slowly she turned

Living the Slow life in North Carolina

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  • Back Forty update

    I tried to shift my morning blogging to the deck now that we’re having some nice weather on the weekend, but it’s not going to work. Not only has my wireless connection gotten really iffy, I can’t seem to sit so that I don’t get a glare. So I’m back in the Happy Room after an hour of sipping coffee on the deck and strolling about with my camera in the Back Forty, writing in Notepad to shift over to the blog so that I hopefully don’t lose another long post.

    Yesterday I did manage to finish mulching the paths as far as I had cardboard to cover them. I guess that I’ll have to troll for cardboard this week. Sandy got all gung-ho and wants to buy 40 bags of mulch and do all the paths at one time. I tried to tell him that is how I hurt my elbow, but he says that he’ll do all the heavy lifting. I still think that it’s a task best broken up into several days, but if he wants to buy 40 bags of mulch, I’ll take it.

    Uh oh, I think that I just scratched a tick off my shoulder. I can’t tell you how much ticks freak me out. If that’s what it was, it was a tiny one, which is even more scary. Remember this if I suddenly stop blogging and you find out later that I’m in the hospital with Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever or Lyme Disease. Send me a funny card.

    Anyway, I did some of the outside work in the rain, and that was fun. About half of the asparagus came back, and I consider that pretty good considering the drought. I didn’t need all that asparagus for the itty bitty space I have anyway. I was really thrilled to see all these figs on the tree that we rooted from a cutting from my mother’s fig tree. There is lots of lettuce and pretty flowers and weeds galore. The kale and brussels sprouts are flowering and I hope that they will develop seeds before I need to pull them out. I may plant my “green” beans this afternoon, since we might get a few showers over the next few days. The chives are blossoming and I think that alliums might be my favorite flowers now.

    I am bringing my seedlings back inside at night because a #$%@^% critter dug several of them up in the trays. I keep a collection of large soda bottles with the bottoms cut out to protect seedlings in the beds from critters until they get established, but I still need to nurture the babies inside a little longer since it is supposed to get down into the thirties tonight and the next couple of nights.

    Here are a few photos from the Back Forty.

    “Put the treat right here, please…”

  • Creating tapestries

    I thought that I might share a little about my creative process in doing the mini tapestries. It’s so simple that it won’t take long. Reading Living the Creative Life and The Artist’s Way made me think about this, and I figure that it’s worth sharing.

    This is my current workspace in the Happy Room, on the futon that serves as a guest bed. Isn’t it a mess? But it’s really working for me, like I have a palette of yarn.

    I found that the trick to keeping my creative energy going is to always have a little cardboard loom ready. It takes about five minutes tops to warp a piece of cardboard, which I prepare by snipping slits top and bottom 4 or 5 slits to an inch. You can’t really get a lot of detail with this method, but the simplicity and limit is part of the charm for me. For more detailed designs, I use a pin loom, where I can get 8 ends per inch.

    I could draw a design on the cardboard, but what I do with the mini-tapestries is that I begin with a blank cardboard piece, pick up a color, and begin. It helps a lot to have an idea prompt. I have a theme right now of “By the Sea.” As I needleweave the yarn into the warp, an idea will begin to develop. If it doesn’t, I do a solid block of color. I figure that I can embellish the solid blocks with beads, shells, embroidery, or needle-felting later, so it’s definitely not a waste of time. The point is, I don’t wait for an idea. I just start weaving.

    If I’m not totally thrilled with it, it’s okay. I’ve only put a couple of hours into it at the most, and now that I’m interested in assemblage and collage, I figure that I’ll find a way to work with it later. In the meantime, I’m free to play, which is not something that usually happens with weavers. And playing was something that I struggled with so much that I even made “learning to play” a project for my “Creating Peace” class only last fall.

    If I get an idea for a more complicated idea, I’ll work that out later with a cartoon (design for a tapestry). I should make notes, but I have to work on that. It’s usually hard for me to stop weaving and start writing notes! I had a dream last night with an idea for a weaving that I awoke from and said to myself that I should write it down. Of course, the part of me that wanted to go back to sleep convinced me that I would remember this great idea in the morning. Of course, I have not remembered the details as of yet. I’ve had a lot of these dreams and they’re wonderful in their details, but by the time I get to the coffee, they’re a fuzzy warm pleasant feeling. So I need to work on my methods for recording ideas.


