slowly she turned

Living the Slow life in North Carolina

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  • The greatest monologue of all time

    I don’t need anything except this. And that’s it and that’s the only thing I need, is this. I don’t need this or this. Just this ashtray. And this paddle game, the ashtray and the paddle game and that’s all I need. And this remote control. The ashtray, the paddle game, and the remote control, and that’s all I need. And these matches. The ashtray, and these matches, and the remote control and the paddle ball. And this lamp. The ashtray, this paddle game and the remote control and the lamp and that’s all I need. And that’s all I need too. I don’t need one other thing, not one – I need this. The paddle game, and the chair, and the remote control, and the matches, for sure. And this. And that’s all I need. The ashtray, the remote control, the paddle game, this magazine and the chair.

    And I don’t need one other thing, except my dog.

    [dog barks]

    I don’t need my dog.

    ~Navin R. Johnson, “The Jerk,” 1979.

    Update, thanks to Roch!

  • Claytonia

    Also known as "miner’s lettuce," claytonia is a great salad green for the winter garden. It is a favorite of Eliot Coleman’s. Since it is really a weed, it volunteers easily. This patch is from the claytonia I planted last winter that I let go to seed. It tastes a lot like chickweed, which is also abundant this time of year. I like the taste a lot, a little succulent with a tiny bite. Tiny leaves, too, which is why I let it go to seed last year. I kept waiting for it to get bigger.

    This is a wonderful niche plant. Since it only likes cold weather, I planted it under the big maple tree at the corner of the Back Forty. It gets sun in the winter.

  • Sunday sweep

    Yesterday was an excellent day. For one thing, I think that I’ve found the car that I want to buy – a Honda Fit. It was rated as a best green buy by the Sierra Club in the class of wagons. I test drove one, and although it felt really weird because it was an automatic, I think that I got a feel for it. If we buy this model, we’ll order a manual transmission. I especially liked the way the back seats folded down for lots of storage space. And the price is very reasonable.

    Sandy says that he’ll get the Rodeo emptied and clean this week in time for us to possibly make the arrangements to trade it in and order the Fit by next weekend. We’ll keep the 92 Tercel, even though we have a feeling that it is on its last legs. I seldom drive during the week since I walk to work, but I’d like to have a second car because I’m the independent sort, and it makes me feel better that I can drive myself to the dentist when Sandy is at work or go visit my mother (or to an art retreat!) for a few days without leaving Sandy carless. If we drive it occasionally, I think that we can get more miles out of it. It just passed inspection. It does feel good to know that if we absolutely had to, we could get by with one car between us.

    Anyway, it is good to finally get that goal in motion. Now Sandy is fixated on making the house prettier, while I keep looking at the growing cracks in the plaster with alarm. We often have different priorities, but we’ve managed to stay married for twenty years, and it looks like it’s gonna stick. We may end up having to get a home equity loan to repair the foundation, and that’s all there is to it. I’ll probably have to be the one to arrange it. Just as I am paying off the last big house repair, which was meant to fix but didn’t fix the most pressing problem! But the walls will be painted and the floors redone, by golly. It’ll be purdy. Sandy’s new goal is to replace the damaged linoleum in the laundry room. We’re going to go with a wood laminate to match the rest of the house, but will stand up to the reality of the litter box in there.

    Our friend is supposed to come by soon and help us replace the windows in the bedroom. Once the windows are replaced with wooden energy efficient ones and painted, the room will be finished.

    Somewhere in there, I managed to remember to go to Leon’s Beauty School and got a great hair cut and my eyebrows waxed. All for 15 bucks.

    We went to Fishbones, one of my very, very favorite restaurant/bars, to eat dinner. I drank a couple of Smithwick’s and ate shrimp and veggie spring rolls with a sweet chili and curried peanut sauce. I have never had a meal at Fishbones that wasn’t fabulous, and the prices are very cheap for the value. It is smokefree, has a great atmosphere, and a little patio. Problem is, it is small, and it is so fabulous that it is often crowded. The size is part of its charm, though.

    I tried really hard yesterday to think about things other than weaving and art in general. It’s become an obsession. I looked at Daniel Essig’s web site the other day, and I’m so glad that I changed to his class. For one thing, he does work with found objects, and for another, he lives in Asheville and teaches weekend workshops at Asheville Bookworks, very doable if I want to pursue the book making art with him further.

    But I did begin warping up another tapestry box loom late last night. I’ll do a little garden work today, and if the wind dies down, maybe I can finally get started on getting these fleeces that Beverly sent me outside and skirted (the initial cleaning).

