Can you see it?

This past weekend Jeff and I took a couple of days off and had a mini-vacation. It’s our 11th anniversary (when did decade two happen!?), and it was going to be hot in SF, so we figured – why not? So we went.

There must be hundreds of beautiful places for a weekend vacation within two hours of where we live, but after due consideration of the weather and the possibility of the San Francisco Hordes descending upon our chosen location, we chose a small Sonoma Coast town a couple of hours north of here. We picked the town and the inn sight-unseen, but as it turns out, we chose quite well. The town was fairly quiet, it was cool and breezy, we got to go beach hiking, we met the owners of every single lovely place we went, there was a surfeit of Sonoma County wine and we even got a surprise fireworks show before the fourth to boot. WIN.

In retrospect, it was a bad idea to drive ALL the way back down the Pacific Coast Highway to SF, due to the aforementioned SF Hordes. It wasn’t too horrid in the end because we were driving toward the city on the third instead of away from it. Just as a Public Service Announcement, if you’re in the area don’t ever think it’s a good idea to go to Stinson Beach on a holiday, unless you think it’s a grand idea to sit in a seven-mile, four-hour traffic jam on a small, windy two-lane road. That’s not my idea of a good time.

When I got home and was downloading the pictures from the trip I came to a sudden realization – I take most of my pictures with the idea of turning them into quilts! No kidding. Not ALL the time, but most of the time. A very few pictures I take are actually to remember a place that I went or a person or because something’s amusing, but I have quilting on my mind enough that I seem to keep it in the back of my mind whenever I have a camera in my hand. So to illustrate, all the pictures in this post are ones I took with a quilt pattern in mind. Can you see the quilts?

The pictures I take with the idea of a quilt in mind generally …

• have fairly simple structure,
• focus on a single element or the play between two elements,
• are somewhat abstract,
• have a strong message of some kind of sensory or emotional “feeling,” and
• usually feature a high-contrast color scheme.

I think that learning to frame a photograph well is analogous to learning to choose subjects for any kind of representational art – quilts, paintings, whatever. You have to decide what you want to show out of the millions of elements competing for your attention in real life. In the photo below it was really windy and chilly, there were plants with thorns that kept sticking my elbow, I was super worried about getting a sunburn (I did), the gorgeous Pacific Ocean was crashing at my back, there were butterflies flitting around, and I was up to my armpits in these flowers and could barely see the trail, which had an unnerving tendency to suddenly disappear over sharp dropoffs. But what I chose to show edits out most of that in favor of a simple field of yellow and blue.

Out-of-focus pictures are often better for the purpose of quilting (larger pixels), so sometimes if I really do want to make a quilt out of one of these photographs I will edit the photo in a few different out-of-focus or otherwise edited ways to think about composition and pattern. Other parts I’ll crop out and put in high, sharp focus to concentrate on the possibilities for embroidery.

I may or may not make a quilt out of any of these (I think the fireworks and the yellow/blue ones are the most likely) but I do keep a scrapbook of possibilities that I add to on a regular basis. If I started now working full-time I probably wouldn’t finish all of my ideas in my lifetime! I guess it’s good that sometimes it’s enough for me to just think about them.

Hope you’ve had a lovely holiday weekend if you’re in the US, or just a lovely weekend period anywhere!

Winter Storm

If you’re ever down in Monterey, I recommend Asilomar Beach. It’s one of the prettiest beaches that I’ve been to. In winter, anyway. It’s probably not bad in summer, either, but the waves won’t be as fierce, and the sky won’t be as brooding. I think I rather prefer days like this on the beach to sunny, warm days. The ocean just seems to have more personality during the winter, more insistence. I wanted to sit there all day and watch the waves and birds and anemones, but it rained and I had to go back so I could go to work.

If you go up the road a bit, there’s another beach (closed to the public) that’s reserved for harbor seals. Despite chilly rain, these fat seals were perfectly content to lie on the sand and sleep (and wallow). I’m always amazed at how well animals are adapted to their environments. I saw a few seals playing in the water, and one baby seal who tried to beach himself using the waves and ended up facing back out to sea. He didn’t seem worried.

Just two more days of work to survive, and then I have a whole week off. I’m going to enjoy the hell out of all of those days. I have been trying not to bog myself down with too many plans, to not get to a point where I’m stressed about how much I have to do, or think about that bag full of stuff from Home Depot that I need to do something with. I’m hoping one entire day involves sitting on the couch drinking hot tea wrapped in a blanket watching movies and crocheting. I’ve gotten another 20 hexagons completed on my blanket, but the shawl I began in November languishes, and most of my other sewing projects are currently stuffed untidily and sadly into a grocery bag.

At least the sewing machine is now usable. That hasn’t been true for four months. I’d like to spend another entire day sewing next week, maybe two. I’m close to having everything put away, giving me plenty of room to work. I arranged my fabrics on a shelf in rainbow color order the other night, and it was lovely to see all of them again. I am pulling some out, for I have curtains and cushions to make, a jacket to finish, a quilt to complete. I did a lot of sewing work last year that I never talked about here, things that I started but didn’t finish because of time constraints.

I wish I had caught the clear green-blue of these waves better as they danced around the rocks, but the day was too dark, and the rain and wind much too insistent. Storms like these, and the dark and cold, make me want to take a nap. I find storms oddly comforting. I could have curled up in the car and listened to the rain and had the best sleep of my life, I think.

This will be my last post until next week, so I hope you and yours have a good holiday and safe travels, if that’s what you’re doing. I neglected to wish anyone a happy Hanukkah, which has now long since passed. I personally favor the solstice as a winter marker, but that’s also now past. Either way, have a lovely weekend.

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.