s u b l i m e

my first etsy treasury, entitled "sublime", can be seen
here on etsy.there are just so many lovely shops on etsy it was hard to narrow the selection.

assignments

i love a design challenge! i was asked to make a spinnaker pouch that's tied down to the deck of a dinghy from which the sail is unfurled. so i crunched up the sail, measured the ideal size and started sewing away. i made channels on the bottom to thread lines for tie-downs and corner loops for more tie-downs. when the inspector general came into my sewing nest i was told to add more tie-down loops on the top corners of the pouch. sewing was a challenge after inserting custom cut fiberglass battens into the casings at the top of the bag. it has been tested as sea-worthy by the sailor man and given the thumbs up by his crew.

i'm thriving with my next assignment: 5. i just love a widely interpretable topic like that. one of the first things that came to mind was haiku. now that the haiku has been composed it's off to embroidering....
the goal for this and other new pieces is to be exhibited in november.

hybridized painting

circular knitting needles and an ebony knitting needle crossed with an owl doodle.... that's today's hybrid painting. the owl, oil pastel + oil paints on linen, is the size of an atc (artist trading card). the atc phenomenon is something that i thought i might try and after i had cut the painting to the specified size i placed it on top of another painting temporarily and low and behold there seemed to be a marriage in the works.

i had originally planned to sew the owl painting onto cardstock to make an official atc, but as you can see that's not how she ended up. i'll put her in my etsy shop as soon as i can figure out the postage. i bought a postage scale recently yet every time i use it the machine measures a different weight. gggghhhrrrr!

just messing around

on a drizzly day what else should be done but to mess around in photoshop for a bit? well, i can think of plenty of things that NEED to be done, but that's another story. here's a sketch from museo correr in venezia (seen earlier in this blogorama) layered with our garden leaves + biglietti from my solo trip to europe long ago. just pencil + paper for sketching on that trip. no color. just pure illustrative simplicity. on days like today it is wonderful to be transported back to those cool marble steps, where i sat + sketched, in that unairconditioned museum looking up at that vast fresco. ahh memories are a wonderful thing. i hope to keep them around for a long time.

palette creator

just discovered this cool web tool where you input any photo and the site generates a palette of colors from the photo (with web code numbers). the photo shown here i took at the ferry dock.

details

leek

yummy

i think zucchini buds look like a man eating plant.
echinacea mango meadowbrite....love that color.
i wait all year for these beauties. and oh the fragrance! they get soooo tall! if the painters even brushed these babies i would pummel them. such destruction has been wrought upon the garden by the house painters that i am really stressed out right now. all my shrubs had matured to glorious natural symmetrical orbs. yet now, with the mass of broken branches, they look so beat up. i know for my next garden to place the precious beauties far far away from the house.

Beautiful!

on this super hot day, with the smell of oil stain permeating the air inside our house, an image on the internet catipulted my enjoyment of the day enormously. click here to link to the story of a man taking a flight across the high desert in oregon in his lawn chair. the photograph is just so gorgeous to me, primarily because the background is a favorite spot of our family: the three sisters wilderness in the oregon cascades. i am enraptured by that photo. the sense of grandeur, solitude, freedom, color and adventure are captivating. hope you enjoy it too.

Good Thing I'm Not PMSing Right Now!

....or else i would be screaming at five men today. our house is in the midst of being painted and i knew this would happen. i cut shrubs down and cleared everything back away from the house and yet there is not a superhighway (as desired by those who paint homes) leading to the shingles on the walls. my delicate plants are smashed to smithereens. some were expensive hostas others are groundcovers that have taken a decade to fill in and create a lovely carpet of fragile foliage (ducks feet + trout lilies). my japanese anemones squashed. hardy fuschias flattened. a mountain laurel in full bloom (that was one of the slowest plants to mature to blooming age) broken right down to the roots...the whole plant destroyed. if i were pmsing right now my blood would be boiling. i guess i need to look at it as an opportunity to do some new planting. so long you lovely plants. you were so beautiful while it lasted.

Seed Packet

after saving lots of seed from my garden i thought it would be fun to try to sell some. but after looking into all the regulations governing seed sales i decided to forget it (way too complicated!). this would have been the packaging for one of the marigolds i wanted to offer (with one of my gilded oil paintings of the featured plant).

Rare Sighting

i saw a cedar waxwing today. they are so rare around here. i don't think i've seen one for years. what a beauty! solidly built and hued like a weimeriener with a red dash on the wings and a stripe of egyptian black mascara over the eye. cool sophistication. glad to see they haven't gone extinct here.
it was my lucky day to see it. happy 7/7/07!

