slowly she turned

Living the Slow life in North Carolina

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  • New Directions

    I’ve been fascinated with super close-up details since I was a little girl, lying face down in the grass imagining the world the way that ants or grasshoppers do. In my photography, I am drawn to the graphic lines and spaces and textures more than to a certain subject matter, but generally I love nature photography the most.

    For the past two years my interest in quilting and stitching has returned, due to a few fantastic fiber artists such as Melanie Testa, Susan Sorrell, India Flint, and Jude Hill. Susan got me into stitching again:

    I just realized that this is not the finished version of the cardoon embroidery – it is now framed in my office so just imagine a lot more bright pink thistle flower. I couldn’t stitch for a long time after this.

    Melanie and India tempted me back to the road of resist painting and dyeing:

    And now I suddenly have so many ideas for combining my photography and fiber surface design and stitching that my head is about to explode! This, on top of my not-yet-finished spurt of tapestry weaving, and my continuing bookbinding, and now I have taken to weaving painted papers. Really, this may be why so many artists go completely crazy.

    That’s why the calm voice of Jude Hill is so soothing to me. Even though I had sworn off online art classes, I succumbed to the temptation of Jude’s “cloth whispering.” And guess what – I didn’t do a single solitary thing in the last class that I took from her! Everything was crazy busy and I was traveling. But I can go back to it any time and sink into that lovely world she has created. So I signed up for her longer class “The Magic Diaries.” Even if I just draw energy and inspiration from Jude, I’ll be happy, but I intend to make a story cloth for myself. And I intend to share my life and thoughts with you again, rather than only reporting random events and complaining.

    Sometimes people ask me why I feel compelled to share my life online. I don’t really know the answer to that – there are probably a lot of reasons all mixed up together. But I do know that one of the nicest things about blogging was that every now and then someone would email me or make a comment that I made a difference in her life – that I inspired her. That is better than any anti-depressant I ever took.

    So here we go, another phase of blogging in my life, as long as I need to and not a minute longer or shorter.

  • 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.)

  • Side trip to Portland

    We decided that we would rather pay for a hotel room in Portland on Sunday night instead of taking a red-eye flight after the conference was over. I found a good deal for the Benson Hotel, a gorgeous old hotel in downtown, and Judy was kind enough to drop us off there. Unfortunately, Delta moved our afternoon flight back so that we had to leave for the airport at 10 a.m., so our time frame was not ideal for sightseeing. We made the most of it though, with a fabulous seafood meal at Jake’s Famous Crawfish, a long visit to Powell’s City of Books, a walk along the river at dawn, breakfast at a diner in the Pearl District, and a quick stop at a beautiful fountain park.

    We had Dungeness crab stuffed salmon and a halibut/salmon/mushroom/hazelnut creamy hash that was to DIE FOR.

    Oh. My. God. Part of the weaving book section^

    Sunrise from our 11th floor hotel room window. Didn’t I do good – I wasn’t afraid of the elevator.

    I think this is the first time I’ve seen a “sun dog.”

    A rare good photo of me, thanks to Susanne. Our airport shuttle bus driver stopped here briefly to let us experience this wonderful park. We have to go back so we can play longer!

    Seriously, Sandy and I are considering a move to the Pacific Northwest after he gets to retirement age (less than ten years away) and if we can find an affordable place to live near a nice town or city. Susanne is ready to go too! I think that Forest Grove would be a wonderful place to live, just from the few days we spent there. Of course, near Seattle would be wonderful too.

  • Focus on Book Arts 2011

    My friend and paper mentor Susanne and I flew out to Oregon to attend the Focus on Book Arts conference in Forest Grove at Pacific University. Despite our friends’ warning about the rainy weather, it was beautiful and I didn’t have to open my umbrella once. The cooler temperatures were such a relief!

    Judy met us at the Portland airport and as I thought would happen, Susanne LOVED her! So we had a trio of three amazing women for most of the trip. We arrived in Forest Grove late on Wednesday, just in time for the Farmers’ Market on Main St. held each week from 4-8 p.m. Good idea for a farmers’ market here in Greensboro.

