slowly she turned

Living the Slow life in North Carolina

recent posts

about

About Me

  • Zip lining and exploring in Colorado

    Sandy and I went to Colorado to see my Aunt DeLaine and cousin Cherie in September, and we rented a car to do some sightseeing on our own.

    The four of us went to Glenwood Springs on that Sunday with the idea that we would be ziplining there on Monday morning. We stopped in Vale during an Octoberfest festival and mosied around downtown Glenwood Springs and through the lobby of the Hotel Denver, an historic site. The West has done a great job of keeping many of its grand old hotels maintained and in business, unlike the East Coast. This is a detail from a beautiful kilim hanging there. We celebrated Cherie’s birthday at a saloon there. That night Cherie realized that our zipline appointment was actually in Idaho Springs, about two hours behind us, so we drove back to that area early in the morning.

    As you might know, I am very afraid of heights but I occasionally get up the nerve to do something fun despite my fear. This time my courage failed me and I didn’t even make it to the stairs at the first tower before I had a panic attack. However, my 87 year old Aunt DeLaine did it, because she is like AWESOME AUNT.

    DSC_8712


    She did get rescued once when she braked too soon.

    DSC_8710

    Here’s Sandy making one trip across the creek.

    DSC_8676

    Here’s my cousin Cherie.

    As for me, I puttered about Clear Creek and thoroughly enjoyed myself, after a Xanax and a nice calm walk.



    Afterwards, we ate lunch here:

    Next, off to Rocky Mountain National Park.

  • quick update

    Just a few words to say that I’m okay. I’ve been sick with stress and anxiety and in pain and busy at work and either cleaning out Mama’s house, an activity which seems to be in an infinite loop, or crashed with major depression. But I do see a light at the end of the tunnel now and I want to get back to blogging soon. Once this sale of Mama’s house is done there will be much closure and I can stop fretting. I still have the Colorado trip to blog, which was one of the best trips I have taken and was a much needed break with my family and great natural beauty, and I took a workshop at Asheville Bookworks for one weekend. So it hasn’t all been doom and gloom. I’m a lucky gal, and I know it. Although I probably need a medication change, which I will address in early December, and I’m in desperate need of some weaving and art time, but that will come. See you later.

  • Labor Day weekend at Lake Waccamaw


    Labor Day weekend was a mix of hard work and fun. Sandy and I met my sister, brother, and brother-in-law at Mama’s house in Marietta with a rented UHaul van. We filled it up with two bed frames, a set of double mattresses, two chests of drawers, my mother’s sewing machine/table, a wicker rocking chair, and various boxes of stuff that we could squeeze into every last bit of space. We moved a very nice old oak cabinet to my sister and brother-in-law’s new place at Lake Waccamaw. In between loading up on Saturday afternoon and unloading on Monday, we had a relaxing dinner with my brother and sister-in-law (no pics) and chilled out on the pier on Sunday. Even the rain was pleasant.

    Not the greatest selfie of me, but I’m trying not to be vain. That’s my sister, brother-in-law, me, and Sandy.

    Sandy plays chess with Tim. I love his beard! Every now and then he threatens to shave it and I have a fit.

    Now I have the four-poster bed and matching chest of drawers in “my” bedroom. A friend of ours took the futon and queen mattress that I was using in there. I put my mother’s chest of drawers that she used as a dresser in my studio. Her sewing machine is a Singer from around 1960, I think. She always kept it oiled and well maintained because she used it a lot, sewing our clothes when we were kids and quilting and other sewing projects when she got older. I am proud to have it.

    Here’s a photo that was in the treasure trove of photos Lisa found in her house. We think that she was about 13 years old and so that would date it around 1936.

    I submitted the 98% Water tapestry to the ATA Biennial. Pam Patrie is responsible for the excellent job of mounting it. I’ll find out if it gets juried in in January.

    I was asked to include a comment about the tapestry. I said that this was a self-portrait that melted. Here’s the detail shot.

    Now I need to get ready for Sandy and I to go to Colorado! Then I will probably have to spend a few weekends in Marietta to finish cleaning Mama’s house for its new owner. I will be very glad to get this off my mind.

  • Critters

    Holding feet with Pablocito.

    Mr. Sua-vey.