Shocked!

i found out yesterday that the bird that i have been calling a rufous-sided towhee for years and years and years has been renamed! it is now called a spotted towhee. the name change isn't recent. the post about the name change i read was dated 1999! sorry birdie for calling you by the wrong name for so long. see cornell's great birding site for details. apparently those that get to rename animals decided that there were two races of rufous-sided towhees, with slight variations in their plumage. they decided that the west coast race would become the spotted towhee and the eastern race would become the eastern towhee. happy new name birdie!
i'd like someone to reclassify me and give me a new name too! i have had it with people writing to mr. terry all the time or calling up insisting to talk him! so what if i rename myself tere? that's ambiguous still but it doesn't gravitate towards the male gender. tere means hi, welcome, + good in estonian, looks slightly exotic, and it could still be pronounced the same way as my current indeterminate name. this is precisely why i wanted to give my children names that were not gender ambiguous.
(spotted towhee, gouache on japanese newspaper mounted on masonite, 2007)

Express Your Liberty!

i can get pretty worked up about national politics. i won't get into all of that right now. it can seem a bit overwhelming to try to change things on a national level. but when i see something in my hometown that i feel is going the wrong direction perhaps, just maybe, there is a chance to change the tide that is flowing in the worst direction imaginable, with a little civic involvement.

when I moved to this town I found an intact charming main street that was thriving with commerce and a center for sociability due to its scale. it was this real, unaltered, genuine small town scale of our city that was a huge lure. this is the scale of towns that have been repeatedly obliterated by planners and city officials with their lust for grandiocity. this is the town, that if you and i don't stop it, will turn into the Walnut Creek (CA) of the northwest: homogenious construction materials, scale of streets way out of touch with real need, vacuous of inherent beauty, overdesigned to where it could be seen in anywhere USA. i don't want anywhere USA in my charming town.

walking the streets of Rome, Paris, + New York...i know what an urban street scale feels like and the proposal for our small town main street far exceeds the scale of streets in these huge cities. cities like Boston and Nantucket town, where settlement has occurred over hundreds of years and where thousands upon thousands of tourists flock every year don't have sidewalks the width that are being proposed here. Nine feet is HUGE! the designer told me today that he wanted it wider than nine feet. he said that he wants strollers to be able to pass each other on the sidewalk. well, today at the greatest gathering of the year on this island i saw two strollers pass each other on our EXISTING five foot sidewalk. there will be no room for delivery trucks to service their intended target as they do now. when you make operating a business more difficult, through design flaws, merchants will not be pleased, and there is risk for business failure. there is just so much that is wrong with this new plan for our main street.

i love trees. i am a dendrophile! but adding the quantity of trees proposed in the plan will substantially diminish sunlight to enter our main street. i love walking in the sun when it is out. in the northwest we don't need to allocate the sort of tree cover to streets that los angeles or pullman might require. adding more trees, as proposed in the plan, will take away much needed parking.

the travel lanes are proposed at eleven feet wide. that is dangerously narrow. if i am going to travel past a hummer (and there are a bunch here) in an eleven foot lane i will be squished into the the parked cars. the plan proposes back-in parking. in neighborhoods in seattle where this occurs drivers can pull up behind you where it is impossible to back into the space where you intended to park. how long will it take to park in this way as opposed to simply pulling into a space head on?

the designers don't want curbs for the sidewalk. do you want to have to worry about your children on the sidewalk when a car is pulling into a space and the driver is not going to stop where they should?

the whole plan is way overdesigned without regard to the real needs of this town. the designer said that they want to make it more people friendly. as is our main street is people friendly. does it really need such a huge overhaul? yes the sidewalks need some help in places but the plan as it was shown today at the street fair does not reflect the real need of our city and will destroy the small town feel.

working in urban design firms throughout the west coast I have seen the destruction of perfect little jewels of towns by city engineers, city council members and paid consultants that believed they had good intentions, but in reality had no training in the design of livable thriving cities, and yet were making decisions that effectively ruined their downtown core. it took millions of dollars in construction budgets and design fees to bring these towns back, through restoration design work, from their botched ill-fated redesigns.

rise up fellow islanders and make your voice heard that you don't want to live in a vision crafted more suitably for California, but you want to shop in a village that is appropriate in scale. there will be a public meeting august 1st. please don't let our sweet town be overwhelmed by this poorly composed main street plan.


as a disclaimer: it is true that i am a licensed landscape architect in three states. it is true that i have worked in urban design/architecture firms in san francisco for projects across the usa and internationally. it is true that i am very fond of the small scale streetscapes of european cities and of old cities in this country. and it is true that i long for the main street of the town that i grew up in before it was destroyed by planners as reconfigured to a scale, again, out of touch with real needs.
happy fourth of july! use your liberty to express yourself.

Rust

i should be doing so many other things right now...wrapping presents, making a birthday cake, weeding, doing the laundry, etc. etc., but sometimes i just want to write. it seems to happen every year on this day. i think to myself, "where did all the time go?", it is just so hard to believe it's july already! i keep thinking that july is a few weeks off and here it is already. time just escapes. i think when i put my blinders on and dive into projects i loose all track of time. i'll think of an idea in the middle of the night and can't wait for daybreak to start working on it. with dawn so early in this wonderful northern summer i get many hours of creating accomplished in one day this time of year. i make lists of things i want to make. will i ever get to them all? i need a bunch of lifetimes.

the photo above is the ceiling on the ferry between new orleans and algiers that crosses the mighty muddy mississippi. it pretty much summarizes me right now, a couple of weeks before the calendar marks another birthday: rusty, yet functional, patinaed through time, but always wanting to do more. me and that boat have a lot in common. when everyone else on board that boat was taking photos over the rail towards the city, i was interested in the vessel itself. the stories it could tell in that amazing city. i was taking a photo above me and other tourists were wondering what was so interesting in that peeling paint and rust. they'd look at my photo spot and turn away toward the view again. i didn't lure anyone else to take the same photo. as i've said before, i love the sublime in life.