slowly she turned

Living the Slow life in North Carolina

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  • A long weekend in Asheville: Shibori with Heather Allen-Swarttouw

    This Labor Day weekend was so fabulous that I am going to divide it up into several posts. First, the reason I went: Shibori + MX Dyes with Heather Allen-Swarttouw at Cloth Fiber Workshop.

    The Japanese word shibori translates as “to bind” in English. I’m not going to try to give a lesson in shibori here because there are plenty of resources online. But any kind of design technique in which the dye is prevented from penetrating the fabric due to some type of binding would come under that definition. The tie dyeing that everyone is familiar with is an Americanization of shibori. Designs on cloth can be made by stitching and pulling the thread and knotting, clamping objects to cloth, scrunching and tying, wrapping around objects, folding and pleating…there are a lot of ways to go.

    Lately I came to the realization that more than anything else in the world, I love surprises in my art. Since you don’t really have total control with dyeing (well, the way I do it you don’t), every little wrapped bundle is a present.

    Heather demonstrates the “shippo” (interlocking circles) technique.

    This is “karamatsu” (pine cone). I used this on my rayon scarf, which I’ll add a photo of later.

    Heather demonstrates “bomaki” (pole wrapping).

    The cloth is sewn into a tube and pushed down onto a pole so that it has many natural folds. Patterns can be made by tying thread and manipulating the fabric. The pattern she is showing us is “mura kumo” (village cloud).

    The stitching and knotting takes a long time! Fortunately there are a few quickie techniques which combine folding and tying or clamping. We put a lot of bundles in the dye pots and went to lunch. One nice thing with this kind of dyeing – you can use small containers. Oh God, another reason to hoard. But it’s nice to reuse these items, since our city doesn’t accept this kind of plastic.


    A dye box

    What a great idea. This is a way to keep dye powder from flying around and getting in trouble. Cut two holes for your arms. Line the bottom with newspaper and dampen it to catch the dye. Put all your materials in there, put the lid on top, and mix your dyes without having to worry about that tiny speck of stray dye powder landing on your other work and ruining it. It’s happened to me, and I’m making one of these.

    We raced the clock to get as much as we could into the dye pots before 3:30, so that the cloth would have at least one hour to dye. We were able to overdye some pieces from the morning.

    Show and tell

    Shibori dyed cloths hanging to dry. In the photo above, the orange and white cloth is mine.

    Really, in an ideal world I could have played with this for days, stopping only to eat and sleep. I loved seeing how different fabrics took on different colors in the same dyepot. When you start overdyeing, you can really go down the rabbit hole.

    I hope to take more workshops at Cloth Fiber Workshop. And Barbara Zaretsky’s work is fabulous. You can see some of it in the background of the third photo.

    Photos of my fabrics are in the next post.

  • Local food exploration, caterpillars, lungs

    Another caterpillar stitch across the spine (see the holes between the blue butterflies) and a closure and this one will finally be ready for the gallery.

    There were many tests and xrays of poor Miss Lucy’s put-upon body this week. This one of her lungs finally nailed the problem: severe asthma. We are still having to force feed her today but she did get up on the bed on her own last night and stayed there for a long time before retreating under the #$%^@ bed again this morning. This is getting old.

    I didn’t have my camera this morning when Sandy and I visited the North Carolina Farmers’ Market on Sandy Ridge Rd. off I-40. Brunch at the Moose Cafe – finally there is a place that serves organic free range eggs. It was a little pricy but when you consider that they buy from local farmers and was very good, it was worth the price. I wonder why they didn’t pick a North Carolina animal for their name? When’s the last time anybody saw a moose around here? And why Quaker grits instead of Old Mill of Guilford? There is another one in Asheville, so maybe we’ll have breakfast at that one next weekend.

    We bought butternut squash, free range chicken and grass fed beef from Peterson Farm this morning. Also my favorite marinated goat cheese from Goat Lady Dairy, and then I spread my money around the farmers that looked local: Cherokee Purple tomatoes, bicolor corn, cantaloupe, and blueberry cider (from Whiteville, NC). Very expensive sea scallops from the Chesapeake (I guess that it is the boat’s home), “river” shrimp from Sneads Ferry ($$$, but I just ain’t eating that cheap crap from Asia) from the seafood vendor there.

