How Does Your Garden Grow?

Community Garden
by the 2007-08 third-grade class
P.E. Bowe Elementary School, Chicopee, MA
with Cindi Huss

Didn't the kids at P.E. Bowe Elementary School do a great job?! They designed the foliage, fruit, veg., and flowers on paper then translated them into fabric. The fringe at the bottom is made of 199 wood joining biscuits with words the students came up with about what it takes to make a community and/or a garden grow and thrive.

The kids also made design desisions, such as where to "plant" their creations and what to quilt in the background. Some of them just fell in love with quilting and sewing and all of them worked hard. These kids and their teachers rock and it was a privilege to work with them this year! (Click here to see some of the other things we did together.)

Timna Tarr (Q Tailored Quilts) rocks, too. I called her in a panic in June because the end of school was fast approaching, we were getting ready to move, and I couldn't figure out how I'd get the quilting done on this piece in time without crippling myself (it is extremely heavy and quite thick in places).

Found time in her very busy schedule and quilted this in a day! Woo hoo! Thanks, Timna, for putting up with my unreasonable requests for all these years!

Seat-of-the-pants wrap-up--Part I

I'd love to create a long post about favorite places in the area (Pioneer Valley in Western MA), but that would require heights of organization and planning that I, frankly, am incapable of --aside from plans for our (very) impending move, so I'm going with a much more seat-of-the-pants approach . . .

Today I had lunch at Judie's in Amherst, MA, with my friend Cindy--fellow quilter, fellow dancer, fellow ex-Pittsburgher, fellow office supply junkie, fellow Belchertowner (for a couple more weeks anyhow), and fellow foodie and Judie's devotee.

And while my sister is the queen of photographing beautiful food before digging in, I apparently am the queen of gluttony.

I dove right in to my lovely, velvety bowl of seafood bisque. I excavated all the best bits of my decadent lobster salad and enjoyed them with Judie's scrumptious creamy onion dressing. And . . . well, the key lime pie with creme brule cheesecake top (pure culinary genius) boggled the mind and I savored each bite in between sips of a perfect cappuccino.

Then I remembered I was supposed to be taking pictures. So here's the one photo I did get:
Guess this is why I trained as a journalist, not a photographer.

More as I can . . .

New Heights of Domestic Insanity

Well, our house is finally up for sale. Check it out.

Isn't it cute?!

We kicked it all off with an open house last Saturday. After our Memorial Day bash the floors, including the throw rugs, were trashed. The amazing Alicia Murphy took care of the floors and DH took care of the rugs.

If I had been thinking I would have done the rugs and used Synthropol so the red didn't turn everything pink, but I can live with that. However, they didn't come out of the dryer flat and that was a problem.
I had the iron out for the tablecloth, so I, who avoid ironing at all costs unless it involves a quilt, ironed the rugs. With lots of steam. And it worked! And I'm a nut. Ironing rugs.

I've become a lunatic, obsessing about the kids tracking dirty footprints across the floor and messing stuff up. I've taken to being out of the house as much as possible so I don't mess it up. I am much happier when I can be more relaxed about housekeeping. Oy!

But the house looks great!

Tuna Tower

I dragged my poor friend Lori to Whole Foods last weekend ostensibly to buy wine and peppers to prepare for a Memorial Day party, but really so I could take a picture of this before the display changed:


She surely thinks I'm a nut, but it just illustrates my growing sense that taking a little time and effort to make even mundane things colorful and interesting is worthwhile. Hey--it made me smile, which canned tuna fish does not generally do!

Disaster Area

I've been doing so many things around the house and trying so hard to keep it moderately tidy that I have done almost no work for the past three months. However, I must finish the mural I worked on during my 10-week autumn residency with third graders from the P.E. Bowe Elementary School (Chicopee, MA) before the end of the school year (just after the middle of June).

Since we have had to delay putting the house on the market (long boring story) I took the opportunity to create a little temporary chaos in the living room. You can see what it has looked like here. And here was its state last Wednesday:

However, it's all in a good cause. All five panels are done (except the extensions where the tree branches will continue into the neighboring panel). Now I must quilt and mount them.

For the mural part of this program (we explored several quilting techniques and traditions) the children (three classes of about 25) drew vegetation then translated it into fabric and designed the three middle panels ("Spring," "Summer," and "Fall"). They also decided that the 200+ words about community they came up with would be written on "seeds" (carpentry biscuits) suspended from the bottom of the quilt and "rain" (method and materials TBD by me).

When it is done the piece will measure just under 4' x 10'. Hopefully I'll be done with the bulk of the work by the end of next week.

Anyhow, I have completely enjoyed myself (other than stressing slightly about the mess I made and how short my time is) and can't wait to finish this up. The process demonstrates, however, why it was important for us to find a house with a large, dedicated studio space somewhat removed from the rest of the living space in our house. Apparently my creative process requires chaos to thrive!

So-cool Treehouse!

Was on my way to the music store the other day when I saw this awesome tree house (tree complex?). If you look carefully on the right-hand edge of the photo you can see where the second-floor roof of the house is--this thing is waaaaaaay up in these extremely large trees!

