Mountain person

Living here in Oregon I know a lot of ocean people.  Me, I'm a mountain person. This means, simply the landscape you long for. The place where the air smells like air should smell, where you feel most alive and most at home in a very basic way. I think there are probably desert people and prairie people and city people too. That is why it felt so wonderful to drive through forests and up winding mountain roads on our recent trip. I'm a mountain person.

The Beartooth Highway, (my Dad always called it "The Cooke City Highway") goes from Cooke City, Montana to Red Lodge, Montana. Charles Kuralt called it the most beautiful drive in America. Last week, after spreading my Aunt and Uncle's ashes near the highway, just out of Cooke City, we drove to the summit.

You climb upward beyond the timberline where there are vast alpine meadows and small lakes. Still big patches of snow early in July, but lots of wildflowers as well. The road winds in a serpentine pattern up the mountain.

Partway up you cross over into Wyoming for awhile, then at the summit you are back in Montana.

Coming back down you see a stunning view of Index and Pilot Mountains.

We stayed in Cooke City, a small town just northeast of the north entrance to Yellowstone Park.It was beautiful and not overrun by tourists. Just a main street, with some pretty old buildings, but the surrounding mountains made it seem like a movie set.

A forest fire came close to the town some years back.

One evening Ray, my brother Steve, and I walked across the street from our motel to the saloon, just as the moon was coming up over the mountain. Not much action in the saloon, but we sat and had a drink and listened to a young guy play guitar and sing. We were his only audience it seemed. We told him we enjoyed the music and tossed a few dollars into his tip jar. The next night we had a big, catered family dinner at the old lodge where the rest of our group was staying. The caterer, cook, server, cleaner-upper was one guy—the same guy who was providing the music at the saloon the night before. Small town.

I can look at that photo of the moon and smell the pine-scented air and feel the cool mountain breeze after a brilliant, hot day. Intoxicating stuff for a mountain person.

The hat, again

I took the hat on my trip and it was used a lot. Worked perfectly in my opinion. On one windy day it occurred to me it might be good to add a cord or strap to keep it on. I think I will do that for my rainhat version.

Up on the mountain with my hat. That's my cousin Ginger in the red and family friend, Virginia, with me.

Here is my brother in the hat. It fit him nicely and he liked it enough that I think I'll make one for him. We stopped here for our picnic lunch the day we drove through Yellowstone Park. Steve is looking quite smug because our family name name is Howard.

I spent a couple of hours drafting the pattern and turning it into a .pdf file this afternoon. (See how much I love my big-headed friends?) If you want a copy of the pattern leave a comment with your email address in it and I will send it to you.

Because of the size of the pattern pieces you will have to cut four each of the brim and crown pieces and tape them together to get the full size pattern pieces, but I think it is pretty straightforward.

I found some great fabrics today for rain hats, which I will make from the same pattern. I found a store that carries all kinds of outdoor type fabrics, as well as all the clips and toggles and zippers and other goodies one might need. For those of you in Portland, you need to check it out! For the rest of you, they do mail order, but you miss out on the bin of remnants where I found my fabrics. Rose City Textiles. This was a great resource and the clerk I worked with was super helpful and knowledgeable.

Nick Cave at the Boise Art Museum

Thanks to the wonders of the iPhone and my Kindle Fire, as we traveled last week I was able to read my email. The discussion on the SAQA (Studio Art Quilts Associates) list was about "trends" in art. The comments were interesting and as much as I would have liked to toss in my two cents worth, typing on my small devices was more trouble than I wanted to go to and so I just watched the discussion evolve. I knew, eventually, someone would express my point of view and, of course they did. The "trends" thread led to mention of "cutting edge" artwork, and there was some outrage and some confusion and some asking what that even meant. (What does it mean??)  And finally, from Sandy Donabed, who never disappoints me when a voice of reason and intelligence is needed, a challenge. Go look at some contemporary art and think about it and learn about it and report back.

