100º in the shade

We're home from the lake and it's still beastly hot.  The cat was asleep for a day and a half in the culvert under the woodshed. We discovered a burr oak leaf skeletonized by unknowns, insects, we suspect. I have a brand new library card because I found a book I wanted to read for the title alone,  What There Is to Say We Have Said,  letters of Eudora Welty and her editor, William Maxwell.  The librarian issued me my new plastic card, that can be punched and added to my key ring, saying, with a radiant smile, Welcome Back! as if a lamb had returned to the fold. Eudora Welty, love, always.

Spoons for sale in the store,  purchased from a little old lady (as she calls herself) who carves them in Ely, MN.  Lilac, Maple, Lilac.

Midsummer

SNL

When we moved to the valley, in Avalanche, it was hard to get a television signal, without putting an antenna on the ridge, or buying a large, expensive, unattractive sattelite dish to mount in the yard.  We opted out, stashing our little black and white tv in the granary attic.

 For many years we watched no tv, that is, until we had children who were old enough to start digging through the dusty boxes of our former life, in the granary attic, who discovered the old black-and-white tv.  Sofie brought it into the living room, squeezed tinfoil around the rabbit ear antennas, plugged it in,  and we all sat watching as a snowy blizzard with shadowy figures came into view on the small square screen,  our first look at  Saturday Night Live. We were hooked.  For years we continued to listen to and watch what little we could see of Friends, and Will and Grace, through the snow, never able to see what the actors' faces looked like. Eventually, my husband brought home a larger antenna, which leaned against a tree in our front yard, and brought a little more clarity, if turned in the right direction. This meant someone had to go out and turn the antenna, while television watchers inside yelled when the picture was clearest. In summer and winter we watched somewhat better tv with this system.

Still, the hard hearted parents were against the idea of becoming a tv watching family, so this compromise held. Our children grew up, and rejecting our idioscyncrasies,  have moved to far away places with ample bandwidth, and clear signals. Today, I confess, in our own living room,  is a huge, black, flat screen tv sitting in front of my living room window, blocking most of the view into the front yard.  We watch a lot of Netflix on it, but in order to see a bird,  fawn, or approaching storm cloud requires walking over, and looking out over the top of it. So, we can change our minds.

The woven inlay, teal-and-cream colored square in this cushion commemorates our first SNL viewing experience, our first tentative dip back into the mainstream we'd so gladly quit.

Chester's Comfort

I used carpet tacks to stick a piece of my favorite rag weave to the front of this "cabinet" made from an old hand built bee box. The bee box is made with dovetail joints, and has carved in hand holds. There is a  new shelf inside, courtesy of my carpenter-husband, and a little bit of waxy residue from the former tenants. There is a cup hook.

Chester lived alone on the family place a few miles from us, when we moved here 30 years ago.
He was an old man. His house had disappeared long ago behind trees and uncut brush.  Sometimes I saw him walking along the road to the country store, but we never knew much about him. In the winter there was just a footpath in the snow on his driveway.  He didn't farm, he didn't drive.  One year he died.
When the property was sold, the new owners found outside his front door, a huge pile of discarded
maraschino cherry bottles and Vienna sausage cans.

 

I imagine a jar of cherries on the shelf, a can of Vienna sausages, and maybe a tin of Copenhagen snus. 

update

Starting my  morning with a batch of no-knead bread that could use a little warming up, some funny valentines to smile at, and a little more Rosepath weaving.  The cardinals are singing a piercing two- note mate finding call, but isn't this a month early? Apparently, they don't think so.

SNO-CRUSH: Avalanche Quilters

Sno-Crush is over,  but I want to show this quilt made by the Avalanche Quilters, a group of women that quilted for many years in and around Avalanche.  Over the years, the members changed, but the method was always the same.  Anyone could join, no matter what her quilting skills were, and we made every decision by group consensus.  What pattern to make, what materials?  We'd all contribute from our closets and cupboards.

Everyone sewed pieces together and made blocks.  We would lay the blocks out on the floor, and everyone stood around it, looking, then rearranging.  The rest of the group either approved, or suggested another way.  When everyone was finally agreed,  we sewed it in teams, and we marked the quilt. Then we  put it in on our frame, and everyone quilted.  During this process, which sometimes took months,  we had many ancillary discussions, deepened friendships, counseled  our marriages,  distributed eggs, and excess garden produce, planned parties, and childcare,  discussed politics, and
buttoned our lips about what we said at quilting.  We also  found we all had distinct opinions about color and design, and we learned how to express our ideas, how to negotiate, and to compromise.  In the end, each quilt is a very uneven quality. None of our group quilts looks like a quilt that any one of us would have made.  But each one is a shining, imperfect beauty.