    Here’s a photo of the back of one of the tapestries. I designed these “signatures” in Word and copied eight to a standard 8.5 x 11 page, leaving a bit of space where I can attach a pin if needed, and then I used Ricë’s technique for printing them on a piece of muslin. I left the freezer paper on the back and cut them apart.

    Then I made hemmed backs of a watercolory-looking blue fabric to fit the back of each tapestry (using fusible webbing), fused those directly to the back of the tapestries, then peeled away one of my muslin signatures and fused that on top of the blue fabric.

    Here’s the (un-) funny thing – I decided to use fusible webbing for many of my sewing tasks to save my hands some stress and because I am such a klutz that I stab myself with needles and pins all the time. Well, here’s this fabulous alternative, right? I bought a little craft mini-iron that has a long rod handle and a little flat iron tip that I could use for little areas and corners where I might need more precision. So what was the first thing I did with my fabulous new tool yesterday? I mindlessly grabbed it in the wrong place and burned the hell out of my right index fingertip. If I don’t learn anything else from this hobby, I will learn mindfulness, the hard way if necessary.

  • “By the Sea” tapestries

    “By the Sea: Wave”; series of tapestry artist trading cards. Woven on cardboard loom. Linen warp, cotton weft. 3.5 x 2.5 inches.

    “By the Sea: Tidal Pools”; series of tapestry artist trading cards, woven for trading at Art & Soul in early May. I drew on memories of Sunset Beach and Tubbs Inlet for these seascapes. Woven on cardboard loom. Linen warp, wool weft. 3.5 x 2.5 inches.

    ^“By the Sea: Overcast Low Tide” – I think that we’ll keep this one, as it is too big for an ATC and I’m rather fond of it. The wool for the sky was space dyed leftovers from a weaving years ago. Linen warp, wool weft. 3.75 x 2.75 inches.

  • Mojo struggles

    So the question is…
    Now that I’ve gotten my art mojo back, how do I do the other stuff that I need to do? This house is covered in cat hair, but I did manage to clean the toilet and wash the dishes tonight.

    This weekend I hope to finish up the paths in the Back Forty if it doesn’t rain me out. I’ve got the stuff, but I need strong arms to carry it from the back of the Fit to the back yard. There is a lot of weeding to be done. The kind of weeds that a newspaper mulch doesn’t quite suppress. I should go ahead and plant some beans, I guess. My tomatoes, peppers, and cucumber seedlings aren’t quite ready yet, and we’re supposed to get down in the 30s by Monday night. So I’ll tote the trays back in.

    Normally, weeding the Back Forty in the spring is meditative bliss for me, but not this year, because I’m constantly beckoned by the muse. And she’s serious about it. I’ve got more ideas than I could possibly create in a year right now.

    I’m excited tonight because Ricë is giving away some of her stamp collection and she is sending me a box! I never thought of stamping as being a particularly creative art before I started reading books on collage and multimedia and surface design. I didn’t have my mind open to it. I never thought about carving my own stamps, although when I was doing ceramics, I used everything I could find to stamp my clay with different textures and shapes and lines. If I had kept up the ceramics, textural designs and slab pottery and tiles was the direction I was heading. Now I realize – when I carved designs into clay, I could have been carving stamps. I’m just continuing where I left off in 2002, it seems, in a different medium.

    I wanted to work with found objects and texture, and I wanted to work with fibers. Well, here we go.

    This weekend is the last one for a while in which I have no plans other than to hang around the homestead, which I consider to be the. best. place. ever. So I’m fighting between the urge to get this garden and housework done when I have the time, or ditching it all to finish the tapestry ATCs and pins and fill my origami trade boxes for Art & Soul. Thing is, it is necessary to do things other than create art. I keep thinking of that movie Iris, with Judy Dench as Iris Murdoch (I’ve decided that Judy Dench is the most amazing actress on the planet). She and her husband were a creative couple, and their house was an unbelievable mess. I don’t want a house like that, but if I followed the muse every time she crooked a finger at me, we’d be doomed to filth and weeds three feet tall.

