Finding "Frogs" and Visiting Josh

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This month I went to visit my youngest son. He lives in a bigger city than I do and I needed sewing supplies.....always a good excuse to go see him because there is better selection there. Part of my finishing binge, (a knitted cape by Nikki Epstein) needed some frogs to complete it but I couldn't find them in my home town. So I contacted my youngest son and made arrangements to spend the day with him and stay overnight in his town!

What fun we had. I went straight to the fabric store that had a great selection of frog closures for my cape.  http://www.galafabrics.com/victoria.htm  It was a good thing that I had people meeting me because I could have spent hours here, and could have spent many dollars as well!  But they did, as they said on the phone, have the frogs I needed. 

After purchasing those, Josh, Ben and I went for a walk on one of the breakwaters.  It was, to be honest, bloody terrifying!  Josh and I clung to each other and walked down the center of the "wall", freezing in position when someone passed us, while Ben sauntered ahead oblivious to the height and the lack of railings!  It was a scrumptious day, sunny and bright with a slight breeze.  When we got to the end of the breakwater, we climbed down the huge concrete blocks to get to the spot where this photo was taken.  This is Josh and I.  We walked back to where the car was parked along the lower "steps" of the breakwater, and both of us felt far more comfortable.  Yes, you had to watch your step, but there was no feeling of being so high up that the wind could blow you over the edge.  Something to cling to!  Somewhere to sit down and get stabilized!  Solid cement in other words.  I think the birds felt the same way.  They were there searching for open mussels and anything else they could eat.  I think they are Sandpipers.  I love the way they peck around and when something disturbs them they all lift together in a cloud and then settle a few feet away and keep pecking! 

After our walk, we went for lunch, a relaxing meal, and then drove to the motel where I had made reservations.  After check in, we went to another restaurant and had dinner, and then picked up a case of beer (I usually drink wine but Linda taught me to drink beer when we were in New York City!)  Josh and Ben had no problem with that.  We sat on the balcony and visited to our hearts content.  When it was time to go home, they sprinted to catch the bus and I curled up with my book, satisfied with a great visit and a wonderful day in the sun. 

Next day we met for brunch.  Here is a picture of the Hydro boxes on the street in Sidney, BC.  I thought they were wonderful.  Ever so much nicer than a plain green metal box!  The artwork reminds me of something I've seen in a magazine, and I'd love to translate it to fabric.

Again, it was a good thing it was Sunday and most of the stores were closed.  What a window-shopping treat this town was.  I wandered up and down the street looking at the sites and eventually my cell phone rang.  Josh and Ben were wondering where I was....I was across the street from them!

We joined each other in the middle of the street and laughed and hugged each other.  Brunch was next on the agenda.  We walked to a popular restaurant but the line-up was "out the door".  So we wandered around until we found a nice place and went in for an excellent brunch.  After that I had to leave and head home.  I dropped the two of them off at their home, and headed off for my drive home....the miracle is that I found my way from their house to the main highway and in the right direction home!  You have to know I have absolutely no sense of direction and get lost incredibly easily.  If someone paints their door, I no longer know where I am.  But this was a good day and I managed to find a straight route to home.  It was a delightful weekend, and besides having a great visit with my son, I had what I needed to finish yet another project! 

MARCH FLOWERS BRING APRIL SHOWERS AND WINDS AND STORMS!

Here are pictures taken March 1 in our yard and at the school I work at. It’s been an extraordinarily mild winter….so mild in fact that I feel it was a very long spring. Obviously the plants think so as well!  They are well ahead of schedule in their blooming. For a time I was worried that a frost or snow would come along and kill them off as their growth was untimely. But that didn’t happen.

Everything looked like this until April 4th…..when we had record winds for a 12 hour period. The poor little Star Magnolia blooms were whipped around and are now bruised from abuse. The gorgeous pink petals that normally cling to the Flowering Plum for at least six weeks are mostly sprinkled all over the neighborhood lawns as they didn’t stand up to 75 kmh winds! Imagine that! But the Daffodils bowed their gentle heads into the protection of bigger plants and popped up again looking as cheerful as they always do.

