Onward

There has been a bit of blueness here, but it is moving on. Here's Alex with his lap-robe.  I think he liked it.  That's Agnes' tail in the foreground.

After Thanksgiving I sat on the couch for 3 days and made bee earrings...

 

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worked on some patches for Liam's quilt (the velvet in the background is from Diane Cransac,

inspired by Jude's methods, started a penguin for Liam's quilt:

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and wrapped some gifts.  Last weekend I went to a pottery sale and watched a friend wrap pots in newspaper upon which her husband had been practicing calligraphy.  A lightbulb went off in my head and I thought rather than buying more paper, I would wrap gifts with newpaper embellished with seasonal poems, like this:

I know that the calligraphy has a way to go, but still....!

That's all for now...

Heat Wave

It's been warm, verging on Hot, here.  It does not feel like November.  But with the new light, waking up early comes more readily.  Yesterday I awoke feeling I was being watched.  There was a shape on the studio roof:

The passage of time revealed that the owner of the shape was...Buddy!

Buddy is a special visitor because, believe it or not, he once saved Edgar's life.  That is a story for another time.  Edgar doesn't feel especially grateful and spends a lot of time in his dish, especially during the heat wave:

So, while all this has been going on, I've been stitching away on the farm cloth...now it has a backing and just needs a little more quilting.  Here is the bottom left corner:

It needs to be done by Thanksgiving...so far, so good...

Water over the dam

We've been having rain!  The lake is spilling over...

I've been thinking about my carbon footprint, which I can't photograph, so, after splashing in some puddles, I took this:

The persimmons are orange-ing up:

 

Here is the first to ripen. Yum!

Madam Spider, perhaps disguising herself as a persimmon?  She used to be yellowish.

Lately I've been working on the farmcloth, hoping to finish soon.  Here are some details...the edges are nearly all done, then I have to back it with flannel.  At first the denim was trying my patience, but now I take each stitch slowly and individually; not surprisingly, we're getting along better!

The Mystery of the Sneaky Harvester

Yesterday, I went out to the farm in the Valley and passed a field of pumpkins, waiting to be picked:

Today, I was working a little on this:

 

and this:

When suddenly I looked up at the apple tree, and saw THIS lying on a branch:

Then, looking over at my beautiful sunflower, my first EVER, I saw this:

Someone has been harvesting my sunflower!  Maybe it was that cheeky squirrel who quarrels with Agnes. Or maybe it was the crow who hides out in the liquidamber tree singing strangely percussive chants.

Whatever it is, I thought I better quick put up a couple of photos of my sunflower whilst it is still partially around.  Here it is as a very very young sunflower blossom:

And here is what is thankfully still there:

Happy October dear readers.

Wild creatures and the farm cloth

While strolling through the park one day, I photographed this duck because he looked so funny and squat.

Then this fellow and I startled one another at a curve in the path...he bounded off and we considered each other at a safer distance...

I'm making the farm cloth for my farm friends and this week I added their house and began to applique their pictures on...

Alex, upper left, is 96 now.  This week his older sister Louise died.  She was a very dear friend.  Although she was 98, good-byes are hard.  The family is gathering now for the memorial...

These fish are appliqued to the bottom of the farm cloth.  Alex has fought hard for California farmers water rights.

Switching gears

Yesterday we drove out to visit my dear friends at the farm.  Lunch is always amazing but this corn particularly so.  It was so sweet and so Yellow...I wish I could capture the color...pure sunshine.  Oh my!

I pulled off the road on the way home to take this picture or maybe just to linger a little longer. It's looking west in the Central Valley toward the Coastal Mountains.

Am going to get back to work for a while on the Farm Cloth...here's the project:

And here's another one that I stitched on the train going East and need to do some more work on.  It's of a mysterious island nearby:

So life is not boring, but all that driving is kind of tiring and here's Agnes at the end of the day:

What came out in the wash

I had a surprise when I took the farm cloth out of the washer/dryer (it is all one machine). The denim made these interesting pointy things on the sides, and on the bottom edge:

It did this!  After I get the loose threads tacked down, I'll wash it in my neighbor's machine with fabric softener and see if the denim behaves differently.  I like those funny points.  Jude's cloth to cloth class starts Saturday and I'm very very much looking forward to it.

This is Agnes at the dog park with her gigantic Mother's Day Biscuit, presented to her by her friend Pat.  She worked her way laboriously and lovingly through about half of it, then a Big Dog sauntered over and in one quick bite, swallowed the remainder.  Agnes was a little perplexed...she didn't see it happen...one minute it was there, and when she looked back it was gone, but it didn't spoil her day one bit.  She looked up at Pat and wagged her tail and pretty soon she had another homemade biscuit to gnaw on.

Raindrops and gravity

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I've been working on the rain portion of the farmcloth/laprobe.  I wasn't happy with the raindrops so I tried imagining  the path that each drop follows...and that it must be very curvy due to wind currants and birds and airplanes getting in the way while gravity is always pulling pulling.  Here's a close-up:

The raindrops themselves are little rectangles of starched home-dyed silk!  The paths are made of unfurled yarn.  I don't know what will happen when this is washed, but probably should find out soon, as it is supposed to be utilitarian.

Lo and behold, here are some local cormorants.  Before seeing them nesting at Sea Ranch, I was unaware of their social nature.  I have only noticed them swimming individually in the past, but yesterday at the dog park a crowd of them swam by.  Sometimes they would all dip underwater at the same time, vanishing completely and then all pop up again more or less together.

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