Summer Doldrums

Zucchini

In sailing there is a time of day that the wind dies and you must simply wait. You occupy yourself with small tasks, chat with your companions, enjoy the scenery, and wait. When the wind picks up again, it is usually gentle just riffling your hair a bit. Sometimes, though, it is a late afternoon thunderstorm with gusts of wind and driving rain or even a bit of hail.

 

It’s been a long time since I’ve been sailing—I’m not a very good swimmer and racing about decks littered with lines and knobby things, dodging the boom and struggling to lift heavy sails was never much fun for me. My husband and boys loved it and participated in racing events and even delivered sailboats along the coast.

 

Life for me, is now in that afternoon doldrums. Not much is happening of great portent. I’ve been tidying up my sewing/work-room and working slowly on a few household projects. My garden is still producing tomatoes—alas, most of them have peck marks from thirsty birds—and cucumbers. The zucchini is thriving and the okra should be blooming shortly.

 

The dining room ceiling has been repainted, and I took down the curling border print to flatten it and re-hang later today or tomorrow. New blinds have been ordered and I’m contemplating the design of a valance. My washing machine died after twenty years of hard labor (three sons and a spouse who all loved to be outdoors) and so a new one is arriving tomorrow morning.

 

I spent today cleaning out my play-house while waiting for the air conditioner repair-man to arrive. Organizing all the bits and pieces left-over from assorted projects, putting all the materials for screen-prints in one box, recycling all the cardboard boxes and peanuts, labeling everything, and most importantly putting lots of things in the Good-will box or trash means a tidier and more inviting place to create.

Celebrating the Fourth on the farm

No doubt it was a foolish thing to do.

 

I just drove 1400 miles and back again hoping to see a hometown parade, eat bratwurst and homemade pie, and watch fireworks. Rain chased me in and out of Wisconsin, provided sloshy driving through road construction demolition derby lanes but welcomed me back to Texas. Traffic was not as heavy as I expected confirmed by national news broadcasts announcing travel was down another 2.6%. I suppose economic woes are convincing people to stay home.

 

Unfortunately I missed the parade—and the brats—and the home-made pie with ice cream—and watched the fireworks from a distant viewpoint for only a few minutes before tumbling into bed.

 

The two days I spent were short but oh so wonderful.

 

Here I am in the corn field

Each morning began with drinking coffee while sitting on the front doorsteps overlooking the bean fields with the fog rising from the distant Wisconsin River. I sat and gossiped with my good friend while plucking dill heads to freeze for pickle making and snipping the leaves for dill-weed spread. Raspberries were ripe and I had grand intentions of picking them for a batch of jam but I ate them all while I worked on thinning the patch. Glen and I rode out to my favorite spot on my farm—through waist high grasses, surprised a deer, caught our feet on firewood hidden under the grass, and hacked our way through head high blackberry bushes. We also toured the Villa Louis, a mansion on St. Feriole’s Island, ate lunch at the Depot bar overlooking the Mississippi River, and came home to pull weeds in the garden and pick leaf lettuce.

 

Thistle blooms

The farm house is slowly moving along; I inspected the cupola on the barn and the interior pigeon proofing—and while chatting with my youngest brother was thrilled to see a bald eagle circling high above. We took pictures of us standing in the corn—to have a good crop it must be knee high by the Fourth. Flowers were in bloom everywhere including thistles. These are considered noxious weeds and I am supposed to have a plan to work on eradicating them on the farm—but the blooms are so beautiful.

 

Things seem to grow so bountifully and without the effort I seem to need here in Texas.

 

It is good to be home; but already I am looking forward to a return trip.  

 

 As usual, more photos can be found on smugmug at

http://ysr612.smugmug.com/gallery/8846284_buEE2#586290503_Bdvso

Wild Garlic

Wild Garlic

In a moment of over ambition, I signed up to swap a flower quilt. Work and a lot of other things caught up with me and I was nearly two weeks late in sending this to my swap partner. It isn’t exactly the kind of flower associated with Texas, however, wild garlic is so thick that my eyes water when I mow. The flowers are a lovely spidery purple on top of pale green stems.

Chickadee

Chickadees

This contribution to the SAQA Square Foot auction is painted with dye thickened slightly on an alginated cotton, embellished with sparkly sheers, and quilted.  During the wintertime one of the most cheerful birds were the little chickadees who didn’t seem to mind the cold weather or snow and hopped about from tree branch to another hunting seeds. Mom always tossed out the bread crumbs from the huge plate of toast she made every morning in the oven–they busily cleaned them all up but never seemed to argue with each other over the best crumbs.