    All I really want to do is weave.

  • Labyrinth tapestry beginning

    First there was the photo, taken at Healing Ground in Oak Ridge, North Carolina.

    Then there was the idea and the cartoon…

    Then there was a long period of dithering because I couldn’t decide between two approaches. One was to make the “path” blue, the maze white, and sew on buttons or smooth worn pieces of shell.

    The other was to use all these little samples of handspun, natural or naturally dyed wool that were given to me along with the used loom I bought eight years ago, and make it more realistic.

    I decided to start with the more traditional tapestry, and if I’m hungry for more, weave the other one.

  • Slowly She Turned turns three!

    I just wrote this long random post, looked back into the archives to see when I planted my tomatoes last year, and realized that it was my blogiversary. How about that! I won’t try to do a retrospective. I’m looking toward the future right now.

    Last night I looked at the found object jewelry/sculpture class that I signed up for at Art and Soul, and I changed my mind. It looked totally fascinating, BUT I registered for it when I still thought that I was going to be making paper and books in Italy, and when I hoped that one of the three collage/paper/multimedia workshops I signed up for in Greensboro would make. None of this things panned out, and I realized, damn, I still want to take a class in multimedia techniques and bookmaking, and I’m having a hard time getting excited about making jewelry again right now. So I changed my classes. In that two-day class’s place I’ll take two one-day classes – one in book making, and one in fabric collage techniques. I figure that I’ll learn a lot of new things in the first two classes (the first is carving stamps) and the third will be more familiar and relaxing, and I can use all three classes in my plans to make books and art journals and whatever. I need some focus and putting some limits on my direction will help me. Flying out in all directions is great for some people, but it overwhelms me.

    I just wish that there were some book art classes nearby. But it’s kind of nice not to be tied down to a regular time every week. Other than work.

    I received an interesting phone call today. Looks like a reporter for the News and Record is going to interview me again – a different reporter who wants to focus on somebody who is on a journey of “going green.” The other article, almost two years ago, focused on the Eat Local Challenge and being a locavore. It didn’t directly address the ecological aspects of what I’m trying to do. So this one will probably focus more on the sustainable lifestyle changes that we have made and since it will be in June instead of next week, thank God, I’ll have the garden going and we can talk about composting, rain barrels, organic methods, recycling cardboard and newspaper as mulch, earthworms and beneficial insects and such. I will try to get in there my efforts to reuse before recycling or buying, and to consider the impact and sources of the stuff that we do buy. I think that it will be a much more interesting article, at least for me! Maybe by that time we’ll have a new fuel-efficient car.

    The interview was originally going to be tomorrow, and this house is a wreck, as usual, and one night would not have been enough for me to make it acceptable for company. The thought of what might have been did shame me into cleaning the toilet and washing the dishes. I had to spend some time in the Back Forty putting plastic sheeting over the row tunnels. It’s very windy and the lows are supposed to be in the low 20s tonight. Those little seedlings may have been okay, but why take a chance?

    I’ve decided to wait until March 8 to plant my tomatoes. That will be the day after the new moon. My tomato seedlings always get way too big before it’s warm enough to plant them outside. I’m trying to stop making the same mistakes over and over. Last year I planted them (inside) on Feb. 8. Sometimes restraint is needed in gardening.

  • “Take a Number”


    cotton yarn, cardboard, brown paper, shipping label, ink

    I jammed up my printer playing with this brown paper and I think that I killed it! But I do like the effect it made on the words. The “prettier” side is actually the back of the card. It is supposed to have my contact information on it and I have to figure that out. I have a blue gel pen at work that might do the trick.

    This is my first artist trading card. There are only two rules for ATCs – they must be 2.5 x 3.5 inches (baseball card size) and they must be traded or given away, never sold.

    This was a lot of fun and I think that I’ll keep it up. Hopefully I’ll have plenty to trade when I go to Art & Soul in early May.

  • S. C. Cotton Museum

    My mother visited the South Carolina Cotton Museum in Bishopsville, SC today, and discovered something interesting. It’s located in the livery stable that my grandfather operated back at the turn of the twentieth century.

    I have rather odd ancestry – odd because of a line of youngest children born to older parents. My great-grandfather, William Harris Parham, fought in the Civil War. His wife’s grandfather, Tristram Thomas (my g-g-g-grandfather), fought with Francis Marion in the American Revolution – “the Swamp Fox.” So when people talk about their grandparents or great-grandparents being alive, I really envy them.

