A story of Story

Hello everyone.  This may be long and rambling but I want to continue with thoughts from last post.
It started at the exhibit "Girl with the Pearl Earring" (Vermeer).  There were many portraits.  In asking myself which to study in particular, I looked at them from the question of which artist portrayed someone I would feel comfortable talking to.  Guess who won?  Rembrandt!  Sorry, no pictures, but his faces have so much Story in them...so much life and realness and mystery.  I had forgotten. Then we visited the gift shop and of all seemingly incongruous things, I fell in love with a book, Chintz, Indian Textiles for the West, by Rosemary Crill.  It just popped out at me, so I bought it.  Here is one of my favorite pictures from it:

So much activity, so much Story!  As I've become so aware of in Jude's work and online classes.  Because I'm doing alot of piecing work for my grandson's quilt, I have been neglecting day to day Story, and so in asking how I could bring that back into my work, I was looking at Penny's blog, and at her wonderful stitchings of story.  Then I noticed the borders around the Indian textiles:

and I thought, why not create my own sort of border to record daily events, such as:

This includes a friends' medical emergency, Gilly's toenail clipping adventure, a T-cell for a friend who desperately needs lots of them, 10 Chesapeake Retrievers jumping into the water at the dog park, some bees, an Oystercatcher bird, a snake we saw, and so on.  That was week one.  Inside the borders will be another sort of story (maybe)...perhaps trees and a lifetime of pets...a Memorial Day Landscape of sorts.

Here is the Plant Report: the persimmon tree is amazingly full of flowers.  Either I have never noticed them before, which is not impossible, or this year is so dry that it is a bit survival-anxious:

And lastly, this wreath of maple leaves fell, in almost exactly this configuration, into my backyard last week:

So, incomplete as it is, that's the story for now...xoxo, s.

A Hodge-Podge

Hello everyone.  Back from my big circle around the country on the train.  Every day I think of things I want to say to you and then all sorts of things happen and another day has gone by.  So here is a smattering of it all.

It was a good trip...all kinds of weather!  Flooding on the Mississippi.  A blizzard in North Dakota.  Here are some woods in Virginia, on the way home. There was a hollow and every once in a while a dogwood tree or a redbud tree.  We looked down into the hollow from the train...it went on for miles and miles...

I went East across the continent on the California Zephyr and then came home on the Cardinal through Virginia and West Virginia to Chicago.  Then I took the Empire Builder on the northern route through North Dakota, Montana, along the Columbia River to Portland and then down the coast. This shot is approaching Glacier National Park from the East. First the mountains were tiny on the horizon, then bigger and bigger, then we were among them:

My goal on this trip was to fill out the foot square blocks for Liam's quilt...it's taking forever, but I love the way it's coming along and pretty soon I will have 9 of them ready to sew together.  I had to order more blue linen from Glennis and also am going to include some from Deb.  I'm "celebrating the seams", following techniques from Jude, and while I'm trying to keep things more or less square, I'm not worrying about absolute Right Angles.  I think Amtrak would look nice redecorated with hand-sewn quilts:

These pictures are from my camera, but most of the photos I took on the trip were taken on the ipad; however, I have not yet figured out how to post them.  Anyway, I was glad eventually to come home. The marmalade bush said, "Welcome"!

While there is no new picture of Gilly to include, for the animal portion of this report I offer this: just after Grace put up a posting about Buckwheat,  Liam and I stumbled upon one of his relatives in the Princeton Museum:

He has really been around:

That's it for today...I'm hoping to get back to more stories in the sewing...I miss them, and so next time will delve into thoughts about that, and possibly have some examples to show.  Meanwhile, eat well, stay calm, breathe, and get enough sleep.