Nobel Peace Prize

First Wangari and now Al. Yeay!

Read Al Gore's acceptance speech.

Sustainability?

A link from Treehugger directed me to an article in the New York Times by Michael Pollan (an author I admire!) called, Our Decrepit Food Factories. Aside from the alarming struggles that bees go through, amongst other relevations, Pollen focuses on the over/irrelevant use of the word sustainability . This has been a source of irritation to me for over two decades how the use of sustainability, without regard to its essential meaning, is used as a badge of affirmation and elevated status. Michael Pollan is well qualified to speak to the issue and he draws in disparate examples to make his point, as he did so well in the novel The Botany of Desire. Back in my younger designer days there were architects that latched on to the term with such a firm grip that seemed so disingenuous. Today the term has come to have no meaning when our local main street streetscape plan is labeled sustainable. When the the shopping district will be ripped up from end to end, costing millions of dollars (adding 20 years of public debt to the tax roles), and requiring massive amounts of new materials for the redesign of the perfectly functional existing street the term is a joke. Labeling the design sustainable seems to brand it with a healthy honorific glow beneath it's deceptive appearance.

to all

Country Wreath

Only two ingredients this year: variegated holly + hawthorn berries. I love looking around the garden to see what inspires me from year to year. Most years the wreath starts out with a redwood base (oh the fragrance!) and lots of ornamental evergreens are added, but this year I thought I'd keep it super simple. My wreaths are never the perfect circles like you see sold at the grocery store, but hey, this is a home made country garden wreath with character. Good thing I bought some new gardening gloves since the holly prickery leaves and those four inch hawthorn thorns are not something skin wants to come in contact with, YIKES!
I'm surprised that the Crataegus berries are still around. The robins swooped in one day and devoured the Ilex berries, the gorgeous purple Calicarpa berries, the white with a blush of pink Sorbus forestii berries (such a lovely sight in fall with their scarlet and cadmium orange leaves against the white droops of fruit), and the lovely orange Sorbus alnifolia berries. The birds have left the Pyracantha, Rosa, and Crataegus berries for now. I think they are waiting for their sugars to ferment a bit longer for some nice ice wine flavors for a new year's treat. While hanging the wreath at the front door I saw the peregrine again. He took off after a meal in a hurry. Hope it wasn't one of my sweet song birdies that visit my feeders.

Nutcracker

I don't think there could possibly be a better production of the Nutcracker
than by the Pacific Nortwest Ballet.
I looooove the Maurice Sendak stage sets!
What a treat!
I wish I didn't have such a yucky cold right now, so I could have enjoyed it more thoroughly.
Thank you Miss Nini for taking all of us.

Crash

Our tree crashed to the floor in the middle of the night
and some of the prettiest ornaments were smashed to smithereens.
This is just a fraction of the broken glass everywhere.
Oh well.

Let The Decorating Begin!

the signal flags say, "merry christmas"

i love getting out my favorite toys around this time of year. i would play with these for hours on end while growing up (must have influenced my interest in urban design!). whenever i find new tyrolean wooden pieces i just can't resist adding a few more to the village collection.

Happy December!

I love snow!

Thanks

Ahhh, so much yummy food to enjoy in a warm house with healthy family all home for the holiday...that's a lot to be thankful for. Happy belated Thanksgiving to all!
Our new bunny is inside enjoying some running around time. And he has a name that passes the approval threshold of the 4-H bunny girl. She wanted a Spanish name for him so the name that I came up with, Carlos del Huerto, was met with surprising glee. My husband prefers the first name that I gave the little albino, Fred. Fred/Carlos's fur has become much softer now that he has good nutrition. And he is no longer skin and bones as he was found in the garden. Oh, "del huerto" means of the vegetable garden, where I found this little sweetie.
The best part of Thanksgiving is all the left-overs that make for hearty munching for many days with little effort. Yeay. I could go for another piece of Marionberry pie. Wow the crust was perfect thanks to the baking skills of the bunny-girl. She even cut out pieces of crust in leaf shapes to decorate the top of the pie. How festive and beautiful. I'm a proud mama.

Latest Knitting

My latest knitting project is a wisp of a sweater. It's an old Rowan pattern and is made of mohair and merino. The pattern is simple but knits up in a manner that I have never employed before. The merino knits up on a large circular needle and when finished with the row the stitches are slid to the other end and the mohair is picked up again for three rows on smaller straight needles. It will be a cardigan without buttons.
A light spring or summer sweater.

Visual AIDS

The Visual AIDS Postcards from the Edge exhibit is coming up on World AIDS Day, December 1st. Here's my submission for this year.
It's called, "You Found Me After All These Years". I had to give up my white New Zealand rabbit when I went away to college, and when I found a young albino rabbit in our vegetable garden last weekend it was as if my bunny had returned to me after thirty years.

