slowly she turned

Living the Slow life in North Carolina

recent posts

about

About Me

  • MLK Jr. Day

    A little progress. At least all the plastic bags are gone and the coned yarn is with the other cones. Will bring back a couple more boxes of fabric stash today from the other studio. That’s the main thing I have hoarded, and to think that I’ve already given so much away boggles my mind. I might wind some warp for the double weave rag rug project I began 3-4 years ago and abandoned. I’d like to get something going on the Macomber loom this year.

    Very cold again today. Snow predicted tomorrow night. Hopefully light – we have stuff to do at work that can’t be rescheduled. I walk to work so it’s no big deal for me, but the schools around here shut down on just a prediction of snow and it affects other people’s ability to show up. Our office often has school-aged kids hanging out! They are very well-behaved, much more than I would have been at that age.

  • Tapestry diary progress

    The gray area was a rainy Thursday. On Friday, a stormfront moved through, bringing more intense cold on its winds. On Saturday and Sunday, I moved boxes, purged, and shelved in the home studio.

    I feel good about the organizing I’ve done in this studio so far. Trying not to do so much that I hurt myself. Installed a clip-on shop light in a dark corner and it makes a huge difference.

    When I thought hard about what bothered me the most about working/playing in this studio, the first three things were dim light, too many plastic bags and cardboard boxes, and disorganization. I have a lot of clear plastic shoeboxes that I’ve dumped a lot of the plastic bags into. I want to be able to find what I need without opening every box and drawer, so I need more labels for the boxes that aren’t transparent. I also want it to be less cluttered.

    I need to remember that there is more that needs to be moved over here. Tomorrow I’ll move a little more, and play on the sewing machine at the other studio.

  • The Studio

    Yesterday I had a stroke of luck. After going to PetSmart to buy Frontline for the cats ($110 for 6 doses, OW), I went to the studio on Wharton St. to fill up the Chevy with what I could get into it. Had to take advantage of my high energy level! Susanne had hired a guy to clean up the yard and I was able to pay him $20 to deliver my shelf units to my house afterwards. Less than it would have been to rent a truck, and much more convenient!

    So instead of weaving on Cathedral, I spent the rest of the day shifting stuff around. We have a long room at the front of our Craftsman house. It’s a little too narrow to work with very well. At one time we tried to make it our living room, but eventually we moved the sofa, TV, etc. in what was supposed to be our dining room. We never sat at the table anyway – it was a junk collector like our countertops are now. I moved my studio from the back building to half of the front room, and of course it is a mess just like every other place in the house!

    We decided to put one of the shelf units in the middle of the room like a room divider. Now that I have more storage in here, I am looking at what you see when you first walk into the space. I’m going to move the more attractive stuff like cones of yarn and books to those areas, and try to keep my bookbinding/painting supplies in one area, my weaving and sewing to another. We’ll see how it goes. This may just be a subconscious effort to avoid weaving on Cathedral today, but I’m excited. It’s almost like getting a new studio. What I’d really love to do one day is to get a carpenter to put in wall to ceiling shelves on most of the wall space. I also need much better lighting.

    Here are some before shots. Keep in mind that some of the junk is boxes to be donated to Reconsidered Goods or recycled. I’m planning to sell the Schacht Baby Wolf loom, but I think I’ll keep the Dorothy loom up high on the shelves so I’ll have a portable one if I ever buy a camper.

    Here’s what it looks like when you look in the studio when you come in the front door. The basket was made by a dear former friend of mine.

    This is looking back at the “new” room divider, my Macomber loom and the other half of the room where the woodstove is.

    In case you wonder how I keep my tapestry from being destroyed by my cats (and they have damaged the ones I hung on the wall, so they are not on the wall any more), I have found that they hate foil. Anything I want them to stay away from, I cover with foil.

    This is the area I want to make prettier.


    And here is the view from where I am sitting.

    I’ll post my tapestry updates later. I need to eat. I forget about that sometimes.

  • Saturday morning coffee pot post

    I’m finding myself walking around the house talking to myself and Pablocito (he does talk back, at least) so I guess it’s time to write a blog post.

    The overriding theme of the tapestry diary will be weather. It’s obvious to me now. It can be external or internal weather, but climate and weather has always been fascinating to me. It probably comes from being a farmer’s daughter.

