slowly she turned

Living the Slow life in North Carolina

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  • Let Freedom Ring

    We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

    (In memory of Terrilynn, who posted this on her blog every July 4.)

  • Fiber Art Update

    Here is a update of what I have in progress, artwise. I have kept a little air conditioning unit going on energy-saver in the back studio for the past week so that I don’t have the excuse not to go back there because of the extreme heat wave we’ve been dealing with. The light I work under is hot too, so I should probably change the lighting. In a way it is good because it forces me to take a break when I get too hot. At the same time, it should be changed because it changes my perception of the colors I’m working with.

    Suzanne lent me her Critter for beating paper pulp before I went to the lake, but I haven’t used it yet. When the weather dips back down into the mid-80s during a time that I don’t work, I’ll get right on that! I have a lot of different fibers that I want to experiment with on this nifty little piece of equipment. I’m lucky to have access to one, since they are made one at a time by paper artist Mark Lander in New Zealand. His web site seems to be down – he has had many challenges this past year, unfortunately – but here is a good web site about Mark and his Critter.

    On the four-harness loom in the back, exploring huck, a lace weave pattern. I’ve finished two scarves, or table runners if they don’t wash up soft! These should look quite different once they are washed, so I’ll repost the after photos. I’m going to weave off the entire warp before I cut them off, so it will be at least a couple of weeks.

    At the lake, my good intentions were to work on collage and book covers and bookbinding and inkle weaving. That didn’t pan out, because although I carried half my studio with me, I left certain tools home that would have made the creative process frustrating. Fortunately, I also took my tapestry loom and a bag of thrums (leftover yarn from weaving on the loom). Since I need a lot of quiet time when I’m making art, I decided to start a tapestry that was based more on intuition and randomness. I’d been thinking about doing this project with found objects from the lake for a long time. So I dived right in.

    The idea was that I would reach into my bag of mostly cotton yarn scraps and use whatever I pulled out. I quickly realized that this was not going to result in a piece that I would be happy with, but I liked the concept – a free-style,Saori-like, wabi-sabi kind of aesthetic. So I started four little tapestry bands on the back side of the tapestry loom. If the yarn I chose at random really did not fit the movement and colors and feel of the lake experience at that point in the weaving, I flipped the loom over and picked one of the four little bands to weave it into.

    I just can’t express how much fun this is, and it’s portable. I keep the whole thing in a backpack and so I can just grab it and go.

  • Lake Waccamaw 2012

    Here it is, the Lake Waccamaw post. Last year was the first year in a long time that we did not spend a week or long weekend at the lake, so we were really happy to go back and spend some time. My sister and brother-in-law were staying four doors down at a little rental house with a pier. That is where Tim, my brother-in-law, took this photo of me paddling his kayak. It was very nice to be able to sit on a pier and look at the stars and catch the breeze off the lake in the evening.

    Although sometimes the wind barely made a ripple in the water.

    On other late afternoons, we sat out in front of “our” (Cousin Fred’s) house and drank beer. The water was usually lukewarm. Tim dubbed us “The Redneck Hot Tub Club.” I’m going to design some t-shirts for us to wear next year. This is Tim and my brother Thad – usually there were more of us out there but the wimmins wuz in da kitchin fixing supper.

    On Thursday, Sandy and I drove to Wilmington and roamed around the “art/antique” district shops (really more antique and vintage shops) and ate at The Jester’s Cafe. My sister sent us there for the pimento cheese sandwich with bacon and carmelized onions and she was right about it. Sandy had the smoked sausage quiche and we shared a slice of peanut butter pie. Eye rollin’ back in the head good. Then we went to Old Books on Front Street to see my nephew, Seth, and we met his girlfriend, Jess, who was working in the store cafe and gave me some peanut butter cookies.

    And that was only one day of all the good eatin’ we did down east in North Carolina. When we weren’t eating something simple and amazing cooked on the gas grill at my sister and b-i-l’s house, we ate at Dale’s Seafood in Lake Waccamaw, which serves up the best Calabash-style fried seafood and vegetable plates at lunch. If you are snooty about traditional Southern food, don’t go to Dale’s. There’s no point in wasting all that goodness on the likes of you.

    On Friday, I got up early, drove down to the farm and picked butterbeans, and then brought Mama back to the lake to spend Friday night. My brother and his wife and my cousin and his wife came down that afternoon. So we had a great family get-together.

    Sandy spent a lot of time painting on the porch. He started out in the yard, but we had an invasion of midges for a couple of days mid-week, and it seemed prudent to leave the painting studio on the screened porch. I wove some fun wabi sabi kind of stuff and read two books. I’ll post photos in the next post.

    We didn’t see many big gators or strange critters this time, so I was quite happy about that. It’s funny how you get to know the different ducks when you stay there for a while. The weather was cool at the beginning of the week and it didn’t rain but one night. I like the rain at the lake, though, and would have liked to have a big storm at least one day.

