slowly she turned

Living the Slow life in North Carolina

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  • What I’ve been doing

    Making recycled paper

    Making and writing and painting and drawing and glueing in journals – some are altered books

    Yes, I already spilled something on the “Sticks and Stones” journal, made with pizza box covers and my handmade paper.

    Here’s the first handbound book, covers made from a Kandinsky poster book, paper made by Susanne Martin.

    I used these sunflower petals in some handmade paper and saved the stalks to make paper with later. The sunflowers are from a Handance Farm CSA. The echinaecea is from the Back Forty.

    Another studio shot – I picked the drawer out of someone’s trash to use for a shelf. The oil paintings are mine, and I’m proud of them, but apparently not enough to let go of the money to frame them.

    Squirt and Mama Kitty rest on the studio windowsill.

  • Saturday morning post-market post

    Whew! It’s gonna be a scorcher today, and I have an outdoor wedding to attend at 5 p.m.

    I’m going to be like Dr. Horrible’s henchman, Moist. Have you seen Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog yet? Really, you’ve got to see it. The first three episodes are free on iTunes or at hulu.com.

    I posted a lot of new photos on Flickr this morning and will post a few of them here this weekend.

    There’s a bit of controversy at the Greensboro Farmers’ Curb Market today. Market management, with ample warning to the vendors, began enforcing their rules about selling only what been certified that you grow. There is a process for applying for variances. I don’t know why the Molners’ Amish cheese and butter from Ohio are not under a variance, but I will miss it if it doesn’t come back. The problem was just a few vendors who were selling items that they do not have certification that it was grown on one of their farms, and if they aren’t inclined to tell the truth, they could be reselling produce that they bought from a wholesaler. I can guarantee you that at least one farmer was doing it, because once I caught them red-handed with stickers on their produce, and another time when the farmer was away and another person was tending his booth, he made a joke to me about their other farm in Peru.

    So, what I’m saying here, is that if you’re upset over the rule enforcement, consider that it is to protect you as a consumer and the other vendors who have always abided by the rules. The rules, in the past year or so, were being pushed to the point that something had to be done. And the rules have been the same for at least a couple of years, and the vendors were given ample opportunities to come under compliance. The market management needs your support – I know for a fact that they had good reasons, and their rules were made with plenty of vendor and customer input.

    All the same, I think that there is a petition to let the Molners continue selling cheese and butter, and I support that since I am addicted to their cheese. I have to wonder why they did not get a variance though. They are sensitive to rules and regulations (Ron Paul supporters!). Did they apply for one? Let me know if you know the scoop.

    One upset vendor was telling his customers that “slow food people” were behind it. That was absolutely misleading, since Slow Food as an organization has had nothing to do with it. He promised me that he would set the record straight with his customers, since we were beginning to get complaints. I’m writing about it here to set the record straight as well, and my disclaimer is that the thoughts I have posted here are mine as an individual consumer. Other Slow Food members feel differently, and I understand their feelings also. We can’t be painted with the same brush on this issue.

    Anyway, I really loaded up at the market since I just got paid and I’ve either missed markets or ran in and ran out with just an item or two. I picked up my CSA chicken and bought hamburger, Fordhook lima beans, corn, okra, yellow and Zephyr squash, peaches, red pepper/walnut spread, wholegrain bread, and soap. Not that I needed soap, since I am still using the absolutely wonderful soap that Beverly sent to me. But I didn’t want Glenn to think that I’d forgotten them. Pat gave me a few Aunt Ruby’s Green tomatoes to try – she said that they were wonderful but they weren’t selling and that she’d probably have to feed them to the chickens. They were ugly as sin so I figure that they will probably be delicious. She says that they are peppery. I’ll have a tomato sandwich for lunch.

    With only Duke’s mayonnaise, salt, and pepper, of course. Over the kitchen sink.

  • Saturday Morning Coffee Pot Post

    Funny that I’ve chosen to blog on a morning after a 12 hour headache – especially since this blog is very much about choices. I never claimed to always make the right choice, though.

    And funny that I don’t have much to say after three weeks, but what I usually do is just start typing and eventually something will emerge.

    I decided not to go to the farmers’ market this morning. My CSA chicken is not there (they didn’t have water to process them this week – I hope that they found out before they slaughtered them!) and my money is low. I have enough in the freezer and refrigerator to get by this week, with maybe one small run to Deep Roots. There’s a large crowd by this time of morning and I feel the need to conserve my energy today.

