Hello world. I’m writing about covid and my BMI and tidying up. You might want to stop right here and not read any more. The pizza was wonderful, btw.
SO MUCH WANTS DOING
weaving
WEAVING WEATHER
I promise to post a photo of the blanket when the three lengths are finished and seamed.
My studio degrees are in ceramics and metal. I exhibited while still an undergrad and completed commissions. But after I graduated I never really went back to clay or gold. Instead, I went for fabric.
Important influences include Kaffe Fassett’s Glorious Color, Randall Darwall’s breathtaking silk weaving, and my grandfather’s wife Genevieve and my friend Toni who gave me looms.
Continue reading“A LIKELY STORY”
A friend asked me the other day about our beach walks. How far, how long, how fast? We basically walk north on the shore and then home, sometimes south too. If we can get over or around enough creeks and headlands, we might manage to get two miles north, four miles round trip. But it’s not that simple; we also walk into the rocky edges of the shoreline, east-west, up and down, over and over. I told her that when tides force us to walk on the highway we manage better than 20-minute miles. That’s not fast, but good enough. When I log distance, I mostly count North-South distance because it’s impossible for me to accurately record what our zigzag path covers.
Life is like that, isn’t it?
MORE, PLEASE
I laid different shawls/scarves out on the bed yesterday afternoon, and then another row on the cedar chest (above), but already the light was too dim in this north and east facing bedroom. Ten stretch out full length over the bed, and another eight are folded at the foot. The photos are from this morning. Still not much light, but I’ve made no attempt to “correct” anything as the colors look accurate on my screen. (The greens suffered a bit.)
Continue readingTHE MESS
The blanket will only be 45″ by 85″ unless I put on a second warp and weave another (third) length. I could do that. I still have some handspun. As I work on the second length of this warp, I think more and more that I want that third length. It is a goal, and I need goals just now.
There are the needs of my husband, children, grandchildren, friends, students—the people who matter most—and then the things I do—reading, writing, playing with color and making meals. I read the newspaper every morning online—several newspapers. I look at real estate I cannot afford, I draw houses, something I have done since I was a little girl. I have worked for contractors and architects and directly for clients, and I have seen my plans built, but it won’t happen again. Next door someone is shoving mud around in the rain. It is a messy job. And my brain feels a little like that sometimes.
Continue readingDENIAL?
Gary is downstairs listening to a CD from The Searchers, his favorite group from the 60s (they were still playing a year ago). I have spent several days working on a poem for a local event. (With my luck they will not like it, but honest, I couldn’t write a cheerful “pandemic” poem. Others will.) As I sent it off as an email attachment I had word that the gallery is taking down the show the end of the month. They did not sell anything of mine (or from two other people). Yes, disappointing. But the poem . . . here’s the first stanza:
Birds fell from the sky this past summer, a warning as defiling as riots and bloody marble, the risk of living in dangerous times when all times prove dangerous.
OPENING FRIDAY
Hoffman Gallery December Show Open Fridays through Sundays | December 4-27 | 1:00-4:00pm Free and open to the public Hoffman Center for the Arts | 594 Laneda Avenue | Manzanita, Oregon 97130 phone 503 368-3846
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WORKAROUND
The center panel is composed of eighty-one different patterned squares, crossed by twenty or thirty different black and white cotton. The split frame is of several purples, and these each change from step to step. There is also a pieced border.
There is more to this post—I figured out a workaround.
Above is the center panel with the border pieces, unsown and just separate pieces of fabric laid in place. Below is the border pieced without corners and not yet joined to the center—trust me, it evolved. It’s entirely sewn as of now, and today or tomorrow I hope to complete the border, trim the backing, and fold it all up so it’s ready for Linda Pinkstaff at Astoria Quilting to work her magic. We will carry them north in the next week or two. Perhaps by then I will know what I am doing next.
Yesterday I got stuck. We walked north to Arcadia Beach, two miles away. I made granola and peanut butter cookies that were mostly peanut butter, a riff on Maida Heater’s recipe. Gary liked them, and he’s always insisted he did not care for peanut butter cookies. I finished the dreadful novel I began earlier in the week, skimming the less savory parts.