    He said that they served imported shrimp at the recent shrimp festival there and all the local shrimpers are furious. I also learned recently that many restaurants at Calabash and area do not serve local seafood. You can only buy Asian shrimp at the Food Lion, a large southern US grocery chain, at Sunset Beach. (I asked and was directed to one of the seafood vendors set up on the highway. Really? Food Lion can’t support the local economy?) One bright spot: Fishy Fishy Cafe in Southport, one of my favorite places, is dedicated to supporting local fishermen. Apparently they survived the landfall of Irene right there with no problems because they are open for business according to their Facebook page.

    Next weekend we’ll be in Asheville, NC which is a wonderful locavore and craft brew town.

  • Disaster week coverage at SST

    Well, this week has been different.

    Theo got better but on Sunday Lucy started hacking and I assumed that she had a hairball that she was choking back down. Then she stopped eating and drinking and hid, mostly under the bed where I could hear her gag all night. By Tuesday, I was very concerned and decided to get her to the vet for the first time since she was a wee girl (@seven years ago) during my lunch hour, but I couldn’t find her. I scoured the house – I was so frustrated that I had a minor panic attack. I worried that she had died somewhere and we’d have to find her through smell.

    I went back to work and an hour later the building started shaking in a significant and sustained way. Everybody came out of their offices. “Did you feel that too?” “Seriously? An earthquake?” There was a framed document on our wall that was still shaking like crazy after we realized what was happening. We have a little tremor in North Carolina occasionally, and I have felt one before that I figured out what it was, but this was much stronger. Then, of course, there was the media explosion. I’m glad that I experienced a small one, but hope that I don’t ever have to go through a large one.

    Guilford Tech Community College had a bomb threat the same day so I know it had to scare the crap out of whoever was left on that campus after it shut down. I did notice a new crack in the plaster wall of my bedroom. That is the general area where we have foundation problems. A friend near Durham had an existing crack in her brick wall widen and crack the drywall inside. When you consider that nobody around here has earthquake coverage, you understand just how bad a big quake could be here. The buildings are not designed for earthquakes, and the East Coast is overdue for a big one. Geologists said that the reason it was felt so strongly in such a large area is because our rock is “old and cold.” It is pretty solid without a lot of fissures to break up the vibrations. Even my mother felt it down near the beach.

    So, I thought, that’s why Lucy was hiding. Maybe it’s not so bad after all. And sure enough, when I got home, she was out and seemed a little better, but still refusing to eat. Maybe she is still freaked out over the earthquake, I thought. She freaks out over the tiniest things, such as throwing up, anybody new entering the house, flea medication. And the next morning, she was in hiding again after hacking and gagging all night.

    Wednesday evening we took her to the after hours emergency vet clinic. At that point, we still thought she was trying to hawk up a hairball that she couldn’t get out. They did bloodwork and suspected pancreatitis. We brought her home and took her to our regular vet first thing Thursday morning. They did x-rays, more bloodwork and tests, and found that her stomach and intestines were clear and full of gas. Her lungs were filled with fluid and she was coughing so hard that she was irritating her stomach and throwing up a little also. There was some indication of heartworms, so they did that test and we are still waiting on that. They used one of the doctors’ personal nebulizer on her, gave her steroid, antibiotic, and rabies shots, and sent her home with us saying to bring her back if she wasn’t eating by noon. The diagnosis changed to severe asthma.

    At about 8 p.m. I started feeling dizzy and weird and thought it was stress. Then I went through hours in the bathroom – I believe it may have been food poisoning but I can’t be sure. I won’t go into detail but it was bad enough that I thought Sandy might have to take me to the hospital at one point. On Friday, Lucy seemed no better and was hacking under the bed again, not eating or drinking. I fell asleep for a couple of blessed hours and woke up at 12:30, and called the vet’s office. They were having a staff meeting from 12:30 to 2 and I completely fell apart. Sandy came home after I called him at work a few times, hysterical and angry, and we went together to the vet with her at 2 p.m. She was given fluids, forcefed some baby food, and nebulized again. I spent the rest of the day with a monster headache, and she came home again, not hacking so much.

    So, here it is, the morning of Hurricane Irene’s arrival in North Carolina. People to the north of us are much more frightened. We natives tend to take these storms a little less, well, I wouldn’t say seriously, but maybe as part of living here? Kind of like the tornadic storms we tend to get. Here in Greensboro we are on the very western edge of it, so all we are getting so far is wind, not as bad as a lot of thunderstorms we get here. The wind is different, though, it is high in the air and more sustained. I hope that we will get some rain out of it, but the radar is not very promising, and the forecast is for 30% heavy rain this afternoon.

