California and other stories
So what I was doing three weeks ago before things in my life got sidelined, derailed and permanently altered was trying to relax. Ironically enough. I was on vacation in California, seeing what there was to be seen and visiting my brother. Although I’ve been to 42 out of the 50 US states now, I’d mostly missed CA except for one trip to San Diego, but I was too young to really remember it. It turns out that California has a fair amount of spectacular in it, kinda like this:
If that’s not your cup of tea, perhaps you’ll like the quiet coastal lighthouse wreathed in fog just down the road.
I mean really, who wouldn’t like this sort of coastline? Even though I grew up near Texas beaches, there’s no comparison with this. The truth is that many Texas beaches are rather smelly, sad and dirty affairs due to all the offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. They don’t look like this. Or smell like this. Have I mentioned the gigantic and pungent eucalyptus trees near the coast? And the pine trees? It seemed like no matter where we went, it smelled like awesome.
Anyway, we went all over the place from San Francisco to Felton to Santa Cruz to Monterey to Big Sur and back up to Nevada City and Truckee and Lake Tahoe. We encountered quite a bit of wildfire in our travels, first the Lockheed Fire and then the Yuba Fire. I spent half the week with ash falling on me and smoke in the air. This, for example, was what I saw north of Big Sur near Carmel-by-the-Sea (cough cough hack hack).
Big Sur is beautiful and dramatic and slightly nerve-wracking, but overall much of that stretch of Highway 1 is quite peaceful, and there’s more farmland along the coast than I expected. A lot of beautiful vegetables that really made me want to cook quite desperately. When we got to Jeremy’s cabin in the Sierra Nevada, I cooked quite a bit, just to relax, because by that time we knew Audrey was really sick and we were upset at being so far away. In the end, I left my brother food for a week I cooked so much. The news also made me quite weepy about all animals, like this snoring/barking sea lion. They are really more like watery dog-like beings.
So did I mention Lake Tahoe is spectacular? My brother sat out and contemplated it one afternoon.
We did also spend time in San Francisco proper wandering all over the place from the Mission District up through the Castro then up Market to downtown, and up to the wharf and stuff. We treated ourself to Greens restaurant one night for some fine vegetarian cooking, which was quite easily the best meal I’ve ever had in my entire life. When down in the Castro, after having some extraordinary coffee at Philz we sort of stumbled upon ImagiKnit, whereupon I purchased six skeins of Pima Fresca yarn (bulky pima cotton) from Queensland Collection in chambray. I wasn’t planning on that, but it was sooo pretty, and on sale … and as you can see, by that point I was weak. You see, ImagiKnit separates plant and animal fibers, and also labels stuff very clearly instead of just stuffing it all in. Usually I end up with itchy, red hands from picking things up to see what they are, and it was so enjoyable to go to a yarn shop without having an allergic reaction from handling wool.
It was great to see my brother, who I’m very close to, and neat to see his job. He does utility pole inspections in various guises, part of making sure the electric infrastructure in parts of California is operational, that they’ve cleared stuff out to avoid more fires, that nothing’s going to fall down and kill people or leave them without power. It’s neat. If sometimes dangerous for the enormous ants, unruly ranch animals, cantakerous rural folks, occasional cliff hiking and of course, the Very Large Splinters. Like this one.
I also got to see my nearly-three-year-old cousin, and her mom my first cousin, and her husband, and they are all very lovely and exuberant people who live in a lovely seaside community that most of us would give our left arms to live in. We just haven’t figured out places like this exist, and that you can really live there. They fed us, and sheltered us, and I’m afraid we were very upset and poor guests one night, so we’ll have to make up for that later.
So that, in a nutshell, was my vacation, which went awry halfway through, but was still quite memorable for both Jeff and I. I’m sure it will pop up in future art/craft projects. And now I leave you with one last classically-Californian-sunset-but-seriously-it-can’t-really-be-that-pretty picture. Because really, it is that pretty.
Flowers for my Mom
This past weekend Jeff and I made a trip to Houston to visit our respective mothers. Since I work on Mother’s Day, we were a week late, but the love is still there, right?
So for this past Mother’s Day I decided to make my mother a gift of one of her favorite things, violets. I wouldn’t have thought of it except one of my favorite crochet designers – June Gilbank – provided a lovely pattern for a cute little pot of violets just in time to make them for the day. It didn’t take too long to make it, it was fun, and it turned out so, so well! June is one of my favorite designers because her patterns are deceptively simple, but just exactly right.
As you maybe can see from the picture, my mother loves violets, and as long as I can remember has grown lovely examples on her kitchen windowsill. So the idea was to make her a special, permanently flowering version of them. I took June’s pattern and altered it just a wee bit, and it became not just a pot of violets, but a basket for jewelry.
I made sure to use fuzzy green yarn (Jiffy yarn in Avocado) for the leaves, because I always loved the soft velvet of violet leaves. Apart from that, the main difference from the pattern was that I split it in half to make a basket. The original design is all one piece and stuffed with fiberfill. In order to change it, I judiciously applied plastic cross stitch canvas, some matching stash fabric and a bit of fiberfill.
The first step was to cut out circles of plastic canvas to stiffen the flower top “lid” and the bottom of the pot. Then I sewed a rectangle of the canvas into a circle shape to stiffen the pot sides. I also sewed the circle for the pot bottom to the sides. I used plastic canvas because (1) I could sew it and (2) plastic doesn’t disintegrate over time like cardboard does and (3) it’s waterproof.
