Inspiration

From Carol Warren's house, these inspiring photos of mushrooms and their relatives:

Instead of going crazy when I see them, I try to take a deep breath and remember my friend Susan saying, "Mushrooms are just flowers without blooms."

They can still be creepy, en masse, can't they?

I like the shapes of the fungus growing from the side of the stump better than the colony of little brown buttons.  A nice idea for embroidery, or to use the ruffles in a crochet piece . . .  Felting?

The Scarf Chronicles: Chapter Two

Are you ready for another cup of tea, another little sit-down in my kitchen?  The sudden turn in the weather this morning makes the kitchen and tea a cozy place to be.  Today we have lemon-ginger scones to nibble as I show you some more of my scarves.

This first piece is made of cotton yarn from my weaving thread cabinet.  It is stitched on the back loop of each row, which gives it ridges and a deep, extra-soft feel.  The yarn is five strands of creamy cotton that stitched up at an embarrassing 108 inches of creamy, ridgey texture!  After the euphoria wore off, I realized it was just a little too narrow (five inches), so I added "finger" fringe to the four sides and the piece suddenly had the width it needed to be taken seriously, along with humor and uber texture.  This reminds me of walking the beach at low tide, with ripples and patterns left by the receding waves.  The little fingers are in constant motion, like the sea itself:

I also decided to turn the stripe pattern on its side and crochet long verticals rather than sweeping back and forth over the shorter horizontal track.  I like the way the fabric drapes when it is crocheted this way.  This grey is a scrappy from skeins of silk, rayon, and cotton, and as nice as it is, I feel it is missing something— it may need to be unravelled and re-crocheted before it can rest as "done":

I repeated the idea of the vertical stripe in blue-grey, but with more types of yarns in the mix this time.  Grey, blue-grey, pale and dark violet, as well as sea blues— another scarf of delights.  It would not have looked nearly so interesting if this more than a dozen yarns had been clumped into horizontal blocks rather than the narrow vertical stripes that blend so well together.  Many thanks to Jill for supplementing my greys and blues:

Confession time:  This was the most mouth-watering crochet time I have spent so far.  I used a very simple single crochet stitch, but choosing from the bags of yarn spread around me to augment the drawers of my own yarn was like running amok in a favorite yarn shop!  So much fun, in fact, that I have gone a bit bonkers with the idea and repeated it in another group of blue-greys (darker, more man-scarf colors), an autumnal green,  and one of browns, which is the autumn forest floor, to me.

and

The next scarf was stitched with a cream worsted wool that I added to a soft, light, multi-colored fleece-effect novelty yarn.  After stitching, it is difficult to tell that the base is the cream worsted, the thin, fluffy novelty yarn is so completely dominating!  I remember working on this while I listened to The Help on CD, alternately laughing, gasping in horror, nodding in agreement, forgetting to count and unravelling line after line . . .

It did not take long for me to fall under the spell of Noro yarns.  The long lines of color give a different effect from the short color changes of many variegated yarns.  The only drawback is the occasional slubbing in the single plys that throws a line of stitch off.  I am hoping the Noro spinners will improve with practice.  Below, the bright colors from a mainly cotton blend called Taiyo:

In this scarf I have combined two skeins of different green cottons (by Arauncania), using the heavier brown cotton as a sort of marker to divide the greens into blocks and to give some visual break between the two yarns.  The cotton is very soft, and it is stitched quite loosely, so I doubled and sewed up the selvedge edges to make into a tube. This should keep it from stretching out of shape.  A good choice for a man.  I don't usually think in man-colors, but I am learning.  And Charles approves.  What more is there to be sought than a man's approval . . . ?  I digress.

This rich gold scarf came from Jill's bag of browns.  It is two strands of plied wool that I doubled in the back-loop single crochet that makes such a nice texture of soft yarns.  As I sat working with it on the patio one day, a leaf drifted down from the oak overlooking the sun room beside me.  The leaf was a deep red, and against this gold yarn it was stunning.  I thought for a moment the leaf had simply sought a beautiful backdrop for its last days . . .

And now, the tea pot is empty (**sigh**), the scones are only discernible by the crumbs on the tiered tray, and reality intrudes with the idea of there being life beyond crocheted scarves.  We will meet another day and enjoy another handful of the bunch, perhaps after the fall gardening is done.  How cozy the tea will be when the temperature is in the low 60s!