    I hope that there is not much damage at the coast and north of us. I’m not too worried about Mama – it is unlikely that her house will flood if it didn’t flood during Floyd, and it is cement block one story. It survived Hazel so it will survive this easily. The old pecan tree in the back yard concerns me though.

    I fully expect that everybody stopped reading this post about 4-5 paragraphs ago. I’m just writing for myself.

    Feeling a bit better this morning, with some caffeine in me and mostly better stomach-wise. I decided to take advantage of the breeze to work in the Back Forty, but the wind was too high up and the skeeters set upon me like they were starved. I picked my field peas, which are producing well despite the drought and the heat, and are growing up the cherry bush so I can stand up to pick some of them! The butterbeans gave up flowering in the heat, and I have hope that once we get some rain and cooler temperatures for a while they will produce again in the fall until frost gets them. We have hot peppers and the okra that I planted late is starting to bloom, so I hope to have some baby okra to cook with my peas. The breeze seems to have dropped lower now so I may try to venture out there with some bug repellent on this time.

    Other pestilence here is that the fleas have hatched out again. They are so tiny you can’t see them, but the cats and I sure do feel them. Lucy had flea dirt in her fur yesterday but no fleas. I don’t want to bomb the house with chemicals right now (or ever) so I sprinkled the small amount of carpet in our house with salt. That is basically what the “natural” flea companies do. It is supposed to dry them and their eggs up. We’ll vacuum it up a little later today.

    Well, the vet just called and said that the heartworm test was negative, thank God, but that I need to go ahead and get some food into her. So that is the end of disaster week coverage here at …slowly she turned. Good luck to those of you riding out the hurricane. I’ll be back with art stuff later.

  • Sunday morning coffee pot post

    Real life has gotten a lot busier now. Classes begin tomorrow, and the new graduate students came in last week for advising and orientation. I have to say that I’m impressed with them so far. I love my job, as I say often! A large part is due to my co-workers, who have great personalities, compassion, and most importantly, are sane. And I say that with complete seriousness. You haven’t experienced misery until you get stuck in an office with a person with serious negative mental problems.

    Speaking of that, on Friday I came home for an early lunch to drive downtown and buy some bread and a cinnamon roll at Simple Kneads, which is closing and its customers were rallying to try to save it at the last minute. Anyway, when I was at home two policemen showed up at my next-door neighbor’s house. This wasn’t very surprising, except that there were two of them, and I slipped inside to give them privacy. But the next day, her neighbor on the other side approached us and said that the sheriff had been there later that day and now he had not seen her outside or heard her, which is very unusual. He finally called her daughter, and it turns out that she was taken to a mental health facility for evaluation. I am glad that her daughter managed to facilitate this, because she was getting progressively worse and we were worried about her.

    I just hope that they can keep her and do something to help her, because she doesn’t seem to be able to take care of herself. Her family has tried to “commit” her before and she refused help and was not deemed a danger to herself or others, but really, she is. I am not afraid of her but her state of mind does make me nervous that one day she might harm herself or decide that one of us is possessed by demons and attack somebody – conversations with her support this. Not that she would attack someone, but that demons are very real to her, and she lives in a very dark, sad surreal world.

    My colonoscopy had perfect results, yay! Theo’s health problems have been heavy on my mind though. He finally stopped licking and biting himself obsessively only to come down with some sort of respiratory problem. I can’t imagine where he could have picked up a virus so I assume it is allergies. I’ve had cats with much worse physical problems but never a sneezy cat. His eye was watering a lot and he was snuffling and sneezing and I really, really, really did not want to take him back to the vet for a third time this month. A friend on Facebook advised Chlor-trimetron (her vet had advised it for her cat) and so yesterday I gave him a little less than 1/4 pill twice and it did seem to help.