    My father didn’t make his girls work on the farm like most of my friends had to, so by God we better be able to tell him the weather report from TV when he got home. This was pre-cable, pre-Internet, pre-satellite dish, and the weather came on two TV stations at 6 p.m. when he was probably still on a tractor. He had a full-time job managing a little air filter factory in our community for several years while we were growing up, and a TV repair shop before that, when people still had things repaired instead of dumping them and buying new. He also had a marina near Calabash that serviced shrimp and fishing boats. Anyway, he was a busy man.

    Our job was to help grow and pick and preserve and freeze vegetables for the year. Daddy mostly grew tobacco, but he planted a lot of Silver Queen corn because we ate it every day throughout the year. The shock I felt when I first ate corn out of a can after I left home was a real eye-opener as how good our family had it when it came to homegrown food. Daddy also grew several varieties of blueberries as a hobby, so many that our family’s friends came to pick for themselves, we started a pick-your-own side business, and I picked them to pack and sell for my own money. They had a long growing season because they didn’t get ripe all at once. My favorite ones were Tifblues and I had to climb a stepladder to pick the biggest ones, sometimes as big as a quarter.

    Well, I didn’t intend to write about that, but that’s what these coffee pot posts are for – writing whatever pops out. I dreamed about my parents last night. In one dream I was waiting for my mother to pick me up and I was very worried about her. Where was she? Did she know where I was?

    And Theo came back to me in my dream, poor Theo, covered in fleas, looking at me with the “pity me” Puss-in-Boots expression that he had. So I am definitely going to PetSmart and buying Frontline for Diego and Pablocito and applying it today. The flea comb and diatomaceous earth has kept them down but it hasn’t been enough.

    Now, for what I was putting off writing about: I had a meltdown this week. I always need to write about this when it happens because one of the main missions for this blog is to write about my experience with depression, anxiety, panic disorder, and agoraphobia, and my recovery. I don’t always do it because, well, it’s not easy.

    For the most part, I have recovered well. I seldom have a panic attack any more. This one and the last one I had on Thanksgiving weekend were different. There was no chest pain. It was more that I was completely overwhelmed and couldn’t move forward. The other difference was they both lasted longer than usual. So maybe they could be classified as intense anxiety attacks.

    Over the long term, I seem to need a lot more solitude and quiet than I used to. It is fortunate that my office has been moved to a quieter place where I feel like I can shut the door without seeming rude. That was due to my supervisor being a really great manager and seeking a solution to reduce stress for the staff. However, I still crave it.

    It’s not that I don’t ever want the company of others. The parties that I went to this past weekend, and the New Year’s Eve steampunk ball were great. Sometimes I really need to go out to a bar and have beers with friends. But anxiety started creeping up on me last Sunday afternoon. At first I thought I was pre-migraine, because I was getting some visual weirdness, and that may have been so. At any rate, Sandy and I left a lovely party early and I sort of went downhill from there, holing up under the bed covers and dreading work the next morning. Feeling like I can’t possibly submit this book to the Triangle Book Arts show as is, but not being able to make myself work on it.

    The next two days I made it to work, which was intensely busy with the first day of classes and a TA who left the program over the weekend that we had to find a replacement for. That worked out well, and it was probably for the best that the TA in question left, but it was last minute. And the next day, another replacement for a last-minute departure from our faculty just before Christmas, informed me that she hadn’t done the Homeland Security required paperwork, and didn’t seem to have thoroughly read my emails about what she had to do before her first day at work. That, with all the stuff that I need to get done in the next two weeks, with the anxiety over Sandy’s skin biopsy, sent me right over the edge. I didn’t have my Xanax with me. I put a sign on my door, locked it, and curled up under my desk with my back pillow and a coat over me, crying and telling myself to get over it.

    Two hours later I was up and recovering. I apologized for overreacting on email about the “crisis” (it got resolved that day), and I left early to get an scheduled estimate on replacing our aging water heater. After that I got in bed, pulled the covers over my head, and slept on and off until about 10 a.m. the next day. When I got up, I felt so relieved, like all this pressure had built up for days and a dam had burst. I went back to work and did what I needed to do.

    So I wove this for my tapestry that night. The pink shape is my little boat going over the dam. I’m pleased with this because I really did come up with it as I started to weave, searching for the image that could represent my distress and relief in tapestry.