  • Earth and fire

    Here are the first two small tapestries of a series of four. This is “Earth” and “Fire.” Guess what the other two will be!

    I took a piece of the cardboard box that I used for my tapestry bag and decided to work that part of the design in different colors. The loom is just string wrapped around a piece of cardboard with slits cut across the top and bottom – nothing expensive or complicated about that! I used some of the multitudes of leftover scraps of wool yarn that I have hoarded over the years.

    These are 4 x 6 inches each and could be used for fabric postcards if I wanted to go that way…I think that I will mount them together as a wall piece though. The challenge is getting them mounted and maybe framed. Once I’m done weaving, it is very hard for me to follow through on presentation. Maybe I’ll do a simple one-color quilted square to mount them on.

    I still need to sew together some of the slits from the back and probably will fuse a backing to them.

    I wanted to show you my little seascape tapestries, but I can’t seem to get a good photo of them. I’ll keep trying.

  • Monday blues

    Boy, what a rotten Monday I had. Someone overheard something I said out of context and very strongly accused me of being a racist to a lot of people. I had explaining and apologizing to do and now we both feel like shit, but I think that she understood that I was sincerely sorry that I hurt her. I told her about how Obama’s speech on race touched me and that I think that it’s important that we talk and listen to each other about race. I’ve done a lot of crying today and I wouldn’t be surprised if this shows up as a Monday migraine tonight.

    Anyway, I haven’t posted about my artwork in a while. Partially it’s because I hate taking the photos. I can’t get the color and focus right without a lot of trying. I wish that I could weave, read, blog, and take photos at the same time, but I’m not that talented. So I keep promising a post on tapestry, and I will follow through. Soon.

    When I find myself twiddling my thumbs, waiting on hold or waiting on an email, I’ve been folding little origami boxes out of heavy paper I’ve gleaned out of junk mail. This could become an obsession. Best of all, not only am I recycling paper, I’ve come up with lots of embellishment ideas and I think that I’m going to make these some of my trades at Art & Soul.

    Serendipity: I opened one of the new used books I bought, Art Stamping Workshop, and one of the projects was about these boxes – the technique is called “masu.” In this project, you stamped a design on fabric and fused the fabric to paper so that it can be folded with crisp edges. This idea perked me up considerably. I like vessels and containers, and my hands aren’t really strong enough for pottery or basketry. THIS I can do.

    Tonight I’m working on a little series of tapestries that I’ve begun in the Happy Room. I’ll probably take a Xanax and hit the sack early so that I don’t grind my teeth all night.

  • Books, books, books

    I am totally overwhelmed with the books I’ve bought in the last few weeks. It’s like a book fiend has taken over my body. Yesterday Sandy and I did a big purge of books to take to Ed McKay’s today, so I could get my new stacks of books off the floor and onto shelves.

    Some of these new stacks are of old books. For example, when I visited Mama a few weeks ago, I snagged the 1952 set of World Book encyclopedias, which I’m sure made me the geography trivia whiz that I am today. If today was in 1952. I always had my nose in these encyclopedias, and they meant nothing to anyone but me.

    I also brought back my much beloved copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, spine well creased from obsessive re-reading, and a copy of Treasure Island, which I never read but I found a piece of paper in it where I had made as many words as I could out of the words Treasure Island. I made up a lot of word games as a child out of these books and encyclopedias. I found my old stamp collection and a list I had made of “My Library,” which included such diversity as Huckleberry Finn, Flip Wilson Close-up, Steppenwolf, How to Write Codes and Send Secret Messages, and Gardening Indoors Under Lights. I doubt that I actually read Steppenwolf, but I may have given it a try. The librarians on the county bookmobile had a very hard time keeping up with me – I’d have finished my stack of books they picked out for me long before they came back in two weeks.

    There was a real treasure trove of old books in the free section of Ed McKay’s for a few weeks. I’ve picked up a lot of old school books and other interesting books from the turn of the century up through the fifties. I have enough novels from the free section to last me two years. And, believe it or not, I had been hitting the library on a regular basis, but I’m going to give it a rest until I read some of what I have at home. I started reading Wendell Berry’s novels from the beginning, and that felt like going back in time to talk to relatives long gone.

