Tag: gardens

My favorite month…

I recall a similar blog post, a number of years ago, where I said that I always thought of September as the start of my new year. There is something about new beginnings, even though I’ve been out of school for a long time; fresh pencils, new clean copybooks, newly covered textbooks with brown shopping bags (I was a pro at this), and the chance to learn new stuff. I loved school, I loved learning, and still do.

I’ve talked throughout this year about how important it was to keep myself busy. I think I took probably a dozen classes so far this year, many of them through Peters Valley School of Craft, which is only an hour from me. The last of the classes I signed up for there, occurred Labor Day weekend, a three-day weaving class actually. Unfortunately the teacher, Brittany Wittman cancelled the week of the class. The title of the original class was ” Tactile Sensibility: Weaving Compositions”, focusing on weaving as a creative process and enhancing tactile sensibility through experimentation with structure and surface. Sounds like art speak, but hey, I’m a good weaver, but can always look at the loom differently. I was of course disappointed when I found out she cancelled, but Jesse Satterfeld, who is the fiber fellow this year at the fiber studio of Peters Valley, stepped in to run the class. He is quite talented, master’s degree from Kent State if I recall, and though the course description changed somewhat, I decided to follow through because, well why not…

I was a bit surprised that the three other participants in the class were all brand new weavers. But my needs would be different than theirs, and I’m a self-starter. And the looms were already warped, so I plowed ahead.

The looms were set up with the most basic blank canvas you could ever have in weaving. 10/2 cotton, 30 epi, about 9″ wide, and all white. In a straight draw. For the non weavers, that means that the threading was 1,2,3,4 and repeat. I brought some odd funky yarns from my studio, and a bucket of some of my oddiments left from the basketry class. We were given directions for plain weave, various twills, rib, basket weave, many of the same structures I already teach when I do a Learn to Weave class. So I started to play. I sat at the loom, with this “blank canvas” of a warp, and just wove.

Who does that in the weaving world? For three whole days? With no plan or goal? Just sample, play, see what happens if? I even jumped ahead to clasped weft, while the rest of the class was still trying to understand how to do a twill structure. I probably had a yard and a half woven by the end of the day.

Day two I came back, and tired of just weaving odd yarns in basic structures, I really started to look at the four shafts and what they were capable of. Honestly, to spend three days, with one canvas, just looking at it and seeing possibilities I really hadn’t looked at before, was such a gift. It was also a challenge beyond belief, to keep reminding myself that I’m not the teacher, to keep my mouth shut, and let the teacher do his job with the new students. This entire year has been a challenging exercise in this regard, and not always have I been successful, but I’m determined…

I started to play with a mock Theo Moorman, using one shaft as tie down, using a pick up stick to isolate where I wanted the threads. I had a few Catalpa pods and I played with adding them to the mix.

And I took some of the cordage I had made leftover from the basketry class I took back in the summer, and used that same inlay technique.

I even tried weaving in some of the little actual seeds, in the same technique.

The third day, I played around with things I know about but hadn’t ever thought they could work on a four shaft threading. I did some Brocade, which is nothing more than combining a 1/3 twill with a 3/1 twill, using a pick up stick.

And I did some actual inlay, which I haven’t done since a workshop I did in the 1970’s. I’d like to go back and revisit this technique, with a different warp and sett. We combined the inlay with damask, which was pretty cool.

In the end, I had a sampler that reached taller than any ceiling in my house.

I realized it would fit perfectly between the garage doors in the weaving studio, hanging from the ceiling, with a little prop support to keep it from dragging on the ground, becoming cricket fodder (even though Mulder is stalking them every night, I didn’t want my sampler to get in the way of his routine slaughter…)

And of course, September means that the weather is gloriously cooler, and that the garden season is starting to wind down. My gardens are amazing, considering where I started last spring with tiny little plugs. I am including lots of pictures because my 93 year old mom, has by request, no access to anything digital, and the only way she can enjoy my blog, which she loves to get, is by snail mail. So mom, here are a bunch of garden pictures…

The pool in the back of the picture is the neighbor’s yard, there is a stockade fence between us, running along behind the greenhouse, which is in the middle of my vegetable garden.

And of course, my tomatoes are coming in like crazy! I just oven dried a bunch of the little guys to pop in my freezer for the winter

And I’m starting to put the appliqué quilt blocks together. There is still a massive amount of work to do, even once all nine are together, because there is a 380 piece vine that runs through the entire quilt. But it is really cool to see the blocks take shape, and I’m beginning to finish the blocks that I couldn’t initially finish because they extended over the borders into the adjacent blocks.