Madonna in a Crazy World

Madonna in a Crazy World

One of the more fun donation projects I’ve done was a piece for ‘Put a Roof over our Head” for the American Quilt Alliance. It was an odd shape; a square with an equilateral triangle on top creating a simple house shape. Not only was it challenging but I was pleased my piece sold to a very pleased collector in Lake Jackson Texas.

 

This year’s theme was Crazy Quilts but limited to a 16 inch square.

 

I pulled out several bags of cool purples, blues, and blue-greens scraps along with light and medium yellows—I had sorted all my scraps into ziplocks organized by color during one of my long workweeks away from home. Sewing them into roughly rectangular forms didn’t take too long  and became rather mesmerizing after a time.

 

My original plan included using a thick black line to indicate a figure of a mother holding a baby; a vibrant yellow was a better choice. I pillow-cased the backing and stitched a sleeve and label in place—and sent it on its way.

Vegetable Printing on the Surface of the Sun

Brussel Sprout Leaves, Cucumber, and Avocado Peel

Today was supposed to be a quiet day, spent resting and eating a high protein-no carbohydrate-no dairy products-lots of water and fasting after 11 in preparation for a PET scan. Breakfast was a boiled egg and three slices of bacon and lots of coffee—I checked and they said that was okay. I happily spent the morning uploading my Honduras blog notes and did a bit of editing on some of my photo galleries as available hard drive space on my laptop is shrinking at an alarming rate.

 

Vegetable printing at the shop was my next project plus I needed to see how my garden was faring. There was one large cucumber, the grass needed mowing but I wasn’t supposed to exercise today and it was so hot I don’t think I could have sat on the mower without being soldered into place.  I sorted through a few boxes from Art Camp while waiting for the air conditioner to cool the interior—why does everything always look so much more interesting when other folks have packed it away and it is in a different order than you remember?

 

Hand-dyed cotton yellow to blue

Two hours later with sweat dripping off my nose and down my back, I packed up my paint, vegetables, and a few pieces of fabric and headed home. The air conditioner refused to do more than blow hot air around.

 

For some reason, I prefer to use only home-grown produce as my stamps. My first effort was with a squash and a lemon. Today I used dried Brussel Sprout leaves, avocado peel (I didn’t grow this one but I do have an avocado tree growing in my back yard), and a cucumber cut in half lengthwise and across.

 

Cotton Velveteen

Test-printing was in my sketchbook and on today’s newspaper, then on two hand-dyed cotton fabrics and a cotton velveteen. The velveteen was scrumptious; the sketchbook moderately interesting, and the cottons rather unexciting. Of course, there is always embellishing and stitching and cutting it up and recombining that may make these pieces absolutely fabulous.  I cleaned my brush on the sketchbook and the fabric and let everything dry.

 

The Brussel Sprout leaves were really great even though they were like leather; the one cut in half was too small to be interesting and the cucumber smelled nice but wasn’t very intriguing.

Art Camp

Group photo

Meeting at Festival once a year was just not enough and so the Fantastically Frabjous Fractured Fairy-Tale Fabricators decided to meet in the summer. Our meeting place was a fishing cabin on Toledo Bend mostly because I’d never been there and I was making the arrangements. I never quite know what I’ll be in the mood to work on and so the back of my truck (and cab) were jam-packed full! I’d discovered the luxury of my own rolly chair versus folding chairs or straight back chairs, I was sure we would need an iron and ironing board and then there was THE PROJECT. (Note—each of us brought an iron and there was an ironing board in the cabin).

 

After discovering some vintage books at work with hand-sewn signatures and good quality paper, and useful only as paperweights (Current Therapy 1987 was the most recent), I appropriated them for THE PROJECT. I had sent out assignments for the previous two months to cut out various things from junk mail to use as collage elements but first we needed to prep the books by tearing out roughly every other page. Then I began applying gesso to pages. I had thought we would spend one day on this step, but it ended up taking me nearly three days and I stopped only because I ran out of gesso.

 

It was very hot and even I was wilting under the heat on the porch. The air conditioning in the cabin had difficulties but fortunately a repair man was located and some sort of wiring was set up to keep the cabin interior cool. Cissy kept an eye on the repair process while basting a quilt over the porch railing and reported each step. I won’t repeat them here as they involved electrical shocks, beer, personal hygiene issues, a lot of staring at the innards of the unit and discussions of green wires versus orange ones being grounds.

 

Meanwhile, each of us prepared one evening meal. I went first with hamburgers as I was most nervous about cooking for ladies and figured I would begin with a very low standard, Sherry did taco salad, Cissy made a wonderful shrimp and avocado pasta salad, and Suzanne made a full meal featuring tilapia. Since I am an early riser, I made coffee and biscuits or sweet rolls with the help of the Pilsbury DoughBoy. Lunch was cold cuts and leftover supper—and then there was a huge bowl of chocolate and other snacky items including individually wrapped dried plums. Bullwinkle presided over all the cooking but sometimes dipped into the prune stash.