    This made me realize just how dusty and covered with cat hair the house has gotten. With my hand problems and a vacuum cleaner that needs repair it got way worse than usual. So we spent a good part of yesterday cleaning the front room down to the bones – moving the furniture out, cleaning the floors, baseboards, walls, and windows. Dusting and cleaning the upholstery. I love our old Victorian pieces of furniture from Sandy’s family, and our little collections of interesting stuff, but my God. Dusting them is a nightmare. It always makes me wish that we had chosen to live in a new house instead of a 1922 Craftsman with plaster walls. These houses seem to generate their own dirt. Sometimes I think about having the whole inside sheetrocked.

    One reason why I haven’t written on the blog is that I’m very frustrated about the whole Friends of the GFCM situation (they have disbanded but still have final business to take care of) and so angry with certain people (not in the Friends) to the extent that I no longer want anything to do with the GFCM again. I’m just done. I don’t want to think about them any more. So I’m trying to put a positive spin on this for myself – it will be a new challenge to search out other venues of local food. My friends the Bettinis have a farm stand and the Rudd Farm has a farm stand near them with a lot of different vegetables. I think that I’ll cruise out that way and buy direct, and also check out the state farmers’ market on Sandy Ridge Road for the first time in a very long time. Other farmers that I like have farm stores or stands or other venues too. So it won’t be as consolidated and convenient, but it will be an adventure. I would love to order from Piedmont Local Food, but I don’t want to use their only public pick-up location in Greensboro for reasons of my own.

    Sigh. Sometimes this buying ethically philosophy is difficult. I actually had someone admonish me this past week for standing up for my principles instead of “reality.” HA! I’m sure that those of you who know me know that he was barking up the wrong tree.

    Today I’m going to finish up the living room – take all the things off the shelves and clean them and the shelves. Yuk. Then I’m going to stitch and work on binding another book. Yay. And I’m moving forward, despite the world around me, I will keep on truckin’.

  • Woven paper book

    Covers done with woven painted paper, coptic binding, acrylic color washed papers. I folded a few pages so that you can stick stuff in them like business cards or receipts or lists or love notes or photos or whatever.

  • Amuse me, please

    Just posted this on Facebook, but I welcome all smart asses to play along:

    Okay, y’all. I have to meet and finish this day with a sense of humor. I’m doing colonoscopy prep today. So, just for giggles, I’m asking all my smart-ass friends (you know who you are) to come up with stuff I could write on my behind or thighs to surprise the doctor. This probably won’t happen, since I am not a contortionist and Sandy’s handwriting is barely legible, but the point is to keep me laughing. So any other jokes are welcome too.

    Please, no poop or fart jokes. By the end of the afternoon I will not find these amusing.

    Janet started it out right with a haiku:

    “Enjoy your visit.
    Not many folks see this side.
    You are real special.”

    I came up with these:

    “Thank goodness Lassie brought you! Timmy fell down the old well!”
    “Say hi to Gollum for me.”
    “Meet my polyps Bill, Mary, Trudy, Dianne, and Zach. They’ve been pains in my butt for a long time.”
    “WIDE LOAD”

    Hendricks came up with this: “See Ruby Falls”

    Okay, smart asses, GO.

    ******************

    I think that I might add to this post throughout the day as I think about this procedure and the elephant in the room: cancer.

    This is a age-related screening for me. I had my first colonoscopy at age 40, because my father died at the age of 65 of colon cancer, an age that seems awful young to me now. You can live without a colon, but this stuff tends to get you by spreading to your liver and/or kidneys or stomach.

    Anyway, I know what I’m about to go through this afternoon, evening, and tomorrow morning. It’s inconvenient and messy, not very painful, and hopefully I’ll sleep through it like I did last time. It is DEFINITELY worth going through to avoid colon cancer.

    Colon cancer tends to be very slow growing, so if you get a colonoscopy every ten years beginning at age 50 for most people, your doctor can remove any precancerous polyps while he’s in there poking around and usually you won’t have to worry about it. Because believe me, you should take colon cancer very, very seriously.

    That being said, I remember that one of the main things that got me through my father’s sickness and death from cancer was humor. And when you think about it, a colonoscopy is pretty funny if you can get past the fact that you are the joke. Pretty therapeutic for your soul, too. It’s easier than being vain in a situation like this.

    ********************************

    The hour is here for the first laxative – BONG! Or should it be bung?

    ********************************

    I had to give the cats Advantage today for fleas. It doesn’t bother Theo at all. But the other two – gah, you’d think I was trying to murder them. Guido is in the other room wailing and Miss Lucy is hiding somewhere, traumatized. Theo is laying in my lap, thinking, “Those pussies!”

