Raven and Sparrow

Cleaning up and taking stock

I've been cleaning up my studio because I'm a messy worker and things had reached a crisis state. I am hugely fortunate to have the old summer house to use as my workplace. The space is generous and you can't beat the view. However the building is completely porous to wildlife so I have to protect against mice and insects. Also, the bats are back. When you see mouse poop sticking to the windows it isn't Mighty Mouse, its bats. When we were living in the house we sealed every place we thought a bat could slip through and succeeded in keeping them out, but apparently they have found a new entrance. The spiders have never been deterred. The other day I reached for my sewing basket and found it encased in webs by some arachnid yarn bomber. It was time to sweep out.

I've been plunking away at it for a week and progress is being made, but my enthusiasm is low. Usually cleaning up offers its own reward and once begun I won't stop until its done, but this job just isn't fun. Part of the problem is the endless decisions that must be made about past, present and future projects. Cleaning the studio means confronting and asssessing what I am making and why. I am not only airing the room, but my psyche, and all my insecurities are coming out with the dust.

It doesn't help that I am almost done with Lynne's table....coming to an end always makes me question my direction. I'm worried that what I've spent all this time making is mediocre crap... or maybe its just useless. Like who gives a rat's ass about tablesetting anyway? It is easily dismissed as a frivolous indulgence, subject to fashion, showing off and over consumption. I go on Pinterest and review table after lovely table, none of which is actually replicable by me or anyone else and wonder if I am just doing more of the same, only less well with bad photographs. I remind myself that I'm not making pictures, I'm making sacred spaces, but that seems presumptuous, especially when I try to do it for other people like I'm doing now. I haven't yet penetrated the surface and the voice inside says that I never will. Another voice says that the surface is all that there is.

And so... the doubts dart through my head like bats as I sort through the residue of months of work, but what can I do but go on?  If tablesetting is a stupid waste of time, then my time will be stupidly wasted. This is my path, I have no other. Another part of me knows that everything is a door. 

 

 

Smokebush autumn

The day after we returned from Maine the boys and their girlfriends came up for dinner. It was great to see them, but I didn't have much time or energy to get things together. In fact, I was really grabbing. The gray and pink Indian print tablecloth was already pressed so it was the choice, with the pink glassware and the terra cotta plates. Only the centerpiece was a mystery. Then I saw the cotinus coggygria bush that has been struggling in a pot for some years now. In the time we were gone it had begun its autumn color change and the lime green leaves were now tinged with pink. Perfect, and so easy. It was good to be home.

A fluidity of boats

When I was visiting the Maritime Museum in Bath, Maine last week I saw a collection of old boats that is lingering on my mind. They were all small wooden vessels meant to be rowed or sailed, lined up in a shed. Any one of them would probably have slipped right through my brain, but together they touched me deeply. The curves of boats are captivating, and in these little handmade ones the variations were exquisite. Standing among them I could imagine the pressure and flow of the water along their hulls, and intuit the sureness of experience that shaped them to meet the conditions under which they would be used...little boats on a wide and volatile sea. They are poignant embodiments of human interaction with the elements....honest, beautiful and still full of life. Instead of a fleet, they should be called a fluidity.

A woven edge

Sitting in the ultra clear light at 35,000 feet for two five and a half hour plane rides gave me lots of time to embroider. I made good progress on the two cloths for Lynne; the butterfly runner is almost done. I always planned for navy blue edges, but commercial edge binding looked cheesy and was slightly too light in color. I decided the only way to match the navy blue butterflies I had added to the pattern was to continue embroidering with that thread. I did a tight blanket stitch down both sides and it was okay, but a little rougher finish than I was hoping for. Then I realized that the horizontal stitches were like a warp and that thread could be woven lengthwise as well. This idea came out of Jude Hill's Considering Weave, and was new to me, although my embroidery stitch book is full of woven stitches...so it is not at all original. It is coming out pretty well and I am looking forward to having this cloth done.

The other coast

And we're back. After a seven year vacation drought, Mike and I took off for two weeks on the coast of Maine. We stayed at a lovely old inn (Rock Gardens Inn near Bath) and had a wonderful time in almost perfect weather. I had never been to the East Coast before and was wondering if it would be really different from Puget Sound. It was, and it wasn't. The tide, the smell of seaweed and salt water, the boats, the sun on the water....all very familiar. The Atlantic Ocean was much closer to us there than the Pacific is to my home on the protected Salish Sea, but the highly irregular coastline and many islands made it seem similarly intimate and safe. On a summer's day you could easily forget the proximity of the open ocean, although I'm sure it makes it's presence known in other seasons. The rockiness of the shorelines is very much like Puget Sound, and both are sculpted in granite, but the weathering and texture of the rocks in Maine is like petrified wood, glittering with mica. Everywhere there are tiny mirrors. There are also more and much longer perfect sand beaches, with none of the gravel we know so well. Then there are the lighthouses...just as charming as their pictures and way more numerous than I ever realized. Once you see the unforgiving coast you can understand why there is a lighthouse on every point and outcropping. Any random view had at least five, it seemed.

The lighthouses, the general profile of the land, the sail boats....everywhere I looked I saw echoes of the images I have been shown since childhood. Greeting cards, illustrations in my reading books, any stereotype of "the shore" I ever saw drew from these eastern scapes. Finally seeing them in real life reminded me of how far away I felt as a child growing up in the West. We had islands and beaches, but they weren't quite the same and never appeared in ads or the generalized media. The beauty of the Northwest is a constant presence, but it still felt like there might be something wrong with us....we were outside the cultural vocabulary. What an example of the power of image and perception! I have a fresh appreciation for the complaints of ethnic minorities about never seeing themselves on TV.

Now I have personal experiences and memories of the East Coast instead of images, and that feels good. My horizons are broadened.