Hand Warmer

Now, this was fun!  From bits and ends of other projects (of course).  I crocheted, measured it on my hand, crocheted some more, slipped my hand into it . . .  Thus the singleton has become my Michael Jackson hand warmer.  As this is hand-spun wool yarn, the bonus is a bit of lanolin for the hand with every wearing.

Wouldn't it be nice to have two buckets of these at the door, one of lefties, one of rights?  No two should match.  Only boring people wear matched sets of things. . . Except shoes.  Once upon a time I had a friend with a shoe fetish.  We worked in downtown Atlanta together, and at lunch she would often go to Rich's for their shoe sales.  These sales were not calm, polite affairs.  The women who shopped them had split personalities, and the personality that took over when shopping for bargains was not always rational.

Well, Ethel bought the most darling pair of shoes during one of those lunch-time manias, black with brightly-colored leather ball trim at the toes, and they complimented several suits she wore.  But after a short time of wearing them, she began to develop back trouble.  That was when she noticed that the shoes she had were not really mates.  One shoe had a one-inch heel, the other had a one-and-a half-inch heel.  The same shoe, except for the heels.  But in the feeding frenzy at the shoe sale, she grabbed the box and never thought the shoes might not be a matched set.

Beautiful women and their shoe collections . . .

The Scarf Chronicles: Chapter One

While words are fine, it's time I posted photographic evidence of my crochet labors, or no one will believe I've really done anything at all.  So, come join me in my kitchen and I'll spread the work on the counter for you pleasure.  Have a cup of tea and some almond biscotti while I tell you about the scarves.  The "group" photo above includes a large portion of them.  One, The Great Red, will come later.  I cannot stop working on it!  But, you will see, eventually, what I mean.

The original objective was to "use up" the yarn my sister gave me.  That would be the logical thing to do (waste not, want not).  But seven large bins of skeins?  And a lot of novelty yarn, which is difficult to work with and I really only need a little bit of the flashy stuff for accent, not entire scarves.  There was no possibility of it fitting into the already crowded space that my modest yarn collection occupied . . .  So, I kept little balls of a lot of the flashy yarn and shared the rest with my Freestyle friends.  We scrumbled for several meetings with it.

Next, I discovered (to my deep regret), the wool needed to go.  Allergies are hard bedfellows.  So I began to crochet the wool out of the studio—except that every now and again, I needed just a teeny weeny bit more, so I would take a small sample of the almost exhausted ball of wool and go shopping to buy more wool to finish out the project . . .  What was she thinking, you're asking.  Answer:  I don't think I was thinking at all.  I was just crocheting and loving every row of beautiful stitches that seemed to leap from the hook.  Mesmerized, I was.

As we've had suddenly autumn weather the last week, the wool can now be taken onto the patio and worked, especially the sheddy types.  The breezes sweep the wool particles away.  How kind of Mother Nature to do that clean-up job for me!

The Scarves.  The first is a scrappy piece, a loop of blues and sand-colored neutrals that I doubled over and stitched as a tube to help the looser-woven parts remain stable. It can be worn in a short, double loop, or as a single longer loop.   I was thinking of windy days by the sea as I worked:

Palest sky-blue merino mixed with another DK merino dyed shades of blue and green here.  The problem is that this loop scarf was meant to be a long, wide scarf, but the second skein of the sky blue merino was not where I thought I had stored it.  There are a number of things that could be said here about my planning abilities, but they can wait for another day.  I was short of yarn (of course!), and it was yarn I'd bought twenty years ago in Oak Ridge, Tennesee, hand-spun and impossible to duplicate.  After trying, unsuccessfully, to find something that could be used with it, I changed my plans and made it into this extra-long loop and put little "fingers" at the join. It is heavy and will create warmth under blizzard conditions:

Aren't the fingers delightful?

From bits and pieces came a narrow blue scrappy that is 50 inches long, 4 1/2 inches wide and quite light-weight. This would be nice worn with a winter knit blouse (or for a little boy, doubled over under his winter jacket):

The last of the loops (I have made two others as gifts for nieces Jessica and Nahum) is this red one of rich merino and a strand of red twisted with sequins.  This may be my holiday scarf.  It is light-weight and cheery:

I am now over scarf loops.

There are some serious keep-you-warm creations.  The second is the only scarf to which I added a fringe.  Long fringes can be so much trouble when you're shopping and going in and out of shops, unlooping a scarf . . .