The Maine Coon on top has a glorious tail that will extend into the adjacent block once it is added.

I’ve never understood the lure of a kit, and I’m a complete convert. Where I spent three days just staring at a blank “canvas” of a warp, just making stuff up as I went along, executing someone else’s design in a kit that provided all the materials, fabric selections and schematics has been such a different experience. I can see the benefits of both ways of working. One is a creative exercise and one is a technical exercise. Different parts of the brain! Different skill sets. It is probably why I love volunteering as a stitcher at the Shakespeare Theatre of NJ costume department. I just get handed assignments and I have to figure out how to do them.

Last night, I drove up the NY State Thruway, in the pouring rain, to a wedding of one of the girls my kids grew up with. Her family has remained close, and though neither of my children could attend, I was privileged to have been invited and made the trek up to the country club where the wedding was held. During the cocktail hour, the weather started to clear, and I wandered outside to look at the fountains and to my complete shock, there was the most glorious rainbow I’ve ever seen. Guests started pouring outside, and there were more photos of the rainbow I’m thinking than of the bride and groom!

And then as we all watched, a double rainbow appeared. That has to be good luck and a strong omen for the newly wed couple.

And tomorrow, I get to go “back to school”. My ten week class in natural dyeing starts, through Maiwa, and I’ve watched the intros, started a binder of the PDF printouts, organized my dye area, unpacked the “kit”, and am ready to sink my teeth into yet another opportunity to learn.

Fall is coming… stay tuned…

A Story…

Because life isn’t nearly as much fun if you can’t make a good story out of it…

There is a wonderful fiber school called Sievers School of Fiber Arts on Washington Island Wisconsin. I taught there for probably a dozen years before Covid put an end to my travels and I chose not to reschedule after Covid ended.

Sievers has a willow patch, that they tend and harvest every fall, and they have always offered a class in making a willow chair. Many of my regular students talked lovingly of coming in the fall, with their spouses and making a willow chair, and would show me photos of the pair of chairs on their porches, decks, verandas, whatever. I can’t tell you how much I wanted to come with my husband over the years and do this class with him, so we would have a pair of willow chairs on our deck that we made together.

It would have meant that my husband and I would have had to drive from NJ to Wisconsin and back, with two large chairs in tow, and somehow, that class was never at a time when both of us were available and could make the trek.

When my husband died, of course that dream came to an end, and since I no longer teach on the road (though I do miss Sievers), traveling out there by myself to bring back a chair didn’t make sense.

But I live an hour away from another craft school, Peters Valley School of Craft. When I looked at the course offerings back in January, I couldn’t believe they were offering a willow chair class. My husband was gone, but I could still do the class myself and not have to drive back from Wisconsin.

I signed up, though this one was a five day class, not a three day class. I didn’t care. It was actually one of eight classes I signed up for at the Valley this spring/summer. I want to learn.

What I didn’t realize at the time, was the actual dates of the class coincided with the 8th anniversary of my husband’s death. Which was Monday.

Working with willow is challenging for someone used to manipulating fibers, soft things, that though they have a mind of their own, will work with me, or rather I learned to work with them to achieve my goal. I’m still learning to understand live wood. Freshly picked. Shipped in from Montana, since Peters Valley is in the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area , part of the National Park System. You can’t pick anything in a national park. So no willow patches.

There were only three of us in the class, which was great as I usually needed a second set of hands to help hold the bent willow in place. The teacher Walter Shaw, of Wapiti Willow Studio, was generous with his time. And he created a chair as a demo, staying one step ahead. Right next to where I was building mine.

This voice in my head kept encouraging me to ask Walter what he planned to do with the chair he was building. He said he wasn’t sure, his wife (who was teaching a ceramics class at the Valley the same week) was encouraging him to make furniture for her new ceramics studio. I asked if he would sell me the chair…

He agreed, and on Monday, like I said, the 8th anniversary of my husband’s death, I wrote a check for Walter’s demo chair, which matched mine perfectly, same willow, same maple base.

Since I was commuting, I brought home one of the chairs Monday night, and the second chair Tuesday night. I felt my husband there the entire time, and understood that he wanted me to have a pair of chairs too. And so, now I do, sitting proudly on my deck, under the gazebo cover.

We had time at the end of the class to make a willow tray. This was a challenge. This isn’t basketry willow, these are willow branches and they were very hard to weave in and out of the supports. But the tray is lovely.