This postcard has a crocheted mohair skirt, needle felted wool hair, cotton batting bunny and cotton + linen applique. This is the third year I have made a postcard for the annual show.

Halloween in a Greedy World

No one ever trick or treats for UNICEF anymore!
Why?
What ever happened to empathy
towards the rest of the world
on the night of total indulgence?

All of our pumpkins were home grown this year and what a crop is has been! We have quite the stash of roasted pumpkin seeds. Pumpkins must have been a revered crop for the Pilgrams. I looked up the nutritional value of those seeds and the protein, fat and calorie content is enormous. What a perfect food machine. Ours will become pies, cookies, muffins and bread.

The Visitor

I looked out the window on Sunday afternoon and saw a little white bunny munching away in the vegetable garden . I went out there right away to try to catch it and to my great surprise it allowed me to get close and pick it right up without any kicking or biting (I'm the bunny whisperer!). He is a young ruby-eyed white something or other (if it's a pure breed it could be a New Zealand). I put up a sign in the neighborhood and called the local animal shelter but no one so far is missing him. He is so sweet and gentle! He came to the right garden to be loved instead of eaten by coyotes.

A Peek in the Garden

Can You Guess What Cities?

Some favorite places.
Oil on canvas.
Each 4 x 4".
©

i migliori a roma

For the November show at Gallery Fraga I made this piece called, "I Migliori A Roma". The theme for the show is five (for the gallery's fifth anniversary). My piece is about my five favorite places in Rome (Pantheon, Palazzo Spada, Campidolio, Fontana di Trevi, Piazza del Popolo). I love maps and have wanted to paint maps for quite some time. This map is in silk, cotton, nylon and rayon however. Il Tevere, the river, offers some orientation to the map along with hints of major roads, parks and Il Vaticano.
Happy Anniversary Kathe + Jeff! Cheers.

Wow, It's Been A While!

Now that I am taking my medication regularly I am back to my regular old self again at last! Gee, it has been quite some time since I have felt normal. I hate taking medicine and so I wasn't taking it consistently, not an effective way to manage pain. So happily, I return to the living again. Funny how inspired I have become since regaining my old self. For the past months I felt so void of inspiration and lust for creativity. But it's back in a big way and I am ready to cook, well, make stuff rather.
Here's what I finished yesterday:It was made without a pattern and in an improvisational mode. Just sewing away and seeing what happens next.Here's the other side that has a zippered pocket with more Kaffe Fassett fabric (ooh that is delightful stuff) as the lining.
The saffron harvest is ongoing. There is something so enchanting about plucking the stamens out of a crocus blossom and then watching those crimson threads stain a pot of risotto.
Before this glorious sunshine disappears I am off to plant some grape hyacinth bulbs imagining their fragrance in spring.

Year of the Pumpkin

It is one fantastic year for pumpkins. Quantity, size, color...it's all there waiting for pies, bread, cookies, and carving. Shown are cinderella pumpkins that ripen to nearly red in ideal years like this one. This is Pistacia chinensis....oh isn't fall delightful!

i fiori del oggi

Questi sono i fiori dello mio giardino.

Last Friday

I started this post last Friday in the midst of exploration of the inner workings of my left boob.

Under the florescent rectangles on the ceiling, in a windowless room of extraordinarily cohesive drab colors, I wait. Another is told she is fine and come back in a year. I wait for the same conclusion.

On the way over, on the ferry and on the walk up steeeep Seneca Street I listened to the soothing voice of Brenda Dane from the podcast Cast On. Interspersed with delightful music Brenda's weekly trek through the world of knitting eased my anxiety as I maintained a quick pace up the hill to the hospital.

Escorted to the radiology room the technician took a quick peek and changed the paddles from normal to small due to the pancake profile of my boob. And then the stance: grab the bar with the right hand, cheek pressed against the machine and then the panels are dialed in closer and then the squeeze until I uncontrollably utter, "ohhhh!" Such a squeeze! Hold my breath. The picture is taken and I'm allowed to breathe again. But wait, the image is all white. Try again. Yet more squeezing. Same result. Then another technician is called in to help figure out why the machine can't read my boob. They decide on manual exposures instead of automatic and the result is far better after a third smashing.

Then the machine is twisted on its side. I'm instructed to put my arm out like I'm swimming (nice thought right about now) and the clamp comes down again until I can't take any more pressure. A man must have invented this torture for women. There has to be a better way than to smash my boob until it is in extreme pain.

