Tag: Cello

And the Seasons, they go round and round…

With apologies to Joni Mitchell…

I’m sitting here looking out my beautiful window, overlooking my gardens, musing on how fast the seasons are changing, and how oddly beautiful everything looks as it is dying back. It will all go to sleep thankfully for a few months, while I regroup and survive music performance season.

It has been a challenge I will admit, to keep everything alive this summer into September, the intense heat and drought has forced me to plan my day around what desperately needs water. I’ve given up on weeding, it will resume again next spring when new growth presents new challenges. Right now it is seed spreading time, dancing around the yard, putting seeds like milkweed, baptisia, Joe Pye, and iris versicolor, everywhere there is a blank spot. My landscape designer says, “Put down hundreds of seeds, if a few take, they are free plants…” So the autumn dance continues.

As I left my house over the weekend for yet another rehearsal, I slammed on the brakes, because there, a lone iris in my garden by the street, was blooming. You gotta love that even plants can thumb their noses at Mother Nature…

Right now, it is raining. Blissfully. Though the predictions have been ominous, coastal flooding and high winds, the nor’easter, descending upon us, is largely for me, a couple days of gentle, much needed rain, breezy winds, which create a gentle swirl of leaves as they fall off the trees. I will rake them into the beds, “Leave the leaves…”

My days are full, and the calendar for December filling up to the point where I’m getting a bit nervous. I, of course, never overbook….. Hahahaha! Anyone who plays music with an ensemble of any type, knows that December is not necessarily the end of year full of holiday celebrations of all religions, full of family gatherings, etc. It is the season of concerts, gigs, nursing home sing-a-longs, small recitals, and whatever else the 5 early music ensembles I play with, plus my cello lessons (yes we do holiday gigs too) comes up with. Three more gigs were added yesterday. Tomorrow, my day starts with volunteering at the Shakespeare Theatre starting at 9am, guild sponsored spinning group at 2pm, craft group which meets in the library in my town from 6-8pm, and my recorded yoga class at 8pm, carry over from tonight, since I’ll miss it because I’m at a rehearsal from 7pm.

I keep reminding myself that I really do love all these opportunities to be with people of all ages, all kinds of talent, all kinds of backgrounds, and that community is what keeps up moving forward. We need this in our current challenging times of civil unrest. If I can play Christmas songs on the cello or recorder for a group of people society has forgotten, in a nursing home or memory care facility, then I have given back in my own small way.

One of the other ways I give back, is to look at my still overflowing stash of scrap handwoven fabrics, samples and samplers, experiments, and even loom waste, and see what I can make from it. Our guild, the Jockey Hollow Weavers, has a show and sale every year the beginning of November, and I make whatever I can to sell there, a percentage of sales goes to the guild for programming and operating expenses, equipment and library acquisitions, to ensure future generations have access to what has defined me for the last 40 years.

I have to have my complete inventory submitted by October 28th, but the work doesn’t have to be completed until the morning of set up, which is November 7th. So I’m cutting up everything I can, making trays and kits, which I will then furiously sew and construct once the inventory sheets are submitted for bar coded tags.

There are teddy bears…

And zip bags…

And trays of ornaments…

And a few ginger jars…

I’ll make some tote bags, and greeting cards, and add a few scarves which are already finished and in the closet.

What doesn’t sell at the sale, I’ll take to the Shakespeare Theatre of NJ for their lobby pop-up shop in the Kirby Theatre at Drew University. They get to keep all the monies from anything they sell.

I’m pretty proud of the journey I undertook the last couple of weeks reworking a gown I had in the back of my closet for 20 years, to use as a costume for when I play with my early music groups. I needed something “Renna-bethean” as we call it, Rennaisance/Elizabethean, which also serves when I need something Viking and Medieval… tall order. In my last couple of blog posts, I talked about cutting up this gown, creating a lacing down the front, however, when I tried it on, I realized immediately that the slender silk arms of the gown were too restrictive to play cello, which requires sweeping right arm movements. I also needed something that though it looked like a skirt, would split apart to create room for the cello between my legs.