After finishing them, I wondered how easily these wonderfully soft and thick scarves might fit around a person's neck, and that was when I made the decision to make longer and narrower pieces that could be looped twice around neck and shoulders without the bulk of these chunk yarn pieces.  Almost twenty years ago I wove a long, five inch wide scarf for my mother that was meant to be worn doubled, and it was quite striking with her classic suits.  She wore it on her shoulders and by doubling it, was able to catch up the ends of the scarf and draw them through the loop and hold it in place with a fancy pin.  I began to re-visit that idea, with variations on width and composition.

In the studio I keep a yarn basket where I toss the short ends of a skein, a colorful collection of any type and color of yarn.  This amazing scarf is the product of that lively basket, and one I will keep for myself.  I like it best rolled up, where its 144 inches (yes, four yards!) makes a circle that is six inches in diameter, looking for all the world like a colorful little flower (that comment from Anne).  The yarns range from slightly chubby worsteds to DK and fingering weights, a true conglomerate.

I should mention that I have scrumbled all of my life because it has always been so difficult for me to read a pattern.  I have a double stigmatism, which means that there are shadows on both sides of objects.  Imagine reading a cross-stitch pattern or finding your place in a closely-printed page of instructions when there are shadows popping up everywhere!  As a result of having done free-form crochet for so long, I have forgotten the proper way to crochet and make sensible objects.  The scarf project became a way of reminding myself the rules I could not grasp when I was eight and learning to knit and crochet from our neighbor, Bebe Webb.

This is the scarf I made from an idea I saw in a shop.  It took me a while to figure out how to do the little fingers on the side and keep everything as one continuous line rather than adding an edging afterward (as I did the cream cotton, which you'll hear about another day), but once I'd gotten the hang of it, this was purest stitching joy.  I used Kudo yarn:

Whee!!!  What a lot of looking and talking we've done today.  There are more finished pieces, and several still on the hook.  It is so much more interesting to have several projects going on simultaneously, different stitches, different yarn tensions to be balanced, more to think about . . .

Are you yawning, your eyes glazed over, attention wandering? Let us continue this another time.  You have been kindly uncomplaining during my ramble.  Thank you.  Now, may I pour you another cup of tea?

Freestyle, September

We were at Jill's house yesterday for our September Freestyle meeting.  The "meeting" was a shower for Cynthia.  Can't believe Little Girl Patrick is due in less than a month!  Pix I took of the party are at our group blog.

Afterwards, Jill invited me to check out her yarn stash.  I had a skein of green wool I was trying to match for a scarf.  She offered some great suggestions, as well as a lot of yarn.  I love "scrappy" scarves, but the truth is that you only need a few yards of an awfully lot of different yarns to pull it off or your work looks unfashionably cobbled together, where the greater variety makes for an over-the-top, lively piece.  As Jill says, "they insist I buy the whole ball.  How inconsiderate."

We went to say goodbye to Bethy today, as she and Jordan left immediately after school for the airport and a flight to Manchester.  Julie and Ethan have been visiting friends and family in England a week already, and I miss them.  They give life such an interesting shape when they are with us.  Charles consoled me by taking me to the yarn shop in Woodstock and buying me a skein of Mango Moon Chakra yarn.  All I can say is that it's best to take comfort where you can find it.

Gee, but it will surely be quiet around here next week!  Guess I'll crochet a lot.  I mean a really, really lot!

My Dream Job

The perfect job is out there for everyone, if only they can find it.  The one born without a sense of smell becomes a skunk researcher, Type A personalities find high-powered jobs with underlings they can persecute, women with a great need to nurture have eighteen children . . .


If I could have found my perfect dream job in this world, I would have responded to an advertisement for an embroiderer who wished to make samplers.  Only samplers.  At the interview, I would have walked up the steps of a rather formal-looking Regency home to find a buzzing foundation at work behind the panelled doors.  The foundation supported and promoted a love for stitched samplers (stay with me).  I would produce my portfolio of cloths for inspection by a middle-aged woman dressed in a navy suit and wearing glasses with the never-lose-me chain around her neck.  She would ask me several questions about the stitches I used, the thread, then stare gravely across at me and say, “This position requires some looseness of stitching, someone who does not have a desire to create perfect stitches in perfect rows.  The stitcher must be willing to try any manner of thread or yarn or synthetic substitute and stitch joyously across the linen.  Color and texture are a major concern.  The successful applicant must be willing to spend years exploring the art of the stitch, but must not create organized samplers with mind-numbing rows of perfectly aligned clones.”