As luck (or something) would have it, the first stop on our road trip was Boise, and as we often do in Boise, we made time for a visit to the Boise Art Museum. It is a small art museum in a smallish city, but I am often impressed with the high quality of the exhibits. Really great museum. I recommend it if you find yourself in Boise. The current show is "Nick Cave: Meet Me at the Center of the Earth." I think it might qualify as cutting edge.

I was confused about Nick Cave. I thought he was a musician. Well turns out there are two. This one. And this one. The artist is a former dancer with the Alvin Ailey company and now teaches at the Art School of the Chicago Art Institute. His visual works are mostly large "suits" that can be worn or exhibited as sculpture. The first piece we saw as we entered the exhibit was this huge bear, constructed from striped wool sweaters.

All of his work is big—taller than human size—and has a sense of iconic tribal figures and costumes. I was immediately reminded of African dancers, and yet the materials used are mundane, often "tacky" artifacts of American life. Old sweaters, cheap toys, hotpads, doilies, knickknacks, synthetic fur and glittery souvenirs. And yet there is a kind of dignity and mystery, and I found myself circling and circling and discovering all I could about each piece.

 How clever is this? The repeating circular images on old tops and those 

same patterns crocheted into hot pads?

These suits he calls "soundsuits" and the sound that is made by a human moving inside the piece becomes a part of the work, taking the work from static artwork to performance.

 

Lots of ceramic bird figurines!

 

Nick Cave is clearly influenced by his dance background. These suits are made to move and make noise. There is a costume influence at work here. He also says his aesthetic comes from a poor childhood and a mother who delighted in his creativity, though it was created from found objects, old clothing and whatever was cheap or free. There is a sense of the collector and the joy of serendipity as odd objects come together and speak to one another and dance together. Whereas it could be chaotic, it is ordered and intentional and each piece has its own meaning and personality. It makes you smile. It makes you laugh. It comforts you with familiarity and surprises you with originality and unexpected combinations.

Would you take it home for the family room? Of course not. This seems to be the common objection to unconventional art. It isn't conventionally "pretty" or "tasteful". Some of it is hard to understand. Some of it is downright disturbing! But if it makes you react, or laugh, or cry, or feel somehow a little bit off-center, then it is communicating something that the artist feels. It is more than decor. It could be a message or a question or just a feeling of joyful abandon. It makes you feel something new. This is what I love about art.

Photography was not allowed in the museum. All images here were gleaned from the internet, but these were all pieces that were in the exhibit.

Journey

 A family reunion. A journey through the past, remembrance and a glimpse of the future.

We met my brother and my cousins in Pocatello, where I grew up, gathering first at the old cemetary to dedicate a headstone for my aunt and my oldest uncle who died last December. Some of their ashes were buried here, where they lived all of their married life. The rest—well that is the rest of my story.

It was a beautiful summer day and the mood was celebratory, not somber. Memories were shared, dear people remembered with affection, and we mingled and greeted relatives and met their grandchildren. At the end of the informal ceremony the children released balloons into the clear blue sky and we watched as they became smaller and smaller and finally disappeared. Thus began an odyssey of sorts as we traveled, over the next few days, the familiar roads from Southern Idaho, up to our old family cabin, on to Yellowstone Park and into Montana where the remaining ashes would be left.

 The Tetons, from the Idaho side

Three days later we all found ourselves climbing a steep path near the Cooke City Highway in Montana, to a rushing waterfall that crashed over rocks and fallen logs, a place my aunt and uncle loved above all.

We gathered on the hillside. Words were said and the ashes became a part of the Montana earth.

That evening we gathered for a big family dinner in Cooke City. We live scattered across the United States so there was a lot of catching up to do and plenty of sharing of photos and stories. Games and prizes for the kids and toward the end of the evening, a toast to Aunt Pat and Uncle Bill—juice for the children and non-drinkers, Tullamore Dew, brought from Ireland by Uncle Bill, for the rest of us. It was a happy, noisy crowd and I couldn't help feeling there were ghosts among us, joining in the laughter, just across the room, around the corner, watching through the windows. My Mom and Dad, Uncle Bill and Uncle Eddy, Aunt Pat and Susie and Ed and Aunt Clio. Grandma, too—telling her stories and laughing. I imagined my cousin Bill, gone from us far too soon, watching his handsome son move through the crowd.