    Chunkybutt does not fit in this hole.

  • Sunday Morning Coffee Pot Post

    First, THIS article is helping me get back on track after a rather hellish month: 12 Little Known Laws of Mindfulness That Will Change Your Life.

    I came back from Arrowmont with steadily worsening anxiety and physical problems, which peaked about three days ago. My pain level has gone from about an 8 to a 3 after two visits to my chiropractor and two visits to my massage therapist. I did resort to taking some pain meds left over from my mother’s stash on Thursday, but they were a kind that I’ve taken before and I cut them way down to the smallest level that still helped. Thank God the addict that worked in my house did not steal all of them. Also I made a DIY cervical collar out of a scarf.

    Making all this worse was that I spent a week of clearing out my community garden plots and reduced my fall allotment to one 4×8 foot plot. They were so overgrown with cardinal climber vines over tall sunflowers and other monster mystery plants that others in the garden had staked them up and an email went out to all the gardeners (I was not the only offender, but I was one of the worst) and I got embarrassed. Sandy helped me dig up some plants to transplant into pots and the Back Forty at home, and some of the huge plants and roots. I was going to give it all up but I want to harvest my green cotton, and the director of the garden encouraged me to stay on now that I’ve gotten it down to a manageable size and state. I am very prone to being ashamed and none of this helped my mental or physical state!

    However, now I feel very good about it and I planted peas and lettuce in the area that we cleared out. I have not tried planting these in late August before and it may be too hot for them to germinate. I guess that I will find out. The black compost that I mulched the bed with looks beautiful against the green plants. I didn’t do anything that strenuous and it did a lot for my soul.

    I’ve gotten a great yield of butterbeans and field peas this year, enough to freeze some for this winter and Thanksgiving dinner.

    Today I am taking it easy and I’ve been advised not to weave yet. I want to weave! I’m reading “All the Light We Cannot See” by Anthony Doerr on my Kindle through my local library on Overdrive. If you haven’t tried this app and you like to read, I recommend it highly. I made an account with my Greensboro Public Library card number and it is great for travel. I can get new audiobooks too, and a lot of popular audiobooks are available right away. You usually have to get in a hold line for bestsellers. My time on this one runs out today and I’ll have to get in line again to finish it.

    I just finished reading Man in Profile, Joseph Mitchell of the New Yorker. I probably have written about this before, but Joseph Mitchell and I share a great-great grandfather, whatever cousin that makes us, and I did not know about his talent and international fame until after his death. None of my family did, as far as I can tell. I was told by my mother that “Cousin Joe” wrote for “some magazine up north” and that my great aunt thought that he hung the moon. When I found out that “some magazine” was the New Yorker, I started investigating and then obsessively tracked down all I could about him. His writing is brilliant and he is a native of Fairmont! Why wasn’t I taught about him in school? Why didn’t he have more publicity in his own home state, or county, or town, or even family? I feel cheated that I never got to meet him. Evidently he made many prolonged visits to Fairmont and he felt caught between the two worlds, such as I do most of the time.

    We have signed a purchase contract with a buyer for Mama’s house in Marietta and Sandy and I will rent a UHaul cargo van to go down there and take some furniture to Lisa’s lake house and some back here to Greensboro. I purposely chose one that will be just big enough to hold a double bed and mattresses, a small chest of drawers, and my mother’s sewing machine. My house is too small to bring in more of her stuff, and part of the deal with the buyer is that she will finish dealing with what we leave, whether to use it or give it away or trash it. It needs to be done even though it breaks my heart. My mother spent 70 years in that house. I can’t do my part in helping to maintain it.

    Work is pretty good. We have three new administrators in our department, all of whom I think that I can work well with.

    I rallied enough to drive to Hickory (about 100 miles away) and back on Friday to attend the Carolinas subgroup of the Tapestry Weavers South meeting and potluck. We went to a tapestry exhibit at the Hickory Art Museum that was a collaboration between American artists and Yoruba weavers. Very, very good.

    Pam has mounted my “98% Water” tapestry and I should have it in time to photograph and enter it into the American Tapestry Alliance biennial show. I really like the teal background we chose for it. I am nervous about it because I feel like I am jumping into the deep end. If it doesn’t get accepted I will have to get over it and keep working on my technique.