 

We played guess the meaning of an oddball word in the dictionary, go fish with art paintings, and a really strange version of Scrabble. And then we sewed! Suzanne quilted a very large green quilt that had been just fabric two weeks earlier plus a baby shower panel quilt—they were completed and bound and slept under before she left. Cissy worked on a large T-shirt quilt which was also bound and slept under. Sherry finished a Homeless Quilt, a Boys Haven Turning Twenty quilt, a mystery quilt from Festival 2 years ago plus started and finished a fun top called Pointless Wonder. I bound my nephew’s wedding quilt and slept under it. According to my grandmother and father, to give a quilt good luck to its new owner, the maker must sleep under it but I think my grandmother just wanted an excuse for a nap.

 

Jeanelle joined us on Thursday and we presented her with some ‘gifts’ we had made. I had spent ten minutes making up ‘kits’ for this project; we allowed ourselves one hour to complete them and then I made an additional gift of a boa. This boa was composed of leftover pink and black scrap quilt trimmings and miles of peach colored underwear lace. The ‘gifts’ all had to be USEFUL and so she received a ‘prune cozy’, a necklace, a purse, and an idea holster—all made with underwear lace, pink and white gauzy fabric, and upholstery fabric. She received these items wearing a lovely $2 tiara discovered in the birthday candle section of the local grocery store while waiting for a pound of turkey ham to be sliced.

 

Our last afternoon was spent working on our books. First we put our names in the inside cover. Then we stood in a circle and passed our books to the left, worked on a spread using paint and glue and stamps, let them dry, and repeated the process until everyone had worked in everyone’s book. The last page was completed after dark and Cissy put plastic bags over her feet so she wouldn’t get mosquito bites.

 

Too soon it was time to go home. The cabin owners oohed and aahed over all our work, assured us that we were NOT too rowdy (there is a large sign stating Persons who are Rowdy will be asked to Leave and forfeit their Deposit and we did laugh quite a lot particularly when taking our group photo). We pored over the atlas and chose a new destination for next year.

 

 More photos are at smugmug at

http://ysr612.smugmug.com/WeirSewFine%20Studio%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20Sylvia/823890

Going Home from Honduras

Christ overlooking Tegucigalpa

 Although the medical-dental team would gladly see patients until an hour before our return flight, there is much to do with packing up and securing equipment. The folding dental chairs, sterilizer, and generator were stored in the container. Those folding chairs are a luxury as sometimes the local dentists work from a straight back chair—wooden if they are lucky—but more likely one of those plastic stacking chairs sold for just a few dollars at the end of each summer.

 

We ride in the school bus back to Tegucigalpa mid-day; all of us are sad to think that we will leave the next day but glad to see familiarities of a hotel lounge, shops, and restaurants. Terry and I decide to venture out in the city; the art museum is our first destination. A cab is summoned by the concierge who assures us that he is very safe.

 

The cab driver speaks excellent English and offers a sight-seeing tour. First we climb the mountain to overlook Tegucigalpa. We stand nearly at the feet of Christ overlooking the city. Flowers are blooming and I wish we could spend an entire afternoon there walking amongst the gardens.

 

Both of us were impressed with the Art Museum which is housed in an old convent. Two other visitors offered suggestions about other museums to visit. Again I could have gladly spent an afternoon in the patio enjoying the flowers.

 

The evening meal was in the hotel restaurant with each member roasted—gently—with a special token gift.

 

Our flight was not until late afternoon and so Terry and I set out again to explore the city with the assistance of our taxi driver from the previous day. We toured several churches including the Basilica where the Cardinal of Honduras was commissioning new priests. Our taxi driver was most solicitous and watched over us carefully, not allowing us to be outside without his careful eye. Interestingly, the Cardinal has his own bodyguards armed with automatic rifles and dressed in camo.

 

Airports seem to be same everywhere—a lot of waiting and standing and moving luggage here and there. The flight was over-booked and a tropical storm hovered over the airport necessitating arrival flights to be diverted to San Pedro Sula. There was a great cheer when after three hours the diverted flights arrived.

 

Everyone rushed to get on board but connecting flights for most of the team members had already left by the time we boarded. All I had to do was clear customs, collect my luggage, retrieve my truck from the parking lot and drive home.

 

Already I am looking forward to next year’s return trip.

 More photos are on smugmug at

http://ysr612.smugmug.com/gallery/8739752_aqa4t#578148740_uVS6b