To note… I’m just beginning to play cello, somewhat reluctantly, with a couple of the groups. I’m still only a year in, and though I have made remarkable progress, I’m still a beginner and make mistakes, off pitch, crossed strings with the bow, etc. But more opportunities are coming, I just have to keep practicing. The rest of the groups I play a solid bass recorder, and am so happy keeping the low voice going in a group of talented sopranos and altos. I don’t need to be front and center. I did that too much in my handweaving career. Give me the back row any day.

So, to remind me and my beloved readers, I cut the original dress up the middle, and added lacings.

I created culottes, from a 1990’s pattern, using one of the decorator fabrics I got from a deceased weaver’s stash sale a couple months ago. I needed some kind of camisole to go with it, so I grabbed some Rit dye at the ShopRite, and dyed an ivory lace camisole that was sitting in my drawer, probably for 30 years.

I had to hem the dress, since when I initially wore it, I had 3″ heels. Not doing that anymore. I carefully removed the sleeves, and took the strip from the hem, laying it crosswise grain over a sleeve pattern I found in a back issue of Burda Style, and piecing it together to create a short sleeve. I used the silk from the original sleeves to create the same overlay as the bodice.

It was still too restrictive, and so I put in gussets, like we do all the time at the Shakespeare Theatre costume shop. Then I went spelunking in my stash and found a lace fabric, which was again, ivory, to potentially use for the medieval sleeve. I couldn’t identify what the fiber content was from a burn test, there was synthetic, but also ash, so it was some kind of combination. I brewed all the coffee in my freezer.

The color was a glorious orange shade that went perfect with the dress.

So the result was something I was really really proud of. My skills with the sewing machine are dramatically shifting, getting more creative at repurposing, altering and restyling what already exists. I have the Shakespeare Theatre costume shop to thank for that. I have a lot of fun there…

And Saturday, I jumped in a car with other musicians, and we made our way down to Princeton, in heavy traffic, to a festival of early music sponsored by the Guild of Early Music, where we, NJ Early Music, were the last group to perform. I played cello for a couple of pieces, which really needed a cello, and our regular cellist couldn’t come. I made mistakes, but with music performance, unlike textiles, where you can rip something out and redo it, I have to just keep going. There is no correcting a wrong note in performance. No one will die, and it all turns out fine in the end, with a sigh of relief when we all end where we are supposed to! We all went out to a pub in Princeton afterward, and it was so great to get to really know some of the other players in a social setting.

Note… Cello players can’t wear jewelry, have their hair down (it gets tangled in the strings) and need short fingernails on their left hand (challenging for a textile artist). But I persevere…

I actually had a free day yesterday, nothing on the calendar. So I got up, did my morning routine, and went out into the vegetable garden, and harvested all the basil, which was showing signs of cold weather, and larges bunches of parsley. I picked the tomatoes that were starting to turn a blush color, and replaced the ones on my window sill, now very ripe, which I made into a pot of sauce.

I also put a tray of sliced cherry tomatoes, with a drizzle of olive oil, into the oven at 200 degrees, to dry all day. After a few hours, I take them out, cool them, and add them to the large zip-loc in the freezer to use all winter long.

While all that was happening, I started picking all the basil and parsley leaves. With olive oil, garlic, walnuts and parmesan, I made 12 zip-loc bags of pesto, and along with three bags of sauce (I had the 4th one for dinner), my freezer is filling up! I should probably grow potatoes…

I don’t remember if I mentioned that I go dancing on Friday nights with one of my music friends. We go to a local Arthur Murray, where I adore the staff, learn a lot about teaching skills that involve body movement, learn to follow (definitely not one of my strengths, which is why playing in a music ensemble is so good for me, even though again, it isn’t my strength) and get good exercise. My strappy sandals I wore fell apart, and I talked to one of the instructors who pulled up her pant leg and showed me what she wore… Ballroom dancing practice shoes. Who knew there was such a thing… Amazon… They are super flexible, (they can fold in half) with suede on the bottom, and the next day, these were on my feet. I got the sliver ones!

So my world is changing with the seasons, and mostly I’m so happy with all of my new-found communities of interesting and varied people. (The packed schedule is a bit tiring, but I keep going…) Politics are rarely ever discussed, and if they are, there are real discussions, with informed people who are open to other points of view. It is a healthy world, and I have hope that it can prevail.

Enjoy the falling leaves, as nature takes a long nap. We fiber people, and now music people need the time to dive in uninterrupted with our next season of activities.

