Raven and Sparrow

Pet of the Week

  Dot da da Taa! Drumroll please! I'd like to introduce you to Sunny, Pet of the Week. This is an honor that only the extremely available can hope to achieve. Every week the advertising booklet published by my employer includes a photo of someone's pet. Sometimes people bring their dogs or cats or other more unusual animals in to have their picture taken, or just bring in photos they already have. We feature these pictures as Pet of the Week. Occasionally the pet well runs a little dry and my colleague Joe (who lays out the rag) starts begging for input. Here is my attempt to keep up the quality of Pet of the Week. Pretty cute, huh? Sunny is a Welsh corgi, the tailless kind. She is eleven and a half, but keeping pretty spry and playful. Corgis are regular dogs, just low riders. They are complete characters and very cheerful company. Check out Alicia's blog for a totally corgi-ful entry I really enjoyed.

Gardens of nostalgia

  Since my new job has a standard Monday through Friday schedule, my social life has re-energized itself with a vengeance. It has been so great be free to go to weekend parties (and when else are parties held?) and see so many of my old friends. I'm not used to it and will have to slow down soon, but re-connecting with my favorite people has been fun.

Last weekend we stayed with our old neighbors on our old street in the suburbs east of Seattle. We moved there in 1988 when our boys were still pre-schoolers, and were delighted to find that many of the other families on the ten house cul-de sac also had children about the same age. Everybody got along pretty well, and some of the women on the street became especially dear friends. Most of us were interested in gardening, and eventually formed a small garden club amongst ourselves. It was a wonderful excuse to visit the nurseries and gardens in our extended area that we might never have otherwise seen, and resulted in some really memorable excursions.

I was reminded forcefully of our old garden club this year because two of my former neighbors had their gardens featured on the local "big" tour sponsored by the very large and active garden club in the nearest town. Between three and four hundred people usually do the one day tour of five or six gardens. I never missed it when I lived there, and was always amazed at the high quality of the gardens shown, so I know the pressure was on for my friends when they agreed to take part. They spent a year concentrating on their yards and the results were just breathtaking. Each garden completely reflected the personality and  taste of its maker even though they stood adjacent to each other in the same woodsy setting. The combinations of texture and color, the careful consideration of areas both casual and intensely cultivated, the sweep and movement through the properties, the small details and the dramatic statements all came together into completely satisfying and distinctive gardens. It was like all the talk and dreams of our old conversations made real.

Visiting the scene of so much former pleasure has made me review what drew me away. Seeing my friends make such beautiful and personal places out of their arbitrary suburban lots reminded me how important this place is to me. To say that I have always wanted to live here is to trivialize the deep connection with this island I have felt since childhood. The longing to return was strong but hardly admitted, since it seemed so unlikely. The day that it became possible to acquire our present home was one of the most powerful, thrilling days of my life. There was no question about where I wanted to be, and there still isn't, even though I now know more about the costs of having my heart's desire. 

My neighbors' gardens show how love and commitment can shine through the landscape and meld together the person and the place. I am re-consecrated to my land by their example. Thank you, Kathleen and Sandra. With love.

    

Objects of desire

 

I don't shop much these days, but recently I went over to Macy's for some underwear plain and dull. On my way from lingerie back to my car I happened to pass through the china and glassware department. Okay, I went out of my way to pass through the china and glassware department, and was rewarded by finding these Dansk wineglasses. I just love them. I don't need them, I have no place to put them, and I probably won't be able to use them for ages, but I love them. The straight-sided shapes and the etched designs were irresistable, and to further erode any lingering scruples I should have had but didn't, they were on sale.

Sunday at Ala Spit

Yippee! Today is Sunday, the weather is perfect and I don't have to work!! Instead of dragging myself off to Home Depot this morning, Mike and I took Sunny to Ala Spit. It is a long, curving sand protrusion into the salt water, with no trees but lots of driftwood. In fact, there is so much driftwood that people have used it to make shelters; its the largest collection of driftwood houses I have ever seen. No one else was there, so Sunny got to run and play like a puppy. She doesn't like to walk on the shifty pebbles that most of our beaches are made of, and usually will jump from log to log as she makes her way.       These last two weeks have seemed endless. They were busy, since there are so few employees to cover the store, but still....long. I hope I have done the right thing in changing jobs, and of course until I start the new one I won't know, but this morning was great. I hope you are all having as wonderful a Sunday.

Brown table down

Using the brown leaf tablecloth turned out to be harder than I thought it would be. The blue napkins I found in my stash and the gray plates in my cupboard, so I was lulled into a false sense of complacency about the final outcome. I did search the limited shopping possibilities around me, hoping for accessories that would look great with the tablecloth ( I was especially looking for small glass fishing floats for a centerpiece...no luck ), but almost everything I brought home looked wrong in the end.

At Pier 1 I found some dishes that I thought would be great and I had the tablecloth with me when I saw them, but at home they were too yellow and too bright. Unless they look good with some other tablecloths I guess they'll have to go back. That said, I am pretty impressed with the cheap dishes available at Target and Pier 1. I'll have to re-think my view that dishes are too expensive to change easily. Of course, they are all poorly made in China, but the designs are nice.