    Anyway, I have a three-day weekend ahead of me and I am continuing my diary in the theme of weather, but I am going to make sure that I spend much more time weaving on Cathedral. As for the book, I’m sending it “as is.” I’m going to cook if I feel like it, but other than getting a little cleaning done in the yard and around the house, not much housework. If I can clear out some more space in my home studio, I’m going to bring home another carload of stuff from the studio at my friend’s place that I am moving out of, since she is house-shopping and doesn’t plan to rent it much longer. I’ve planted some perennials in the back yard there so I’ll take some buckets and dig those up before she leaves. Mostly pineberries and asparagus, and I hope that the roots of the blueberry bush I transferred over there might have some life left in them, so I’ll dig them up too. Where I’ll plant them here, who knows? Gotta figure that out before I transplant the asparagus, but the others can stay in pots until spring.

    By the way, Sandy couldn’t tell me what kind of skin cancer he has, but it is not melanoma and I think it is squamous cell from what he told me. This is why I need to go with him to doctor appointments. He doesn’t remember the details. He’s having it removed under local anesthesia in the doctor’s office in a couple of weeks. I’m glad he had it checked by a dermatologist. His doctor gave him some cream to put on it.

    Okay, time for another cup of coffee and a shower, then I need to get on with my weekend.

  • Catch-up

    Just a catch-up post. I’ll have more time to write this coming weekend.

    Nutty weather. High of 71 today, then predicted high of 35 on Sunday.

    Walked a different way to work a couple of days ago and saw this gorgeous bush.

    Once I got to work, this hawk flew by and settled low enough in a tree that I could get acquainted with him/her. Everybody was walking under the tree with their faces in their phones and headphones on. What a loss for them.

    I hear this hawk often, and sometimes see a couple of my crow friends chasing it. The crows are almost as big as the hawk.

  • Sunday Morning Coffee Pot Post

    I meant to do this yesterday, but I slept so late that I was shocked to look at the clock when I finally opened my eyes. Let’s just say that there was not much morning left. It’s too bad that we all can’t sleep when our body needs it. There’s something wrong with this system. For me, that means a lot longer than most people. I’ve always been that way, but as I’ve gotten older and creakier I toss and turn a lot and I think that it eats into my total time asleep.

    After I got up, I went straight to the loom and worked on the tapestry diary for the rest of the week. Today I think I’ll weave 2018 into this block. I wanted to acknowledge the “bombogenesis” although the most we got from it was a dusting of snow and bitter cold. That is supposed to lift tomorrow, thank God. I generally don’t mind cold, but I worry about the animals and perennial plants. I’d worry about the homeless here, but in our city they do have places to go, thank God.

    The kitties like to sit on the heating vent under the loom.

    Things are a bit cramped here in the studio. For the tapestry diary I’m using this frame loom that I had warped some time ago to take to the lake. I prop it up in front of Cathedral on the Shannock loom with a piece of mat board behind it. I plan to sell the Schacht Baby Wolf loom beside it. I also have a Macomber 40″ add-a harness loom with 4 harnesses currently. I have yet to weave anything on it, but my plan was to weave a big doubleweave rag rug on it. I started measuring warp for the project three years ago, but the kittens were too interested and then my neck and shoulders went wonky for two years. I hope to get back to that. I may switch over to weaving tapestry on it and sell the Shannock also.

    Yesterday afternoon we went to an annual White Elephant party that my friends give each year, and we both came home with something we were happy with. I got an insulated grocery bag and Sandy got a bendable wooden artist’s model. I hope that he will get back to painting again one day. He clearly has talent but he doesn’t have the patience for practice – he wants to be great right away.

    I need to go put beef stew in the crockpot. One of the things that I’m letting go this year (or trying to) is the guilt I feel about not wanting to cook. I simply have higher priorities these days. It’s not that I have let go of the belief that whole organic and local foods are important. I do want to get my food gardening to a higher level this coming year. But the fact remains that I waste a lot of fresh food because I put off cooking at the end of the day, and I want to do other things when I’m not at work. So I’ll be concentrating on buying easily prepared and more healthy prepared foods to eat in the coming year, and maybe eating out more often. I’ve reached the point where I honestly do not want to buy my food from anywhere but the farmer’s market, the co-op, and sometimes Costco, and I’m still very picky about the origin and quality of my food.

    At the same time, I keep bookmarking recipes in the New York Times for things like bread so the habit in my mind remains.

    We do have an enormous choice of good sauces to pick from for quick easy meals. Some that I’ve been pleased with are curry and masala sauces from Maya Kaimel. Quick stirfry of chicken and/or veggies, pour this sauce over, make some rice, and presto, a great meal.

    I am dead serious about not buying any clothes, books, or art supplies this year. I’m adding seeds to that list. I’ve already bought more than I have room to plant. I have enough tapestry yarn to last me for the rest of my life, thanks to Mama’s life insurance money.