    This afternoon there is a celebration of John’s life at Green Hill. I have had a hard time dealing with this loss, as I do with almost any loss. I didn’t RSVP until the last minute because I kept putting it out of my mind, and when a friend emailed me for the third time about it I realized that I had to do it. His wife said that when she was going through his papers from the 90s that my name came up a lot, and that made me feel good. And it makes me feel good that John would be proud of the artwork that I am doing, although he never could understand my depression and anxiety at all. He asked me the oddest questions about it, but at least he asked. Some people just don’t get depression. My mother is one of those people. I wish that I was, but that would require giving up a large part of my life experience, and even the negative parts make you who you are.

    Anyway, I found a recommendation letter that John wrote for me for a scholarship application to Penland about ten years ago, and I’ll treasure that. Plus other tidbits here and there.

    In the studio, I hauled out all the old sketchbooks and notebooks of mine I could find (and that survived my studio flood of the early 90s), cut and tore out all the parts about weaving, and altered a nice coloring book about mythology that I got from the free shelves at Ed McKays. I took the pages about Arachne and glued them to the covers and first pages, glued woven samples to the covers, and glued every scrap and study and photo and note I could find that I saved, which was plenty. Even the projects that didn’t work, or never made it to the loom. I left some spaces for writing and other scraps that might appear, because in our cluttered house that is almost a certainty.

    This past week I have been an obsessed fiend about making paper. This is the time of year that I clean out my files at work and I recycled a lot of it. Once I figured out how easy it was to make paper I couldn’t stop. I have to stop long enough to work, eat, sleep, and let the previous batch of paper dry. I’ve made several batches: white, dark pink, light pink, white with sunflower petals, and last night, a blue-grey. I saved all the trimmings from the sketchbooks that I took apart and used them. I added dryer lint to the last two batches. I’ve already used up my little Kandinsky journal and I couldn’t wait to make another journal with the paper that I’ve made. I did that last night too, with pizza boxes from Sticks and Stones (they have a very cool stamp that they use on their boxes), white paper, and I lined the inside covers with the sunflower petal paper. We shall see how easily I am able to write on the handmade paper.

    The cool thing about this is that the materials are not costing me a cent, so I’m getting in a lot of practice before moving on to the more difficult or expensive materials. But I have spent a lot of money on great pens! I have always loved good pens, and the selections these days just make my head spin. I ordered $25 worth of gel and fabric pens from jetpens.com the other day, a site that I’ve tried to avoid because I knew that resistance would eventually be futile.

    Now I need to save my money for my San Francisco trip, which is only a month away. I’m so excited that I will be able to see and listen to so many of my food and writing idols at Slow Food Nation. (Michael Pollan and Wendell Berry among them!!!!) I will actually be attending the National Congress before Slow Food Nation, so my only overlap will be the Food for Thought speaker day on Friday. Everything that I read about all of it just boggles my mind. What an amazing event they have planned!

    The garden is not producing much these days, although it is full of foliage and green tomatoes! The Principe Borghese tomatoes began to ripen first. They are small, not sweet, but I ordered the seed because they are supposed to be good for drying. I’m getting a lot of Hungarian wax peppers, and they are delicious. There are a few more peppers ripening – pimento, paprika, and a wicked looking cayenne. I don’t ever even see a blueberry turn red before some critter takes it, so there will be no blueberries for us this year. This winter I will try to remember to build some kind of wire cage to put over it during berry time.

    My guess is that it will keep me hopping to keep up with canning tomatoes in a week or two.

  • Sunday sweep

    I’m braising a pork shoulder roast that I bought from Bradd’s pastured pig farm. He’s the guy who feeds his pigs the leftover whey from Goat Lady Dairy. I bought this a while back and I’m trying to clean out my fridge some. This will feed us both for a couple of days, I hope. I’m sort of following this recipe except I used one huge Vidalia onion and one Granny Smith apple, and instead of cider I had a jar of local chipotle apple marinade that I dumped in. We shall see in about 3 hours how it is. I figure that anything is good with Vidalia onions.

    Sandy is painting the dining room, and boy, it is bright yellow. I love it. We’re planning to do a faux finish over it with a sponge and a textured roller, so who knows what it will look like next weekend, since neither of us have a clue as to what we are doing. Fortunately, I don’t care a lot about appearances.

    I bound my little journal/sketchbook with the Kandinsky covers yesterday, and I like it. It’s just the right size to carry with me. However, I found the instructions for Coptic stitch in How to Make Books very confusing. I’m good at following instructions and the pictures didn’t help at all. I mean, when you go in and then back out of the same hole with a needle and thread, aren’t you basically doing NOTHING at all? Seriously, that’s a major editing mistake, and then she refers you back to those instructions for the next Coptic book. If I hadn’t done it before by a slightly different method, I would have given up. I winged a solution and it came out fine. The next Coptic stitch book I bind I’ll use Dan Essig’s handout for the instructions.