My Dad and aunts and uncles who grew up, not so far from where we were, are all gone now. It is a sobering thought to realize that my siblings and cousins and I are now the oldest generation of our family. And it is good to be with them from time to time. We have shared a lot. "Remember this" I tell myself. Just remember it all.

The Clan of the Big-headed Women

It seems there are a lot of us with big heads. Sandy claims hers is bigger than mine. She wears her husband's hats. My husband's hats are too small for me. My problem is two-fold. Big head, lots of hair. I measured my head. If I pull a tape measure tightly around my head, just above my eyebrows it measures 23.5 inches. According to a chart I found by googling that is an XL or 7.5 hat size. I need a little extra room for my hair if I don't want a crease in it when I remove the hat. The hat I made measures 26 inches around the opening, which leaves it nicely roomy on my head.

I got lots of suggestions. I have tried the stretching idea. I have had luck taking the band off hats made of straw or grass-like materials, wetting and stretching them. I have never been able to stretch a fabric hat enough to make it fit.

I plan to make a rain hat from the pattern one of these days.  Synthia suggested cute oilcloth. That might be good, but perhaps a little too cute for my tastes. I am thinking more along the lines of GORE-TEX® . This is Oregon. We don't do cheerful rain gear. We blend into the landscape and are one with the rain. (ohmmmm) My friend Sheila directed me to Sunday Afternoons, a company in Southern Oregon. These look like very nifty hats and they do have an extra large size—which is not a guarantee that it will actually be large enough, but seems worth checking into.

For my hat I made my own pattern. It is a simple design, but required some math and figuring and trying. I constructed a paper hat and adjusted the sizing, then took it apart to use for the pattern. I am very happy to share my pattern with my big-headed sisters, if you'd like to make your own. I will need to draft it in Illustrator and make into a pdf, which I can email, so give me a week or two. I'm going to be gone for several days before I can even get to it.

Big head, big hat

I have a big head. I look silly in hats because they do not fit onto my head. They perch, like fat birds, atop my head. I have always found it strange that women's hats come in one size only. I know women whose heads are so small that most hats cover their eyes. Men's hats are more likely to be sized and occasionally I find a men's XL that fits me, but the choices are limited and most men's styles are not to my liking. Once my son Andy gave me a purple woman's hat for Christmas. It actually fit. I asked how he decided on it and knew it would fit me. He said he tried it on and knew if it fit his head it would fit mine. Large heads are inherited. I would loved to have seen him trying on the purple hat in the store!

I am getting ready to go on vacation and for years I have wanted a soft, floppy hat that will keep the sun off my face—one I could fold up and stuff in my pocket or pack. Earlier this week I looked once more, in vain, for such a hat. After examining a few, I decided I could make my own, in a size that would fit me. Here it is, and it fits over my large head and thick hair. I am wearing it as I type this. I like it so well I might make more. I think, made from waterproof fabric, it would be great for a rain hat. Ray even liked it.

A day in Portland

Old friends from another city were here for a quick visit. They hadn't seen the house since we were working on it before we moved in, so we brought them out for lunch and the quick tour, then into the city to see what we could see. The old standbys—Powell's Books, The Japanese Garden, the Rose Garden, Saturday Market—were all old hat. Been there, done that. The weather was undecided. Rain by the bucket load, then sun and blue sky and then all of it over again. Seemed like our friends might enjoy a stroll down N. Mississippi Street, a bit of the old, a bit of the new and a small sampling of Portland culture.

We went into this store, restored to its elegant bird-free state.

The birds, well chickens, were actually here at Pistils Nursery, roaming among the plants and flowers.