Transitional blue

I am about to leave Home Depot. This week I received a job offer from a local printer and today I decided to make the change. You would think I would feel joyful, but so far I just feel blank. The new job pays less and offers fewer benefits, but the hours are regular: weekdays from 8:30 to 5:30 with weekends off. What a concept. (Tomorrow at Home Depot I am scheduled for 1:00 to 10:00 and the day after for 8:00 to 5:00.) Also, it is much closer to home, so I won't lose so much time traveling, or spend so much on gas. I will be doing graphic design and general dogsbody type work. It will be a chance to sharpen my skills on the big graphics programs like In Design and Photoshop. 

This afternoon as I was making this decision I got such a horrible headache behind my eyes. I rarely get this particular sort of headache, so I wondered if it had to do with the job. I focussed on it for a while, and like the answer in the eight ball, up from the depths rolled the thought that my eyes didn't want to work in the print shop because it is ugly. It is in what used to be a bank, built in the sixties, which was an eyesore to start with. Now it is worn and shabby on the outside, and absolutely crammed with presses and paper on the inside. Everything is grubby. I have been in several print shops, and the smaller ones were all like this, so I guess it is just the result of working with lots of paper and ink. When I realized what the problem was, I decided I could live with it, but that I have to make a point of looking at or making something beautiful as often as I can. With that resolution, my headache went away.

Tomorrow I will give my notice at Home Depot. I won't miss the soulless corporation or the horrible hours, but I will miss my friends.

Mad at miters

I have hemmed many many tablecloths, and every time I have trouble with the mitered corners. I found very clear instructions in the February 1997 issue of Martha Stewart Living but if I don't get it out and study it each time I mess up the corners. Even sometimes with the magazine open and available, I mess them up. As I did this time.

Out of the eight corners on the two tablecloths I was hemming, one went bad. Of course I didn't see it until I had clipped the seam, and after that there was no way to fix it. Sigh. Now the brown tablecloth is defective. Not that every tablecloth isn't loaded with mistakes, but this is so obviously bad workmanship. Grrr.

This makes me less interested in doing any embroidery on the brown cloth, but as I said I was on the fence about that anyway. I think I will declare it finished.

Successes and failures

Here is my other tablecloth in a dyebath of 1.5% weld extract. It was blue and white with faint green hints, all of my previous efforts having disappeared in the wax removal process. Now it is electric green and yellow. Saint Mike said that he usually really likes my work (bless his heart), but this one leaves him cold. Also, it still has those mysterious smears which look so appetizing. I think this one is headed back

into indigo.

Also, I was happy with my Clorox bleach pen discharge, except it was a little faint. I thought maybe my bleach pen was running out of umph, so I opened a new one. Disaster. I have to re-think this technique.

On the bright side, I think over-painting my lac-dyed cloth turned out pretty well. It is always hard to get the consistency of the paint right, and having done this entire cloth I think I almost have it right.

It still needs something more, but I like where it's going. It sure is different than I planned.

Alas, a-lac

My original idea for this tablecloth was a lavender background with white leaf shapes. I waxed the pattern, mordanted, painted with cochineal, dipped in indigo, painted with cochineal again and dipped indigo again. You have seen some of these steps in previous posts. When I tried to remove the wax, I lost all of the pink and most of the blue I spent so much time putting in. I've never had so much trouble losing wax. I re-mordanted and immersion dyed with lac, the insect dye from Southeast Asia (source of lacquer and shellac). It is strong blue-pink like cochineal, but not quite so pure in hue. I like it better, even though I have to boil it with cream of tartar and strain it before I can put it in the dye kettle with fabric. It isn't tremendously light-fast on cotton, but I decided I don't care. This is what I got. I haven't yet washed all of the dye out, so it may finish lighter. The contrast between the pattern and the background is low, so I need to add some definition. Embroidery is the safe route, but I am thinking of using fabric paint to bring out the pattern. Unfortunately, I don't have any way to try it out without working on this cloth, so I will have to leap into it...do or die, so to speak.

Over-painting is the plan with this table runner too. It is an old reject from a couple of years ago. I was experimenting with clamp and fold dyeing, (you can see the faint squares running down the middle from that trial) but didn't care for this result. This time I have used a Clorox bleach pen to discharge the branch pattern, which I will over-paint. The stray dots came from the last shake of the pen just as I was finishing. Darn.

Back to work

Vacation is over and I am back at work. My holiday was way too short, I think, and it will be a year before I get another. Sigh. I am also back at work on my tablecloths. The brown one came through the wax removal process with its dark value intact, and really nice veining and color variation in the pattern. I am done dyeing it and will move on to hemming. I'm wondering if embroidered edges would add anything, or just gild the lily.

The other two aren't so good. All of their initial color was lost, and even the indigo blue faded out. Both of them have some smeary places that look like someone wiped their nose there or something. I have put them both back in mordant and plan to over-dye them in immersion dye baths. All "white" will be lost, but perhaps the heat of the bath will minimize the smears. They are now embarked on paths that will take them far from my original ideas for them. I don't know how they will look when they are finished.