Notice the "pink" theme going on in our yard?  Which reminds me....I need to dig up the "May Bush" my Dad saved me from their home of 52 years.  it's looking healthy but hasn't bloomed yet.  It will look great in the next yard!  It is pink too~

Traumatic but Entertaining Times

Late in the fall my husband and I decided to sell our house. This decision was not an easy one to come by as we’d only been in it for three years. However wonderful my sewing studio is, the private office, the delightfully bright kitchen….the stairs have become difficult for him as his arthritis worsens more quickly than expected. So we put it up for sale. We know winter is not an ideal time to sell a house, but wanted this to be over with and be in a new place for spring since we both love gardening. (And there’s the secret hope that we won’t have to watch the trees we’ve planted spring into bloom and look glorious just as we moved.)

However, that was not to be. We spent the winter cleaning and purging. In fact, we took a lot of stuff out of the house to make it look larger and cleaner, and moved all that to our son’s vacant house. We did this ourselves. Several loads went across town and were stored in his house and shed.

But that wasn’t the end of our moving things. Our son came home from where he was working (out of town) for Christmas so in consideration of his family, we moved our things out of his house and back into ours! I’m sure by now the neighbors thought us insane. When he left to go back to work, we moved some big things back over to his house. And then he decided to rent it. A good decision as he was carrying two payments because of needing accommodation where he was working as well. So….back we go to get our things out of his place entirely and bring them back to our house. Some got put back in place, some got stored in the garage. By now the neighbors had gotten up the nerve to come over and ask about all this activity.

So, to make the winter seem shorter, I can sum it up in one sentence. “We moved several times and cleaned and tidied constantly”. The happy ending to the story is that the house sold during spring break, and at a reasonable enough profit. Since we had to do this thing, we hoped to be able to come out of it well enough ahead that I would be able to retire when I want to. I’m not sure when that will be, but soon. We have to be out April 30th, but we aren’t sure where we are going yet! I’m trying to remain calm about that.

It seems the house, being of good quality and in a desirable neighborhood, took longer than usual to sell. All the feedback we got from our real estate agent was that the “unfinished house across the street was not something these customers could see themselves looking at for years to come.” Now when we moved in I saw this house, but thought it was weathered and would be finished the next summer. After we moved in I found out that it had been like that for 11 YEARS!!! And since we’ve been here three years, it’s now been like that for 14 YEARS! The story is that the owner started the addition without a building permit or inspection and the city came by and stopped work on the project. They will not give him a permit unless he pays a penalty and he refuses to pay that penalty. So it sits there, actually rotting in the weather and he uses it for a storage shed and a place to tune up lawnmowers!

I think it terribly arrogant of him to impose his poor judgment on the rest of the street and have been told that his house probably lowers the price of the houses in the neighborhood by $20,000 each. The lesson there is that when you fall in love with a house, look around and see what surrounds it. That “Location, Location, Location” comment really does hold true! I spoke with our City Hall representative and he said that if I could get four neighbors to write an email to him complaining, that this guy would be told that either he gets busy and finishes it within a certain deadline, or they will finish it for him and charge him contractor’s prices. I got three people to write in……. Even tho I won’t be there anymore, I think I’ll continue to follow that one up, for the sake of the two very good friends we made in this neighborhood.

Preview of Quilter's Connection Article

Much to my pleasure, I received via email, an invitation to contribute an article to a new Canadian magazine called Quilter's Connection.  http://www.quiltersconnection.ca/  It was to be their "green" issue, concentrating on re-purposing, re-cycling and re-using.  I agreed and decided I would feature Art Trading Cards, wonderful little tableaus for experimental artwork. 