So with the films seemingly good for review by the the radiologist I am sent back to the waiting room until the conclusion is made. Cancer or no cancer I'm waiting to hear. I am ready for either one. In the tiny windowless waiting room, with three other women, we all wait. There is a steady stream of women into the changing stalls, stripping their upper half and donning a striped gown, tied in the front. I make a big happy bow on my gown. I'm sitting in the oddest elevated chair and joke as I enter the room, "oh good I get the high chair". Joking in this environment isn't exactly what these women want to hear right now. How long will it take for my results? I'm told to keep my gown on just in case. In case? Should I start another Cast On podcast? Will it be another hour? The thought of Brenda's voice helps.

I didn't sleep very well last night, as usual, and when my kitty crawled up on me I started to pet her and the pain in my chest seemed to melt away. I guess I need to bring my cat with me wherever I go for pain relief. Maybe that's why Paris Hilton always has such a blissful look on her face, because of her little dog companion. But does she still carry that pup around anymore? I thought I read that she got rid of it.

And here I wait, with two women now. One was escorted away for her films. What will be the result? But what I really want to know is why I have gripping pain in my chest.

I've got so much catching up to do. Lots of pieces have yet to be started for my November show. There seems to have been a never ending stream of needs in the last couple of months.

And then my name is called and I'm given the come here finger signal. I think that can't be good since I heard another woman's all clear diagnosis right in front of everyone else. The technician said the radiologist described the polka dots on my film as "probably benign". This is not quite what I had expected. I wanted to have a black or white conclusion. Not a "probably", that leaves reasonable doubt. They want me to come back in six months to see if anything has changed. So in the mean time I live with do I or don't I? Uncertainty. I want concrete conclusions, no kinda sorta maybe. And now over a Chinese chicken salad, next to a scrambling three year old, I just want to cry. Cry about my boy I left at college yesterday, cry about uncertainty, cry just because I'm tired.

Forget crying how about a mood swing by trying on a designer dress. And it has to be one of the most gorgeous dresses I have ever tried on. By Nicole Miller. I felt dreamy. Perfect colors. Soft luxurious exotic fabrics. And that dress, that lovely dress, melted away my anxiety and mad me feel fabulous. Thank you Nicole.

Population 300

In the tiny town of Wheeler, population 300, I found a fantastic fabric store that was loaded with delightful offerings in this Oregon coastal hamlet. I wish our local fabric store, in a town 76 times the size of Wheeler, could offer such an array of goodies. Creative Fabric has thrived in that tiny town for over 26 years. Thanks to my family for indulging my need to stop there. It was great.

Manzanita

i had never been to that part of the oregon coast before. what a treat to slip into a charming town for a few days in a delightful cabin within walking distance of the shore! the timing was perfect for warm temperatures and the added bonus of shopping at the local farmers market for fabulous produce. what a great town! wish i could stay for the rest of my life. but i know what the oregon coast can be like in the winter, gales over 100 miles an hour. yes, but on days like those we spent there the desire to spend more more more time amoungst the sand drifts and rustling beach grass is great. and who would have guessed that in a nearby town, wheeler, with a population of only 300, that there would be a superb fabric store that has been there for over 25 years. more later...daybreak on manzanita beach
the yummily soft sand at sunrise
watercoloring at the beach

Knitting in the Garden

Waiting around has its advantages, especially when something tangible is produced. Although with this pattern I have had some major ripping seasons. One misplaced stitch throws the whole thing into chaos. I have to train myself to check each row before continuing on to the next row, instead of blissfully knitting for twenty rows and then taking a look. There is great satisfaction in solving a knitting riddle. Several of my stitch markers had slipped under yarn-over stitches and fouled up the whole sequence of the pattern. I finally figured out the problem and am now happily knitting again instead of the dreaded rip. This yarn is delightful to work with. I bought it at an alpaca farm in Oregon, near Mt. Hood (alpaca babies have to be some of the cutest things on earth!), even though I found when I came home that it is also available at my local yarn shop (but not in the color I chose). The color seems camouflaged amongst the geraniums, so I guess it will feel like I'll have a garden wrapped around my neck once it is finished. I bought two skeins of the yarn, not knowing what I would make with it, and I will continue the triangle until I run out of yarn.

great find

maybe not everyone's top choice at the biggest garage sale in the state, but for me, finding this assortment of metal zippers in their original packaging was fantastic. at last after so many long years of waiting in their package some have been freed to finally be functional. a couple of the zippers were custom made. i also found very old wood frames that are waiting for paintings (when will i get a chance to do some summer painting?!). several years ago i bought a big box of basket making supplies. i made one basket but need to revisit that box and make some more baskets(so i can have more room in my sewing area).

no presents?

The invitation said no presents, please, to a birthday party. Doesn't everyone like to get presents? I know I do. Anyway I like to make presents and here is the latest. I recycled a worn out shirt to line the purse.

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.