What I did not do is work on this quilt, which now has a name: “Aurora Which Means Dawn.” That is a line from a Golden Book about Sleeping Beauty. So perhaps I should call this “Sleeping Beauty”? Except it’s not a sleepy piece but bright day. It is my fifth quilt during the past year. Can that be? I have not made that many quilts in a year before. Let me think. Why would that be?
Some people bath less often, some are drinking too much, some quarrel with or avoid their family, some have shifted their political priorities—perhaps a national healthcare system and stable income seem more reasonable necessities when the alternative is bumping into sick people who cannot afford to take better care of themselves?
Anyway, I’ve tried most of the above, and settled on rewatching favorite television series such as The Mentalist, Psych, and Monk while working with color. I must have a couple hundred skeins of Koigu wool, a fine, two-ply Canadian merino that is hand painted. I have hundreds (plural) of different batik fabrics gathered over the past twenty or thirty years. Some are were once lengths of a yard or two, but most were never more than a quarter yard, now reduced to scraps.
My work is not mere craft but neither is it great art. There is art in the design and craft in the making. There is pleasure in looking at the many patterns and rich colors.
BEAUTY TOO
This single-flowing pink rugosa rose has an intoxicating fragrance and set huge apple-red hips. I let the hips set each year hoping to make jelly, but the chipmunk gets them every time.
Two months ago I wrote here about beauty and about the storks nesting in England for the first time in a hundred years. It seems a long time ago.
This lacecap hydrangea grows under, around, through, and over the windswept pine in our front yard.
Yesterday, for the first time in over four months, I ate a meal I had not myself cooked. It was a risk and we will not likely do it again any time soon. Most of our favorite places to buy food are closed (Ove NW and Pearl Bakery) or they have demonstrated a certain level of complacence or carelessness. And I am a decent cook and baker myself. Yes, I can bake a cherry pie starting with a hallock of sour cherries if I could get to the Farmers Market to buy them. I was baking sourdough before the pandemic. Usually by this time in the summer I have frozen pesto and huckleberries and the makings of pies. Instead my freezer looks barren. Continue reading
HALFWAY
Gary standing in the path he built (and has had to rebuild several times) through the rocks. We hope we will be able to turn the loungers around and safely enjoy a 4th of July fire on the sand. (We half hope someone takes these lounge chairs—one of which we found.) That’s a bit of beach trash in Gary’s hand, a length of plastic pipe he carries to poke at the sand.
Today is halfway through 2020 and it’s a good place to pause and take stock. For many human beings this has already been a tragic year on so many levels, so I feel I need to access my situation.
We are both retired so we’re doing fine as far as finances go. That is, unlike so many who are without income such as one son and both daughters-in-law, we still have Social Security. Everyone in our immediate family is healthy but several have continued working in essential services. We have been isolating since 10 March with one exception: our younger son and his two children visited for a weekend sixteen days ago. We are still healthy because they are still healthy, masking and taking other precautions. Other than that, we have the habit of weekly grocery shopping with the occasional extra trip out to pick up mail or deliver mail to the nearest mailbox.
At the beginning of 2020, I set a couple of goals that are still valid. We gave up seafood from our diet. In six months, no seafood, again with one exception: there is fish sauce in my pantry and I made an umami-rich sauce that I’ve used in bowls with fresh veggies and pasta or rice.
The other goal was to purchase no more than eight items of clothing the entire year. I have bought three garments from Eileen Fisher on steep discount (more than 60% off). EF is a highly responsible company and I am glad to support them. Do the two hair clips from eBay count as clothing? Does the replacement headband for the one I’d worn since the 90s but lost on the beach count as clothing? Either three or six purchases, either I am doing fine or this is not looking promising for the second half of the year.
In the past four months I have cooked angelhair pasta at least a couple dozen times (a simple one-pan meal cooked with vegetable stock and with greens, onions, and/or cheese), baked a couple dozen loaves of bread, made gibassier and waffles and spring onion pancakes. I have made curries and vegetable stews and spiced grains. I discovered that a rich soup can be made with leeks and water and salt and pepper—simple as that. Yum. We have eaten pounds of broccoli and uncounted bags of various greens.
Last month I killed my sourdough starter, but I have grown a new one. It tastes fine once it’s baked, but the smell is rather alcoholic than sour. That’s because the “All-Purpose Unbleached Flour” from Costco has barley mixed with the hard red wheat—I didn’t even notice until a local friend and I were comparing notes on our sourdoughs and she said her sourdough had gone rather alcoholic too. A step shy of beer, but . . .