    Last night Sandy took me out to dinner at Liberty Oak. We tried to go to Riva’s Trattoria, a new restaurant that’s gotten a lot of press because they are Slow Food and buy as much from local farmers as they can. There’s a big demand for this in Greensboro, I’m telling you. I know because we couldn’t get in. They said that ordinarily we wouldn’t need reservations, but they were packed up to an hour from then, and it was a bit late. I’m glad that they’re doing so well. We hope to develop a relationship between them and our Slow Food chapter too. Then we tried Rim, a new tapas bar, but it was closed for the holiday weekend (!!!??). Oh well, Liberty Oak is always a great dining experience, but I was excited about going some place new.

    Not much else to say except I don’t want to go back to work tomorrow. I’m either starting Eat, Pray, Love or Jayber Crow tonight. Maybe both.

  • Saturday morning coffee pot post

    Man, aren’t three-day weekends the greatest? If we ever get the option of working four 10-hour days, I think that I’ll go for it.

    The coffee is almost gone already because I’ve spent most of my time so far reading emails and comments! Whew! These two discussion groups are terrific (the other one is “thecreativelife”)! But I have to go to the farmers’ market soon. That really shouldn’t sound that way – “have” to go, as if it is some kind of burden. It isn’t. But right now I feel so relaxed and comfortable that it’s a shame to get dressed and leave the house.

    I’ve been working sporadically on another path that curves around from the shed, goes across the back, and meets the other one I mulched earlier this year. It’s not really a new path, but the original cardboard layer has decomposed and the weeds were taking it over. The garden has changed back there since I laid the original path too – the apple tree finally croaked, a redbud is growing, and a tree from a neighbor’s yard is dipping down over the back fence. Between leaving when the mosquitoes get to be too much and leaving when the NDN begins telling me about “unclean spirits” not allowing anything to grow, it is slow going. But that’s fine, because nobody ever notices it but me anyway. It’s almost like my secret garden. Except that I have a crazy person who interrupts me to talk about demons. At least there’s a fence between us. I hope that her daughters visit her this weekend and see the change in her. Not that I think much could be done for her, since she doesn’t think she has a problem and she’s not a danger to anyone.

    Oof. I draw ‘em like flies to honey.

    So. Yesterday, Sandy and I went to a great place for pizza – Sticks and Stones, on Walker Ave., across from another favorite restaurant of mine, Fishbones. Owned by the same folks, actually. But Sticks and Stones is focused on local and organic ingredients! The pizza we got was incredible, with Italian sausage from Cane Creek Farm, a local farm that raises pigs on pasture. Anne-Marie had proposed doing a Slow Food get-together there. I definitely think that it would be a hit, and I wonder if we couldn’t do a standing date there, say on Sunday evenings or afternoons once a month, just as a social thing. The one time I’ve tried this before, people think that it’s a good idea and then don’t show up, but maybe having it in an affordable restaurant/bar would work.

    Sandy decided that he loved the color of the walls in the restaurant, so we added buying paint to our list of errands and bought new paint for the dining room, which is a rather awful Carolina blue. Not that I don’t like Chapel Hill, y’all. But we’ve never liked the color. This is a pretty bright Tuscan gold, with a slightly darker color to add texture with a sponge and a textured roller. It might look terrible. But we’ve made paint mistakes before, and we’ve lived with it (the year of the Peptobismol pink living room comes to mind). A change will be nice. I don’t plan to paint it, though. I’ll be busy cleaning and decluttering.

    And hopefully having SOME fun in the studio. Yesterday I puttered around out there and before I knew it three hours had gone by. That’s when I know that I’m in the present moment, living my life to the fullest. Time warps and folds. I decided against combining the Elements tapestry covers with Susanne’s papers, and put together a small booklet with some of her papers and a cover cut from a Kandinsky poster book I scavenged. Small enough to fit in my pocketbook, beautiful enough to make me proud of it, simple enough that if I make a mistake I won’t beat myself up over it. I used my Japanese screw punch for the first time on the papers. I might need a smaller size punch bit, but I love the tool. Now it is ready to bind. I’m going to try the Coptic stitch again.

    Okay, coffee’s gone. Time to buy my groceries at the farmers’ market.

  • Mama Kitty’s stamp

    from this photo:

  • Back Forty photos

    I can’t eat these Violetto artichokes because they are too beautiful and they attract an enormous crowd of different kinds of bees and other insects.

    I was given this potted plant about five years ago. I planted it in a spot where it ended up getting trampled a lot and forgot about it. Now it is protected by these hostas, and it has bloomed for the first time. Maybe it loved that intense heat we got early in June.