  • A conversation in the car

    Me: “Don’t you think that smashed hubcap would make a great base for some found art?’

    Him: “I think that if this light changes and you’re not in the car, you’ll be on your own.”

    He reaches over and locks my door. “Do you have your seat belt on?”

    I have to do the same thing to him on a regular basis, with other stuff.

    It’s called marriage.

  • Take it further challenge, February

    The Take It Further Challenge for February had two options: a color combination and/or a concept prompt of “What are you old enough to remember?”

    I wanted to do both, but blanked out on how to do it until yesterday. My concept had more to do with technology – the phone system, mimeographs instead of copiers, etc. I thought about collage and I might still work with this idea, since I have a great secretary’s manual from the 1930s to work with. (By the way, I’m a secretary, and I’m the daughter of a secretary.) But I ached to do some more with tapestry, so I began by pulling out yarns that were a close match to the color challenge.

    I couldn’t find the shade of brown, and it irked me because I felt that it was so familiar that I must have it somewhere. I stopped and took a few moments to straighten up my studio, and there it was – my cardboard box that I used as a loom for the tapestry bag. I decided to incorporate a small cardboard loom into my project for the brown color, and I cut the box into small pieces. One piece had the UPS shipping sticker on it, and I thought, I remember when there wasn’t a bar code or number on every single thing that was sold or shipped, and you didn’t have a different password or ID number for every different purpose, and the technology that is supposed to make our lives more efficient has complicated our lives in many ways.

    Then I realized that this was the piece that I would use for my loom.

    The bar code is meant to look like the weft on that side, but I am so tempted to weave the whole thing. I’ll upload the finished object when it’s done.

    (Later that evening…)

    I wove a frame around the bar code. I’ll finish this tomorrow night. The weaving is done. And it was fun.

  • Saturday morning coffee pot post

    Now that I have gotten my whining out of the way, it’s time to write about whatever else occurs to me until the coffee runs out.

    I don’t think that I mentioned this yet, but I signed up for another class on Friday night at the Art and Soul retreat – carving stamps. I think that this will be great fun and I’d like to do my own alphabet. When I was in high school I did a little freelance work lettering signs for small businesses and I took a typography course in community college, back in the days before desktop publishing. I’ve always been interested in the design of fonts. I bought a print making kit with a carving block, inks, stamp pad, brayer, linoleum cutter and blades. Now I just need to buy rubber erasers to carve small stamps. And prayer. I am such a klutz that handling sharp objects always carries a high amount of risk for me.

    Part of what I’m doing with the money that I saved to go to Italy this summer is going to this retreat, but I’m also buying some tools and supplies to help me get started in multimedia. I use as many found objects as I can and recycle paper and fabric, but I still have to buy the stuff to attach them to each other! My latest purchase is a craft iron with a tiny tip. There are other attachments you can buy for it for other functions, but I’m just trying this now. Since I’m figuring out that my chronic tendinitis is not going to let me hold a needle and apply pressure for more than a few minutes, I’ll be able to use fusible webbing and this iron for some small projects. I also bought some embossing powders and heatproof craft sheets to use between the iron and my projects. My next two purchases will probably have to be a heat gun and a cordless drill. If anyone has any recommendations on brands or sources, please let me know.

    I bought these items specificly for an artist trading card project that I am doing with recycled manila folders and short pieces of leftover yarns and thrums (leftover warp threads from weaving). We had a large number of legal size folders in the office that we don’t need, so I am cutting them down to normal size and using the leftovers that would have been thrown out. There is a chapter using these materials in Artist Trading Card Workshop that I thought would be a good jumping off point for me. I hope that I’ll get a chance to play with this today.

    And I found a new discussion group for Art Journal Quilts through a real soulmate blog that I just discovered recently, Notes from the Voodoo Cafe. This makes three art discussion groups that I’ve joined. Normally I don’t like this much email but I have them going to another address I set up just for things that can wait until I have some relaxing time to read through them.

    Part of my frenzy here is that since I finished the tapestry bag, I’ve been sinking. Maybe the art is distracting me from experiencing my grief and I need to work through that, but right now, I’d rather be distracted.

    Last night I read Bel Canto by Ann Patchett while listening to classical music. Nice way to finish off the work week.

    I keep dreaming about hidden or newly discovered rooms in a house where I live filled with beautiful furnishings and books and interesting objects. I see this as my subconscious assuring me that there is still much treasure to be found in my life.