Sparkly stuff I seldom sport.
slowly she turned
Living the Slow life in North Carolina
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Diego, my sweet reincarnation of Guido (except he likes to be picked up).
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Hey. I’m going to start the visual journal again to get back into blogging. I’ve been pounded with depression for the past month or so and it’s been hard to make myself do much of anything, but photography with a little point and shoot camera is easy and it helps me zero in on the little bits of beauty in my life. I’ll post 1-3 photos a day, sometimes with commentary, sometimes not. To kick it off, these are a bit old, but related.
Sandy took me to a nice little place called Devall’s Cajun Cuisine in late October and I had the gumbo, with sides of red beans and rice and fried okra. Huge portions, great food, friendly service.
Last weekend I was down east working on our new family country manor (a.k.a. Mama’s house) and Lisa, Tim, and I went to Dale’s at the Lake at Lake Waccamaw that night where I had their roasted oysters for the first time. -
It’s slow going, mainly because my life and house is messy right now, but I only have about three inches left to weave on “98% Water.”
My new-to-me Shannock tapestry loom is still sealed in the shipping box, because I don’t have a place to put it with our belongings scattered about in boxes. Most of the boxes are Sandy’s stuff from the man cave that he is now painting and reflooring. He says that he is going to build shelves. I have a lot of purging that I need to do in the studio. Again. I think that I’m going to have to let the hoarding for collage and mixed media go.
I need to sell my Macomber floor loom to make some room so that I can work in the studio. I have not woven a thing on it, so I have a strong urge to warp it up at least one time for a rag rug. I have a lot of the warp already measured, but my original plan was to weave a complicated double width project from the book Contemporary Rag Rugs. Now I feel like I should ditch the design, warp that sucker up and knock out a couple of rugs this winter just so I can say with confidence that it works well before I put it up for sale.
Here’s a photo of our new bathroom. It was hard to photograph because of the long shape. There are two windows and I’m planning to finish painting the trim this weekend. We still need to put up window treatments too. Right now I have an Indian batik bedsheet on one window and a thrift shop single curtain on the other.
Next I’m replacing the cabinet doors and drawer fronts in my kitchen, replacing the broken dishwasher, and doing a bit of a cabinet change in one corner. After that, we tackle the foundation under the old bathroom, repair the floor, and remodel it. Thank God the city inspections department will have nothing to do with these repairs, because they were horrible to work with on the addition. -
As with the other class, I was so completely engrossed in Sharon Payne Bolton’s Far East class that I didn’t get many process photos. However, I took a lot of photos of her books and my classmates’ books for inspiration and they are on my Flickr page. The photo above is of the front cover of my book. Here are a couple of shots of the spreads in it:
I felt like I have so much more to learn from Sharon – she was an amazing teacher with boatloads of patience and imagination. I hope that I’ll be able to take another class from her. Art-is-You Petaluma is moving to the spring next year and spring retreats are nearly impossible for me to attend.
Collaging and binding frenzy!
Stencil area
This rainbow ended in this lovely lady’s tutu.I said goodbye to Anne, my roommate who ran a terrific store at the event, boarded a bus for San Francisco, and took the red-eye back to Greensboro.
And as you can see from the dates of these posts, I’ve been too busy since to blog about it until now. I’m starting to feel a little less frenzied now and I’ve got more to write about. Later.
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Roxanne took this photo of me on the second day of our class, when we went on a field trip to Cornerstone Gardens in Sonoma, California. The task before us was to sketch and take photos of the many unusual sculpture gardens on site, and I went a little crazy on the photos. In this photo, an olive fell out of the tree above me on my sketchbook so I decided that it was asking to be included. I used my watercolor pens and it came out pretty good in the end.
I saw a lot of tapestry designs in these photos. I was going to say that the eucalyptus garden was my favorite because of the smell and the concept (three walls formed from a fallen eucalyptus tree) but then I remembered the lines and shapes of the agaves but then I remembered the beautiful grassland paths but then I remembered the reflections in the pool with the lily podlike structure…oh well, you get the idea. More photos at my Flickr site.