This is the second class I’ve taken at Peters Valley since I wrote my last post. The previous one, at the end of May, wasn’t the best class I’ve ever taken. The instructor was overly enthusiastic with all of the techniques she wanted to try with us to explore Eco Printing, within a three day period. Since the current trend is to Eco Print, or print with botanicals on cloth, by dyeing the cloth first with natural dyes, much of the class was focused on natural dyeing and the use of modifiers. We made lots of small samples for a notebook. We learned to make print paste as well, and experimented with block printing, flower pounding, making our own soy milk for a mordant and print paste base. It was a lot in 3 days, and though I took a notebook full of notes, I’m no longer sure which sample goes with which technique. We even tossed a cotton tote back into a “dirty pot” on the last day.

We did print two silk scarves, one dyed with madder, and the other with logwood, using an iron blanket, but I will honestly say, I wasn’t happy with anything I did there. But I have a lot of things to explore, and I’m already starting to save leaves, since I have a yard full of very printable botanicals. Winter will be fun this year.

A couple of weeks ago, I came home from wherever I was, and discovered the mother lode of magazines in my mail box. I’m a member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and get their bulletin a couple times a year, and they are always interesting and informative. In the mailbox was also the latest issue of Shuttle, Spindle, and Dyepot, from the Handweavers Guild of America. And there was the much anticipated Journal of Weavers, Spinners, and Dyers, a gorgeous publication from the UK.

This issue was much anticipated because I wrote an article on sewing with handwoven fabric, some many months ago. I finally got to see it in print. It really is a lovely article, and it is fun to look at my heavily edited manuscript written in British English, British spelling, metric equivalents, etc. The article is available as a PDF download from their website.

And of course, through it all, I’m out there daily tending the garden. The planting is complete, for now, and my job is to keep everything alive. It is lovely to watch the changes each day. Something is always blooming. Though I do watch the weather app in my phone hoping to see some rain in the forecast so I get a break once in a while!

Lots of bluestone walkways. The landscape designer built a stream bed for heavy rain runoff, that meanders down along the “ridge”, under the shed steps, and through a trough out the back of the property. Those are Clethra bushes, Itea, and a couple of American Hornbeam trees.

One of the pond complexes…

The rebuilt gazebo

This is my view every morning when I eat my breakfast. There are baby koi along with the Shubunkins goldfish. They are quite hilarious to watch. Spunky little critters!

I’m getting to take lots of pretty flower pictures, all of these already existed on my property. The perennials the landscape designer planted are still very small. Next year they should start filling the spaces, so there won’t be dirt to weed and they shouldn’t need watering. Each day there is something new to appreciate. These aren’t native hydrangeas, but the landscape designer did plant a few native ones. I think they are white, but still early to tell.

I have lots of volunteer Fleabane peaking out around my property. I love the little white daisy flowers.

After we ripped off all the invasive Akebia vine from the gazebo, we were left with a structure in desperate need of support. We shored it up, and discovered we had a crossvine that was barely surviving, and this year the trumpet flowers from it were glorious. There is a large white willow that frames the gazebo.

My clematis survived, which I wasn’t sure about since it was tangled in a mess of oriental bittersweet.

And of course peonies are gorgeous for about 4 hours, and then the rains always come as soon as they open up, which makes them not so gorgeous. But for a day, I had beautiful peonies.

My landscape designer planted two southern Magnolia trees. The flower blooms are gorgeous.

And of course, I have roses.

Though the irises are gone now, they were the most spectacular I have ever seen them this past spring.

One very rainy day, I hunkered down in the basement and got the body of my pieced jacket together. It is quite fun. Only needs a lining and perimeter bias trim. Waiting for another rainy day, but the forecast is calling for hot and dry. In the mid to upper 90’s. Sigh…

And when I can, after dark, I sit curled up and continue working on the appliqué cat quilt, a project of my mom’s that she asked me to do for her, since this kind of work at age 93, is challenging. The kit is one from the 90’s from Maggie Walker. This is block number 5. I still have to finish embroidering the whiskers and stitch the name along the side, Abyssinian.

I’ve already started #6, which will be challenging, because it overlaps #9, and I have to wait to finish much of #6, until I build #9. This is the coolest puzzle I’ve ever assembled.

My retrospective at County College of Morris is still up, running through August 22. It isn’t open on the weekend but the new summer hours have been posted.

Wednesday, May 8 – Tuesday, June 25 Mon-Fri, 8:30am-4:00pm. Sat-Sun, CLOSED

Wednesday, June 26 – Thursday, August 1 Mon-Thu, 8:30am-8:00pm. Fri, 8:30am-4:00pm. Sat-Sun, CLOSED

Friday, August 2 – Thursday, August 28 Mon-Fri, 8:30am-4:00pm. Sat-Sun, CLOSED

And finally, my exhibit is up on their website.