One of my best discoveries is organic miso available at one of the stores we shop once a month. I now have both white and red miso in the fridge! Also, salad greens sauté well with pasta.
My root canal is still sore. I gained back the four pounds I lost. I am not running. sigh
Three packages that we ordered in May have not arrived and we assume now all three are lost. Gary’s CD of Estonian music and my handmade doll from Russia both vanished somewhere in the Baltic. They left their country of origin and never arrived anywhere at all. And the painting—Oh, that painting I love so much—UPS lost track of it at their hub outside Chicago and has issued a refund to the shipper. The refund has been forwarded to me, and I will do the responsible thing and set it aside toward our property taxes.
This year, I have ordered eleven skeins of yarn. I use fourteen for each warp and that much again in weft. This means that the four seven warps I have put on the loom since January have yielded nineteen and a half shawls so far. I am generally still weaving past 7pm. After six months work and subtracting expenses, selling them all might yield a couple weeks or even a month of minimum wage pay, but who’s counting?
I pieced the top and back of a quilt that is waiting its turn to be quilted.
Butterfly Fontanelle has gone through revision three times and I am halfway through reading it aloud again. Tiny changes this time, little corrections but since I am still finding things to repair, change, and move, I will need another edit when I finish this one. I am always in too much of a hurry to send out work. Did it this time too, but I have sent it to a slow responder that does not allow simultaneous submissions, which will ensure I do not send it out again until winter.
This morning I caramelized my last two onions to top macaroni and cheese made with the last of the Stilton, mozzarella, Parm, and with a scattering of dried cranberries because our taste has shifted to sweet and savory and salty all at once. I had only two cups of milk until our next shopping trip so cooked twelve ounces of pasta. It’s in the oven.
At our next shopping trip everyone in the state is required to be masked. Yeah, July 1st! (And about time.) But neither the local sheriff and nor the parks department plan to do a thing about what happens on our beach on the 4th. The one time we tried calling the fire department about a beach fire that was over twenty feet high (absolutely not exaggerating—it flew up another ten feet), the volunteer fire department dismissed our concern. The local millionaires are allowed. “With the rich and mighty, always a little patience,” according to Jimmy Stewart’s character in Philadelphia Story.
I read the news every day—NYT, WaPost, NPR, Guardian—even on the days I swear I will take a break. I study covid-19 statistics. Gary reads different news’ sources. Between the two of us we cover the world. Apparently we are much better informed than the President of the United States. That’s because we read. I have read 34 books so far this year, including nonfiction, memoir, poetry, and novels. Streaming (no cable) we are currently particularly fond of watching Midnight Diner (again) and we finished Somebody Feed Phil on Netflix, even though Phil eats so much meat! Detectorists remains Gary’s all time favorite. On recommendation of a friend, we tried again to watch it and decided we liked Shitz Creek after all. We look forward to Monty Don and Gardeners World on Friday nights. We paid to stream two current release movies and they each had their good points, but we’ve found better distraction and information and drama via our subscriptions.
The hall where I meant to paint is not finished, but Gary and I are scouring the house for set of essays written by a former student. Gary is not optimistic, but our search will be thorough. I was fond of those essays and kept them and still trust they must be here someplace . . . I hope. In the mean time, searching has forced us both to sort and clean. It wasn’t how we planned to spend the week, but it needs to happen.
There has been a lot of cleaning house going on throughout our nation. Statues of treasonous and racist men are coming down. Men who did nothing for our country other than attack it. Comment on national websites point out that even Benedict Arnold fought for our nation in several important battles, long before turning against our country, and no one celebrates him in a public statue or named a military base after him. Laws are changing. White people are taking long, difficult, honest looks at their own privilege and insisting to themselves and the world that we can do better. As hard as these days are for so many and for so many reasons, this is reason to think we might actually accomplish some good in our nation.
My husband and I still get along fine with one another. We are sad sometimes. We nap too much. We worry about our children and the world. Too much. Half of a year and too much has happened to claim anything except hope. There is hope.
We have rewatched the first seven and a half minutes of the pilot of The Mentalist a dozen times in recent months. “Seriously, it’s not as bad as it looks.” And every time, we laugh.
How could I forget making chutney and two kinds of jam?
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&PRIDE Press 