Winter Camp Draws to a Close

Its plain to see that Winter Camp is drawing to a close.

After this particular winter, I'm feeling like once the Outside opens, I never want to come back in the house again. In preparation, I spent this past weekend finishing the main chores of Winter Camp: mending and organizing.
I don't know why I let it pile up, because when I am mending, I am in love with mending. I love my hands as they reconfigure rips and tears back into Integrity. And I love walking around my home not averting my eyes from rather stunning holes in garments, linens, and furniture.

First, I mended Billy's work on the duvet cover on our bed, which is becoming a scrapbook of wintering over with boxers.

Then the chenille pillow I use to support my back while reading in bed:

On to the futon in my studio where Billy sleeps after he's done his warm-up exercises on our bed:

While in the studio, I felt suffocated by the piles of fabric--even though I have not brought in any fabric for well over a year. I listened to a Radio Lab program about the brain and blew my way through each and every piece. I got rid of two large bags that will go to some hapless Freecycler. And more important, I uprooted masses of stink bugs, who seem to have an affinity for woven stripes. Now I don't feel suffocated, I feel inspired.

Which lead me to my Jewelled Kilim quilt of last summer. I finally put on the binding...

And wove some bases for new pillows to go with my Gridlock cloth:

.And because one organizing leads to another, I cleaned my bulletin board, the better to showcase the collage that Thing One made me for Mother's Day years ago: "Mom is like a good friend who knows a lot about Stuff." Hallmark couldn't have said it better.

And I finally hung the tree upon which grows tiny beaded Indian people.

It started with the small cow head at the top, which is beaded around some sort of vertebra. (Are you paying attention, Saskia?)I found it in a suitcase at a flea market, which cost me 25 cents. Himself decided I need to collect something besides bags of trash of his Stuff to take to the Thrift Shop and so over the years,the cow got some friends.This is how it starts...because then the collection needs a home and the home needs a wall...and the wall needs a room (sing to the tune of "The Green Grass Grows All Around All Around...)

So its raining and the cold is comin' round the corner once again. But inside, Winter Camp is comin' down. At least in our hearts.

Small Bird Makes Trouble

Our world is still very much covered by snow and ice. It is hard for the birds who had misread the news about global warming and opted not to fly south this winter.  It ain't easy out there and I've tried to help by keeping the feeders full. 

This has turned into a full time job, given the favorable reviews we've gotten in the avian press and local word-of-beak recommendations. Every once in awhile, I turn my attention away from the birds and to other silly things, like working, cooking, sleeping. And the feeders run dry.

This apparently does not sit well with Small Bird, who has started prounion rumblings out among the flock. This morning, I came down to get my coffee and there, propped right up against the coffee pot, was this communique:

On one hand, I admire his mastery of American civics. The Constitution of the United States, after all, begins much the same way:

On the other hand, there are those here who are starting to wonder if he is another Eurotrash Communist infiltrator looking for handouts from the good, kind people of my country.

Small Bird Arrives in America

If you are here because you clicked the wrong button on the Spirit Cloth blog, you already know that Saskia van HerWaarden lives in a magical birdhut.  It is a place where her wild creativity bubbles up from her soul, through her hands, and into all that she touches around her. She ecodyes fabric, she stitches, she prints,she saws and hammers all kinds of stuff together, and she builds kingdoms and their citizens from the treasures she scoops up on her walks through the Dutch lowlands. (She claims she also works in some sort of appliance service company, but that's just her cover story.A pretty lame one too, if you ask me.)

As a thank you for sending her some books, Saskia invited me to select a cloth from among the wonders that she created for a recent art show. And I just received it him. Small Bird has Left Home.

Do you see Small Bird, born in the center but taking his first steps to the left of the blue beading? Under the safety of the sun, the moon, and the waves, Small Bird flew all by himself across the ocean...

...carrying two items. First, a fortune from the fortune cookie he probably got from the Chinese restaurant at the Amsterdam airport.

According to Google Translate, it means "a pound of feathers do not fly if there is no bird in it." (Having just ordered a pound of feathers, this is patently untrue but I see no point in arguing with Small Bird on his first few days here.)