    We picked up cherries and the sweetest “Hood” strawberries for snacks. Also some marionberry creamed honey. Creamed honey is new to me. The town is small but just big enough for me. There was not a lot of time for exploring, but we both enjoyed a funky little bakery coffee shop called Maggie’s Buns and bought art supplies from The Accidental Bookmaker.


    My first class was Jill Timm’s “The Amazing Dremel,” a class that I’ve been thinking about for a couple of years, actually. I found it on the Internet and thought that it would be very helpful, and it sure was. The first thing Jill had us do was work with glass, because it tends to be the most intimidating surface. After that, we all settled into it. She provided a large number of bits and wheels and by the time the class was over we all felt totally comfortable using a Dremel or rotary tool.

    I was most happy with two samples picturing Guido and Miss Jazz, which is not surprising, but since I was really after learning about this tool for woodworking I was surprised that I enjoyed working on glass and ceramic tile so much. The flexshaft attachment was very helpful because it was lightweight and allowed me to hold the tool more like a thick pencil. My hands did hurt at the end of the day, but I don’t plan to use this tool for hours on end in real life so I am pleased with the potential of what I’ll be able to accomplish with it.

    The next two days Susanne and I both took Patti Glass’ “Caterpillar Book on Cords” class. I went forward with an “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” theme, since Patti had beautifully printed copies for our text blocks, while Susanne used a copy of her paper weaving and a large snakeskin in black and white. I was anxious and went overboard with the image transfers and I did not like most of my wooden covers. I plan to sand and carve out the butterflies with my Dremel tool – hooray for new skills!

    The caterpillar stitch is complicated and requires patience, practice, and a lot of concentration. Susanne and I are still working on finishing ours. I removed my stitches and completed the headband. This week I am going to redo the stitch you see in the photo.

    Next posts: Portland and texture ideas.

  • Update

    This will be short – my tendinitis has flared up again and I had another injection today. It hardly hurt at all. Also had my neck x-rayed and the doctor doesn’t think that it is causing it.

    I’ve posted a widget for Forest Grove, Oregon to the right sidebar because my mind is spending more time there instead of here. My friend Susanne and I are flying there next Wednesday, where we will meet up with my friend Judy and we are all going to play at the Focus on Book Arts conference at Pacific University. I shipped a flat-rate box of my supplies today so that we won’t have to mess with checking bags.

    The AC and furnace installation was finished today, thank GOD. Of course, the weather cooled down so I didn’t even turn it on. Oh the irony.

    We’ve been doing major purging and cleaning and organizing. I cut the three tapestries off my loom and now I need to back them and either hang them or frame them. I have a nice collection of driftwood sticks and I think that I’ll try to hang two of them and frame the other.

    Well, gotta go. Always assume that it is good news and that I’m happily busy when I don’t post. Or, if you really love me and can’t get enough of me, like my page on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/slowturnstudio/. Be sure to tell me you’re a reader of this blog and note: if you send me viruses or spam I will hunt you down like a dog and unleash the merciless fury of a hormonal woman in pain on you.

  • New art and progress

    Getting close to the end of this tapestry. I reworked this transition from the golds/pinks to the blues/pinks several times. Much happier with it now.

    This is very different for me, the all-natural earthy hippie wannabe. It began as a joke – I have a lot of disdain for some of the art I see in museums and at UNCG. It seems to me that some students are encouraged to produce junk as art in the name of originality. Sandy was cleaning out a big drawer full of cables that are no longer useful that he’d been hoarding for years. I said, wow, I can random weave these like vines around this metal frame, stick a few condoms on it, splash some red paint on it, string some Christmas lights on it and submit it to the MFA program, ha ha. Then suddenly it was an hour and a half later and I was totally entranced in it. Now, suddenly, this joke has real potential to me. But no, I am not going to hang condoms on it. I have not sunk that low yet.

    The working title is “Always Connected.” This is the base for some other cool electronic found objects that were going in the garbage. It is surprisingly heavy – there is a LOT of wire in this piece.