Sunlan Lighting is a light bulb store. Any kind of light bulb you would ever need or not need. Our friend Monte got just what he needed for an antique fixture that won't handle a modern light bulb. The owner, sitting at her desk as you come in the door greets you with, "good afternoon. How may I enlighten you?"

We walked on. The sun came out, the sky turned blue. We browsed the gourmet salt shop. We found just the exact tiny piece of hardware Monte needed for another project at the Rebuilding Center, we marveled at the curiosities in the shop windows, and admired the lovely old buildings that house them.

Note how the color of the sky has changed since the previous photos. Really, it was a crazy weather day.

We finished the day with an excellent Portland micro brew, before heading back across town.

Great to spend the time with Monte and Janet and fun to play tourist in our own city.

Water

It has been a weird week. I am running up against the deadline for finishing the "Elements" pieces and I essentially lost two days this week. Monday morning I woke up with a stiff neck and by bedtime I was in a serious amount of pain. Did not sleep and by morning I was in such pain and fear of what might be causing it that I went straight to the Urgent Care Clinic near us. It was a strained trapezius muscle in my neck, making my neck impossible to move without screaming, hot pain and sending tentacles of pain winding up around my skull. The recommendation was rest and drugs and sleep and a soft cervical collar to support the weight of my head. So I lounged around all day on Tuesday reading and sleeping, felt a little better on Wednesday and much better today. So I was back in the studio this afternoon.

"Water" should have been easy (that's why I left it for last), but I had a hard time settling on an idea. Close to my heart is the wetland area where we walk, so that began to take shape in my head. I started with an assortment of blue, gray and tan fabrics and fused some strips to form a base.

At the end of today I had this:

I think I am nearly there. A few additions, then I will trim it to size and bind it.

Speaking of the wetland area, we had a surprise when we walked last week. Sofia was with us, and as we came around the corner near the Fanno Farmhouse, Beth and I were talking away and Sofia piped in "look at the turtle!" There, studiously digging in the dirt at the side of the trail, was a large turtle. I took its picture with my phone.

That evening on the local news was a story of another turtle that was captured in a backyard several miles away. They are snapping turtles that have invaded the wetlands and creek. They are not native to the area and are thought to have been pets, originally, that were released into the creek and have bred there for years. This is the season when they come onto land to dig holes and lay eggs. They are quite destructive, eating the native fish, frogs, even baby ducks and can take a finger off if you are dumb enough to offer it to one. We found this one pretty interesting and were happy to have encountered it until we learned later what pests they are. If we see another we are advised to call the Parks department or Fish and Wildlife, who will come and take it away. Wish I had known. Now I am on the lookout when we walk.

The old with the new

Ray's greenhouse is his happy place. I have to check in every so often to see what's up. I think the last time I posted pictures the entrance looked like this.

There's much more of a jungle view through that glass door these days, and the door, itself, is now painted to match the siding.

I noticed recently that he has hung a few treasures on the upper wall—things we have carried with us for years. Horseshoes. I told him that you are supposed to hang horseshoes with the opening facing upwards, otherwise the good luck empties out the bottom. He didn't care. Pieces of an old iron stove. We found these

on a hike many years ago when we came upon the ruins of an old cabin. The tool at the far end is a log peeler, made for removing the bark from logs. Where did this one come from? I'm not sure, but it is like the ones my family used when we were building our cabin.

The oval plate is an international license plate that we bought for the shiny, new yellow Volkswagon we bought in Germany in 1972 . We spent that summer traveling in Europe in our yellow bug, then we shipped it home. The Oregon plate is the first one we had when we moved to Oregon in 1979. I was happy to find these old fragments of our earlier lives lending their spirit to the new greenhouse.

Drawing with the sewing machine

If you have been keeping up with my drawing blog you know that I have been focusing on contour drawing. I thought I might try some contour drawing with my sewing machine. I laid a little bunch of leaves next to my sewing machine and decided to first draw some of the leaves on a gray/green fabric and fused them onto a piece of white canvas. Then I started "drawing" using black thread in the machine. Free motion stitching is not unlike drawing with a pen or pencil, except instead of moving a pen across the paper, you move the fabric under the needle.

