Shaking up the neighborhood

As the studio/greenhouse construction continues I can see that some of the neighbors are curious about what is going on here. What may not be clear from my photos and descriptions is that our house sits very far back on our lot, the stream runs in front of the house, and the studio is being built between the stream and the road, so fully visible from the street. In fact we think it will make our house even more secluded to have the studio where it is. I notice cars slowing down and drivers looking things over as they drive by. A couple of neighbors out walking have stopped to ask what we are building. This morning another neighbor came by and introduced herself and inquired about the construction. I was really happy to meet her. I drive past her house frequently. It is another, like ours, of the old, original houses on the road. It sits far back from the road with a huge green lawn and gorgeous trees and gardens. They have lived there for more than 30 years. She was able to tell us a bit about our house and former residents, including a wood carver of some note, who died tragically, quite young. She seemed pleased and supportive of the studio addition to the neighborhood. I think I will enjoy knowing her.

Again, yesterday morning, I awoke to the "beep, beep" of the concrete truck backing up the driveway, and when I dashed out for my walk, this guy was smoothing the floor of the greenhouse. It slopes slightly toward a drain in the center.

Ray had left a little earlier for work, but as he headed out he said, "why don't you see if you can get the grandchildren to put some hand prints in the concrete before it hardens." On my way back from walking I picked up the kids and my son-in-law and we did our best to immortalize the moment in concrete. It was setting so fast that the hand prints were really hard to impress and don't go very deep, but I think they will show. I added their names and the date.

Maybe years from now they will come back to see their names and prints and tell whoever is living here then about all of us.

Knockin' my Socks off

Every time I pass my front window and catch a glimpse of the flowers out front it knocks my socks off. I stop what I am doing and just take in that view of those scrumptious flowers. I love what Ray has created out here. It used to be grass.

The orange lilies are divine. I am thinking that my orange piece for the 12 x 12 Orange Challenge just has to have some of these lilies in it.

The big, tall lilies have started blooming. So beautiful and so fragrant. They perfume the entire yard.

This is as big as my face.

The toy fire truck is one of the treasures dug up in the yard. It sits on a stump amid the darker orangey-red lilies.

The studio progresses. The plumbing guy worked out there all day today. His work is not so visible, but oh, so important. I started trying to figure out where everything will go today. Yesterday I went out and shopped for a toilet and sink and looked at shelving. Shelving has me a little stymied, but I think I'm figuring something out.

Our son-in-law arrived home from Ecuador last night and came to look at the construction this morning. This has all happened while he was gone. I think he was pretty excited—I think I've mentioned that he designed the studio. He said that the little country house in Ecuador that he designed for his mother is having problems with the plumbing. I asked what kind of sewer/septic system it has and he told me that the sewer dumps into the river. Oyyy! Of course I thought of all the hoops we have jumped through to build this anywhere near our little creek. Apparently water quality is not quite as high a priority in Ecuador.

More than a friend

Today is the birthday of one of the best people I know. Do you know what it means to be a friend? Most of what I know about friendship I learned from Priscilla. She was my mother's best friend. They met as young mothers, when I was so young I don't even remember, and were friends until my mother's death. She has been the "other mother" in my life, for essentially all my life.

Here she is, circa 1954, all dressed up in hose and high heels, feeding the ducks in a Boise park with four little girls—me, her daughters Kathleen and Leslie, and my sister Becky. We girls were great friends, Kathleen and I close in age and Leslie and Becky close in age. (Her third daughter Nancy, and my brother Steve came along a few years later) We shared birthdays, holidays, went to camp together, played together. Our parents played bridge and picnic-ed and sailed and traveled together. When my parents built their cabin, Priscilla and her clever and sweet husband Phil, were hammering nails and skinning logs right alongside them. When the cabin was finished we spent many, many weekends together there with Phil's canoe on the lake and evening card games and glorious meals that Mom and Priscilla would cook in the tiny cabin kitchen.