It is at this point in the interview that my fingers begin to twitch, and I am frankly salivating and this somber woman concludes:  ”We have had many applicants for this job, but I believe you have the loose quality we are looking for.”  I take delight in this dubious compliment as the woman removes her glasses, lets them ride on her bosom, rises from her chair and reaches across her desk to shake my hand.

“Now,” she says, “Go forth and explore the world of stitchery.”

Ah, yes!  As I am babbling something about being so happy to be a part of this project, the woman guides me to a door.

“Welcome aboard,” she smiles, pushing the door wide.  Inside is a rainbow that stretches around the walls of a large room, and the rainbow is thread— flosses, woolens, silks, linens, rayons, hemp, even the glitzy metallics and flashy polyesters!  Soft perles, hard-twist rayons, linens plied into every size imaginable—it is enough to make the heart stutter.

I never found that advertisement.  I wonder if that makes me an unfulfilled ex-member of the workforce?

Saga of the Dressed-Up Wool

I never know whether I should thank my father for the obsessive-compulsive gene he passed on to me, or if I should volunteer for gene replacement study, but sometimes obsessive determination is a wonderful characteristic to have.

I have been crocheting a lot lately (all right, compulsively).  The problem I have is I want to use beautiful yarn that is not hair-pullingly difficult to work with.  A little lumpy, but not horribly so.  Beads would be nice.  Add to that list of requirements that I should not have allergic reactions to the content.  Here, I am afraid that wool drops off the radar. But wool is so forgiving, so embracing!

*Sigh*  The truth is this:  I am in the process of crocheting the wool out of the studio.  It has to go.  But I would like to give it a nice send-off.  This is how the Saga Of The Dressed-Up Wool began. . .

On a trip to Asheville several weeks ago, I found a skein of yarn that was made of lengths (18 inches) of rather commonplace yarns knotted together.  Unlike some others of this cobbled-together yarn I have seen that was put together with outrageous fibers of multiple (and very incompatible) weights, these commonplace lengths looked as if they could be crocheted easily.  The knots would be decorative.  The weight of the yarn was a worsted one, so there was the consistency I always look for.  I also discovered that the yarn was made by a Mom and her two children, so I plunked over the $25.00 for the skein immediately (cottage industries need to be nurtured).

The skein stayed in my mind as we went on to other things in Asheville, and after a while I realized I was actively working on improving the yarn with all these mental gymnastics!  At Purl's, on Wall Street, Elizabeth so kindly gave me all the "trimmings" from the store's ball-winding station.  They are always so interesting, and there are lengths that can be used for embroidery or felting or . . . As we approached our car, it suddenly hit me that the yarn I wanted could be made by hand but it would not have to be spun, as I have no aspirations to be a spinner at this late stage of my life.  The half-bag of trimmings, some beads--- I suddenly had latched onto a way to create an interesting yarn!

Between Saturday and Sunday, I worked for about twelve hours on this project.  To describe the process, you must grant me a certain willing suspension of disbelief (Coleridge, I think).  After knotting some of the interesting yarns from the bag of trimmings from Purl's onto some hand-spun yarn, I hand-sewed seed beads, buttons, small chips of stone and quartz, other beads and trims, to a staggering 15 yards of wool yarn.  Wool?  you are asking with a puzzled look.  Yes, wool.  Wool because it does have that "forgiving" quality I mentioned, and because it can hide the carrier thread for all these gizmos I was hanging onto the yarn.  I was careful not to flap the yarn around and send up sprays of wool particles to sent my allergies on the alert again, but I did take Monday completely off to let things settle a bit both in the studio and in my imagination.

The result of this slave-labor effort is an absolutely drop-dead gorgeous yarn.  Well, to me it is a drop-dead gorgeous yarn.  It began as the yarn in the first photo up top.  These are some of the results:

If this does not make your mouth water, maybe you are reading the wrong blog.  I digress.  Forgive me.

