unwelcome guest

baby copperhead

After a week of daily thunderstorms the sun broke through midday and I was able to get in a swim which was mostly pool cleaning.

Just as I reached up onto  the deck for my float I noticed this little bugger hunkered down under it.

I knew him for the dangerous character he was immediately but, at only a foot long, no great threat if respected.

 With Colin's help I caught him in the pool net and we let him go over the fence into the woods where he should conduct his snakely business down by the creek.

on the fiber front

Isn't this just wonderful? It makes me want to put up Christmas lights in the crape myrtles.

Now that I have passed out of  yesterdays  aggravation, I've gone back to hanging stars on my firmament again. That Chandelier tree has me thinking some fireflies would work here too.  My Goddess complex is full blown. Writing fiction will do that for you too.

I'm not long on exotic or task-specific tools; I've rolled a perfectly good pie crust with the bottle of Canadian Club I had just poured from for the filling -why dirty up my maple rolling pin?

But a friend recently thought of me while she was at a tag sale and snagged a set of Gingher shears and snips with the guards and gifted them to me -what a treat! We are rife with deadly weapons!

 I have the same attitude with computer software. Free is good and if it does what I need it to do, why shop around or upgrade, but today I bit the bullet and downloaded Scrivener  for my writing projects. I kept reading good things about it and I don't even have a fully functional copy of Word anymore, not that there is any comparison. The best tools are the ones that get out of the way and just let you do the work.

Thanks again, Kara!

just because you can doesn't mean you should

Out of the corner of my eye and lurking on the pile just under the main design wall is this. Sixty-five square inches of "WTF was she thinking?"

Well, she wasn't thinking anything beyond how satisfying it is to needleturn and appliqué chunks of hastily hacked out  hand dyed damask to an equally delicious vintage damage tablecloth. It's a good thing I don't take this attitude with raw cookie dough.

How many hours evaporated and what was learned? Too many and nothing.
Not only are these pieces invisibly stitched ever 3/8th inch or less but each element was revisited with a tiny hem stitch just inside the border to forestall any fraying. I must have been in some kind of mental lockdown. I don't even want to revisit the time. My task for the evening, flip it over, clip all the stitches and get back to reality...I need another personal blankie like I need my own fleas.

flood water finished

I'm going to make a few prints from this tomorrow and then put it away.

The story is still looking for legs and this piece is not helping.
Turns out that visual art (at least my visual art) is not  a great prompter of murder and mayhem. Settings and atmosphere, maybe, but not action.

new practice

7.6.13 rising waters

I think I've found a way to integrate the stitching and the writing. Like a lot of people, I used to stitch while something else was going on - TV, music, anything else that occupied the other available sensory input modes. Working this way was a good way to not think, a meditation and a comfort.

Now I've turned off the distractions and while working on these small pieces, find myself thinking my way through the writing; settings, atmosphere, history, characters, even action.

Here I was thinking about what it would be like when a community is deliberately flooded and the long time land holders and residents are forced to leave.  Some don't leave. Some can't.


I'm not going to focus on finishing (overworking?) these- they are rough drafts too. - Just stopping when the thought spins out, dating them and giving them a name appropriate to the storyline and then boarding the next train of thought.

Meanwhile life spins on through the summer. Sweetie is pissed with me cause I just dosed the back of her neck with a stinky herbal concoction  to help repel the fleas that seem to find tiger cats tastier than any other. She's also been literally under my feet due to her constant anxiety over thunder and fireworks. Is there Xanax for cats?

A sketch created with this online tool