The last day of the quilting, we embroidered our names around the edge of the quilt, holding it upside  down across our laps.  Then everyone's name went into a hat, and we drew out the name of a winner.

This quilt is called House Top, and styled after the Gee's Bend Quilts.  It is wool scrap, no batting, with a flannel back.  The edge is black cotton velveteen.  The gray wool squares are a silk and wool combination.  This is the second time the quilt has been shown, and it still has some pins in two squares.  It's not finished!  That is a hopeful sign to me, that there are still quilting days ahead.

Hen of the Woods

All weaving came to a standstill.  My husband brought home many bags of clusters of Hen of the Woods, or, Maitakes, that he collected  in the woods.  The mushroom clusters grow at the base of oak trees in the fall. (Similar mushrooms growing on different tree species should be avoided).  They  are very flavorful, and taste like tender meat on chicken wings. They have a firm texture, a little chewy.

They pull apart easily before they are cooked.  I've been sauteeing them , or roasting with olive oil,  garlic and rosemary, salt and pepper.

Often the mushrooms are huge, and may weigh up to 40 pounds.  Enough to last the whole winter, until the morels come up in the spring.  They freeze well, so I've been putting them away, and sampling, sampling, sampling.

Rags and Mushrooms

 Look what popped up under the spruce tree this week.  Could I eat them?  Or, dye with them?  Probably both, eat and die.

I'm weaving my favorites again,  a little bit of rag, a little bit of linen,  leaving the edges raw. They are  a set of cushion covers I'm designing for modern concrete benches.   Good textures to combine, smooth polished concrete, with rags and linen.

Foot bridge

   

The new little foot bridge is painted with fresh red and white stripes.  The last  flood washed away the 2-plank bridge.  This one should be easier to see on a foggy night, if I go back to work after supper.

I cross the creek many times each day, and hoped the stripes would give me a little energy each time I crossed. The bridge has a little bounce.  Possibly the stripes will cause a transformation to occur each time I leave my (humble) kitchen and cross to the workshop:  housewife to artist. 

 I'm attracted to bridges. I was married on an old bridge.  (It was dismantled a year later--the bridge, not the marriage).  Some bridges scare me. (The  steep, narrow bridge over the Mississippi at Lansing, Iowa). I miss them when they're gone.  (The old 8-span green bridge across the Wisconsin River at Spring Green was replaced this year.  I'll never be resigned to the modern highway bridge). When standing on a bridge I like to look upstream, to see what the water is bringing down.  A warp coming off the back beam of the loom is like a stream flowing toward me, the future, possibility. The fell is the present, the bridge, where I stand.  Downstream, the water under the bridge, is the woven fabric  winding on to the front beam,  the story of what happened.

Eating Bread and Honey

That would be me, like a queen in her parlor, eating bread and honey.  Mr. Pike, the beekeeper, delivered these  bottles of honey from the hives in my yard, gathered in the flowers in our fields and woods.  There's still quite a bit of honey left in the hives for the bees to use to get through the coming winter.

Scarf # 3 is drying on the line.   I'll call it Sugar Maple, for the color the maples are about to turn on the hill.  One more to make on this warp, but it will be back to the shadows with my normal nocturnal plan:  copper,  light olive green, dark orange and deep teal blue.

Sweets

Scarf No. 3 on this mostly silk Rosepath warp.  I'm really warming up to the seductive warm colors, with a little aqua for the sugar-on-top.  Figuring out color is always my first interest, and I usually try to make it more difficult, because the results are often more interesting, at least to my eye.  But even with a simple color scheme,  nothing is automatic about color and design.  There's always the chance of good color going bad.   Seeing the rags I used to start this scarf makes me feel itchy to do a little more rag weaving.

There was a torrential downpour on Friday the 13th, another flood in Avalanche.  It was a little scary. Soon after the waters subsided,  a sister, nephew, and son and brother in-law, came to visit.    Our table has been full of people talking,  eating good food, and laughing about I don't remember what,  but was very funny at the time.   The good feeling is what lingers.