    Two weeks from now I will be in Colorado, visiting my aunt and cousin and exploring a bit on our own. So there will be another travel blog post coming up after that.

    I’ll post a few photos to this post at a later time – need to go rest my neck!

  • Site Specific Weaving class at Arrowmont




    At the beginning of August I spent a week at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in a class taught by Erika Hanson about nomadic weaving systems. The original idea was that the class would do outdoor site installations on campus, but the plan changed when the days were heavy with muggy 90 plus degree weather and many in the class had no weaving experience. So Erika flexed and we spent many hours in the weaving studio, with most of the students on floor looms. I knew that I couldn’t handle a floor loom for 5 days so I mostly worked on a small frame loom.

    I kind of fell apart on the first day with a migraine and toothache, and I went to my upstairs room in Teacher’s Cottage, a sweet house built in 1912. I slept for several hours. (Narrator from the future: “Laurie would soon discover that she needed a root canal and her neck was totally out of whack for two years, with the pain for both maladies starting here.”) When I returned to class, they had gone on a walk and the assignment was to weave a piece that evoked a place they had seen, including different pattern weaves. Since I had stared at the ceiling in a pretty funky state of mind during that time, I realized that a skewed vision of the bones of that room would be perfect for a small tapestry, so that was my major focus for the week. I’ll finish it soon.

    On Thursday, I came up with a good quickie installation idea for this very dark glum place next to the Teacher’s Cottage. I was poking around outside looking for a place to hang a warp-weighted loom, and when I came to that side, I thought, “There should be a path here,” but there wasn’t. When I walked back to the corner, to my surprise there was a man made cave opening in the rock wall with ivy falling over the entrance. It must have been a root cellar or something at one time. There were old hooks hanging in the back of it.

    At first my idea revolved around weaving a banner of some kind to hang from the tree limb in front of the area as a map, or to lay on the ground as an actual path, but I realized quickly that there was not nearly enough time for that. The gardeners on campus had dumped a bunch of light green iris leaves in our studio, so I decided to plait stepping “stones” and make a path with them.


    I did begin a warp weighted loom weaving just to get the idea of it. I have a recurring dream about weaving top to bottom on a loom and when I saw that this was going to be a Scandinavian type loom I got very excited. Later when the weather gets cooler I plan to play with this on my front porch.

    Our class did incredible work for beginning weavers. I was stunned by the quality of it. One student wove a net for the ping pong table in the student lounge.

    Random notes: The FOOD, oh the FOOD at Arrowmont was SO GOOD. Downtown Gatlinburg itself is a world of redneck kitsch, and I had no real desire to explore it. (I worked at South of the Border in my high school days, and that was enough for life.) Arrowmont is a lovely oasis just behind Cooter’s Dukes of Hazzard Museum and I was wholly content to spend my entire week on campus, either in the studio, in Teacher’s Cottage, porch-sitting or gallery-gazing. The drive though the Blue Ridge and Great Smoky Mountains is gorgeous. I did drive to the east part of town to visit a grocery store and Smoky Mountain Spinnery, a very, very nice fiber arts shop that I recommend if you are in the area. If you’re interested in fine art and craft, it is definitely worth taking a look at Arrowmont’s galleries and studios and installations.

    Yes, I would definitely go back.

  • Saturday morning coffee pot post

    I’ve spent so much time farting around with trying to get my laptop back into adequate working condition that the coffee is nearly gone and I have been resigned to tapping this out with two fingers on my Kindle, which I hate. I am one of the last secretaries; I prefer typing on a normal size keyboard. And…now I am back on the laptop with a mouse and so far Chrome hasn’t crashed. Crossing my fingers.

    Seems like the only time I post any more is about travel. Either I’m about to travel or I’ve just come back. Pretty tough life, eh?

    Anyway, this week I wrapped up my summer projects at work, mostly, and tomorrow I’m driving to Gatlinburg for a weeklong weaving workshop, which sounds fascinating in concept but I’m not so sure about how I will handle the physicality of the heat in the forecast and how my back muscles will react to nomadic weaving systems. I’ve become such a wimp since I’ve gone through menopause. I am going to take this laptop with me to check email and try very hard to stay off Facebook. I’m not taking the Kindle because of the lure of games, which I have not loaded on this machine. However, I may still blog and I might upload photos from my phone to Facebook and Instagram without reading my feed, because I need a news break in the worse way.