  • Sunday morning coffee pot post

    Guess it’s time – life has been very distracting lately. I have actually been writing in my journal, although I sort of cheat by writing about each day several days at one time in hindsight. No, wait. You cannot cheat when you write in a journal. All rules are out the door, even ones that you set, because you are the only referee. That also means that you can use tape and write boring stuff and stuff that has no meaning or value to anyone but you and paste over and draw over stuff and attach new pages and pockets and sew stuff in and use acidic non-archival stuff that will disintegrate in a few years and photos that you hate and draw mustaches on them and self-portraits of yourself making faces in the mirror and stuff like that. You can begin every sentence with “and” or “but” and use partial and run-on sentences and end every sentence with a preposition and split infinitives and use cliches until the cows come home. I love my journal.

    So. The mama drama is not over, but not overwhelmingly stressful now. She finally got her epidural injection and it wasn’t as bad as she dreaded and that helped a lot. I need to check on her this afternoon to see how she feels. A few days ago she was feeling a little better so of course she went out and overdid it and was back to feeling puny again. Part of it was that I gave her a cold. Not a terrible one, but one that drains you for a few days.

    The ductwork went in as scheduled and I immediately called the mortgage agent to schedule the appraisal and get the loan process going again. We had a major heat wave with temps in the mid-high 90s and it got up to 88 degrees inside the house. Fortunately I am somewhat acclimated to it because Mama’s AC was out and my car’s AC quit, but I was having frequent hot flashes and so I was miserable. The past few days have been better because it cooled down a little and the hot flashes went away.

    The appraiser did not show up until a week later this past Wednesday and then he did not turn in the report right away as he promised, and it turns out that my mortgage agent was nine months pregnant and I didn’t know and I couldn’t get her to return my calls. I was way pissed. On Friday another agent took up my case and she is advancing me enough money on a personal loan to get the deposit to the HVAC company on Monday morning so that I can at least get the AC/furnace installation on the schedule. Which, at the earliest, will be June 13. I am also irritated at the HVAC manager for not working with me on the deposit situation – I did, after all, just pay them in full in cash for the ductwork, which is why I didn’t have a deposit for the rest of the work.

    I came home to Sandy emptying out the “computer room” which is also a major junk hoarding room and he put down new carpet (a remnant, because it is a small L-shaped room). It looks very good and he is making a real effort to get rid of a lot of the junk in here. Hence the art work in the previous page started happening. Guido immediately decided to anoint the new carpet and Sandy chased him all over the house until he hid under the bed in “my” bedroom and apparently finished his work there. Ah, the joy of cats. Once we get everything moved out of there I’ll clean the floor and we’ll put down carpet in there too.

    We went downtown on First Friday and had such a good time roaming around. The crowd at Elements was good, again, and downtown Greensboro just gets better and better. Then yesterday I got my hair chopped off and went to Lowe’s to buy a Dremel for the class I’m taking at Focus on Book Arts in a few weeks. I went ahead and bought a flex shaft attachment because the latest tendinitis update is that my forearms hurt pretty much all the time, but especially when I hold things with any weight. I’ve been trying real hard not to complain, and despite this I’m about as happy as I’ve been in a long time.

    We went to a cook-out last night with some of the Ph.D students and their friends and it was so nice to be included. We don’t socialize much any more and sometimes I really miss it. When we came home we were looking at icanhascheezburgerafterdark.com (warning, almost every post has the f-word and is definitely NSFW) and I started laughing so hard that I lost control over it and I laughed until I cried and then I couldn’t stop laughing even at things that weren’t funny and my sinuses opened up and my stomach muscles started cramping and I knew that I had to stop laughing because it hurt to laugh so hard and yet it felt so good to totally lose control laughing. I haven’t done that in years. My stomach muscles still ache today but it was completely worth it.

  • Second sunrise tapestry progress

    I think that I might weave skies for a while…

  • At Lake Waccamaw again, finally!

    Sitting here in one of my favorite places in the entire world, the glider on the back screened porch of my cousin Fred’s house at Lake Waccamaw, watching the birds swoop over the water and listening to the artesian well trickle between the sounds of the waves lapping on the shore. As the shadows grow longer, the waves usually crank up to small whitecaps in the evening.