On Monday, while I was recuperating from the yarn decorating frenzy, I did some serious thinking about what I'd done in the studio over the weekend.  This same technique would work well with the wool cord I'd made earlier, wouldn't it?  And think of the objects I could add to the list for embellishment:

• sweater-wool felted shapes
• leather shapes
• embroidered shapes
• crocheted (with small, tight yarn) shapes
• vintage trims and lace snippets
• old game pieces
• sequins
• bracelet charms
• alphabet beads
• vintage jewelry pieces

I could make that felted cord meant originally for a simple neckpiece into a marvel of ostentation . . . Yes, another project, which will also be totally unexplainable to my friends, but immensely interesting to me.  So, thank you, Daddy, for the obsessive-compulsive gene.  I would be in the throes of a really dull retirement without it.

Allergies on the Rise

9:00 a.m.:There has been too much crocheting going on in the studio (and the sunroom, where the sofa is so comfy).  From my (silly) decision to crochet all of the wool out of the studio, there are two bags of finished work waiting to be wrapped for gift-giving during The Holidays.  My body, however, systematically resists an over-dose of wool, and is now in full armor.

My first reaction was to wait until the weather changes and the autumn finally comes (which may not be until early December, at the rate of the temperatures here in the Atlanta area), but that could be a long, long time in coming.  What to do with my hands, how to stay sane until then?

I was really feeling sorry for myself this morning when I read Diana Trout's blog, here, and suddenly realized she offered a solution to the wool /idle hands crisis:  WATERCOLORS!  I put them away two months ago when I embarked on the crocheting safari, but today is to be one of perestroika!  The blue box of paints and clutch of brushes will make there appearance on the drafting table.

She has a lovely plastic pallet for mixing and storing, which is more organized than my usual habit of using a ceramic plate.  Hmmm . . . .  I wonder if watercolors will work on fabric that has been soaked in bubble jet solution?

Time to move out to the laboratory.

More to come!

Note:  6:50 p.m.:  All the while I was painting, mixing blues that drew me into the most enchanting oceans, or greens from grass too lush to dream of cutting— well, all that time, I was thinking about fabric for quilting.  Maybe the watercolors were the path to something else?

Thank you, Diana.  I have several pages of background for my sketchbook, and a postcard with a purple sun and yellow sky.  Not a bad day!

Oh, and my sinuses are improved.

Playing With Wool

Once upon a time I made a felted cord (the musician in me resists typing "chord") and embroidered it, then made two felted and embroidered endings for it, adding some loopy knitting tapes to cap things off:

This cord was felted with roving, and a long piece of crewel wool was the center of it-- just in case the cord wanted to thin out and become many pieces.  I love the result, and combine it with a scarf and another felted neckpiece I found in Asheville (center of All Things Civilized) to wear with a blue wool jacket from Fall thru early spring.

Since that time, I have often thought about the process and how to vary it, how I might create another neckpiece that would be more interesting without slipping over the line into gaudiness, and this past week I began to work in earnest on the project.

First, I crocheted a cord of a lovely pale green and lavender heather wool, but ran out of the 3-ply yarn and found nothing with which to continue it, so at 30 inches, I set it aside and rumaged through the yarn to find a continuation.  No such luck.  Anything else I could find was not the right size, and was certainly much too soft.

Then I remembered a cone of ink bottle green Harrisville wool yarn meant for weaving.  Knitting and crochet threads have been fluffed and fulled after spinning, which is what makes them so appealing in a yarn store.  Yarns spun for weaving are left tight and unwashed so they are used first to weave piece then to full (wash or wet and agitate the yarn) the woven piece.  The fulling process is like a mini felting process, and it closes up the small spaces between the yarn in the cloth.

I started a second cord with the weaving yarn.  This Harrisville wool was a two ply, thin yarn, somewhere between a size 5 and 8 perle cotton, so the crochet was fraught with moments of searching for the correct swear word to express that particular situation.  After about ten or twelve inches, I realized that I could use that irregularity to my advantage, and I began to deliberately vary the thickness of the cord.  81 inches later, I was satisfied that I had enough cord to work with.

In this picture you see the cord and some of the irregularities I mentioned.

I decided to see what would happen if I began adding wool roving and wool stitching to the cord before it was felted.  Wow!!!  This was almost sinfully delightful, stuffing parts of the cord, wrapping other sections, needle felting the roving into the crocheted body, threading an especially large tapestry needle and stitching odd, random threads over the roving and around the crochet . . .  I should make dozens of these cords for my mental health!!!  Any frustrations I may have felt over the real or imaginary conflicts in my life were resolved with the work on the cord:

Gaudy?  I couldn't have cared if this cord ended up as a drapery tie-back in a bordello,  and I could have gone on for weeks this way except for the realization that as much fun as this was, the real fun would begin after the cord was felted and ready for embellishment.  I put the two pieces of cord in a mixing bowl and poured boiling water over them and stirred for a few moments.  The smell of wet animals filled the kitchen . . .  I wrinkled my nose and stirred some more.  Some of the blue dye released (probably from the roving), but when I drained the hot water off and changed to ice water, the color set.  A second bath of boiling water was clear, and after some more stirring the wool was ready for the washing machine.