    Arrowmont very kindly gave me a gift certificate for what I paid last summer when I had to leave as soon as I got there because of Mama’s passing. They didn’t have to do it, and I didn’t ask for it, but they did it anyway and for that reason I’m already in love with them. I couldn’t fit in another workshop last year and it was hard to fit it in this year, but I did and I upgraded to a private room in a cottage with air conditioning. So, if I can’t physically bear whatever happens in class, I am taking plenty of personal projects and To Kill a Mockingbird, which I realized that I have never read when all the hoopla came out about Harper Lee’s new book. I will probably fill up the whole damn car with my studio, but this one is all about me.

    Here’s a link to the workshop description: http://www.arrowmont.org/workshops-and-classes/workshops/details/706-site-specific-weaving?xref=697.

    ^^^Daddy, Laurie, and Sherman.

    A dilemma in the computer world is that Flickr is doubling its fee for my Pro account. Granted, they are giving me two year’s warning and that is good. However, as much as I love using Flickr I’m concerned because a) $49.95 annually is too damn much to pay for a photo storage service, and b) does this mean that they are having problems and my photos are in danger of disappearing? I know that Flickr is not used as much as it was ten years ago. I can find a free storage solution, but almost every photo I have on this site actually resides on Flickr. So much code will have to be changed if I get rid of my Flickr account! I have thousands of photos on Flickr. I feel pretty pissed off about the choice that I face.

    Boy, this electronic world we live in is so much simpler, right? Now that I have a smart phone it dings and whistles and buzzes at me all the time. I love it but I feel like I’ve fallen further down the rabbit hole.

    In the actual world we are selling my mother’s house. We have a buyer, who is getting it for about half of what it is worth, but she will be a good neighbor for our next door neighbor down there, who has done so much for my mother and us. I won’t be getting much out of the deal once my sister and I split the money, but it will be enough to pay off my home equity loan and do a few more repairs to our house. It has depressed me much more that I ever expected, just as the grief that I still feel about Mama’s death is surprisingly fierce and catches me off guard and sends me into tears. However much I despise the thought of living in Robeson County as an adult, Marietta was my home and I was lucky to spend my childhood there. It was a community that took care of me and allowed me to range freely and play tag with horses and build hideouts and catch tadpoles and dig through old trashpiles in the woods and climb as many trees as possible and ride my bike for miles around and my mother’s friends were incredibly patient in dealing with me, although they did report me when they saw me playing tag with a friend on our roof.

    But it is time to move on. I’m lucky to have good friends here now, and it frees me up to leave the area if I choose to. I’ve read some very scary stuff about earthquakes and tsunamis expected on the Pacific Northwest coast that has rocked my anxiety world. At least in this area you get some time to get out before you get blasted by a hurricane. I’ve also considered other areas to move to, but you can’t escape climate change and so I may as well stop worrying. I do know that I will NOT consider moving anywhere hotter than here.

    Time to get laundry started and start packing for my trip.

    Here’s a shout-out to an old friend, a song that applies to me as well:

  • We’ll be back

    I didn’t do any serious weaving while we were at Pam’s. I played around with color combinations and followed along with her lessons with Susanne, which were very helpful to me too, since I never received any formal training in tapestry. I sketched an idea for another small tree tapestry and came home with many more ideas on the tree theme. I left my “98% Water” tapestry there and Pam is going to mount it for display for me – she is a very kind mentor and friend indeed. On Sunday morning, we packed up our things and waved a sad goodbye to her, with plans already percolating to come back in 2016.

    We returned the Beetle to the car rental place, and they joked about charging 25 cents per pine needle stuck to the car. Then we took the train from the airport to downtown Portland, where we checked into the Crystal Hotel. Each room had been decorated with the theme of a song by a singer or band who had performed at the Crystal Ballroom. It seemed as if they knew something about our personalities. Susanne was in Gogol Bordello’s “Wonderlust King” room. I was in Silversun Pickups’ “Lazy Eye” room, with the theme of waiting, something that comes up a lot in my journaling. We loved this historic hotel in the heart of Portland.