Second, pictures of his family that his mother tucked in his bag while he was ordering Chinese food.

Small Bird's Father

Small Bird's Mother

Uncle Louis,the black sheep. He is rarely mentioned except in a whisper, which makes Small Bird adore him.

We're keeping Small Bird away from Billy Dog and Clutch till his English gets better and he learns how to say "I am not food." We did introduce him to some of the smaller, less intimidating packs of critters around the house.

Indoor Finch Family standing very still

The Mexican Road Kill Ensemble, available for Bar Mitzvahs and Weddings

The Memphis Clay Quintet

Soldiers of Fortune

Board of Directors, The Raggedy Ann Preservation Society

Everyone is getting along beautifully, although they are staying up way too late at night listening to Small Bird's stories about his friends at The Birdhut.

Thank you, thank you Saskia. Your work is infectiously beautiful.

Spawning 'Shrooms

Yesterday, I went to a workshop on how to grow your own 'shrooms. Himself was very excited till I had to tell him "no, you dolt, not THOSE  'shrooms."  

THESE 'shrooms...

 

No, these are not beer nuts. They are "spawn plugs," sold online by Field and Forest.  Spawn plugs? Isn't that something Sigourney Weaver pulled out of her astronaut buddy's chest? And how could anything called "spawn" have such lovely surnames as "West Wind" and "Snow Cap?"

Well, it turns out that these spawn plugs inoculated into the right environment will eventually give rise to a nest of shitake mushrooms.  Our Spawn Daddy was Alex, who took 9 of us on to his back porch and showed us how to do exactly that.

Shitakes love a three-foot segment of red or white oak. And here's the kicker, if you live in the Northeast this winter: you can't use fallen logs. The wood needs to be so alive that you need to go into your woods with a saw within 30 days of Inoculation Day. If not, you run the risk that some other fungi or bacteria gets a toehold and eventually ruins the neighborhood for our poor Spawn.

Luckily for me, Alex actually trekked through the three-foot snow mounds day after day to bring us these oak logs, which, by the way, are really heavy little bastards on a good day and especially heavy since they've not been sitting on a woodpile drying out for a year.

Alex then showed us how to drill an array of 50-60 holes spaced 4 inches apart around the logs and then hammer the little plugs into said holes.  Once our Spawn were all snug in their new homes, we tucked them in with a covering of wax. The logs then go in a shady spot, where they should be kept relatively moist. And then, depending on the strain, 6 to 12 months later, the Spawn spawn and shitake mushrooms cover the log. That's called a "fruiting" and hopefully, it happens several times before the wood rots away and the Spawn are homeless.

This is Alex's sprawling Spawn Condominium Development.

 These are my more modest Spawn Apartment Towers.

They will go into a shady part of the yard as soon as I can find the yard.Which may be soon, according to my Snowman Thaw-O-Meter...

In fact, winter must be nearly over because I have completed my project for Winter Camp, ie, piecing together a Gridlock Quilt for our bed. I threw Billy off and threw it on so I could see how it will be as a blanket instead of wallpaper.

I still have all the handstitching and embroidery stories to tell across the top. And,eventually, some type of border, perhaps of words or more little stories, will take shape. And that will help me name it, I hope. But even at this stage, I am very pleased with it.

First of all, it has all my story cloths in it. They all work together and I am excited about making their stitches travel onto their neighboring blocks.  Second, I made it completely out of fabric that I had here (with the exception of one fat quarter of blue/white dot that I deemed essential but ran out of, so sue me). I even cut apart old blocks that I had bought at flea markets and got lots of 2 1/2 inch squares of shirting fabric from the early 1900s.  That connection...my hands to those of some woman 100 years ago cutting up her husband's shirts...well, I just FEEL woven to her when I look at them.  And finally, I only used fabrics that I LOVE.

I did worry while I was stitching that I would feel protective of this quilt and not let the dogs come up and inoculate it with slobber, shedding fur, yesterday's mud, and whatever spawnlike phenomena come with eight sets of padded toes. But keeping my dogs off the bed would be a complete negation of my lifestyle, which is heavily dependent on warm canine breath in the morning (no, you dolt, not yours).