  • Independence Day coffee pot post

    It is getting harder and harder to post here, because for one, I am art journaling on actual PAPER (yes, it does still exist) and two, every time I get online I am totally distracted by this wonderful new Yahoo group that just started. Everyone is excited and enthusiastic and it is very busy with interesting posts right now. There are people on it who have been journaling for decades and people who haven’t journaled at all but want to begin. It is flat wide open and it could consume all my time just chasing the links and looking at books that are recommended. If you’re interested in getting into art journaling, defined here as “notebooks with a few sketches in the margins to watercolor diaries to collages between the pages of an old hardbound book to everything in between” and mixing “words and art on the pages of a journal/diary/notebook/sketchbook,” this looks like it is going to be one of those really inspirational, helpful, supportive discussion groups with some very free spirits in attendance. If you’d like to join: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/theartjournal/

    My head is full of the book projects that I’m working on, too. Yesterday I carved a large stamp of Mama Kitty, which came out very well considering that she was a torty. It was a bit of a challenge. I will post a photo separately. Today I plan to warp up the tapestry for the cover of the Feral Family book. I’ve decided to work on the pages before I bind them, because I’m planning to do a lot of writing, and if I mess up, it will be easier.

    I also made signatures (the folded page sections inside a book) for the Elements tapestries books from four sheets of handmade paper that Susanne gave me. These will be thin, 4″ x 6″ books. Right now I am trying to decide how to bind them. I bought a book called How to Make Books that I like a lot. But the decision is hard for me – I also can see making cloth pages for these tapestry books, and doing different covers for Susanne’s papers.

    So many ideas and possibilities for the weekend. I feel overwhelmed at the outset! I’d like to take a stab at making my own paper from recycled paper and cooking some plant materials to make pulp, too. I’ve promised Sandy to work on decluttering this weekend, and if I don’t clean out the refrigerator, I’ll deserve what I get when some mutant vegetable rises from the bottom of my vegetable bin and consumes me.

    Yesterday I worked some in the yard, planting more beans. I figure that this is my last chance to get more beans in, and I had the space from where I harvested garlic and pulled out lettuce and 2-year old parsley and chard. I have green tomatoes, finally, and harvested one cucumber and some Hungarian wax peppers are appearing. This year I have planted eleven different kinds of beans, and two varieties of field peas. I hope that they will fare better than my green beans did, who got blasted by the record heat at flowering time.

    I’ve been sleeping an unusual amount of time lately. Yesterday afternoon I had a headache and took a nap – highly unusual for me to nap, not unusual to have the headache this time of the month. Then I went to bed at 9, got up at 7:30, fed the cats and lay back down for an hour! Jeez! I feel like a vampire has been sucking on me, but other than that I feel okay. This is the third period that I’ve missed, so I guess that I’ve definitely hit menopause. I am afraid to stop taking birth control pills, mainly for the reason that I’ve taken them for 27 years and the one time I tried going off them was not fun at all. I’m sure that this time would be different though – whether better or worse I couldn’t say.

    Reading a lot of Elizabeth Berg now – she has replaced Alice Hoffman and Anne Tyler for my new “women’s book” author, at least for now. I like her style and her characters are very different so far. I just finished Talk Before Sleep and have started Open House. When I find an author I like, I tend to read all their books I can get my hands on all at once. I’m not sure that this is the best way to go about it. Seems a little obsessive.

    Okay, I’m done with the coffee pot. Time to upload some photos and then get out to the studio while husband is still sleeping and NDN is inside the house. Lately she has really gone off her rocker. Can anyone recommend a good exorcist? God, she must be terrifying the poor little girl who lives on the other side of her.

  • Lake Waccamaw hats 2008

    This third hat from last week is mine, MINE! The hatband is inkle-woven from cotton threads. I looked out over the lake and designed it from the view. At first I resisted putting the blue and brown together, but the lake is the color of tea and the sky and sun reflects off it. When I started weaving, I was happy with the choices I made. This hat is pretty rough compared to my other ones because I was getting down to the dregs of my supplies, but I like it the best.

    The first two before the final trimming, drying on the screened porch. They are now in the possession of my mother, who helped me gather the cattails and couldn’t decide which one she wanted.

    All three were handwoven with cattail leaves and a small amount of bulrush.

  • Six snaps!

    I never knew that part of the pleasure of canning my own food would be the pops that the jars make after they come out of the boiling water bath. It shows that the jars have sealed.

    Five pint jars of watermelon rind pickles, one jar with half watermelon rind and half cherries, just for kicks.

    Pickling is so much easier than most people think.