    I joined Audible.com for a free trial and chose “Fire and Fury” for one of the free selections, and to balance that out, Pema Chodron’s “When Things Fall Apart.” I listened to the first one for a little while yesterday. I mainly wanted to add to the demand for the book, because I know that numbers drive Twitler into a tantrum, but of course, I’m not buying it. I’ll probably cancel the Audible after the free trial. I know where to get audiobooks free.

    Okay, time to weave. We have another “Old Christmas” party to go to this afternoon.

  • Tapestry Diary 2018

    More context helped – we had a light dusting of snow last night

    It accentuated all the cracks on my walk to work

    I should probably replace this sidewalk but I kind of like the cracks.

  • Tapestry diary

    Whoa, it is cold as hell on the east coast with no end in sight yet. Fortunately we are west of where the “bomb cyclone” is hitting today and tomorrow. Don’t you just love the names for these weather events? “Polar vortex” is my favorite. I hope that it doesn’t kill many animals. My heart aches for the strays in these rare prolonged cold spells. The other day I saw an orange tabby run across my back yard, and then around 2 a.m. on New Year’s Eve a couple of dogs ran across the road in front of us in Greensboro. When I hosted the feral cat colony I rigged up shelters for them, at least good enough to block the wind.

    I decided to weave a tapestry diary this year. The goal will be daily, but the secondary and more realistic goal will be weekly. I’ll post occasional photos on Instagram and Facebook.

    So the first day was a portal, and the second day was supposed to be a thermometer with a low temperature reading. You can probably see what it looks like instead. Ahem.


    Anyway, I’ve made some jokes about the rest of the week’s subjects being a cigar, a banana, a rocket, a grain silo, and the Washington Monument. But I don’t think that I’ll really do that.

    The fact is, I don’t have a real plan at all for this. I’ll just follow my nose. But I don’t want it to take the place of weaving on “Cathedral” so I’m not going to put much time into it every day. I want it to be woven mainly of my cotton thrums.

    Guess I won’t weave that smokestack pouring out smoke that I see on my walk to work every morning this week. Another day.

  • Bringing in 2018

    Ah, first day. We went out for the first time on New Year’s Eve in many years to a Steampunk Ball at the Haw River Ballroom with friends, and it was fabulous. We all enjoyed dressing up steampunk and dancing. The music was fabulous, both the dj selection at the beginning of the evening and the live music by the Onyx Club Boys later. I could see myself getting into this bigtime.

    Today I’m looking ahead. I am actually going to begin a tapestry diary today, something I’ve intended to do for several years. I have a frame loom warped already and I’ll use that. The plan is to work on it weekly, but I’ll attempt to do something daily if it is at all possible. I’ll probably use a photo for inspiration of color or shape. I’m not going to promise myself to work daily on anything, because I’ve seen that aspiration go down in flames too many times. It only produces guilt.

    Another goal is to not buy any clothing, books, or art supplies for the next year. Basically, nothing that is not necessary. Something else I’ve wanted to do for a while. I have enough books to last a lifetime and I need to get rid of a lot of stuff.

    I want to spend more time with the Triangle Book Arts group.

    I don’t want to sell anything or enter competitions or juried shows again this year. This may change.

    I have to consolidate my studios soon, and I’m getting there little by little.

    Trips and workshops for the year are planned as followed: Seth Apter one-day workshop here in Greensboro in early February! Tapestry Weavers South retreat on the Georgia coast in May. I have put down a deposit for Tommye Scanlin’s tapestry class at John C. Campbell Folk School, but since I am third on the waitlist and it is the week of Memorial Day, I have very little hope of getting in. I especially want this one because Jenny, a friend from Washington state, is going, and I always want to spend more time with her.

    Sandy and I plan to take a week in mid-September as usual, but this time we are going to try to hit both Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks in our quest to visit as many National Parks and Monuments as we can. My friend Judy from Montana plans to join us.

    Here are more photos from last night’s festivities, including our friends Jerry and Susan Wong. Gerald Wong is running for Congress. How’s that for cool friends!


    From the peanut gallery at the Haw River Ballroom

    Jerry and Susan


    Jerry made this awesome staff that had lights that synchronized to the music.


    Sandy and I relaxing between dances

    I don’t normally take bathroom selfies, but it was the only place with light!

  • 2017 Wrapup. Hmmm.

