Category Archives: In the Company of Cloth

notes from a quilter, collage artist, fabric collector

Thank you thank you thank you

12 Replies

Thank you poll workers and people who tirelessly canvassed. Thank you to the folks who phone-banked and who are curing ballots even as I type.

Thank you reporters and others who kept us informed (Aaron Parnass, Heather Cox Richardson, Robert Hubbell, Rachel Maddow, and Lawrence O’Donnell to name just five).

THANK YOU VOTERS!

Thank you first-time voters, thank you voters who waited in line for hours, thank you voters who had their drop boxes closed on them, voters who had their polling places closed on them, voters who were supposedly gerrymandered out of having a voice. Thank you Black voters, Hispanic voters, boomer voters, party-switching voters, and young people.

Thank you, Beto O’Rourke and Stacy Abrams.

Thank you district court judges and lawyers who held the line, followed the law.

Thank you Trump for being so epically stupid as to put Paxton forward as a candidate.

Thank you Ukraine for bombing the shit out of bot farms in Russia.

Thank you friend Lisa for being tirelessly involved on the ground for years in North Carolina.

Thank you Pete Buttigieg.

Thank you folks who wrote Postcards to Voters (including me!).

Thank you for generations of activism and sacrifice by Black Americans. Thank you Black women for always understanding the assignment.

Thank you to the voters of Ohio and Michigan for seeing through the hateful rhetoric.

Thank you to the preachers not only for winning previously red states but for embodying what Christianity should look like.

Thank you to Rep. Garcia for his two word announcement last night: “Lawyer up.”

Wildlife, hearts, a barn, and roses

9 Replies

This guy sat there hugging that black walnut for the longest time.

We haven’t seen the turkeys in a while. I know we were gone, but even so.

Last night a barred owl hooted its plaintive notes at around ten.

Today I will rinse my Santa Fe cloths. Supposed to hit 70, so it’ll be a good afternoon for drying.

And then what?

Several gifts stores were selling woolen embellished hearts. I love them. I’m gonna make a few. Probably don’t have any wool anymore because of a relentless moth infestation, but I have velvet and upholstery scraps and lots of pretty beads.

And speaking of shopping (not!), this was one of my favorite paintings on Canyon Road.

And to end, enjoy these roses, also from Canyon Road. They remind me that Ken and I have an anniversary coming up (36 years). How did THAT happen?

Sunday, early. Notes.

6 Replies

It’s early, but not that early. Light comes late here in Santa Fe.

We’ve had intermittent rain since arriving here in the southwest on Wednesday. Ominous clouds have populated the sky, but until yesterday, they never resulted in much more than short intervals of rain.

Yesterday though, wow, real thunder and lightning attended slashing rain. By the time we walked back to our car after dinner, the sidewalks and alley were filling with deep puddles and gutters had turned into rushing streams.

There was a tornado (small?) in Santa Fe last evening and after we got home from dinner warnings blared from our phones.

We’d been reading about flooding north and west of here, some of it severe. Also impacted: parts of Colorado up as far as Durango. Four Corners.

And here’s what I came here to say: this is the very first time that I have personally felt afraid about a climate-weird storm. New England doesn’t get much by way of hurricanes and tornados. We are many years into a significant drought, of course, and trees are dying from various stresses which is to say we are not immune. No place is immune. But to have a nervous system responding in real time to alarming weather was new.

The day was so very full that I was too engaged to take decent photos. These will have to do. I want to get participants’ permission to post their likenesses before I post those images, so they’ll have to wait.

It’s been a relief, honestly, to let the documentation impulse go a little. I’ve been taking lots of notes though!

Entry to workshop site yesterday
View from back of Airbnb yesterday
Shop window reflecting storm clouds
Seen at Museum of Indian Arts and Culture
Quilt by Beverly Y. Smith. Girls’ clothing created with flour sacks and mattress ticking

The docent at the International Museum of Folk Art told us that the artist drew the faces on the cloth with pencil. I love how skillfully the girls were rendered, top to bottom, and I wish I could convey how impactful the scale of the piece is.

Here are a few more tidbits from yesterday.

Marty Bond again: “Peace is not weakness. It’s power at rest.”

Susan Lanier: “It’s important to know what your job is. If you can do it, your little job will get bigger and deeper and wider. It takes courage.”

Vex: “Sometimes ancestors are not human.”

Rebecca Peterson: “Dreams have wild potential. Don’t pounce on them. Let the dream speak.”

Also Rebecca: “The body goes more slowly than the mind.”

I meant this to be a quick weather post. I guess I got carried away!

Wicked good carrot soup

4 Replies

Not a great picture but what a tasty soup!

Here’s my version of Fall Carrot Soup

Make the chicken stock:

Boil a chicken carcass from a previous meal in a Dutch oven with plenty of water. Add: onion skins and ends from one medium onion, ends and peels from six or seven carrots, tips and ends of seven stalks of celery, ten cloves of garlic, rosemary, thyme, and bay leaf. S&P.

(The onions, carrots, and celery from above will go into the soup).

Make the soup:

Rough chop a medium onion and sauté with three cloves of garlic, as well as thyme, rosemary, oregano (except for the oregano, I used fresh herbs).

Add six or seven chopped carrots and three chopped celery stalks.

Ladle in enough stock to cover and then some.

Add two tablespoons of tomato paste and two teaspoons of fresh grated ginger.

Cook until carrots are soft and then using an immersion blender, make a puréed soup.

Serve with chopped dill and thyme, more salt, and a swirl of garlic-infused olive oil.

I probably would have added a tablespoon or two of heavy cream or marscapone if I’d had any in the fridge, but this recipe was delicious without them!

Who’s weirder?

11 Replies

So lately this person comes over to the playground between 5 and 6:00 a.m., hops onto a swing and then pumps hard and hums for a while.

It’s a better sound to wake to than the beeping of trucks in reverse (which we had a lot of this summer while the city repaired nearby sections of Route 9), but it’s a little weird.

They’re not singing exactly. They’re making melodic sounds but not really a tune.

This has been happening for months so this morning I had to see where it was coming from — ah, over the fence.

This morning I took this video clip, all the while wondering: who’s weirder, the person humming and swinging across the fence or the person in her pajamas filming them at 6:10 a.m.?

PS. I FOUND ANOTHER TYPO IN MY BOOK TODAY. Good grief. (I’m preparing for the indigo weekend in Santa Fe next month).