    We went to Powell’s City of Books, of course, and to Sizzle Pie for slices of pizza with names like “New Maps from Hell.” Their motto was “Death to False Pizza.”

    We stood in line at Voodoo Doughnuts for incredible sugar highs.


    And, what the hell is this bug that we saw on a Portland sidewalk? It was about an inch and a half long.

    Then we got up at 3:30 a.m., caught a plane home, and we are here now.

  • Ecola State Park


    Susanne said, “What an unfortunate name – sounds like a combination of E coli and ebola.” But it is one of the prettiest beaches on the planet, on the north side of Cannon Beach. We only went to part of it, because it was midday on Saturday and everybody was trying to get in. We didn’t mind waiting in a long line of cars in the cool shade of the woods, but when we heard it was another hour wait to get to Indian Beach, we stopped in this part and hiked down a trail that went to the edge of the sea cliffs and looked down on the beauty below and beyond. Later I learned that Indian Beach is where people go swimming.

    Looking back at Cannon Beach and Haystack Rock.




    See the fisherman near the bottom of that big rock?


    Yeah, it got a bit too steep at this point so we sat and enjoyed the view.


    As we were leaving we noticed the fisherman was scampering around that huge boulder near the top like a mountain goat. I took this photo of him at the halfway point down. We waited to make sure that he didn’t kill himself, and he sort of slid down with that pole still in his hand.


    We tried to go into Cannon Beach for a late lunch but the traffic and parking situation was so insane I nearly had a panic attack. So we headed south on the Pacific Coast Highway with its stunning views over the ocean and found Big Wave Cafe in Manzanita, where we split a fried seafood platter and I drank a Moose Drool ale, which was much better than it sounds. We loved it!

  • Focus on Book Arts 2015

    On Tuesday evening we left the beach to go to the Focus on Book Arts conference at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon, about a 90 minute trip toward Portland. Pam arranged for us to stay with a friend of hers, Nel Rand, who lives in Cornelius, only about 15 minutes away. So not only did the travel improve, we had the privilege of making a new friend, who is a fabulous artist and writer as well.

    Our class, “An Intimate Atlas,” was a three-day map-making experience with Jill Berry. I’ve taken a lot of great book workshops, and this one ranks up there with the most enjoyable I’ve taken. The synergy of the women in the class and the instructor was perfect. There were no whiners and no neurotic meltdowns. Jill gave us techniques and prompts and it was amazing to see what a dozen different women did with the materials. I was already acquainted with some of these from Jill’s book  Personal Geographies, and had done a few of the exercises in a journal. In this class we each made six different maps and a book to contain them as pop-ups! I was surprised at how easy the book structure and pop-ups were to do. Therefore, I HIGHLY recommend this class to anyone who love maps and would like to do a bit of introspective play with watercolors, markers, and stencils.

    Jill has an excellent slideshow of all the different maps on her blog post, but here are some photos of just mine.


    This was my favorite, based on Wendell Berry’s poem “The Peace of Wild Things,” which was copied on the white paper in white ink and then painted over with a grey wash.


    This hand map is about creativity and teachers, the past and the future. It is not quite finished in this photo because I have added names since this was taken.


    Here is a travel spread. On the left is my trip to FOBA in a game board format, spiraling into the center. I struggled the most with the heart map, because my heart has been hurting and closed for business lately. I made this “Hearchipelago” of islands places where I have lived and visited that I loved.

    A spread of the last two maps – At the left is a map of Marietta, my hometown, circa 1972 or so, of all my hideouts. At the right is a map of our house from Diego and Pablo’s point of view.

    The outside cover and spine of the book.


    Here are classmates dripping lines onto papers with walnut ink to make the back of our maps. I really loved doing this part.

    Susanne and I connected with Judy Strom, who steered us to FOBA in 2011. She is from Montana and we first met at Journalfest in Port Townsend, where we took two classes together. Judy is one of the main reasons I want to visit Montana, because I don’t get to see her enough. She was taking a class in the room next door.

    We made another new friend, Kathy Dickerson, who I look forward to spending some time with on another trip to the PNW. Here we are hanging out in Urban Decanter on Main St. of Forest Grove on our last hot (upper 90s!) evening in Forest Grove.