    I drove to Marietta on Wednesday afternoon, and my reason was to accompany my mother to her doctor’s appointment for an epidural steroid injection for the terrible sciatic pain she is experiencing almost constantly. We (including her “man” friend Billy Kay) drove an hour to Florence, South Carolina to the Pee Dee Spine Center, where she had an appointment at 2:45 yet was not seen until about 6:00. Then, just as they were ready to give her the injection, somehow they found out that she had been taking an arthritis medication that the doctor said gave the procedure a risk of paralysis. I understand how she was confused about it, but my heart just broke for her when they called me back there and told me what was going on. If I had been her, I would have bawled like a baby. So now she has to go back on Friday, after she has not taken that medication for seven days. What is really tough is that it is the only medication that gives her any relief at all.

    So I stayed Thursday night and we ran some errands on Friday morning. Then I cooked all afternoon so that she would have plenty of good food to prepare easily during the coming week. She has lost so much weight during this ordeal, which began in February. I don’t know what to think about this medical practice. If we have another bad experience on Friday I think that my sister and I are going to arrange for her to see a doctor in the Triangle. There are so many good doctors and hospitals in that area and she can stay with one of us for a while.

    After eating dinner with Mama, I drove to the lake and here I sit. It’s a little warm and humid. My sister and her husband are here, and Lisa spent a few hours with Mama today. We’ll swing back by there tomorrow on our way home.

    I’ve been weaving the second sunrise tapestry. It’s been good to see my color choices in natural light, sitting in the shade of Spanish moss draped bald cypress trees. I don’t get the chance to come down here much anymore so I grabbed it. Since my cousin retired, he is often here with his friends. The days of this beautiful retreat as a common getaway are over. It makes me sad, but also grateful that I was able to use this place for free so often for so long.

    I gather water smoothed, beetle carved driftwood sticks in the cool, shallow, tea colored water, digging my toes into the tannin soaked sand. One day I am going to come down for a weekend and make paper, including things that I find here in the water and on the beach. I would love to set up an outside Navajo style tapestry loom over one summer and weave the fibers and sticks of this place into a big wall hanging. I guess that it could happen and I should not count it out. This is truly my favorite place in the world; surely I will be able to continue to embrace it with my heart.

  • Saturday morning coffee pot post

    Whew! This week was a rough one. Last Saturday started out so lovely, and ended with leaving a cook-out abruptly to visit an urgent care clinic. I had a bad urinary tract/kidney infection that apparently had been “cooking” for some time. This one affected my kidney so I had painful cramps in my kidney and it scared the bejeebers out of me. Anyway, so Sunday was a total wash, mostly sleeping, and I was on Cipro for five days, and its side effects for a few days longer, and now I am feeling normal again.

    The good news is that I sold a couple of books at the gallery, even though it has not opened yet. I was supposed to work there last Saturday and last night. We need a website so I am developing one on WordPress.com that I like so far. I’m considering moving this blog to WordPress.com but I do like the freedom that I have to fiddle with my code by hosting my own blog. It seems like an unnecessary expense to pay hosting fees these days though. I played with my old blog at Blogger but I left there because it always seemed to be having problems and I heard a lot of frustrated howls from bloggers this week. The truth is that I no longer have the desire to keep up with web design technology and I’d rather let somebody else do it for free.

    I bought some plants last Saturday at the Greensboro Farmers’ Curb Market from Handance, Weatherhand, and a couple of herb farmers at the Herbfest outside. Now I have a decent culinary herb garden again, and several varieties of hot peppers. My department head and his wife will eat the hottest peppers imaginable – I grow habeneros because they are pretty and then I give the peppers to them. Sandy’s tomatoes are growing like crazy. I have loads of black-eyed Susans that volunteered from last year so when they bloom I will definitely have to take some photos.

    Some critter dug up some of my pepper and basil plants yesterday, but I was able to replant them with no problems. Mama Robin is now sitting on her eggs. I petted a dying bird yesterday morning and buried it yesterday evening. So it goes.

    I made a small amount of paper in a burst of energy on Monday evening, but I think that I’m going to wait to make any more until it is less rainy and chilly outside.