As if the suspension bridge weren't cool enough, these folks have attached a series of rings to the bottom side of it so you can cross like a monkey if you'd like. And they've kept safety in mind--the high ladder is surrounded by construction fencing so kids don't topple off backwards.

Makes me feel a little inadequate as a parent!

My new studio (and house)!

We have a house in Kingsport! Woo-hoo!

It's a ranch with a big yard in a family-friendly neighborhood in Kingsport City proper, so the kids' schools will be great.

It also has a great BIG studio space--the entire finished basement! Imagine this space with a whopping stash, racks of thread, rolls of batting, a big design wall, and a large space for felting and dyeing (and pay no attention to that woman sticking her tongue out--it's an obscure counting ritual practiced by overwrought house hunters.)

On our first visit we saw deer in the backyard.

My youngest's favorite feature--the laundry chute:Definitely some super spy possibilities here!

Anyhow, it's a lovely house in move-in condition with discrete spaces for living and working, so I think we'll all do very well here.

I already have plans to update a couple of things (like the matchy-matchy pink toilet, bathtub, and twin sinks in the master bath and the dark, dated kitchen) but overall it's a pretty great house. And the housing dollar goes a lot farther down there than it does up here!

Fiber Art Center Closes Doors

So sad. I went in to the Fiber Art Center today to help pack up the last of the consignment goods. It is so difficult to see the physical closure. It took 7 years of hard work by so many people to build it up, yet everything has been dismantled over the course of just a couple weeks.

I have enjoyed the Fiber Art Center as an artist, teacher, vendor, student, audience member, volunteer, working member, cheerleader, public relations coordinator, newsletter editor, fundraiser, curator, etc. It was a lot of hard work but I am so much richer for having done it.

The Fiber Art Center was a marvelous dream and wove together a community of incredibly talented artists and fiber art enthusiasts. Unfortunately, the current economic climate is not conducive to the survival of a small nonprofit arts organization.

I will cherish the memories and the and friends I've made and be eternally grateful for the opportunities, guidance and encouragement I rec'd at the FAC. You all rock!

The website, with a retrospective look at the last 7 years (scroll down the first page) will be up for a few months. Check it out to see what we all wrought.

Everything's coming up . . .

. . . shibori!

I had a lovely three-day dyeing workshop with Jan Myers-Newbury last week (or at least it was last week when I began composing this post).

(By the way, Jan, I lived on Summerlea St.--I knew the knowledge was in there somewhere, but it only surfaced today.)

At dinner she pointed out that the ceramic lazy Susan on our table (at Susanna Foo's--excellent food!) looked like shibori, and she was right.

Then I noticed the bathroom wallpaper looked like shibori, as did the wood grain on a table, bare branches against the sky, and the clouds we looked down on during our flight last Sunday.

And then there are the clamp-resisted wannabees, like this cool building (very "early fortress")

and the reflection of a beaded curtain, also at Susanna Foo's

.

I even found an arashi shibori overdyed with a clamped resist--or is it a clamped resist overdyed with arashi shibori?

I know that shibori originated as textile artists observed and mimicked the world (particularly the natural world) around them, but it's fun to come full circle and suddenly see much more intensely the patterns around me. Thanks, Jan.

Anyhow, met lots of interesting people and thoroughly enjoyed myself. Took a day afterwards to visit college friends and that gave me a great boost, too. They say you can get the measure of a person by the company she keeps . . . therefore I must be a truly phenomenal specimen of humanity!

It's a different world than where I come from

We're house hunting in Kingsport, TN this week and the first night we saw this sign. Here religion is not a personal, private matter as it is in New England. It's a wear-it-on-your-sleeve, share-it-with-your-neighbor sort of a thing, and that will take a little getting used to.

However, the area is really quite lovely--tons of flowering trees just now, beautiful green grass, flowers, mountains, rivers and lakes. Pretty spectacular all told! And everyone has been very nice and extremely helpful.

SAQA/SDA Breaking New Ground Conference

I'll preface this with a disclaimer: I do not have pictures (yet) because the Wayne Art Center asked us not to take pictures and I decided not to take my camera along on the gallery tours because it was heavy and I didn't know whether they'd let us take photos anyhow.

However, let me assure you that the Biennial at Snyderman was worth the trip all by itself (and after visiting the facilities at the Philadelphia University's School of Design we all want to go back to school--there!). And Elements and the conference were worth the trip all by themselves. And tomorrow I begin a three-day workshop with Jan Myers-Newbury (who gave a very entertaining introduction for Judith and Michael James) that I expect will be worth the trip all by itself. Top it all off with the many dedicated artists at all stages in their careers and of all ages and you have a winning event.

I've been inspired by the successes and struggles of established artists as well as the enthusiasm and drive of emerging artists and impressed with the collegial, generous atmosphere of the entire event.

Maybe tomorrow there will be photos. Nighty-night.

Silk under water . . .

. . . is so cool!

In person it looked almost like stone or clay. I love what I do--every sense is stimulated, often in ways I don't expect.