All this means that I’m frequently asked to meet groups of weavers and sewers and friends, and relatives at the exhibit, (when I’m available), give them a tour, and go out to lunch, or dinner, or in the case of my sister from Maryland, have a glorious weekend of family, including the sister from NY. We saw my exhibit, and then my studio and gardens, and then headed to NY to see the NY sister’s new home and gardens. We even got to walk across the Hudson River on the NY Rail Trail bridge over the Hudson. Something I’ve never done. Somebody has a photo of the three of us on the bridge, I forget who!

And I did manage to squeeze in a visit last Tuesday to the MET museum last week to catch the final days of the Weaving Abstraction in Ancient and Modern Art, and the new costume exhibit Sleeping Beauties. My head was full, all of my senses on fire, and I was home by lunch time.

It was really important for me to stay busy this year. My son is still deployed in the middle east, and I worry about him daily. Keeping busy has always been my antidote for stress. I still play with Montclair Early Music, and volunteer weekly at the Shakespeare Theatre of NJ as a stitcher in their costume shop. My life is exhausting, but I couldn’t be happier, because all of these things I chose to do.

Stay cool dear readers, it is summer out there and record heat doesn’t bode well for the future. Enjoy your gardens, or volunteer in one, and get your hands dirty. And when gardening season ends, there will always be fiber to play with…

Stay tuned…

On making lemonade…

I would wager a guess that everyone of you dear readers knows what it is like when your life is not your own.  When circumstances get in the way of plans, of what makes you happy and what does not, and what messes with the lives of those you love.

I really expected my next post to be all about my adventures at the Chilhuly museum in Seattle, after an amazing week on Whidbey Island followed by an amazing weekend in a workshop with Heather Winslow, whom I got to host and is a complete delight and then get ready to pack for my trip to Yadkin Valley Fiber Center in NC, where I was to teach a three day jacket class…  But that was so last month…

Except the storm hit.  Literally.  The northeast has had a rash of really wicked storms in the last couple of months.  I’ve gotten through them all unscathed, fortunately I had an all around handyman who cleaned up the minor debris, six loads to the dump of yard waste. I made many calls to landscape maintenance companies to find someone who could just cut my lawn and do some mulching.  Everyone would drive by my property and keep on going.  Except they couldn’t keep on going.  I live on a dead end street with no turn around like a lovely cul de sac.  Apparently this is a problem for a 41 foot landscape trailer.  Who knew…

I finally found a company who promised me they would add me to their customer base. They could park on a neighboring street and drive the equipment over.  Then it rained, and rained and rained…

 

Then the storm hit Tuesday two weeks ago.  We almost never lose power.  We live near a pretty stable grid.  Last power outage was Hurricane Sandy, and that happened because a 150 year old oak came down on Main Street and took out the main trunk line.  It took ten days to repair that.  The first gust of wind blew Tuesday two weeks ago and wham.  Power out.  I was in the middle of stitching around the swatches for the guild exchange.  I finally finished them on the loom and needed to cut and mount them for the guild meeting.  Thankfully earlier in the day I updated all the handouts I’d need for the upcoming jacket class.  What I didn’t do was print out the computer sheets for what I needed to pack, because I wasn’t planning to pack until Wednesday afternoon.  The flight to Charlotte was Thursday morning.

Yeah, so that happened.  And I knew when the first gust of wind hit and the power was out that it wasn’t going to be good.  In fact, once the storm passed I ventured out down main street and not only was there a 150 year old oak down between two of my neighbor’s houses, miraculously missing both, but further down Main Street in the same spot where the tree took out the trunk line during Hurricane Sandy, the remaining two 150 year old trees had gone down like dominoes again taking the trunk line with them.  Sigh.

So my son and I made the best of it.  We lit the oil lamps, drank, made food with what we could and not opening the refrigerator or freezer.  I have a gas stove, which I could light with a match, and I still had a Verizon signal.  Later that evening I drove around trying to charge my phone and I was shocked at how many trees had come down and blocked roads.  It was going to be a long time before we got our power back.