    Yesterday, Sandy and I went to Empire Books, where I never made it past the cookbook and arts and crafts section. Sandy found a perfect copy of my favorite artist Andy Goldsworthy’s Time for $18. I picked up a $4 copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, three wonderful craft books: Art Stamping Workshop, Beaded Crazy Quilting, and Paper into Pots, and a 1950 half autobiography/half cookbook called Love and Dishes, by Niccolo de Quattrociocchi, an Italian restauranteur in New York City. It has recipes from all the famous NYC restaurants of the time. I’m really looking forward to digging into this one.

    It is a good thing that I don’t live closer to Empire Books. I might go broke. I really, really need new clothes but I spend all my money on books, art supplies, and good food. My priorities are pretty good but I might need to get a little more practical.

    So, what started this post was a question from Moomin Light in the comments of the last post: What creativity books have I been reading? I mentioned Living the Creative Life, by Ricë Freeman-Zachery. I’m also reading her book Stamp Artistry.

    I was already into The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron, which I like but I’m going to wait until summer if I do the lessons.

    Danny Gregory’s The Creative License is so incredible that I nearly have a panic attack each time I open it, but it’s next. I read his Everyday Matters last year, and I’m a lurker in the Everyday Matters Yahoo group.

    In addition, I’m feeding my inner child and dreamer with Dan Price’s illustrated journal Radical Simplicity: Creating an Authentic Life. Because I spent a good part of my childhood winters building hide-outs and lean-tos and treehouses to read my books in.

    I have Amazon links to these books in my pretend bookstore, if you’re interested in learning more or buying them. I’ll update it with my newest books later today.

    Yes, I’ve been a book hound since I graduated. It is delicious.

  • Saturday morning coffee pot post

    Sitting here half asleep, trying to plan the weekend while the coffee lasts.

    High on the agenda: more coffee.

    First in line: the Greensboro Farmers Curb Market on the corner of Yanceyville and Lindsey Sts., where I will pick up excellent snackies and a few grocery items for the week. I’m pretty good for groceries, since I am trying to eat out of the freezer and make room for future chicken stock, once my chicken CSA starts.

    Then to Deep Roots Market, where I will buy things like coffee and toilet paper.

    Then to Harris Teeter for beer and cat food.

    Then to Joann’s – cotton and linen is on sale and I found some great deals in the remnant bin since the remnants are an additional 50% off, and small pieces are fine for what I do.

    Greensboro’s Earth Day Fair is this afternoon – I hope that it doesn’t pour down rain. Or worse, wait until it begins and then start to storm. I’m not doing the Slow Food table there this year, but somehow I feel a little guilty about it. I’m insane for feeling this way. No one helped me with it the last two years. It’s just that it’s a bitch when the weather is bad at these outdoor fairs, and I pushed the fact that it was important for Slow Food have a presence there. You also have to park about a half mile away from the table, so there is no easy exit.

    On Thursday, though, I am doing a Slow Food table with Renee of Sweet Basil’s restaurant at the showing of Wild Caught, a documentary about North Carolina fishermen at Weatherspoon Art Museum. Renee offered to prepare wild-caught fish hors d’oeuvres! I’m loving that she is so interested in getting involved with Slow Food. Except for Masood and Anna of Zaytoon, other restaurants around Greensboro seem to be uninterested. There is also going to be a little farmers market in the back of Weatherspoon from 4-6:30, when the film begins. We’ll be set up inside, from 6-6:30.

    So I have an excuse to go to Sweet Basil’s this weekend. I have to take Renee some flyers. Not really, but that’s my excuse. Ooh, maybe we can hit Empire Books while we’re over that way. It is a really good little used book store. And Guilford Garden Center for some landscape fabric and hardwood mulch to finish the paths up, if it clears up this weekend.

    I enjoyed a good thunderstorm last night, nestled down in fresh organic knit sheets with a great new book. I splurged on these a few years ago, and I’m spoiled for any other kind of sheets now.

    I’m deep into reading books on creativity now. Last night, I was fascinated by Living the Creative Life, by my new friend Ricë. Wow. What a wonderful book. If you’re at all interested in unleashing your creativity, I highly recommend it.

