blissfulwhen i planted little shrubs from cuttings and young trees a dozen years ago i imagined that someday it would look as it does now. patience and anticipation are what guide a garden designers hand. i have to stop and soak in the image from my kitchen window as the collision of bloom from buttery corelopsis, forsythia, cornus mas, ribes sanguineum to that wonderous prunus 'accolade' just define a perfect moment. i know while i stand there in ecstasy that the image will change soon from its peak to the sublimity of falling petals and then ultimately the focus will turn elsewhere in the garden. but for that brief moment every little problem melts away as i gaze upon those soft colors, spellbound.

grocery bagjust finished my new grocery bag. it's made out of a weird crinkly fabric, with cotton embellishments, that is quilted with cotton batting sandwiched inside to give it some body. this was a fun quilting project, on a reasonable scale, after doing that monster quilt.
grocery bags can be more than utilitarian. they can be a fashion accessory.

San Francisco has passed an ordinance that will ban petro-based plastic bags from being distibuted at businesses. I suggest that our city council consider adopting an ordinance similar to San Francisco's that reduces pollution and dependence on petroleum based products by requiring environmentally friendly bags to be used in our city.
IKEA has made a bold environmental statement by charging for their plastic bags in an effort to encourage customers to bring their own bags and curb waste. I think it is time our city take the lead in the northwest and require compostable bags or renewable material bags (paper or natural fibers) to be given out at stores here as an option to bringing your own bag while shopping.
Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Maathai has taken the lead in Kenya to ban plastic bags there in an effort to curb a vast pollution and related health problem.
Waste can be reduced for our landfills and our environment can become cleaner without discarded plastic bags floating around endlessly. As those bags end up in our natural areas they pose a danger to endemic wildlife. Please encourage your council members to take a bold move towards a greener future and reduce waste.

i've been wanting to mess around with collage for a while so i thought i'd make a digital collage of bits of my paintings for the illustration friday submission theme of "i spy". next i'll try with the tangibility of papers + glue.

finished!

now i have to return to that gustav klimt quilt that i started years ago.

requiem for a quilt storeup in port townsend today for a regatta and then popped in town to visit my favorite quilting store in washington, quilter's cove. walked up and down the street.
it was in that block, but where?
was i crazy?
gone.
the owner retired, so said the owner of edge to edge. she made it all the more distressing adding that there were huge discounts on all the fibers just before the store closed. weird...i was on their mailing list. sad. i had bought many fabrics from that store over a decade.
now that store is a memory stitched in the works that were made from their fibers.

patience

is a virtue
i submitted this painting
(koura, oil on canvas)
in oct. 2004
for publication in exhibition magazine,
the literary/art journal of the b.i. arts + humanities council,
and i just heard today that it will
be published in their april 2007 issue.

happy spring!!!!

almost finished quiltingnext is to sew on the binding

...............

birdies on the last day of winter

steller's jay

chestnut-backed chickadee

ring-necked pheasant

let me know if you know what kind of gull this is

the furry buds have popped open

and now the sweetest fragrance
of star magnolias
is perfuming the air.

here the cherry tree creates a watercolor of petals as background.

today's garden

prunus 'accolade'

wild mustard

ribes sanguineum alba

ribes sanguineum

ribes sanguineum

hummer magnet

katakanasince i ran out of japanese hankies to fill out the quilt matrix
i painted a quilt square with my name in katakana.
quilters are always supposed to sign and date their quilts,
so i signed it right on the front in big black inky script.
a friend from college taught me how to write my name
in katakana(the script used for foreign names + places).
when i was little my sister's friend
(whose parents were in ww2 internment camps)
taught me how to say, "i don't speak japanese"
in japanese, along with a bunch of other japanese phrases.
i would love to be able to sit in on the classes
taught at the high school and learn
how to write and speak japanese.
then i would be able to read all the
fabulous craft books i've been buying at uwajimaya.
i hope that mariko, our japanese exchange student,
when i was little, will enjoy seeing this quilt
when it is finished since she gave all the hankies to my mother over many years.