Stay tuned…

A Summer Routine…

My mom mentioned she hadn’t gotten to read a blog post from me in a while. I said, just reread the last post. Life is basically just a rerun during the summer. Get up, have breakfast with my little buddy, and then go out and water.

Last post I talked about how much rain we were getting. This month, not so much. There was that flooding 5″ of rain a week ago, but nothing since. So out I go to water anything that was just planted in the last couple of weeks. Which is a number of plants!

I mow when necessary, weed when necessary, which is all the time… The interesting thing about native plants, is when they fill in, you don’t need to weed under them, but you do need to watch out for things that suddenly appear out of nowhere and are 4 feet tall because some bird pooped out the seeds. Today I pulled out four Northern Catalpa trees. There were a few Tree of Heaven seedlings, which I instantly eradicated. And though the pokeweed is native, and I kept a few bushes because they are an important food source in the fall, I don’t need 485 seedlings. So I’m always on the hunt for things that shouldn’t be on my property, and I use my plant app on my phone hourly.

The gardens are magical.

Even the lily pad in the koi pond bloomed.

My landscape designer ripped out a 40 foot tall non-native trumpet vine, and we replaced it with an American Wisteria (Wisteria frutescens), who knew there was such a thing, not to be confused with that monster non-native thing that destroys buildings.

I had additional path lighting added to one of the new planting areas. It was magical to sit in my window and look out at the lit path as dusk set in, during a rain storm.

The insects are everywhere, except mosquitos, for some reason I don’t have them. Dragonflies are everywhere. I hear dragonflies eat mosquitos…

There must be 50 different types of bees in my yard, all different sizes. Here is one on the Rattlesnake Master.

Lest you think that my life is one giant play in the dirt kind of existence, which it mostly is right now, I’m heavily into the early music world, playing recorder with a couple of different groups, and now the cello, with the early music beginner group. We had a performance at the Tenafly Nature Center last Saturday night, I wish I had a picture. It was for a Faeries and Fireflies festival, and there was a quintet of us, along with a drummer and a couple vocalists, all set up in a life size eagle’s nest built on a platform. We were in our medieval costumes and it was just the greatest experience. We even had a mama doe and four baby fawns stop to listen to a few songs.

Our Medieval Festival is coming up the end of August, and I’ll be playing bass recorder with Montclair Early Music, and cello with the beginner group called the Musettes.

I think a lot about this new path I’ve chosen, especially on the cello. I’m not particularly good at the cello, but I am always prepared, organized, and I show up. And I practice a lot. That in life, counts for a lot. Talent is a gift. But the professional part of showing up prepared and practiced counts for more! So I practice, and I show up with my music ready, in order. And I play my heart out. And each time, I get a little better.

Meanwhile, my local library in the next town has a botanical drawing class once a month. True botanical drawing requires precision. Especially on location. Laying on the ground using calipers and measuring devices, to sketch accurately a particular flower or leaf, isn’t quite my most favorite thing. I much prefer to draw from a picture that remains static, and isn’t influenced by a breeze, or by changes in lighting. One of the things I tried was to take a great flower picture. and then trace it onto my sketchbook. That way it is accurate size wise, and then I could fill it in with watercolor. But that sort of becomes like a coloring book. Which I use to love as a kid.

But now, I just want to look at the picture, figure out how things are shaped, and do a quick line sketch, toss in some color, research what I’m drawing, and call it a day.

July is my least favorite month, I hate the heat, obviously I’m a sweater girl, because I make them. But July is filled with loud thunderstorms, and fireworks, and I have a couple of animals that get traumatized easily with loud unexplained noises. So I always plan to sit on the floor of my basement, during July nights when there are fireworks or thunderstorms, with my dogs, one of them has to be sedated, and have my knitting at hand. I started a new sweater, because September will be here before you know it.

And yes, in spite of my crazy busy life, I’m still weaving. I have a powder room on my first floor, off the kitchen. It is located in the interior of the house, no windows, and therefore some protection from things like fireworks, etc. One of my dogs lays on the tile floor in there a lot.