    One great thing about writing these wrapups is that I always see that the previous year was busier than I thought, or better than I thought. I did manage to write at least one post every month. I tried to stay away from political commentary, just because I am so sick of it and there are plenty of other places to go for that. This year was tough for everybody with brains and heart. In the end, this blog serves me and me only. My first post of 2017 explains my thinking pretty well. I don’t dwell on it because I have friends with children. That’s all I’m going to say about that.

    In January, I had moved my studio into my friend Susanne’s rental house, occupying the little area of the kitchen where the dining table would have been. I enjoyed a lot of sewing there, and good company. Soon I will be moving out as Susanne looks for new digs in the coming year, so I’m consolidating it into my home studio slowly. It’s working out.


    On January 21, I participated in the amazing Women’s March on Washington along with about half a million other people. What a rush!

    In February, this blanket woven and stitched from Sandy’s discarded shirts was well under way. I need to get back to that. The cats were loving our newly screened in front porch. However, Miss Penny from across the street had a much different opinion.

    March was mostly about thinking about upcoming trips. The depression was starting to sink in. Theo obviously didn’t have much more time to spend in this world. I made a book from the denim paper I made the previous year and had hopes for gardening in the back yard of the studio house. I tried to ignore growing physical pain because my chiropractor moved away and I was in denial.


    In April, I worked hard on the front yard garden, spent a lot of time on the front porch, and went to Lake Waccamaw for Easter. Apparently I didn’t write about going to the People’s Climate March in late April! Wow. I’ll have to go back and do that.

    May was bittersweet. We let my sweet Theo go on May 5. He spent a day at home on the front porch eating all the treats he wanted and accepting last visits from friends. He was quite emaciated so I posted a photo of him from when he was healthy. I will probably never have another cat as loving and needy of attention as Theo. Everybody was in love with him.

    Ten days later Sandy and I left for a two week trip to Ireland, London, Devon, and Cornwall for our 30th anniversary. I wrote it up in June. It would take all day to pick out one photo, so I made a quick decision about one photo from Trebarwith Strand on the Cornwall coast, since I think that was probably my happiest day of the trip, walking on the Coast Path. Afterwards we hiked the opposite direction and climbed a bazillion steps to visit Tintagel Castle.

    I’d barely caught my breath in June before Susanne, Joseph, and I got on a plane for Oregon where Susanne and I went to Focus on Book Arts and Joseph visited family. I was thrilled with my classes with Jennie Hinchcliff and Leighanna Light! I then spent a day on my own in Portland, visiting Powell’s City of Books and the Japanese Gardens.

    Above, from Jennie’s class “Collecting & Keeping: Chinese Thread Books.”

    Above, pages in progress from Leighanna Light’s “Lily’s Book” class.


    Above, Japanese Gardens, Portland

    July brought a trip to Lake Waccamaw again and lettuce and tomatoes from my new container garden in the front yard. The woodchuck came back and decimated a lot of the back garden. I was sick and in pain and frustrated.

    In August, I found out that my gallbladder was a mess, but I found a massage therapist who, although she made me cry on the table, fixed my neck and shoulder pain with trigger point therapy. I lost a couple of friends. Sandy and I went to see Lyle Lovett and His Large Band at the Carolina Theater. Lots of figs.

    A trip to Colorado has become a tradition in September. This time we stayed in an AirBNB in Boulder for one night before joining my cousin and aunt on a weekend trip to Cripple Creek to celebrate my cousin’s birthday. There are donkeys that roam freely through the town and they were spoiled rotten! I would love to move to Colorado.



    My gallbladder was removed in early October and I learned a lesson about pain management and trying to be tough. I worked on an accordion book to hang in the Triangle Book Arts show coming up in January.

    Deep depression came down like a dark cloud in late October and November, although you wouldn’t know it from the photos. I had a good time that night, although I won’t be playing the bongos again, because Sandy bought us bodhrans for Christmas! The whole #metoo thing got to me really bad. We spent Thanksgiving with my sister at Lake Waccamaw and got to see my brother and nephew. It pulled me out of my funk.

    December was better. I took a lot of good photos in the winter storm and began weaving on Cathedral again. I missed having Christmas with my family because of a stomach virus, but over all I feel better than I have in months. My friend Jackie and I went to the Asheville area for a couple of days to deliver “98% Water” to the Folk Art Center for a Tapestry Weavers South show. Tonight Sandy and I are going to a steampunk ball at the Haw River Ballroom with friends. This is very out of character for me to go out on New Year’s Eve, but we are looking forward to dressing up.

    Here’s the progress I made from early January to yesterday on “Cathedral.” Not much, but at least it’s growing again!