Peony

The picture of the peony on this antique postcard could have been taken by the lady of the house I live in, 100 years ago.  The house resembles ours, and there is an old peony planted at the same corner. My husband found it in an antique store, and mailed it to me, 30 years ago.  He was in Wisconsin looking for a good farm we could buy.  We were determined to leave the city and get back-to-the-land, where we meant to build our house,  grow and preserve our own food, and I'd weave all the cloth for our clothes!  He hadn't found anything promising.

Just like the lady who lived in my house then,  I take photos of my white peony every year as it blooms in the front yard, propped  up with sticks and bentwire edging fence.  I also collect finch nests that blow down from the big white pine tree in spring storms, and line them up on my kitchen window sill.  Other than that, I don't think her life was much like mine has been here.  Our experiment in getting back to the land didn't turn out at all as we expected. What did happen was much more interesting.  And, thank goodness, I never wove one thing for us to wear.

Honey bees

Today the beeman brought bee boxes!  It's a little early, but the weather is warm this week.  My new tenants are very welcome.  If it's a good season, we'll get some honey for our rent.  The neon box colors are wonderful, and will fade to chalky neon.  My old stack of empty boxes, with weathered wood, chalky paint, and dovetailed corners, always inspires me.  I'm always mining for color and design to weave.  Tomorrow, the bees arrive, with their Hawaiian queens.

I just finished scarf #3 on my warp of 16/2 Swedish cotton.  This one is called Dilly, the name of a little town nearby.  But,  I wove it before I saw these bright, square bee boxes, and it looks like the same idea to me.  I even wove in a color for the official Bee sign.  I must have been picking up on some good bee vibrations.

rainy day

Nothing suits me better.

At Home

Three red tulips came up in an old tulip bed by the lilacs. I once had a vision for this bed, with tall,White Triumphator tulips, small Chinese firey red twisted tulips, and blue-black parrot tulips, and checkered frittalaria. I planted bulbs every fall, only to find the shrews or the voles ate most of the bulbs by spring. I gave up on this idea years and years ago , but some tulips still come up. Three makes me quite happy, actually.

I hung the wool rug from our living room, that my mother wove, out in the sunshine, by the spruce tree. Everything that hangs near the spruce picks up that fresh scent. It's finally warm enough to keep the screen door open after the sun sets. The full moon came over the hill, as the owls started to hoot, howl, and screech and chatter up in the woods. It feels so good to be at home.

eat local

May Day

Weaving linen transparency pieces with Finnish paper yarn and Habu sprigged yarn is a diet I could live on. It's all air, and windows, and crisp paper, with a plain weave linen crust.

Spring has taken the territory at last. Everything looks like a weave to me. Late afternoon sun slides in, shadows stretch, tree trunk, and stream, interweave with path, budding cherry branches and the foot bridge.

Tales of Ramps and Gentlemen's Pants

Ramps come up early in the spring, along with wild ginger, and Dutchman's Breeches, which my then little girl, Ursula, named Gentlemen's Pants. Now our family calls them that. Ramps are a kind of onion, or wild leek, so delicious that the sight of a patch of them makes my mouth water.

My favorite fairy tale collection, Tales from Grimm, written and illustrated by Wanda Gag, in 1939, includes the story of Rapunzel who was named for the rampion plants which grew in Mother Gothel's garden, a famous witch in the neighborhood. As the pregnant mother of Rapunzel gazed from her small window into the witch's garden next door "a strange feeling came over her. She had always been fond of rampion salad, and these plants in the witch's garden looked so fresh, so green, so tempting, that she felt she must have some, no matter what the cost." Though I've always thought rampion must be ramps, it turns out they are not the same. But the feeling that comes over me, pregnant or not, seeing a patch of wild ramps in the spring woods, is just the same.

The wife begs her husband to get some for her, or she fears she will die. Because he loves her so dearly, he climbs over a high wall at dusk, into the witch's garden, and quickly digs a handful of plants, and brings them back to her. "She was overjoyed, and immediately made a big juicy salad which she ate with great relish, one might almost say with greed." The cost of that handful of rampion was dear, of course. The witch claims the baby. Last Monday I did ask my husband to bring some ramps home, if he saw any. On Tuesday there was a bag of them on my kitchen counter. He is a good man.

Whoever eats ramps out of the spring woods in Wisconsin will certainly identify with the wife's strange longing. And will scramble through rusty barb wire, thorny ash, up steep hills, risking ticks, to get to the patch that looks so fresh, so green, so tempting-- while keeping an eye out for the witch. Or, alternately, send her husband.