Here I should explain that I cannot felt wool by hand any more because my palms are no longer flat, thank you Mr. Arthritis.  These days, I depend upon the washer for any felting that may happen around here.

Charles was glad to donate his yard-work clothes to the cause— denim is the best thing I have found to use with wool in the washer.  Denim is high-density, tightly-woven, and unless you are dealing with designer jeans, they have a pretty hard surface.  This is the perfect substitute for hands in agitating wool.

Into the wash.  I checked once to make sure things were not tangled, and the cord was shrinking nicely.  Maybe too nicely.

Out of the washing machine, the 81" cord now measured 76 inches!  And the pitiful pale green 30" cord came in at a whopping 32 inches!  The only explanation I could think of was that the pale greencord was beautifully uniform, but almost twice as fat as the second, longer cord.  In the shrinking process, the cord became thinner, but grew two inches longer, the way children enter puberty as chubby little buttons and come out tall and willowy . . . ???

Into the dryer.  Listening to the drum bang the clothes around, I wondered if the original 81inches of crocheted cord was going to be long enough to work with after all this processing!

The final measurements:  the 81" cord that shrank to 76"  now measures 68" long.  And little shrimp cord of 30" that grew to 32" is now 31" short.  I will set little shrimp aside and think of something for it to become, but not now.  The stitching and embellishing of the long cord begins this afternoon!

Simplicity

I have been rediscovering an old friend, the straight stitch.  This renewal of interest springs from a real desire to simplify everything in my life.  Despite my love of creating stitch samplers with variations on every sort of stitch, including some I have to dig out of Grace Christie's book of almost-forgotten embroidery stitches, the simplicity of the straight stitch is both appealing and useful (Morris comes to mind here:  "beautiful and useful").

And this most recent urge to simplify was re-kindled by the subliminal at work:  a dream.  Occasionally I have a dream of an old cottage somewhere amongst trees and shadows and filtered sunlight.  The inside is pared down to the bone, and I move through the minimalist rooms and enjoy the beauty of old paint, floorboards that are patched and wonderfully imperfect, deep moldings at floors and ceiling.  The walls, singularly unadorned, are interesting in their own right, as they are painted imperfectly.

In the pale bedroom of this cottage is a bed, a low pine bookcase beside it, and a lamp.  One narrow dresser (it is a sort of blue-green and the paint is chipped) stands against a wall.  No rug covers the floor, and only a sheer white curtain hangs at the window.  There is an old quilt on the bed, faded to muted tones of blue and pink and green with a touch of yellow in flowers (I have lain against the quilt and studied it in my dreams!).  This is the room I remember in most detail, as if I go to sleep looking for a quiet place to sleep . . . ?

The dream is recurring, and each time I see a little more of the cottage.  It is so absolutely simple—it may be perfectly simple.  I wish I could live like that but I seem to have a penchant for gathering things (interesting or not) as I move along.  Everywhere I sit or lie to rest, there is a stack of books or magazines nearby.  Mug mats protect the covers of books and table tops.  Towels never hang straight in any bathroom I pass through.  Kitchens overflow with stacks of china (so that I am always prepared to feed hoards of guests) and even though there are only two of us here, my dishwasher is full every evening, sometimes even before lunch!  Messy, by definition, is me.

After this cottage comes to me in a dream, the straight stitch begins tugging at me.  I lie half-awake and think about the plainness and beauty of this stitch.  With it I can build lines, shapes, fill the shapes, create the illusion of movement and direction, layer them to create texture . . . All this with the simple in-and-out of the needle and thread through the fabric.  Choosing a color really defines the line.  Choosing the weight and type of thread defines the importance of the line.  Choosing a direction begins the unfolding of the idea.  Another form of simplicity.

I know I will never have such a beautiful, bare-bones cottage as the one I have dreamt about for years, and I also know I will continue to dream of it because it is such a clean and desirable space for my cluttered heart to grab a moment of respite.  Cultivating the straight stitch might be a way to cultivate the culture of minimalism.  And that could be a step toward simplifying myself.