So using this quilt in my life will no doubt be like stepping out of the house with brand new sneakers...white and clean as a fleeting moment in time.

Life in the Northeast

How it was.

 

How it is. 

A Week of Weather

Monday brought in 10 inches of snow.

Although the lines at the cafeteria were a little longer...

...for most of the natives around here, it was business as usual.

While I was shoveling, the two words that came to mind for the snow were "myocardial infarction." But it didn't take long for that Michigan girl to burst to the surface.Yes, its "good packin!" So I did what you do with that. Right at the street, to make the sourpusses smile.

I finished every household chore that had been on the list since 1997, paid all the bills, read all the blogs on six world wide webs, and ordered seeds for the garden that must be there in the yard, somewhere. I made a pot of veggie chili with every thing in the refrigerator that once was a vegetable and not yet quite a fungus. And then, because I still had energy even after the treadmill, I got out the ladder and washed every single white beam in our bedroom.

It was all so soft and fluffy.

And then came Wednesday. Which was not.

It started like this.

And then turned into this.

And then this.

The tree didn't do any damage but it sure was a scary sound. One of many, actually. And even though we lost power for the day,we have a generator, which worked. So many around us are still without power, which isn't expected to return until Sunday. Folks have trees in their bedrooms, on their cars, at the foot of their driveways. Its pretty sobering.

So, with all chores done from the Monday storm, what else can you do but this?

No, not a Polar Unicorn. I just started on the head.

Back to Beastly Basics

Those of you in other countries may not know that the Northeastern United States has been annexed as a suburb of Greenland. The extreme cold, with its spears of gusting winds, has no mercy for this 200-year-old wooden house. Even little Billy sticks his head out the dog door, pulls it back in with a low moan, and retreats into a little ball on my his futon.

On one hand, the weather blows the winds of gratitude through me. A warm home, plentiful food, and no real need to brave the elements except by choice. That is, as the man from Motown says,some kind of wunnerful. I've been trying to maintain some balance by tooling away at my Gridlock quilt.

But, in truth, these past few months have formed a creative gridlock of theirown. Jude's What If series is really over:no matter how many times a day I click on the icon, she does not post something new there. So I found myself going back through her video class called Patchwork Beasts (which you can still get over on the Spirit Cloth shop). At first, I felt a bit like my 19-year-old self when Ricky broke up with me and all I could do was read his letters over and over again.

But eventually, I came to two realizations. First, Jude did not break up with me. Probably. And second, getting back to basics is a great way to (re)kindle creative embers. I just love her beasts, I just love her way of getting me to find my own.

This time around,I heard something that skipped past me on my first viewing: name your beasts as you create them. It gives them personality and helps define their story. I had a name in mind before I picked the first piece of cloth. So here it is, the first beast of 2014, ready to be stitched and storified.

Meet "The Polar Vortex."

What's in My Tree Today

This bird's nest was in the bare tree right where above where I haul the trash to the street. Mama Bird apparently created wax paper nest liners.

Less mess, I guess.

The Mystery of Patches and the Moth Hole

No, I am not writing a Nancy Drew novel. I am presenting the mysterious tale of my favorite sweater. Which, over last summer, appeared to turn into a food court for moths.

Things were looking grim, until I looked more closely at this.

The sweater, which I bought at a local crafts fair, is an amalgam of a bunch of thrift shop sweaters that the artist recut into one. When I looked closely at the bits and pieces scattered across the top, I thought, "These are bits and pieces scattered across the top. Another word for that is 'patch.'"

So I rummaged through a box of wool squares that I had just been thinking about giving away. My romance with wool quilting was a hot one, but I had broken things off between us awhile back and really didn't see any chance of reconciliation.

But, with a scissors and some wool yarn, the squares became patches.

Patches, meet moth holes.

 And now all I have a sweater again.

But here's the mystery. I patched up every last hole the other night and when I took it out, I see new ones. I don't see moths. I don't see holes in any other wool anything of mine. Does anyone know what's going on? I will just keep patching away until someone answers...