't be trashed by April this time.

I chose several coordinating fabrics from my stash and pulled out my roll of heavyweight fusible interfacing and started measuring and cutting. Once I started working this out, I got kind of enthused and decided it would be handy to include space for a little notepad as well. Of course notepads don't come in the same size and shape as the calendar, so I made one with a cardstock cover that almost matches my calendar cover. My wallet has a pocket on each side of the inside that the planner and notepad covers can slip into.

When I made my notepad, I used bond paper and cut it to the same size as the planner pages. If I had had a good, beefy stapler I would have stapled it, but I don't, so I used some heavy cotton string to sew the pages into the cover. I perforated the pages, so they will tear out without making a mess of the rest of the pad. Neat trick I learned years ago for perforating paper—sew through several layers with your unthreaded sewing machine. I added a small pocket to the inside cover for business cards and receipts.

I like the layout of the calendar pages—a week at a glance with lines for writing appointments and such. Better, I think, than little bitty squares to write in. That was a lucky find.

I jazzed up my basic wallet cover by cutting a motif from one of the coordinating fabrics and fused it onto the cover, then I painted the outside of the cover with clear, acrylic gel medium. It will protect the outside, make it waterproof and I hope make it more durable. The final touch is a piece of black elastic cord that slips around it to keep it from flopping open inside my bag.

I am pretty pleased with how it looks and its small size. The test will be whether or not I actually use it.

More before and after

OK, do you want to see some big changes? This was our kitchen before. The furniture and bananas were the previous owners'.

Yes, that is purple wallpaper and yes that is blue formica and yes, holy crap!, that is a blue metallic refrigerator. This is how it looks today:

This room was pretty much stripped back to the studs. In progress shot here. We replaced cabinets and countertops, removed the window on the back wall in order to relocate the stove there and put the sink in front of the garden window. We replaced all the lighting and installed the skylight. We replaced the white vinyl flooring with terra cotta ceramic tile through the kitchen and dining area. I had the wall from the living room, on the left, extended, with that little step-down, to cover the ends of the kitchen cabinets and define the kitchen. The garden window and the dishwasher were the only things that stayed.

Looking from the living room toward the dining area and the room beyond, that we now call our "den," looked like this when we bought the house.

You are seeing a bit of the bathroom doorway that was changed, as well as the rather large opening into that little room back there. We closed in that bathroom door and extended the wall on the right side of this photo to make the doorway into the den narrower and give us a usable wall there. You can see those changes in progress here. This is how this area looks today.

This is a small house, but just right for the two of us. The kitchen and dining area are open and visible from the living room, so I wanted it all to flow together literally and visually. I chose kitchen cabinets and finishes that are similar to the furnishings in the living room and dining area, especially the cabinets. The open arrangement works so nicely for us and is especially pleasant when I am working in the kitchen. I don't feel so isolated.

We still have work to do on this house—that may always be the case! But in the short term, when we are finally able to sell our old house (it is currently rented) we hope to remodel and enlarge the master bedroom and bath. We also have plans to build a detached studio (for me) and greenhouse (for Ray). We hope to get started on that project sometime this summer. The crash in real estate and the dive the economy made came at the worst possible time for us, and changed our plans, but we've learned, pretty well, how to be flexible and rethink a situation. Meanwhile we are happy out here in the woods and I really, really, especially love my kitchen.

Then and now

Periodically I like to look back at my blog and see what I was doing a year ago, 2, 3 years ago. It was two years ago that we began our serious remodeling of this house. It was a really stressful, but also exciting time.

We had originally planned to buy a lot and build our retirement house, near Portland, but not right in Portland. We became very discouraged by the lots we found. Most were very small, with no trees and extremely expensive. One day, after looking at three lots—one on a busy main street with no trees on it, one on a flag lot behind an old run-down house and one so narrow and deep we'd have had to build a New Orleans style "shotgun" cottage, I finally said to Ray, "Let's start looking for an existing house, with possibilities, on a great lot."

I started researching houses on the internet and found this one, just five minutes from our daughter and family, and with a nice, deep wooded lot. It even has a creek running through. It didn't take us long to decide that we could make something of the house and we bought it. We ended up working on it for nearly a year before we moved in. In that year the economy took it's swan dive and we found ourselves with an old house and a new (old) house that were both worth much less than when we had started this adventure. That is when the stress kicked in, but we forged ahead and did what we could do.


It seemed that Ray and I, alone, could see the possibilities in the house. My daughter has admitted her original skepticism and I know friends were just being polite when they said things like, "it has possibilities." Looking back on my "before" pictures makes me realize just how much we accomplished on a reduced budget and less than a year's time. Here is the living room before we started work on it.

And after, taken today.

Another view before, with previous owners' furniture.

And after with our furniture, taken today.