In the eucalyptus garden
Took lots of reflection shots here
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Tuesday, September 23 was a traveling day for Sandy and me, but we took off in different directions. He went home to Greensboro, NC, while I headed further west to Art-is-You Petaluma, a retreat that I also attended in 2012 and enjoyed so very, very much. On the way there I flew over Utah, which was probably the weirdest landscape I’ve ever seen from the air. I couldn’t stop taking photos. I’ve already posted one but here’s another:
I ate fish tacos at the Sheraton bar and wiped out that night. Dramamine on the bus ride dropped me like a rock. It was Albie Smith’s last retreat for teaching and that made it very hard for me to choose my classes. In the end, I went with two other instructors whose classes I’ve been daydreaming about, because they would be new for me. Hopefully I will get back in contact with Albie when I move to Oregon. Another great reason to head to the PNW!
Mixed Media Natural Journaling with Roxanne Stout was my first 2-day class. I love her style. She is every bit as sweet and talented as I suspected that she would be. The first day we decorated small glitter jars and mostly prepared backgrounds in our watercolor field journals. She had lots of different paints and pastels and fun little add-ons like beads for us to use. We did a few drawing exercises during the class of grasses, twigs, and leaves. It was a lot to take in.
(photo by Roxanne Stout)
(photo by Roxanne Stout)
Honestly, I was so deeply involved in the making of my journal in the classroom that I didn’t take a lot of photos of my own work, but there are photos of my classmates’ work on my Flickr page. I did manage to pour a cup of white wine on my new friend Jodi’s expensive camera AND her journal at the end of the class while taking photos. I was absolutely mortified, but fortunately the camera survived and Jodi was very gracious about the whole thing.
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On Sunday, we headed up into the Rockies. My cousin drove the four of us to Breckenridge, where we had a light lunch and then walked around the shops. The leaves were at their peak of color change, and the aspens were stunning against the blues/greens of the conifers. We were all kind of pooped and a couple of us started having some altitude problems so we went to our overnight lodgings at the Frisco Lodge in Frisco and rested up. We found a few places still open that Sunday afternoon and I snagged a great hat at a consignment shop.
After a great breakfast at the lodge we did a bit more shopping, then drove around to look at the scenery. On our way back to Broomfield we stopped in Georgetown and at Red Rocks. I would love to see a concert at Red Rocks. I can understand why it is such a big deal now that I’ve been there. The geology is so unusual too.
I have to say, the clouds in Colorado were nearly as magnificent as the mountains. My attention was always drawn to them.
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On our second day in Colorado, Cherie, Sandy and I went to explore the Santa Fe St. art district in Denver. I was itching to spend some time at the Abecedarian Gallery, which specializes in book arts. To my surprise, their current exhibition was of my favorite book artist, Daniel Essig, and his wife, Vicki Essig. I knew what to expect of Dan’s work, having taken three of his classes, but it was Vicki Essig’s work that really blew me away. It is the type of art that is difficult to photograph because it is so delicate. It was so inspiring and made my mind turn immediately to combining my woven tapestry with books and found objects in a different way.
I have to say that I am flabbergasted that I don’t have but one photo of this afternoon. I must have really been in the moment. The photo above was the outdoor area behind one of the galleries. I love how they constructed the wall.
That night we watched my cuz-in-law, the fantabulous Kenny Perkins, perform with his band at Logan’s Roadhouse. They totally rocked the house.
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This sunset greeted us when we left the Denver airport on Thursday. It turned out that all the sunsets were beautiful.
On Friday, Cherie, Aunt DeLaine, Sandy and I went to the Dale Chihuly exhibit at the Denver Botanical Gardens. It would have been a great visit even without the art, but the Chihuly glass sculptures combined with the gardens made the visit spectacular!
That night we all ate from the buffet at Taj, a great Indian restaurant in Boulder, then we went to the open house at the observatory on the University of Colorado Boulder campus and looked at Mars, a globular star cluster, and a ring nebula. Students were playing some form of the human vs. zombies game and one of them used us for cover as we walked back to our car. I wouldn’t mind ending up living near Boulder one day.
slowly she turned 