I was using the powder room the other day, sitting there, like one does, with the dog curled up around the sink, and noticed that there was some kind of rubber debris scattered around the floor. Right away I assumed the dog chewed up something. I looked at the little bathmat on the floor, not remembering at all where it came from or how old it was, and it looked intact, so I was confused.

I turned the rug over and yikes! The rubber backing was disintegrating before my eyes.

Damn, that means I have to add to the list a trip to get a new rug for the powder room.

As I sat there, I started to think… Which one can do easily sitting a powder room…

I had just transferred a warp from a table loom, onto my floor loom, or one of them anyway. It was a colorful Rep Weave, about 25″ wide, and would be much easier to weave off spread over 8 shafts on a large floor loom instead of struggling trying to separate a dense warp on 4 shafts on a table loom. I had blown through half the repeat in just one sitting already. Yarns are vintage Silk City Fiber Contessa, Rayon/Silk, variegated, circular wound on a board to create an ikat effect.

So I got to thinking… I wonder if I could just finish that little Rep rug, and if it would fit in the area in front of the sink in the powder room. I went out to the studio, turned on some music, and got to work. Within a few hours, I had woven off the rug, stitched the ends, tossed it in the washer and dryer, and bound off the edges with some silk noil bias I had laying around.

It is my new favorite thing in the house. I love that I can instantly fix a problem with something that comes from my hands.

Oh, and the original rug? My daughter told me later, when I showed her the replacement, that the original mat had been given to her by a former co-worker 9 years ago when the co-worker was leaving the vet practice and cleaning out her locker. The co-worker kept it in her locker for her dogs when she would bring them to work with her. It didn’t owe us anything.

So my days are full, of flowers, of music, of yarn, of animals, I only wish there were more hours in a day. Fortunately I live in a climate where by late fall, the gardens will go to sleep, and I will have a few months of inside time, and by March, when I’m tired of the inside time, things outside will start to wake up. Meanwhile, there are vegetables to harvest and eat, and we are coming into tomato season, and there are a lot of tomatoes out there!

Stay tuned!

And in the end, she kept calm and carried a lot of yarn…

When I wrote my last blog post two weeks ago, my world was full again, my son was home from a deployment in Syria, and all was well with the world. The next day, the Monday before Christmas, my daughter and I went to the theatre to see a lovely production of White Christmas at the Papermill Playhouse. It was a great show, and we drove home, completely unaware of what was happening in our house. A heating pipe burst (actually turns out in four places), in the back of my daughter’s second floor bedroom, and while we were gone, it flooded the back half of her room, and was raining through the ceiling fan of the floor below. We did our best to figure out how to shut off the water, call the police (who were kind and supportive but not very helpful), call the plumber hotline at 11pm the night before Christmas Eve, drag out rugs and debris that were most critical, file an online insurance claim, and realizing we had no water until the plumber could get there in the morning, went out to an all night QuickChek (which my daughter apparently knows well since she works the night shift), and a stop at a Taco Bell, because it was 2am. I don’t ask, she was driving…

Christmas Eve was a parade of contractors, insurance reps, a restoration company, the plumber, all while I had promised a friend to drive her to the airport in what turned out to be a blinding snowstorm. You can’t make this stuff up. In it all, I stayed remarkably calm, because the alternative wasn’t very productive.

Christmas night, my wonderful son came over, helped me move anything that was not nailed down from the affected rooms, and we got take out Chinese. Not my best Christmas ever, but certainly a memorable one, and my son, who has been through hell and back, was the most amazing level headed, flexible, calm and decent human being, and I couldn’t be more proud of him.

8am the day after Christmas a crew showed up. And the mitigation work began. By noon my den looked like this.

They moved the sofa, and put in my living room, where I already had two sofas. They put the credenza with the TV in front of the piano, in my dining room. They tried to work around a floor to ceiling bookcase, and a 1950’s phone booth. Don’t ask…

In the upstairs, my daughter worked all through Christmas night, since she works nights, and this was her night off, and moved everything from her room into a guest room. To save all of her stuff, I lost count after 18 loads of laundry. Time was of the essence, and since she works the night shift, filling in for a Christmas Eve overnight into Christmas morning, I jumped in to help. (My daughter is a critical care Vet Tech in an 24/7 vet hospital).

By the afternoon her room was filled with drying equipment.