From Priscilla I learned that being a friend meant being there through it all. If you were sick she not only brought you dinner, she stayed long enough to clean the bathroom and do the dishes. She accepts and loves her friends, despite differing backgrounds or philosophies, with the most open heart and open mind of anyone I know. It is a gift I strive for in myself and wish more people possessed.

Here she is today, at the age of 85, with grace, smile, sense of humor and style fully intact.

One little story to tell you something about our relationship, and maybe a  kind of spooky power she possesses! A number of years ago we did a lot of renovating of the kitchen in our old house. In addition to paint and new floor and counter tops, I bought new appliances, except for the refrigerator—the old one was still going strong. I think I wrote Priscilla and sent some pictures of the changes we'd made. I said the only flaw, in my opinion, was the old refrigerator which was a different color from the new appliances and didn't look too great—but eventually it would die and I would replace it. A few days later she called and started out, "Now I know this is none of my business, BUT—I have been thinking what your mother would have advised and I know she would tell you to BUY THE NEW REFRIGERATOR NOW!"  Then she assured me that I should do whatever I thought best, but oh, she really thought I ought to replace the ugly old refrigerator. Then we talked about other things and I hung up thinking how sweet it was that she even cared about my refrigerator and maybe I'd go take a look at new ones tomorrow. The next morning, when I got up, I found a huge puddle of yucky water on the kitchen floor, emerging from  under the ugly, now dead-as-a-doornail, old refrigerator. My first thought was to wonder how she did that, then I headed out to the appliance store with a happy smile on my face.

Priscilla, I love you with all my heart and feel so blessed to have you in my life. I am so sad that I wasn't able to come to Idaho for your birthday celebration. Have a wonderful birthday!

Northwest Vibes

Friday night was the opening for the High Fiber Diet group's "Northwest Vibes" show. It was at the Singer Hill Cafe in Oregon City. The cafe is in downtown Oregon City and has a small gallery, cafe and really unusual gardens with cafe seating. There was also live music.

As I said, small gallery. The work was stacked two and three pieces high on the walls, which is not ideal, but worked fine for this venue. It was cozy, but felt festive and fun.

That's my piece "When it Rains I Make my Own Sunshine" on the bottom there. Gerrie's Portland cityscape is at the top.

It was a beautiful summer evening and I really enjoyed the show and dinner in the garden of the cafe. The garden features vertical gardens planted on the sides of the buildings, fences and around pillars. Fascinating concept.

Ray met me there after work and Emily and the kids went too. We had a nice evening. It was a little different from most of our shows, but a nice location for a small show. I enjoyed the cafe, which I had never been to.

My daughter and grandson, Marco.

Studio progress

I think our builder is angling for the best Angie's List rating ever. He is so all over this project. Behold the progress at the end of today.

Floor joists.

Yesterday I awoke to a hummedy, hummedy, clunkedy, clunkedy sound and knew that something was happening outside. I threw on shorts, shirt and sandals and grabbed my camera. Just as I suspected—concrete truck. They were pouring the foundation.

This morning there was a guy out there knocking the forms off the concrete, then a pile of lumber was delivered, and when Sofia and I arrived home from the library late this afternoon there was sawing and hammering and big boards being fitted into place. The joists for the studio floor are now in place.

A beautiful sight.

When we were planning and designing the studio Ray kept saying it would be built on a concrete slab. That would be the easiest, most straightforward way to do it. I was not keen on the idea of a concrete floor. So hard to stand on for hours at a time and my legs and back are not what they once were. When we started interviewing potential builders a couple of them agreed that the slab was the way to go. The third said, no, he thought a crawlspace and joists would be just as easy and make a nicer floor to work on. Yeah! So that's what I am getting. I have yet to choose the final floor covering, but it will most likely be a commercial grade linoleum. I want something tough and easy to sweep and mop, where stray pins cannot hide, nor threads and snips adhere to and paint will not stain..Light, bright and neutral to reflect a lot of natural light. At the rate they are getting this thing built, I think I need to go floor shopping quite soon.

