If this blue and white path is to remain, it will have to be unified, connected. Right now it just looks broken.
What about another tree?
I may stitch a way station halfway up the slope with a brightly lit path leading to it.
Let’s call this one, Green Silk Moon.
I’ve been fiddling with this quilt longer than I might otherwise because I’m not home. I don’t have other cloth projects to distract myself with. Those of you who know me know that I’m more of a beginner than a finisher.
I had the funny (illuminating?) thought: what if most of my quilts aren’t finished?
I know this has come up on Jude’s blog in the past, this idea of non-completion. She may have said something along the lines of: until they are sold or given away, every quilt in my possession can be considered incomplete.
It might sound burdensome but it’s actually liberating.
Colorado saw a little snow last night and it’s cold again.
Once I started seeing this small vertical quilt as a landscape, the chartreuse bar (midsection) needed interrupting. I used floral patterning from a rayon shirt.
The design came together after I went down to the cellar to get something and came up almost two hours later without it.
This is the front of our basement fridge. It was probably something in there that I needed?
This WIP is right next to the fridge. An old strip of houses lies atop a beige brocade with swirly floral shapes and above one of Deb’s amazing splatter cloths.
I’ve been baking up a storm for today but thankfully not hosting. Turkey dinner with all the fixings is one of my least favorite meals to serve company!
I placed a Ukrainian soldier next to a close up of Lady Liberty in one of my collages this week. It’s one of those times that if I could identify the photographer or publication, I would make an attribution. My storage methods (top left), pretty much make that impossible.
It occurs to me that though glued down this one is not done yet.
I hope one and all of you have a happy thanksgiving!
One of my big blessings is that I will be dining with like-minded family. In other words, there will be no bracing myself for the fox sound bites and no prepping snappy, informative but somehow non-offensive rejoinders. Phew!
Following on another sleepless night. We had thought to go downtown today to support Gaza at a protest at the Israeli consulate, but no … we will write postcards to voters and make some donations to upcoming gubernatorial races instead (VA, NJ) (done, done, and done).
Feel quite literally sick and tired. I’d forgotten that if I chew gummies too many nights in a row, but stomach goes berserk. Oh well.
We walked to the dispensary nearby on Thursday, only to find it shuttered. So there’s that too. I did add magnesium to my pill box yesterday. Fingers crossed.
Pics from yesterday.
Something bled all over the Red Cross quilt. It was folded near the ironing board for weeks and perhaps the spray from my water bottle dampened it and made a red thread run? Or something else, I don’t know.
I unpicked some of the red threads, bought a color catcher for the wash. I’ll let you know how it comes out.
Just listened to an expert talk about system collapse — about how we have maybe four to eight weeks before we reach a saturation point of vulnerabilities. Eegad.
Here I am at my kitchen sink in Pittsfield, MA. Age 24? I lived alone in a sweet third floor apartment and gave over one of my bedrooms to painting. That seems like a different life.
More recent collage Supreme Court backdrop
Why didn’t I keep at it, you might wonder. Well, paints are really expensive for one thing and probably the more important other thing, in my family my sister was the painter. I was the writer. You know how potent those early designations can be!
I post the purple painting fragment to demonstrate the way motifs endure. I didn’t know when I painted Lady Liberty as a young woman that she would become an urgent symbol of American resistance later on. None of us could’ve known.
How fragile our democracy! How resilient white supremacy! How infecting to our institutions Christian theocratic tribalism! In those days I worried about HIV and how to create a reasonable worklife.
Just as a recent data point: Trump got booed at the US Open. His dictate to the Association to air clips of him with the sound off were foiled by — oh, I don’t know — the internet?
Do you hear that though? Not the booing, but the tyrannical imposition of his insecurity. He KNEW he would be booed. He KNEW the association would bend the knee.
Northampton, MA
Last summer when friend Lisa and I attended an indigo workshop we stayed very near my last college residence (above). Two Isabella Street, Northampton. Near the railroad tracks. From there I went to San Francisco for a short six-month sojourn before returning east. But while in SF, I worked in a copy shop and had access to what was then cutting edge technology: a color Xerox machine with a color dial. I got an employee discount! It allowed you to make endless variations by changing how color was laid down. To say I enjoyed making collages and then tinkering with them on the machine would be an understatement.
Also talked about here. I repeat myself. I give myself permission to repeat myself.
Anyway, there is that house motif. And below, a photograph I took while still in high school.
Along Rte 20 in New Lebanon, NY
Sometimes I wonder (not at all to my credit), if my endless house creations indicate a profound loneliness and inability to connect. What no people? Not even a cat in the window? Or maybe they reveal artistic limitation — living creatures being much harder to render than walls and roofs after all.
At least they have gotten more richly rendered over time!
This was a Jamie Oliver recipe from his Five Ingredient series. It was only okay. Lamb, onions, eggplant, curry sauce and yogurt. I’m sure his was better partly because of his excellent fry pan that requires no oil (look at the pools of grease in mine!)
My cold cucumber soups vary in result pretty widely. If I stick to the Love & Lemons recipe, however, the batch tends to be good (a dash of honey instead of a dash of hot sauce). The soup I made two days ago was outstanding. Incentive enough to keep fresh dill in the house.
As Jamie Oliver likes to say, “I whacked it with a little olive oil.”
I learned how to use the microphone on my computer today. Sort of. I guess it needs to learn my speech patterns because so far its mistakes make the text nearly unintelligible. Also — it adds two spaces after periods. Really? Is that because I haven’t upgraded to Windows 11 yet?
I’ll keep at it. It’s more direct than recording a Note on my phone, emailing the Note to myself, and then copying that text into a word doc.
Blah. Blah. Blah. Right? Very minor compared to typepad closing down which, in my humble opinion, ranks as technology cataclysm.
This morning’s swap shop find. “Maybe I’ll cover a few pillows,” is a thing I tell myself.
Ken’s rebuilt doors (all six of them along the upstairs hallway) are a huge improvement to the old grubby louvred ones. Horrible to clean.
As usual, a wall and ceiling repair project grew and grew until it included replacing baseboard trim, sanding and painting chipped baseboards, updating the light fixture, and rebuilding every one of those six doors after cutting out the louvres.
Have a good Saturday! I am shortly off to my library’s semi-annual puzzle swap!