  • Back Forty Update

    With a high temperature forecast of 104 today (and that is before the heat index is added), maybe I should be drinking iced coffee. Right now the temperature in the Back Forty is a reasonable 78, so I decided to take a few photos. With all my traveling I did not get a whole lot planted this year. But that means that I still have some space to plant a fall garden, so it’s all good.

    Since it’s gonna be brutal out there, I plan to turn up the air conditioning, clean floors and organize my explosion of art supplies in the bedroom and dining room, blog and read blogs, and maybe sneak a few minutes of weaving on my loom in the back studio, where I have a poor little window AC unit struggling on energy saver. At least the building is now shaded by trees.

    We took out the deck last year and replaced it with a small landing, and since the whiskey barrel rain barrels were beginning to rot, we put them into service as half barrel planters. I hope that the critters will let me harvest some tomatoes this year. The nets you see in the photos are the old screens from my gazebo in the back. They are hung over one blueberry bush and one branch of my seckel pear tree in an effort to get some of this fruit for myself, since they don’t ripen after picking and the critters took all of them last year. Every last stinkin’ one of them. I put out a dish of water for them yesterday so that if it is thirst driving them, they don’t have an excuse this year.

    Field peas and butterbeans

    This side is shady and kind of wild. Carrots, dill, parsley, flowers, various herbs, “weeds” and what little is left of the lettuce.

    Herbs, artichoke, peppers, field peas, zephyr squash. I love zephyr squash because it is not as seedy and it is beautiful.

    Brandywine and Juliet tomatoes in a whiskey barrel planter

    The other planter with Brandywine tomatoes, and soapwort. I do not recommend planting soapwort. It is now a terrible weed in my garden, sending runners out everywhere.

    This is how I mulch my paths. Sometimes I use landscape fabric too. I’ll cover the cardboard with pine needles. This path is a challenge because when we have big rainstorms the water flows down this path like a stream and carries off light mulch and weed seeds. When I have a little extra money I think that I’ll invest in some river rock to lay down here. A French hydrangea and my studio/shed is to the right, and a Nanking cherry and lots o’ weeds are to the left and back. That is my compost bin at the end of this path. It has become much too shady and it doesn’t get hot enough. The ants love it. It will have to be moved to a sunnier place in order to cook the compost.

    Harvesting squash and peppers, and of course, herbs, now. The mosquitoes have decreased significantly since we took out the deck and the rain barrels, but they are still worse than most places because of the jungle next door.

  • Inishowen via the Lough Foyle Ferry Company

    Who needs a video camera when this company provides this AWESOME website with 360 degree panoramic views!

    http://www.loughfoyleferry.com/vguide.html

    I’ve picked out a place for Sandy and I to retire near Greencastle. Now I’ve got to save my pennies.

  • Saturday morning coffee pot post

    It barely qualifies as Saturday morning, since I slept late then went to the Greensboro Farmers’ Curb Market, but I do have coffee.

    That market just keeps getting better. Susanne has set up a booth where she sells her books, marbled papers, and handmade papers, many made with materials from the other vendors’ farms or produce or flowers. I’m happy that she is doing well there! I bought a few more plants to plug in to my garden, since Pat had her plants at half price. What I don’t yet have in my garden that I usually plant are really hot peppers, like habanero and serrano. The department head loves to eat super hot peppers, and I love the way that they look in my garden.

    The rest of the weekend will be devoted to weaving, I hope. I finished warping my loom for a long ten-inch wide huck threading and started weaving on Thursday night. I am thrilled to be weaving on my loom again. We are going to try to fold it up and take it to the lake with us if it fits behind our front seats in the Honda Fit. I suspect that it will. It’s quite amazing how much we have gotten into that car since we bought it.

    It is starting to get hot again but while it was cool I made some headway on the back forty clean up. Sandy cut down a pretty hefty part of my next door neighbor’s mulberry tree last weekend and I cut it up for the city to pick up on the curb. I don’t want him doing too much more than that though because I am worried about his heart. I pulled out a lot of thick grapevines and honeysuckle vines that I wove into a couple of baskets. The honeysuckle vines were thick enough that I was able to strip enough bast (inner bark) from them to make some paper, so they are doing double duty. Today I’m going to cook the bast with some soda ash for a few hours and Susanne will help me beat them into paper pulp. She might lend me her Critter for the summer! I am very excited about being able to use this great little beater. Mark Lander makes them one at a time in New Zealand, and I doubt I’ll ever save enough money to buy one for myself, but it is perfect for my needs and Susanne is not using it right now.

    Last Sunday we went to an international festival downtown called the Mosaic Festival. It was full of different kinds of food to try and music to listen to and crafts from other cultures. These two ladies were spinning and weaving intricate pick up bands on a backstrap loom.