Fitting in with the "Green" theme, I have been picking up bits and pieces around the grounds of the high school where I work for  quite some time now.  I bring them home, run them through the dishwasher, and if they survive, save them in a basket for mixed media art "in the future".  The variety of items I have found is amazing.  Pop can tabs, broken earrings, plastic buttons, flattened bottle caps with unique designs on them, bits of rusty metal...the list goes on and on.  My co-worker has even joined in and brought me little things she has found! 

So with this invitation from Quilter's Connection, I suddenly had an incentive (and a deadline) to put together the things I'd been percolating in the back of my mind for a while!  Here are the results.  The complete article will be in the spring issue of the magazine so I can even add that to my list of where I've been "published"! 

These are a sneak preview of what will be in the magazine.  You can play a sort of "Where's Waldo" game and see if you can see the things I used below in the picture above!  They ARE there! 

An ATC Exchange

In the fall of 2009, the Richmond Art Gallery (RAG) sponsored an exchange of Art Trading Cards.  I decided I would like to enhance my collection by taking part in this exchange.  The guidelines were that each participant sent in 9 trading cards in a "trading card" page with a self-addressed stamped envelope for returning the cards received in exchange.  There was no theme, no regulations, and all forms of art were welcomed.  This meant the ATC's would be photography, painting, paper art, mixed media, and mine...textile art.  Any medium was ok. 

Here is a sampling of the ones I sent in.  The orange ones were made with the trimmings from a dye experiment where I quilted the sandwich of fabric first and then lay it in a tray and poured dye over it.  I have a quilt on the design wall from this technique, but it's not finished yet.  I couldn't bear to throw out the pieces....they were so bright and colorful! 

And one day in the mail, an envelope arrived, printed with my own handwriting, and it contained these!  They are a combination of paper art, mixed media, and two fabric ones.  The one of the box jellyfish reminds me of the movie "Seven" with Will Smith.  A thought provoking movie I watched one evening by myself.  I can't say I loved it but I did enjoy it! 

I especially like the one of the leaf in the bottom left.  I "think" the leaf is paper but am not positive about that.  The bird one is velvet on paper, and there's one that is First Nations buttonwork.  They are all beautiful and have added nicely my collection.  The best part was receiving these in the mail after I'd forgotten all about the exchange! 

Liquitex Inks, Derwent Inktense Pencils & Author Ambassadors

The publisher of my first book, C&T Publishing, is now handling more art quilting supplies.  They asked several months ago if any of their authors would be interested in being an "Author Ambassador".  I happily jumped into the experiment with enthusiasm. (I do have trouble sitting on my hands at meetings!)  A package soon arrived in the mail containing a very generous and exciting bundle of goodies.  Liquitex Inks in primary colors, a selection of Derwent Inktense Pencils, some fabric medium and some Liquitex paints.  Enough to make someone like me salivate and instantly start hatching new ideas. 

I set out to play with the products and to sketch out what I wanted to produce.  I wanted to try the inks since I had not used them before.  I've used lots of fabric paints, but not inks.  So I tried painting with the inks, using a quill pen with the inks, using a rubber stamp and a brayer with the inks, darkening areas with the Inktense pencils, and just generally played around happily.  Then I drew out my design on paper, put it on my tracing surface and got going with the inks and the real thing.  It turned out beautifully.  I was really pleased with the way the inks performed, both as a color medium, and as a resist when a second coat was added.  The Inktense Pencils were really wonderful.  They colored in spaces, they darkened lines, they shaded cheeks.....all depending on the wetness and size of the paintbrush used.  In essence, I LOVED the products. 

And then the inevitable (at least in my life) happened.  I was beading away on a finished piece and spilled a glass of red wine on it. (There's a lesson in here......is it about drinking wine while beading?  Is it about drinking white instead of  red wine?  Those are the only two options I'll consider OK?)  Since the project was done on a very sensitive fabric, it lost it's glamour when it was rinsed, and in the end became unusable.....except perhaps as bits cut up and add to an Art Trading Card.  Not to be deterred, I started over, albeit too late for my deadline by now! But, now it's finished.  This project was done on polyester satin, with Liquitex Inks, Liquitex Fabric Medium and Derwent Inktense pencils......and a lot of hand beading.  I'm not as happy with it as I was with the first one, but in the end I learned more about the product by trying to reproduce what I had done on the first round!  I will definitely be using the products again, AND ordering more from C&T! 