The greenhouse will get a poured concrete slab with a drain in the middle. They tell me the plumbing will start going in tomorrow.

Mom's birthday

Today would have been my Mom's 86th birthday. The photo above shows her at the age of 18 or 19, as a student at the University of Colorado. That's where she met my dad. She is sitting on the grass, working on a painting. At the end of her sophomore year she left college to marry my dad, who was in the Navy during the war. She always meant to finish her college degree in art, and nearly twenty years later she did.

In those twenty years between she raised my brother and sister and me and taught us to draw and paint and sew and used her talents to create costumes and prom dresses and decorate our house on a strict budget and lead Girl Scouts and Brownies and raise gardens and flowers and sing on long rides in the car and help my dad build a cabin in the mountains. And then she finished her degree and worked as the director of the YWCA where she established an art center and an art festival and a shelter for battered women and a place for people, old and young to meet and enjoy friends and shared interests. She was a friend, a mom, a wife, a grandmother, an advocate, an artist.

I can imagine her at 86 and I still feel cheated that she died before she got to be old. But I am lucky that she was my Mom.

It looks tiny!

Yesterday a crew showed up and spent all day building concrete forms for the studio/greenhouse. Yes, greenhouse. I think in my excitement I failed to mention that the structure will include my studio and a greenhouse for Ray. He refers to it as "the greenhouse." I refer to it as "the studio!"  Ha!

Anyway, it was pretty fascinating to watch them pull the components from a big flatbed truck and Lego together the forms. When they finished it looked small. Tiny, even. I was not worried. I have experienced this growing/shrinking phenomenon before when we have built buildings or added rooms. On paper it looks vast. The hole looked big. The forms look small. I expect the poured concrete will look a different size and so on until it is finished. The illusion was so striking, though, that Ray took his big tape measure out and measured. Yes, it is exactly the right size.

From another angle:

It is not a large studio, but I think it will be just right for me. I make small work. I don't do a lot of big space hogging stuff like dyeing or printing with a press. I do need storage space. There will be a small loft over the studio which will probably end up mostly as storage space.

The little bump out at the top right will be a small bathroom. It doesn't look big enough right now, but I know it will be! Here's a drawn on copy of the photo, which gives you an idea of what you are seeing here.

Ha! I don't know how illuminating that is. I know the loft is confusing. Imagine that it is floating above the studio with a stairway down the right side.

A Room of One's Own

This morning at 8 am, I walked down to the creek, stood on the bridge and took this picture. The last time it will ever look like this.

Several hours later this was the scene.

 

And at the end of the day, like this.

Looking back from the street toward the house.

These were the first steps in the studio construction. It has been a long time coming. Nearly three years in a concrete sense, but much longer in other important ways.

Virginia Wolfe said, in order for a woman to write she must have her own money and a room of her own. The same I think if one is to do art of any kind. It is true that art can be made anywhere, and has been, but oh, so nice to have one's own dedicated space—and not just a cramped, dark little bedroom, which, by the way, I have always been happy to have. This seems really big to me. I know I will love having the space to work in, but I will also feel that what I do is deserving of the space.

Follow along here. I plan to bore you silly with all the gruesome details.

Hopelessly sappy

I remember my children picking me bouquets of dandelions when they were little. I know I recognized how sweet that was, but I think I was also far too busy and hassled then to give the gesture my full attention. Today Sofia brought me this little bouquet of goatsbeard flowers, picked out in the weeds, and was so pleased when I put them in water.

Sometimes I think one of the best things about being a grandparent is reliving some of those sweet moments that small children provide, but with a greater appreciation of how quickly time passes and how rare those moments really are.

Point, Click, Quilt!

