A holiday swim

Thank you all so much for visiting my blog.  May this be a generally happy and a thoughtful holiday for you. 

Workshop cloths

This is the first woven cloth I made for Jude's cloth to cloth workshop.  It's made out of dear old scraps from various projects.  Some hand dyed silk.  No quilting yet.   It's nice to handle...very light

This one has lots of flannel in it so it's a bit heavier.  What fun it is to make them. Each is 12" square just about.

I can't resist adding this photo.  Very slowly and carefully the old department of Public Health building is being torn down.  They spray it with enormous quantities of water, I suppose to keep the dust down.  This project has been going on for months.  This was yesterday's view which I found beautiful.  More lovely than the building itself ever was.

Gifts

Yesterday I finished this very small hanging for a friend.  There is a little bit of fabric weaving in the center...the border is strips from my grandmother's shawl and the hanger is made from braided bits of the same shawl.  The body of it is made from silk batting.  See the bee?

Saturday was an amazing day.  I went to the quilters' drop-in and on the way passed a little garage sale where I found this rug.  It's about 6 feet long.  Evidently a family member brought it back from Turkey, but the people decided not to keep it because of a few holes and so they were selling it for $10.  I asked them if they were totally sure of that price and they were, so I am very grateful.  Doesn't that look like a lighthouse on the top?

Then, on the way home, I bought this silk hanky in an antique store. After I finish admiring it, I may chop it up for inclusion in another cloth.

I've also started making cloth in Jude's workshop and I'll put up pictures of my experiments soon.  She is a wonderful teacher; the techniques and the results are very satisfying.

What came out in the wash

I had a surprise when I took the farm cloth out of the washer/dryer (it is all one machine). The denim made these interesting pointy things on the sides, and on the bottom edge:

It did this!  After I get the loose threads tacked down, I'll wash it in my neighbor's machine with fabric softener and see if the denim behaves differently.  I like those funny points.  Jude's cloth to cloth class starts Saturday and I'm very very much looking forward to it.

This is Agnes at the dog park with her gigantic Mother's Day Biscuit, presented to her by her friend Pat.  She worked her way laboriously and lovingly through about half of it, then a Big Dog sauntered over and in one quick bite, swallowed the remainder.  Agnes was a little perplexed...she didn't see it happen...one minute it was there, and when she looked back it was gone, but it didn't spoil her day one bit.  She looked up at Pat and wagged her tail and pretty soon she had another homemade biscuit to gnaw on.

Mother's Day

It is Mother's Day Eve and I wish you all a good day tomorrow.  Sometimes we are mothers and sometimes we aren't, but somewhere somehow there is a mother involved in our being here and may she be blessed.  My own personal mother died several years ago, but I still have daughterly feelings which I try to activate when the motherless feelings arise.  And one day after my mother died, I for some reason needed to be especially kind to myself, so I bought this little needlecase which is in constant use.  It comes from a quilt store in Vermont and I wish I could be more specific, but alas, that's the best I can do.   Perhaps the lovely person who made it will see it here!

Raindrops and gravity

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I've been working on the rain portion of the farmcloth/laprobe.  I wasn't happy with the raindrops so I tried imagining  the path that each drop follows...and that it must be very curvy due to wind currants and birds and airplanes getting in the way while gravity is always pulling pulling.  Here's a close-up:

The raindrops themselves are little rectangles of starched home-dyed silk!  The paths are made of unfurled yarn.  I don't know what will happen when this is washed, but probably should find out soon, as it is supposed to be utilitarian.

Lo and behold, here are some local cormorants.  Before seeing them nesting at Sea Ranch, I was unaware of their social nature.  I have only noticed them swimming individually in the past, but yesterday at the dog park a crowd of them swam by.  Sometimes they would all dip underwater at the same time, vanishing completely and then all pop up again more or less together.

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