And same with the den, the noise was deafening. The only place I could escape the noise was my studio. There is a metaphor there I’m sure…

And so, for the next four days, I listened to the loud sound of machinery drying out my home, meanwhile, I hid in the only places unaffected, my weaving studio, my sewing studio, and my bedroom/office. This was not a bad thing.

I had planned to go to my mom’s after Christmas to show her the progress on The Quilt. Of course I had to cancel those plans because of the mitigation work, and since I was basically confined to the studio, I started winding skeins for dyeing. And I kept working on the twill sampler…

And then there were knots over the back. Yippee!

And I finished something like four towels worth on the new towel yardage…

And I kept working on the quilt. New Year’s Eve, I went to a concert, part of Morris County’s First Night, the cello player was my teacher. I went with one of my music friends and we went out for sushi afterwards. I was home by 9pm. I spent the rest of New Year’s Eve working on the quilt. I finished all the appliqué work 30 minutes after midnight.

That spurred me on to get the borders on the quilt, which spurred me on to go out to a quilt store for backing fabric, batting and advice. I was out anyway picking up my work from the Shakespeare Theatre pop up shop, where it looks like they sold $700 worth of my work. They get to keep all the money. We do what we can to support the arts.

Anyway, I got lots of advice, about how to quilt, whether to cut the edge binding on the straight of grain, as suggested in the directions, or whether to cut it on the bias, which, why wouldn’t you do that? In the end, I did what I wanted, because why would I do anything else?

I came home, inventoried my work while I washed the backing fabric, and then set to work trying to figure out how I was going to quilt it. I decided that I’m not skilled enough to do free motion embroidery, and I didn’t want to see machine stitching anyway, to compete with all the hand appliqué. So I stitched in the ditch wherever background fabrics were pieced. It was enough quilting for a wall hanging, and by Friday night, last night actually, the quilting was done.

Today I attended a winter sow lecture at the library in the next town, and came home with a tray of pots filled with soil and seeds from a number of different perennials. They will get cold hardened outdoors, under chicken wire (which they provided as well), and be ready for the spring.

Then I went down to the sewing studio, and put on the binding. On the bias. Because I know better.

So the quilt is finished except for a rod pocket, I can’t believe it. My weaving friend Tommye Scanlin, wrote a lovely book called Marking Time with Fabric and Thread, just out in October. Tommye is an incredible tapestry artist, and the book is about marking time, fiber artists who use their medium to mark days, weeks, months, years. Journaling of sorts. It is a beautiful book, full of inspiration. And this quilt was like that. I spent the last 15 months or so working on it, through a challenging year, it was so centering and so calming, and one of the most important things I’ve done in recent years. All for my mom, who wanted to make this but her eyes and hands at 93, just can’t. So mom, this one is all for you. Thank you for the gift this quilt was in helping me mark time.

So the carrying yarn thing in the title? 1/4 of my daughter’s floor to ceiling 12 feet of wall closets, is full of yarn. She had some pretty great stuff in there. (Which I’m stealing, she doesn’t read my blog!) I started carrying all the yarn down to the weaving studio to figure out where to put it. The knitting machines are now down in the weaving studio. This is going to take a long time to sort out, but ultimately, we lost nothing. Everything was cleanable, and salvageable, including the wool rugs, and I’m thinking of rehoming the TV and credenza because I don’t ever watch TV, and turning the den into a music room, with the piano, the cello, and all my recorders, music stands, and music. I’m part of the music world now and getting together at peoples homes to just play is a real joy. I want to have that space too. I even brought my cello, beginner that I am, to a rehearsal of Christmas music with some of the newer recorder players, the Monday right before the flood, and held my own playing the bass line, which I knew well on the recorder, but now I could play it on the cello.

So my world going into 2025, after 16 years of blogging, is a little turned upside down, but I have friends, I have places to gather with friends, I have plants patiently doing their winter thing, I have music, I have yarn, I have some fresh MX dyes on their way from Prochem, and I have projects waiting to help me mark time. And I have a quilt ready to take and give to my mom. All is well with the world, at least in my little corner. Eventually reconstruction will begin, but for now the house is quiet again. Happy New Year to all of my readers who have stuck with me over the last 16 years, I hope you find lots of new adventures, things to learn, and new friends in the new year.

Stay tuned…