If you've been reading the quilting magazines at all over the past few years, I'm sure you've seen Susan Brubaker Knapp's quilts. Susan has a distinctive, representational style of art quilting that is crisp, bold and graphic. I love the clean, clarity of her work. C&T has just published her new book about quilts that are inspired by photos, which many of hers are. I just got a copy and had a chance to look through it. I am looking forward to reading it in depth, but I wanted to share my first impressions.

Using photos as the design inspirations for artwork is nothing new, and, honestly it is often the recipe for really awful, boring, poorly conceived work. Haven't we all seen those quilts that take a mediocre photo and slavishly reproduce every single detail, including the distracting telephone pole and the badly placed and sad looking tree? Ugh. These are the pieces that give this technique such a bad rep. Susan, on the other hand,  shows how a photo can be a starting point for something truly artful. She starts by providing a lot of solid suggestions for taking better photos from the outset. Then she talks about how to analyze the photo, select the most promising elements, improve the composition, if need be, and interpret it with fabric and stitch, using the strongest parts of the original photo and playing them up in the fabric work. Sometimes that involves leaving things out, sometimes adding something to improve the balance or the flow of the design and sometimes focusing in on a small selected part of a larger photo. The focus is on creating good design, not on simply recreating a scene. Just look at that beautiful cover piece and you can see that this is much more than a simple-minded "how to copy a photo" book. I think anyone who ever made a piece inspired by a favorite photo can learn something from this beautiful book. I did. And it is such a treat to see all Susan's beautiful examples.

I was really flattered when Susan asked to use one of my pieces in the "gallery" section of her book.

On the right hand side, is my "Baños" quilt and the two photographs that inspired it. Ray took the picture on the right, that has the figure of the old man in it, so he also has a photo credit in the book.

I am really pleased to be a small part of such beautifully conceived and produced book. I think it will be a really useful and inspiring resource for many quilt artists.

Garden time

I think it is the height of the garden season here. I just love it when the flowers are all in bloom and the colors are so intense and the foliage so wild and lush. This is the front garden where there was only dry, parched grass a couple of years ago. Ray has worked his magic.

I can't resist taking photos when the garden is in bloom. I have finally figured out pretty well how to get the kind of flower photos I like—where the flower is in focus and the background is out of focus.

I love the energetic, wildness of Shasta daisies. The thing is they don't smell very good, so aren't great as cut flowers, even though I sometimes cut a bouquet just because they are so pretty. But the smell is—well, disgusting.

The crocosmia are all over the city and the red color and tall, graceful stems are spectacular. They are natives of South Aftrica and I only became aware of them about eight or so years ago. Have they always been around and I never noticed, or are they kind of new to this country? Well, whatever, I think they are incredibly beautiful. The hummingbirds adore them, too.

The lilies are always wondrous. These are one of the shorter variety with the beautiful, long graceful foliage. The taller varieties, bigger, more fragrant, with the smaller leaves will be blooming soon.

Last summer we hung this hay rack on the front of the house and I planted it with geraniums and some lobelia. It was a little sad. This year I planted impatiens and creeping jenny and it is beautiful.

We have finally gotten all the permits for the studio construction and are making plans with a builder. I am not believing this will finally happen. 

It's a Heart!

This is what we purchased at the Salem Art Fair. This is a piece by Linda Thorson of Seattle. These are cast using architectural detail concrete and can be hung outside or inside. I loved the detail and I always love hearts. Couldn't decide whether to put it inside or outside and finally decided to hang it inside where I can see it more often. I hung it next to the Goines poster. I like the way they speak to each other, both the color and how the heart shape echos the shape of the leaves in the poster. I think I need something else to hang with them. I'm sure I have something around here!

Art Fair

I love going to Art Fairs. Those entrepreneurial extravaganzas where artists have booths and try to sell their work. This is somehow quite different from a gallery show. It is row after row of those tent-like canopies with work that ranges from the whimsical to the tacky to the useful to the sublime. We went, with some friends, to the Salem Art Festival at Bush's Pasture in Salem, Oregon, the other evening.