Next I got a large circle of coordinating fabric from my stash and stuffed it into the little basket made from plastic canvas. I stitched the fabric to the canvas with yarn around the top, and then I tacked the fabric to the bottom of the pot with four tiny stitches, also using yarn. That leaves you with a basket lined with fabric. Then I trimmed some of the major excess off the outside, still leaving a considerable amount so it’s fabric-lined inside and out. Here’s the lining basket after sewing (and a lovely picture of the Men’s Health magazine I was using as a table).
The final step was to stuff the fabric basket into the yarn basket and smooth the fabric down, and tack them together with matching yarn. Voila! fabric lining inside and out. Creating a lovely, structured, lined basket capable of holding the most lovely of jewelry, if I do say so myself.
I did something similar to structure the “flower lid” by adding a circle of plastic canvas to the bottom of the lid. I also obviously added the brown lid bottom to suggest the dirt the flowers are growing in. In the original there is no need for this bottom. Apart from the canvas, the lid is mostly stuffed with fiberfill. The crocheted bottom structured with plastic canvas is the lovely structural finishing touch that makes the lid match the bottom in shape and style. I don’t want to say more beyond that, because I don’t want to give away June’s clever pattern.
I also added a “lip” to the top and bottom of the crocheted pieces in white by adding two rows – I crocheted around twice in both the back loop and front loop of the last row of the top and bottom. The point of the lip is to create a way to fit the basket together in a neat way. (sorry for the fuzzy picture below) I did this before attaching the fabric. You can see the bottom of the lid including the “dirt” bottom and lip in the picture of the two halves also.
So that was my Mother’s Day gift to my mom! She loves jewelry and violets and purple, what better way to tell her her crafty daughter loves her than to make something out of the things she loves?
Just a few Midwestern photos
So remember I made that quilt, and I said that it was inspired by Iowa, in particular the farming area where my parents are from and where I spent a lot of time when I was growing up. Well, it was on my mind because I took my vacation there this fall, and went to a harvest festival in the town my grandparents live in. So I thought I’d show you where the inspiration came from.
So yeah, the inspiration is obvious. I can’t really emphasize enough how much my summer and winter trips influenced me while I was growing up. Even my family didn’t know that until I said it on this blog, though. I’m not a particularly communicative person, apparently.
Southeastern Iowa is beautiful. This particular area is close to the Mississippi River, which is my favorite body of water (I’ve even swum parts of it, which I think about now and – ew! snakes! fish! tugboats!), and has, as far as I’m concerned, the best weather ever. And if you think Iowa is fla, it’s really not (cue Dar Williams song the Hills of Iowa).
The fall leaf photos you’re seeing now are from Geode Park maybe 10 minutes from my grandparents. It’s a state park around a lake. It would be a rather forested area if it weren’t for all that farmland, but all that farmland makes that an easy fact to overlook. They have maple trees, obviously, which are my second favorite tree behind aspens. Aspens win because there’s nothing like sitting in an aspen grove on a breezy spring day and listening to the leaves chime. I recommend a porch on a mountainside in an aspen grove in Colorado. Really.
I had a pretty relaxed time – went hiking a couple of times, did some sewing, went shopping with my grandparents, and my aunts and cousin came down over the weekend. There was a parade and lots of food (and the amount of baking was ridiculous). One day I took a trip down in to Illinois to visit where my other grandparents used to live, and where they and many other relatives are now buried. I don’t get many chances to wander around there, but I wanted to show Jeff around, because I have a lot of memories there, too.
I think it’s interesting, as I get older, to think about the things that ended up influencing the way I think about the world now. I’ve lived in a lot of places that I think have influenced me. Yet all the factors seem so disparate, and sometimes I think end up existing in sort of tenuous harmony in my mind. In my adult life I’ve chosen to live in three of North America’s largest cities, yet when my mind seeks artistic inspiration it turns to … pastoral Iowa? Okay. Sure. Maybe if I lived in pastoral Iowa you’d see me drawing my inspiration from Manhattan, then?
In any case, fall in Iowa certainly offers a lot in the way of busy farmers working to get hundreds of acres of grain corn and soybeans in before the first freeze. It was a very wet summer and this put off planting and caused Other Bad Agricultural Things (clearly I’m not a farmer). I visited a stretch on the Illinois side of the Mississippi where the fields had a foot of standing water – anyone remember when it flooded in Iowa? That water hasn’t all gone away months later.
Hey it’s me! I’m big on detailed self-portraits, eh? This is sunset on the Mississippi … it’s about a mile wide here. *sigh* Such a beautiful river. In summer there’s a nice little farmstand on the other side near there.
Now that I’m finally getting to taking care of pictures and trip stuff, and my 65+ backlogged emails, and my office-craft area looks less terrifically and horribly messy, I might actually get back to that crafting thing. Unfortunately, you know what one result of my big House Cleanout was? I found all those pesky clothes I’ve been meaning to mend, hem and alter. Isn’t that just a terrific joy? </sarcasm> I have sworn I will get to some of this though, and not just create new messes, which seems to be what I’m most skilled at.
Until I make it back to the computer, I bid you adieu