Most of the changes to this room were cosmetic—paint principally, but we replaced all the windows with energy-efficient double paned windows. The old windows were not bigger. The heavy drapes were hung to the sides of the windows, creating that illusion. When the old window was removed in the living room the carpenters discovered carpenter ants and a lot of damage done to the structure around that window. That was not a happy day, but it was all repaired and the ants exterminated.

When we started work in the kitchen and dining area we got into some more structural changes. In this "before", looking from the living room toward the dining area, you can see that there was originally a door leading from the dining area into a small bathroom.

You can also see that the kitchen flooring, oddly, extended about halfway across that dining area.
Here's the after.

The bathroom door was relocated around the corner in the utility room and the wall repaired. The china cupboards are now where that door was. Not visible in this photo is the new kitchen and dining room floor that extends across the entire dining area.

More extensive changes were going on in the kitchen. We will look at them tomorrow.

P.S. All after pictures are clickable for closer views.

Mt. Hood

I finished my Mt. Hood piece today, except for a hanging sleeve and label. You may remember that it was based on a photo I took from an airplane and will be submitted for the High Fiber Diet show called "Bird's Eye View." The mountain is currently covered with snow, but this view represents a late summer view. Here is a closeup detail.

As I was working on this today I couldn't help but think of the three climbers who died on the mountain just a few weeks ago. One body was recovered. The other two have not been. All young people in their 20s. What a tragedy, but one that seems to repeat itself almost yearly on Mt. Hood. December is not a good time to climb and these young people did not carry a locator beacon that can be rented for $5 and are recommended for all climbers.

When climbers go missing like this the Sheriff's office search and rescue team, the National Guard and volunteer searchers are sent out to search for them, risking their own safety and at great expense to the tax payers. There are always editorials and letters to the newspaper from people who believe that the climbers who need to be searched for, or their families, should foot the bill for the search. Some are so hard that they suggest that climbers who refuse to carry rescue beacons should not be searched for at all. Of course that will never happen. I'm quite sure that regardless of how careless or misguided they may be in getting lost there will always be people who will do their very best to find them, even at great personal risk. And bless them for that.

I am sorry for those foolish climbers, and even more so, for their families.

added: The Mt. Hood piece is 15.5" x 47"

Very belated thank you!

Way back in October I won this wonderful little quilt from Frances Arnold. She had a giveaway on her blog to celebrate 101 posts. I have been very remiss in not thanking her publicly and sharing this gem. I have had it hanging in my studio and enjoying it all this time however. It is very scrappy and happy and makes me smile every time I look at it. Those are many, many very small pieced strips you are looking at. I love these kinds of quilts, though I don't make them myself. It really sparkles.

If you look at this piece long enough, the design "pops". Do you know what I mean? First you see stars on a multicolored background,

then it pops and you see diamonds on a dark blue background.

Neat, huh?

Thank you Frances. I love it.

The word for 2010

On the QuiltArt online discussion list someone suggested the idea of choosing a guiding word for the new year. It has been an interesting lot of words people have come up with. This is an exercise that is not the same as a resolution, but rather a thought or idea that we feel would be a positive influence on our lives for the coming year. "Focus" was a popular choice and one I can identify with. Laura Cater-Woods talked about "mindfulness" in such a beautiful way. Being more mindful of the details of life, no matter how insignificant, is something I find becomes more important to me as I get older. It provides richness and texture to our daily life.

Some of the word choices seemed off to me. Someone said their word was "clutter," as in getting rid of it, I guess. But I would not want such a negative word guiding me through the year. Someone else listed her word as "me." Honest, if nothing else.

Christine Thresh's word is "Good." She says, "I hope I will examine my actions and motivations this year and ask myself 'is this good for you? Is this good for the community and the world?' ” I really like that.

The best word I could think of to describe what I most want and need right now is "thrive." It may not precisely express what I am after, but it was the best word I could come up with. At the beginning of this new year I find myself so lucky to have opportunities I never expected and so much to look forward to. I am part of the 12 x 12 group, writing a book that will be published in 2011. I am writing another magazine article, making quilts for a couple of exhibits and working toward some additional new adventures in art quilting. There are family celebrations planned for this year that will be joyful occasions. "Thrive" to me means being in the moment and enjoying these gifts. It means staying organized and avoiding the stress of hurried, last minute pressure. It means taking care of my health and well-being so I can work at full capacity, with maximum enjoyment. It encompasses some of the other words that came up, including focus and mindfulness.

I made a quick, tiny little banner to hang in my workroom that will remind me that I can thrive on a full schedule and the occasional deadline and I am lucky to have the life I have.

Goodbye, Hello

Goodbye to Christmas, 2009.

The glitter of the holiday is packed away for another year.

Hello, 2010.

With family (we missed those of you who couldn't make it—) at the windy, stormy beach. Rest, recreation, good food, good company. Ready for what the new year brings.

And so it goes.