Curling Bethy's Hair

What a morning!  Bethy wanted curls today, and as I had nothing else planned, we opened the Friendly Corner Beauty Parlour.  First I washed her hair, which started out in the bathtub but moved to the shower before it was over.  Then dried it and began rolling it up with my heat curlers (very old set, but they work!).  About 2/3 of the way through the rolling process, she began to sniffle.  The sniffles are the beginning of a meltdown.  It seems that she wanted the curls to appear without any work, and I had to explain to her that beauty is not a freebie.  She was so sure the Princesses in the story books got their curls without any effort at all, and I had to disabuse her of that notion.  What a terrible job for a grandmother!

By the time I had finished with the rollers, she was only on half-sniffle, so we passed the time waiting for her hair to dry completely and the curlers to do their magic by taking pictures.  There was much giggling, and I suddenly was not 63 years old anymore, and my best friend and I were in our tiny bathroom craning for space in the medicine-cabinet mirror as we tried out new hair styles-- that would have been in the 1960s!

Then, the comb-out.  I think the curlers worked rather well, wouldn't you agree?

She primped and preened in front of the mirror, then turned suddenly to me and I grabbed the camera.  Where did she learn these moves?

The child was five in April.  Honestly!  I don't think I learned to poke my arm out that way until I was about thirty!  But, of course, I still can't use an i-phone, though she says she'll help me when I get my own.

Friends

We travelled to Knoxville yesterday for the monthly Freestyle Meeting, this one at Margi's house.  Jill and I were  in charge of the food, and we planned a tea for our friends.  I made sandwiches (egg salad, carrot-ginger, and pickled okra pinwheels), and Jill brought smoked salmon with cucumber.  I made the scones, and Jill made the teacake (chocolate!) and shortbread and little pastry cups of lemon curd (homemade) with raspberries and cream.  Jill also brought her mother's teacups, a dozen of variously patterned cups and saucers that looked as if they had come straight from an elaborately carved Victorian cupboard.

Margi's house is such a neat place— a log cabin by the lake.  She has furnished it with pieces she has collected, lovely old oak for the most part, and as she is a weaver, some of her work is there.

But the nicest part of the day was not the food or china or setting, but the ten of us gathered under the beams of the living room.  We all have a common interest in some form of fiber, and during Show 'N Tell we share our latest creations to the admiring oohs and aahs of the group.  How talented each of us is, but in our own way.  The inspiration flies back and forth as ideas are laid out and expanded.  I always come home and immediately set to work on some project or another.  This time I think I will take up the crocheted scarves that I had set aside when the weather got so unbearably hot and sticky— Christmas will be here before I even realize it!  I will post photos when I get them a little farther along the way.

I think that special nurturing ability to inspire one another to try new things is one of the most admirable qualities of the friends I have.

Look at how things have grown!

I am always amazed when things that I have planted actually grow to be mature plants.  My green thumb can sometimes have some darker overtones to it.  This is the May-June photo of part of the upper right terrace:

And this is yesterday's photo:

The red plant in the center is a new color of Rudbeckia, much nicer (to me) than the orange-yellow. And the chartreuse dangling plant is Creeping Jenny.  It is not called "creeping" for no reason— it has the growth habit of a small, simpering kudzu vine.

But taken together, it's a sort of magic, isn't it?

And in the fountain, there is a little visitor:

He looks quite happy here, doesn't he?

First Fruits

The blueberries, tomatoes, and strawberries have been ripening, and Charles harvested them for us.

Snacks a-plenty!

The asparagus have passed their season, and we now see only the occasional fern coming up.  Next spring they should begin to show themselves just before the perennials make an entrance.  This should make an interesting texture.  And good food, too!

Charles' Swing

Charles wanted a swing, has wanted a swing for a long time.  We found a builder at a market in Woodstock, one who offered a six-foot wide seat-- big enough for two grandparents and two Adorables!  Last week we were able to pick up the pieces to be assembled.  Jordan was called into duty for the assembly job.

And eventually a somewhat level place was made for it.  We may have to pour footings for it, one end is a bit high off the ground and while I don't plan to look at the sky through my toes while swinging, I always fear the worst with the children, who test everything!

So, now we can sit quietly in this very over-sized swing and enjoy the garden from the upper level.  Hmmm . . . . still looks nice!