ribes sanguineum

i love this plant!
i have white ones, palest pink ones, rose pink ones, but i think this one is my favorite.
it is not a named variety.
maybe i should clone it and name it.
flowers are such perfection right now.
they are at the stage when the buds are plump and colorful yet not fully opened...my favorite stage in a flower's life cycle. the grape hyacinths are so lovely in perfect shade of blue. lilac buds are swelling with anticipation. the cherry is gorgeous.
the fuzzy buds of star magnolias are shut tight still.
the fur on their calyxes look like little white hamsters.
the buds have broken on all the willows this year and so i've missed another year of harvesting their beautifully colored branches for basketmaking.
too many projects i want to do all at the same time.
i need about four lifetimes to accomplish everything i want to do.
if i am reincarnated will my new self just continue what i have in mind?
or maybe i'll be a geologist, a profession that i could have readily enjoyed.
i wonder if i am related to the richter that invented the earthquake magnitude scale, since my great grandmother's name was richter. additionally there's gerhard richter, the german contemporary artist, that would cool if i were related to as well. hmmm.

machine quilting
day 2

starting the machine quilting
day 1

just finishedthe back side of my japanese hankie quilt. now the huge task of sandwiching the front, batting and back together then quilting the whole mess. it has been quite a while since i have worked on this quilt. the front can be seen here.

rugged beautytalk about a plant that can take it...
these beauties have fought off large hail pellets,
three days of snowfall, + rain,
and still hold up under the pressure.
the best of the spring bulbs!

this has to be a record! three days of snowfall in a row! only today it's the big fat falling straight down to the ground kind of flakes. no sunshine today so it looks entirely different than yesterday. today it is a purely winter scene. i'm glad we fed the rabbits before it started coming down this morning. you can get pretty wet coming in after those huge flakes cling to your coat. wow those flakes are huge today!

okay, off to an entirely different subject: sewing/sailing
my son said to me yesterday, "haley has this really cool mat that she can change on so her socks don't get wet." he knows that any hint of a sewing project and i am on it right away. give me a problem and i will find a solution. or at least try. so i gathered up all my polar fleece scraps (i knew that some day all those bits would become useful), the waterproof pack cloth that i bought a long time ago for sailing bags, and some pack cloth for the binding. so without concern for style, just trying to piece enough scraps to make a continuous fabric that was big enough for the mat, i stitched away. it needed a bit of embellishment so the S went on there just to make it personalized. it should be nice and soft to stand on out there on the dock.

ahhh snow on the first day of march!

i love being an island within an island.
here, way at the top of the hill, we sometimes have the benefit of snowfall when it occurs nowhere else on the island. tromping through the soft crunch of snow under foot in the early morning sunshine my mission was to chop up some firewood from a tree i just felled.
was i in vermont?
oh i love the sound and feel of snow under my gardening shoes!
such softness in my quiet strides.
only the nearby stellar's jay breaking the perfect silence.

update:it's snowing again,
yet i can see blue sky to the west!
it's the dry tiny kind of snow that falls so gently.
what a magical day!

eucalyptus girlmaking these bead dolls is so much fun. with the patterns in japanese they're stretching my underdeveloped brain to figure out how to make them. here miss marigold, named for her flowered skirt, stands atop my harvest of eucalyptus branches. i love the smell of eucalyptus, which transports me back to my roots in northern california. i am thrilled to have hardy varieties of eucs that can take the cold temps here. i copice one every year yet the other one i had let grow into a big tree until this year. the trunk was being ravaged i think by deer rubbing their antlers on it. i thought that with the cambium layer of the trunk ripped away from a sizeable area that the tree might become susceptible to a blow-down so i chopped it down to a newly copiced stump. it will likely resprout (eucs are tenacious buggers) and i will be able to keep it at a manageable size from now on, and harvest the lovely red petioled leaves. i have got to paint those leaves one of these days!

viburnum bodnantensethroughout the winter this sweet shrub, near the livingroom window, brings a little happiness into long grey days. its fragrance, if weather permits to enjoy, is a delightful reward for venturing outside.