I took my doggies to the kennel on Wednesday and tried to pack as best I could remember, what I’d need for the class, since I had no power I had no computer. Wednesday night I realized that I would be gone when the power came back on and I couldn’t take a chance on what food would be safe to eat, so I put out a plea on facebook and a friend came and we unloaded about a hundred pounds of food from two freezers and refrigerators and she carted it all home to share with her mom, very happy to have all of it.  Thursday morning I got into the limo, with two large suitcases, my carry on bags, and no power.  I was doubly worried because my alarm system was dying, and my son, though he lives in the house, would be leaving for guard drills on Friday for the weekend.  

But there was nothing I could do but hope for the best.

Late Thursday night, while I was in NC, the power did come back on, and my son was in residence, and the alarm did go completely nuts, and I was able to get him in touch with the alarm company and they talked him through resetting everything.

The weekend was a complete success, I adored my six students, they all made beautiful jackets, and I adored staying with my host Leslie, who runs the fiber center. And though I did forget a couple of important things, I managed to do without them.  I’ll talk about all that in another post, and give it its own space, but last Monday morning, I flew home in a relatively uneventful flight, hopped in the limo, and on the way home found out that my mom had been rushed to the hospital yet again, this time with suspected blood clots in both lungs. Which turned out to be true.  My sister was beside herself, she had lost so much time from work from all the other calls to the hospital in the previous two weeks, and living closest to my mom, the ball is always in her court.

The limo arrived at my front door and to my complete surprise, the landscape company was there, with the first 10 yards of mulch and had most of the front yard underway.  It was beautiful.  There was a glimmer of light.  

 

I have never wanted to not do something the way I didn’t want to get in the car and drive to Maryland.  I was exhausted, and my house still wasn’t completely back to normal after the power outage.  I had no food in the house.  Since we had no food, my son suggested sushi for dinner.  And wine doesn’t have to be refrigerated… I went to the kennel to get the dogs Monday afternoon and looked through the mail, tried to make some sense of the couple hundred emails in my box and called my mom.  I knew what I really didn’t want to hear.  I needed to make the trip to Maryland.  I did a big sigh, went to bed, and in the morning, the morning of my birthday, I made a decision to just be.  In the moment.  Enjoy what I could out of the day, celebrate the fact that there were many rainbows in my life and that today was a storm, and that hopefully there would be a rainbow at the end.  I looked out the window and the day was clear and there, at the end of my driveway was the mulch truck, back with another 10 yards and I looked up at the sky and said thank you to my late husband for the best birthday present he could ever have given me.  My son assured me he would be around to care for the dogs, I threw a bunch of clothes back in the suitcase and left.

And you know, life is funny sometimes.  I realized on the 3 1/2 hour drive down the NJ turnpike, over the Delaware Memorial Bridge and on into Maryland that it was my birthday and I was going to be able to spend it with my sisters and my mom, no matter what the circumstances.  The three people I love most in this world, other than my children.  And it is a different kind of love.  My mom is 87.  She has had an amazing life, she remarried at 76 to a guy she dated in high school.  They are still married and he is devoted to her and hasn’t left her side.  I have two amazing sisters, we are really really close though not geographically, but we are there for each other.  And so I got to the hospital, had lunch with my youngest sister, got to my mom’s hospital room, and we all sat, and visited and laughed and the hospital cafeteria had sushi, so I picked up some, and while my mom ate her bland hospital food for dinner, I had my small box of shrimp sushi, and smiled.  It was a lovely rainbow and I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

That evening I went to my other sister’s house to spend the night, and we got a lovely visit in.  Back to the hospital Wednesday morning, again Thursday and again Friday.  My sister who was so behind in her work, she is an architect, was able to catch up and clear her schedule so she could take over for me on Saturday.  It turned out to be the most gentle special week.  I made lemonade from really sour lemons and a good shot of vodka in there was all it needed.  I sat and talked and knitted, dozed and just felt present.  It was enough.  And it turned out to be one of the best birthdays I’ve had in a long long time.

And I came home Saturday morning and this is what waited for me. 

 

I still have a pond that keeps emptying, and the water feature in the yard stopped working, but I will call pond guy Bob on Tuesday and he will eventually figure it out.  The yard is lovely.  I stopped at Trader Joe’s on the way home and refilled my freezer with all kinds of lovely things.  My daughter and I went to see Moliere’s Tartuffe at the NJ Shakespeare Theater today for a Sunday Matinee and we laughed through the whole show.  It is hard to imagine that a play written in the 1600’s could be so relevant for today.  My son made awesome burgers and had dinner waiting when we returned.  I had a cold dark beer for dinner, and celebrated that I have more than I need, and am surrounded by amazing people whom I love more than life, and that it isn’t what happens in your life that’s important, it is how you look at it.  And this week was a great reminder of what I truly value. 

Stay tuned…