    I’ll try to start posting more of my fiber and book art work now that the Ireland trip is behind us. I certainly have enough inspiration to carry me for a long time. I don’t think that I could have extended that trip one more day because I was filled to the top – I would have had to take a least a week to rest! Someone asked me if I wanted to go back, and I said, “Only to live there.”

  • The O’Neills: Megalithic Ireland Tour 2012

    Start reading my Ireland travelogue by clicking on this link and there is (or will be) a link to the next post at the end of each post so that you can read it in order. There are also links at the top of each post.

  • Saturday Morning Coffee Pot Post

    We have got to do better cleaning up this house. Miss Lucy’s asthma is acting up again. So I cleaned the kitchen and mopped the floor before I even started the coffee pot this morning. This afternoon I’ll tackle another room, and ask Sandy to check on the basement (it may be flooded) and fix a couple of gutter spouts. We had a very heavy rainstorm yesterday and since the housing development (that we fought desperately) was built uphill we often get a river of water through the back forty. I have a row of thick hostas and lenten rose that deflect most of the water from the basement, but it has been a big problem since last summer.

    My plan, other than going to battle with the cat hair and dust, is to warp up my loom today for huck. I’m inspired by this book, The Handweaver’s Pattern Directory, by Anne Dixon. I love this book so much that I’ve preordered her next book on inkle weaving patterns. The huck patterns look easy and versatile enough that I think that this will be a good threading to explore throughout the summer. I’m starting out with a long eight inch wide light green unmercerized cotton warp, mainly because I have so MUCH of the dang stuff, and I’m going to use a lot of different colors of weft. And what can I say – I’ve been on the Emerald Isle in recent days so there’s that color inspiration.

    I have four posts up under the original dates of travel in my Ireland diary. It all starts on this page and there is (or will be) a link to the next post at the end of each post. I probably will add at least twenty more posts to this series, but some of them will be all photos. In the meantime, you can check out all the photos at my Flickr page, although you won’t get much commentary.

  • Update so that you know I didn’t fall off a cliff

    I’m back from Ireland, and I brought back a nasty Irish cold that I’ve been battling since my last day there on Monday. Now I’m over the worst of it (I HOPE!) and I’m going to start working on my Ireland travelogue. If you are still reading me from the old days, a scenario that I’ll admit is probably delusional given my move to Facebook and the dearth of writing at this blog, you might remember that I love to write about my travels. If I won the lottery, I would most certainly waste a good bit of the money on traveling. Oh, and world peace. Mustn’t forget that.

    This is going to take a long time, but I need to get crackin’ on it because my memory is fuzzy on the best of days these days, and it’s been two weeks now since we got off the plane in Dublin. So stay tuned.

    A quick note about my health – my tests Thursday came back with very positive results, so my mind is greatly relieved.

    A quick note about Guido’s health – my boy is napping on the floor with four paws in the air and all three weathered our trip well with the help of my good neighbor.

    A quick note about the Back Forty – we apparently had a lot of rain while we were gone. Beans and field peas are up, but the herb seeds I planted are not. Calendula, coreopsis, and day lilies have replaced the foxglove blossoms. The blueberry bush is loaded. Now to figure out how to get them before the birds do without tangling the birds in a net.

  • Coming Home

    After we left the Giant’s Causeway, I took over driving because the roads were wide and easy at this point. Sandy tried to take a nap, but what I assumed was a bypass of Belfast took me through Belfast at rush hour. He got a little taste of what it was like to be a passenger in harrowing traffic, and I am still working on unclenching my fingers.

    We stopped in Dundalk for one last dinner in Ireland at Eno Bar and Grill, across from Dundalk Cathedral. I had my favorite salad, with beets and oranges, and Sandy had pasta. The chef sent out a free calamari appetizer – a very nice dining experience.

    As we left Dundalk, I was trying to reset the GPS and Sandy grew absent-minded and neither of us noticed that he was driving on the wrong side of the road until we saw a car coming at us head-on. Sandy swerved and the other car swerved in the same direction. Sandy swerved back to the side of the road. The other car stopped and a small red-faced elderly gentleman jumped out of his car and marched up to us and chewed us out. We apologized sincerely and abjectly, and promised the old man that we would be off the highways of Ireland in less than one hour and that we would be supremely careful (if he would just let us drive away!) for the short remainder of our trip. Finally our pleas of fatigue and stupidity calmed him down and we drove the rest of the way, adrenalin pumping, to the rental car return at the airport.

    Then we flew home to Greensboro the next morning after an uneventful night in an airport hotel and TWO security checks and a long line at U.S. Customs.

    The end. If you made it this far with us, thanks for reading my Ireland adventure story! I hope that you enjoyed it. Now go plan a trip to Ireland – the people there will walk up to you on the street and thank you for being there. If you’re a nervous driver, I suggest that you take buses and trains. You won’t regret it no matter where you choose to go or what you choose to do because in Ireland there was beauty and craic everywhere. Be sure to order a pint of Smithwick’s. Sláinte!