B as in . . .

Ball.  The most basic of shapes, a circle, becomes a 3-D sphere, and from that, a child's plaything. As Morris entreated us to have only beautiful and useful things in our homes, no rubber balls for me! I have been working on these fiber balls in odd moments-- winding yarn for the centers, or using roving and felting them, or bundling up scraps of thread and fiber and shaping them into rough balls.  No limits here! I even crocheted over one of wrapped yarn in Bethany's favorite color, purple/magenta, and while she sorted buttons on the studio floor one day, I added beads (pink and purple) in a loopy ring around it. She loves anything that is pink or purple, making the color of prime importance, while the object itself is quite secondary.

Making the balls keeps my hands busy when I'm doing something mindless, like watching "Lark Rise to Candleford," or one of the Agatha Christie Mysteries. Even wrapping with fabric strips can be part of the TV experience because tearing the strips is not exactly brain surgery. And Bethy has discovered the empowerment of ripping a piece of fabric into strips. She makes it into a rich, tough-girl action that I watch without laughing, a hard thing to pull off sometimes because she makes little noises that might be the groans of athletes in training!

Right now the balls are gathered in an oversized yellow-ware bowl in the studio, but they are destined for my grandmothers' wooden biscuit bowl on a table in the house. Do you remember days when a kitchen cabinet had a shelf for a large, oval, flattish wooden bowl that had a little flour sprinkled over the inside and a sifter sitting in it? It would be taken out every morning and on Sunday afternoons and more flour added from a canister, with buttermilk, baking soda and baking powder and that inevitable daub of lard. . . . homemade biscuits, the central feature in the Southern heart-attack breakfast and Sunday Afternoon Dinner!

It is as if I have a wonderful collection in progress that I can add to forever. Think of all the different ways there must be to make interesting surfaces for spheres! Scraps of fabric sewn on in patchwork fashion, odd threads wadded and tacked in place, beaded patterns, and . . .

Birds is another B-category word.  Red Birds.  Or blue-green many-feathered birds.  Birds concerned with their breakfast, or maybe high-fliers practicing the morning aria, heady with the feel of wind and sun ruffling their feathers as they swoop through a summer day.  They queue up for breakfast at the feeder, or wait with some impatience on the edge of the petunia pot for their turn at the bird bath.  In the morning, they are quite vocal in their disdain for waiting, and occasionally one will try to hurry a bather.  When the bathing bird is large, like the oriels or the thrushes, a flap of the wing sends the wren back to his place on the side lines.  Such audacity-- like little Romans in their bath!

And boats.  Especially sail boats.  Van Gogh’s paintings of the sea and of boats is particularly interesting to me because of the texture in his work.  This little boat sails on an ocean of layered buttonhole stitches.  Seed stitches create the sky, and a flood in the Smyrna studio many years ago leached the color from the seed stitches to give some additional color to the sky (such is the fate of many a basement studio!).

And there are bees and bugs and bikes and blueberries . . . . a rather pleasant letter to start the day!