    ********************************
    Watching “To the Ends of the Earth” on Netflix instant view now. We decided to discontinue the DVD rental, and for our last month we are watching “Bored to Death,” a HBO series. Ted Danson is hilarious in it. Book today: “Her Fearful Symmetry” by Audrey Niffenegger.

    ********************************
    Sandy doesn’t want to hear any more about my colonoscopy prep. The man is obviously eaten up with envy.

    ********************************
    Friend of mine playing online Scrabble on chat: “I think my scrabble game is prepping for me to have a colonoscopy. I’m having a major vowel movement.”

  • Dragonfly mica book

    I’ve made one similar to this before. I just love these old nature illustrations. I download them from eBay and print them on my Epson printer. It reminds me of looking through my great aunt’s old books back in the 1960s when I was really little. You could entertain me with a set of encyclopedias and nature books for hours.

    I learned something from this book and the last mica-covered book. I will never ever peel mica again. Once I began, I couldn’t stop it from flaking until I had peeled most of it off. Either it will go on whole, or not at all.

    By the end of this coming weekend I should have half a dozen new journals to put into the gallery. Then I am going to concentrate on stitching and quilting, although I’m going to have to be careful not to go too crazy and hurt my hands. I’ll use the sewing machine some. I love love love weaving cloth strips together.

  • The Wind and the Rain

    This is an altered book that I’ve been working on WAY too long. I finally reworked the cover and voila, it is done at last.

    The pages are acrylic color washed Rising Stonehenge papers.

  • Sunday morning coffee pot post

    It’s been a great weekend so far. The Elements reception went well, and everybody really liked the cheese and apple breads I baked. I went by Zaytoon and picked up a couple of their spreads to go with them, and tried to give them some advertising all night. So many wonderful small local restaurants have closed in Greensboro this year that I worry for all our small businesses.

    Yesterday I broke the fast and went to the Greensboro Farmers’ Curb Market for the first time in weeks and had a wonderful time visiting with friends and food vendors. I got there a little late and so missed out on low-fat milk and salad greens, but I will pick these up at Deep Roots Market later today. I feel so fortunate to have these two healthy whole food resources nearby.

    Theo is making me insane, though. I took him to the vet on Tuesday, thinking that his main problem was his anal glands. I changed their canned cat food because all three cats were rejecting it, which makes me concerned that there is something wrong with the batch. Now he is still jumping back from the food as soon as he smells it (the other cats are fine with it now) and he is licking and scratching and biting himself worse than ever. He is also smacking his lips a lot. I gave him a quarter of a Pepcid yesterday (something the vet told me to do for Squirt when he had stomach problems). He wants to be in my lap or on top of me or in my sight all the time. So I guess I’ll be taking him back to the vet for a steroid shot tomorrow and I bet that they will want to do blood work. I wonder if it is anxiety.

    Sandy is very excited about painting now and I am thrilled to have an art companion! We cleared off the dining room table, put a plastic tablecloth over it, and had an art date yesterday afternoon. He has decided to try acrylics, and chose subjects that are definitely NOT beginner material, but the point is that he is enjoying it and I was quite impressed with his work yesterday. Of course, Theo had to get into his lap to check out his work.

    I finally washed some Stonehenge papers with acrylic paints for binding into journals. The trick with this is that you want it to be pretty, but not TOO interesting because the purpose is to write over these pages. I stack these with sandwich paper that I brought back from Albie’s class and the wrinkles of that paper and the plastic garbage bag that I laid them on made some wonderful effects. I guess that I’ll save the more interesting ones for endpapers or covers.

    Today, my goal is to finish gluing paper to covers, binding, and make closures for at least three books to put in the gallery. I hate glue, so I will have to make an attitude adjustment to get started with this – do the gluing first and get it out of the way.

  • First Friday Downtown Greensboro Tonight

    From our artists’ co-op:

    “Come to Elements Gallery in downtown Greensboro this Friday for First Friday 6-9. Meet our talented artists and check out our Featured Artists for August… Jo Anne Doyle, a very talented potter has many new items in the gallery this week. Deb Covington has brought in some beautiful additional paintings. John Martin has some unique metal pieces in the window and around the gallery. Come get out of the heat, enjoy some refreshments and feed your soul while you stroll through our gallery.”

    I’ll be there with the refreshments crew.