I love this event. Not all of the art is to my taste, but I have such admiration for the artists who put together these great exhibits, work all year to have new work ready and spend long days answering questions and meeting the public. It reminds me how much fun it is to exhibit like this and the high you get from talking to people who like your work and what a thrill it is to sell work. Long ago I participated in some similar events. I think I should do it again, but I think of how much work I would have to make!

Some of the things that caught my eye:

This large silk-screen print of aspens was stunning! So crisp and graphic.

Lots of cleverness and quirkiness.

This is not a photo. It's a painting.. I am seldom impressed by hyper-realism, but I liked this work a lot.

Glass beetles.

I've never seen a pottery glaze like this.

After viewing the art we parked ourselves at a picnic table and enjoyed a drippy, messy, delectable pulled pork sandwich, an ice-cold beer and a really good live blues band. Hard to imagine a better summer evening with friends. 

Are you wondering if I bought anything? I did. I'll show you tomorrow.

The object #28 Money ball

Remember this? I told you I'd post a photo when I was finished with it. Here it is.

It is sitting near our front door in my succulent garden that is not quite as wonderful as I hoped, but maybe it's getting there. I think the "money ball" is a nice distraction from the scraggliness of the succulents.

I had seen a garden orb with pennies glued all over it and thought it was cool. Then I remembered the box full of foreign coins that we have been accumulating for the past 40 years. I finally thought of a use for them. I glued a bunch of them all over the concrete ball and when the glue had dried I grouted the whole thing. I have already had to reglue one coin that fell out, so I am hoping that was a fluke and is not going to be a problem. I am inordinately pleased with it, though. I can't stop looking at it. I think in 100 years one of my great grandchildren will take it to the Antiques Roadshow,* and though it will not be worth anything much, the expert will praise its quirkiness and sentimental value.

*yes, I think Antiques Roadshow will still be on TV (or whatever replaces TV) in 100 years. Because it may be the BEST TV SHOW, EVER!

Catching up with the Twelve by Twelve reveal

I've been so intent on reporting on our trip that I failed to post about the July 12 Twelve by Twelve reveal. The color theme was gray. If you didn't catch the gray quilts earlier in the week you can still go to the blog and see them. You just need to keep scrolling down through the posts to see them all. Pretty interesting I think.

I was excited about working with gray, but when I got to it I had a hard time. I made one piece that seemed like a much better idea in my head than it turned out to be in fabric.

My idea had to do with the fact that gray is about a million different colors. There are purely neutral grays that are mixed from black and white, but there are also the grays that result when complementary colors are mixed in a way that neutralizes them. They always contain hints of the original colors. I went to my collection of solid color fabrics and pulled out 4 that appeared to be shades of gray. I used a little stamp I had carved to stamp a white design on each one. When the four "grays" sit side by side you clearly see that each, while gray, is also something else—pinkish, purplish, greenish. I called it "gray is relative."  I added some gray quilting in the background as well. It seemed weak.

Then I went in another direction entirely. I used the idea of visual color mixing and created my gray tones using only black and white in differing proportions.

I cut a paper "snowflake" to use as a pattern. The shadow was cut from solid black, then I laid a piece of gauzy cheesecloth over it. When you see it close up the cheesecloth is a tiny white grid pattern over the black. The other gray is black print on white paper—pages from Time magazine—torn into little pieces then glued to white fabric. I use diluted white glue to glue the paper down and then coat the whole thing with more diluted white glue. When dry the paper/fabric can be cut and sewn like regular fabric.

I was much happier with this piece, but I really missed using real color in this challenge. I think the other members of the group came up with some wonderful ideas as well and it was a really interesting challenge, but I have to say that the piece that was made by a blogger who follows along with the group was my favorite of all the gray pieces. Take a look at Joanne Suley's gray quilt. Isn't charming?