And this project, done with the same supplies except on plain muslin with the polyester satin background is one I consider to be successful.  I love the intensity of the color achieved on muslin.  The freckles are done by using very watered down ink on the Fast-2-Fuse before pressing the layers together.  I was happy with where they fell in the composition.  This is an idea I'd like to work on some more and into a bigger piece I think! 

My Skechers and Various quotes on Walking

"Two roads diverged in a wood and I--

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference."

Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken

Today I had to change the laces in my favorite shoes.  Oh the thoughts and memories that went through my mind as I put new laces into these shoes I consider a gift from God......

It was a surprise for me to have the opportunity to visit Pittsburgh and New York City last spring.  Today, as I re-laced these shoes, I couldn't help but think of that trip again.  In Pittsburgh the hotel that C&T Publishing http://www.ctpub.com/ put me in for Spring Quilt Market and the release of my first book, "Embellishing with Anything", was within easy walking distance from the show.  It was a delightful way to discover the downtown core, people- watch and absorb expressions and sights I would have missed by any other mode of transportation.  As well, the days of the market were spent walking from booth to booth and on my feet all day talking to vendors and quilt shop representatives. Unfortunately, I didn't have these yet or I'd have worn them there too!

Walking is a way of being somewhere, rather than striving to arrive.
-Hillaby,John

And that is truly what I did in Pittsburgh.  It was an unforgettable experience.  And I shared it with Jan Krentz, http://www.jankrentz.com/index.php Those were special days I hope to have the opportunity to do over again sometime! 

When I arrived in New York City a week later, meeting two friends there, we again walked everywhere we went, except for our time on the buses and the trains.  But walking was certainly how we spent the majority of our time....and well spent it was too! 

"The true charm of pedestrianism does not lie in the walking, or in the scenery, but in the talking. The walking is good to time the movement of the tongue by, and to keep the blood and the brain stirred up and active; the scenery and the woodsy smells are good to bear in upon a man an unconscious and unobtrusive charm and solace to eye and soul and sense; but the supreme pleasure comes from the talk." ~Mark Twain


This quote very aptly describes our six days walking all over New York City.  Three good friends on an incredible adventure walking and talking everywhere we went....and eating too!

But, by day three in NYC, I knew I was travelling with two women who are a decade or more younger than me.  My feet were killing me! I had to miss out on one evening's activity (the Rockefeller Center) because my feet were just so sore.  But the next day we passed a Skechers store..http://www.skechers.com/shoes-and-clothing/styles/fitness/women_s_shape_ups/list
...and my love of walking was rekindled the moment I put these shoes on.  We walked all day and well into the night for four more days and I didn't miss one minute, and there was NO breaking in period either!  All walking is discovery. On foot we take the time to see things whole. ~ Hal Borland

The following quote is especially fitting for a day in Central Park and Tavern on the Green: There is nothing like walking to get the feel of a country. A fine landscape is like a piece of music; it must be taken at the right tempo. Paul Scott Mowrer

Here's a video on the shoes, and I whole heartedly support everything they say, except they haven't mentioned plantar faciitis, which they are fabulous for. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWSdIlsnYfw  Watch others on YouTube as well......there are many more people than me that think they're great!

Since returning home, I've walked miles and miles more in these shoes.  I've walked the dog, walked to work, walked on the beach, walked to the store, stood all day teaching classes related to the techniques in my book, and more.  I dread the day when this following quote can be applied to these shoes:  When you have worn out your shoes, the strength of the shoe leather has passed into the fiber of your body. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson  Luckily I bought two pairs!  YES....I went back and got more before coming home!