I added a contour line of the shadow with gray thread.

I wish I had not stitched the veins in the leaves. Too much and they are far too tight and fussy. I removed them from the photo in Photoshop to see what it might have looked like. I like it better.

I could go back and pick out all those stitches, but I won't. Just something to file away for the next time.

The Seasons, they go 'round and 'round...

This week marks the end of another school year, during which we have helped to care for our grandchildren. We have had the pleasure of doing this since Sofia was born a little more than five years ago. Marco was born almost two years ago. Their parents, my daughter and son-in-law, think we are helping them out with childcare. We are, from our point of view, both helping them and adding so much joy and love into our own lives by having them with us for two days a week during the school year.

There is no more powerful reminder of how quickly time passes than watching a child grow. Sofia will go to kindergarten next year. It seems like such a short time ago that she was born, making us grandparents for the first time. We still refer to Marco as "the baby" but, as you can see, he is quickly moving beyond babyhood.

On today's excursion to the nature park, the kids and Ray and I loved the sunshine and the blooming forest and the smell of woods. We have all been cooped up indoors for most of the past nine months and today felt like summer had arrived. Marco, who seems to be learning a new word every day, learned the word "flower." Sofia exclaimed over the yuckiness of the many giant slugs encountered on the trail. They were the only animals we saw today.

They walked, skipped and ran along the path to the end, then let Ray push them in the stroller on the return trip.

Marco wore himself out.

Next week their parents, both educators, will start a hard-earned summer break. We will see them all often, but not for our scheduled twice weekly days together. I will get a lot more artwork and blogging and drawing done. They are five minutes away, but I will miss them. The brightest little lights in my life.

A week...

has gone by since my last post here. Dang, time flies.Can't say I was too busy to post, though we did have a sick baby this week—our grandson— and did a bit more childcare and support services than a usual week, but still. I just didn't have too much to post about. STASH met on Thursday and we celebrated Gale's birthday.  I posted on my new drawing blog. I am having fun with it and making myself do a bit more drawing than usual. Please join me over there and draw along, or just enjoy the drawings that readers are sending.

I finished the "Air" quilt for the set of "Elements."

"Water" will be the last, but I am still pondering. In the meantime I made a start on my next 12 x 20 piece. The theme is "Myths". I don't want to share too much before the reveal, but I made a challenge for myself to portray draped, striped fabric. I started with a little sketch.

Then I cut into one of my precious pieces of Marcia Derse fabrics to start putting it together. I think it is a good effect. Here is a bit of a preview. Care to guess what it is?

This fabric is so beautiful. My favorite color for sure. I tend to hoard favorite fabrics. It is always hard to make the first cut into something really special. But this was just what was called for here, I think. I needed something fit for a goddess. OK, that's all the hinting I plan to do.

This morning I wandered around the yard while I was waiting for my friend, Jeri to arrive to go to a meeting with me for the Open Studio tour. It was wet out from all the rain, but boy are things blooming. This is my neighbors' Dogwood tree. Astounding.

On the path to somewhere...

I headed to the studio this afternoon as Ray was working on the final section of the pathway to the studio, with the assistance of his loyal cat, Thor.

Those little bloops of green along the way are Irish moss, which we hope will spread and fill in between the rocks. I added the solar lights to light the way.

Along the way I admired the poppies and the foxgloves.

 I spent the afternoon quilting/doodling on the "air" quilt and finally finished the stitching part. Here is a detail.

Then I added the dots. I'm not sure where these dots originated in my brain, but somehow they seem to work on everything. More needed, I think.

In this piece the air is just full of "stuff". Leaves, pollen, motion. fragrances and atmosphere. It seemed odd to be working on an autumnal quilt on such a perfectly wonderful spring day.

At the end of the day I had accomplished a lot and so had Ray.

Pretty great pathway, huh?