    The Toyota has been dead as a doornail for the past two and a half weeks, so I have to get all my running around town done on Saturday and Sunday. I haven’t minded staying at home during the week at all. However, we need to get it jumped off and either repaired or charged up in the next couple of days because my brother-in-law will be in the hospital for a few days starting tomorrow night and I need to be on call to help if needed.

    And during the time that I’m not running around doing these things, I’ll be at home weaving and listening to podcasts, and trying not to think about how the bathroom needs to be cleaned.

  • Back Forty Update

    I’m back to the phase when I think that I’ll quit blogging and just live my life, but that never lasts long. Right now I’m blogging out of a weird sense of obligation that only bloggers understand, but a few days from now I’ll probably have to restrain myself from doing several posts in a day. I AM trying to balance the blogging addiction, and lately it has been working, partly because I have so many other things capturing my attention.

    Such as the Back Forty – I took down the greenhouse yesterday so that hopefully this next predicted soaking rain will benefit the lettuce, beets, and carrots planted in those beds. I transplanted a lot of leek volunteers. I took advantage of the wet earth and dug up a lot of dandelions and thistles, especially in the middle of the path that I’m about to mulch, thanks to the help of Gwen, who brought me some more cardboard.

    I’ve been cooking again too. Nothing fancy. It’s only me for dinner these days, but I’ve never minded leftovers too much. Tonight I’m baking a meat loaf and a local pasture-raised ham steak spread with peach preserves from one of our Amish farmers. Also peas and corn from my freezer – I need to make some room in the freezer for my chicken CSA which will begin in a couple of weeks. I’ll eat most of the chicken but I plan to make and freeze stock. I’m going to try to get more serious about producing my own food this year. Not being clinically depressed should help with that goal.

    Seedlings inside will go out to harden off in the next few days. They’re looking good – I also have a few cucumbers that I got from Stew that I hope will do well in containers. The only thing that did not germinate at all was the Red Marconi peppers I got from the seed swap at the CFSA conference, so I might have to buy a few sweet pepper plants. I love growing peppers.

    Okay, back to the stove then back to weaving.

  • Slow Food potluck

    Our Slow Food convivium is starting a regular potluck night on the last Sunday of every month, and last night was the first one. If you have never been to a Slow Food potluck, hoo boy, is that some good eating! There is always an assortment of people with all kinds of interests, so when one group is watching the game in one room (it IS March in North Carolina), some are swapping toddler stories, a couple of others are discussing mushroom cultivation and another group is talking about raw food.

    On the table, the feast included roast venison, deviled eggs, turnip greens with ham and homemade hot vinegar sauce, salad with soba noodles and tofu, and orange cranberry sweet potatoes. The only requirement was that the dish contain at least one local ingredient.

    Sandy and I both attended, so I took two dishes with the main ingredients fresh from my garden. The first one is proof that vegetarian food is not diet food. I tossed sliced leeks and fennel bulbs with butter from the farmers’ market and braised (simmered) them in water and lots of butter for a long, long time until the water had simmered away and the leeks and fennel turned into silky melt-in-your-mouth goodness. Then I ground some fresh black pepper and grated a little Pecorino Romano cheese on top. This is a typical Tuscan style of cooking vegetables, except the Tuscans probably wouldn’t combine the two.

    The other dish I took from a wonderful, well-known food blog, 101 Cookbooks. I have had a sealed plastic bag of farro from Spannocchia since October 2006 when I bought it there (in Italy). When I looked it up in Italian cookbooks, I was instructed to soak it a day ahead of time and I just couldn’t remember to do it, and eventually forgot about it. I saw a link to this recipe and remembered the farro and decided to try it. Turns out that you don’t need to soak it at all, and it also turns out that I liked the flavor a lot! You can order farro, an ancient variety of wheat grain, from Anson Mills in South Carolina. I used lettuce, beet greens, and claytonia from the Back Forty, garlic chives from the Back Forty instead of a shallot, honey wine vinegar from Quaker Acres Apiary, the rest of my olive oil from Spannocchia, and goat cheese from Goat Lady Dairy. This recipe was a winner and very easy:
    Citrus Parmesan Farro Salad.

    Yum – I was so stuffed – I guess I didn’t mention the Swedish cake and the chocolate/Guinness stout pie.