End of summer

  

Now we have a mouse who rolls hickory nuts from the kitchen into a cupboard door in the bathroom

every night. We have set a trap with a smorgasbord of delights, peanut butter and cheese, but he / she's resisted that temptation so far.  Mama Kitty sleeps while he trundles nuts past her on the maple floor boards. This is a persistent mouse, a mouse with magical thinking. Magically the nuts are going to fit under the door.

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.

Testing

So far, so good. Plainweave, log cabin, and Rosepath samples.  I really thought I was going to thread up Goose-eye, but it came out Rosepath.

Down the Rosepath Again

 

Rows of X and O motifs in gaily colored Rosepath (sigh!) against a  background of black and gray prison stripes, suggest some of the complexities of romance, and seems Valentines-appropriate. (Or, that I'll never escape Rosepath).  Wearable cuff, sentimental, handwoven, closed with vintage Mississippi pearl buttons, and hand crocheted button loops, lined with dupioni silk,  I call them Hard Times for Valentines.

Hand weaving

 

We meet in each other's homes and studios, all around the area, once a month. We don't call our group anything particular,  unless it's 2nd Mondays.  We go to Dell, Asbury Ridge, Norwegian Hollow, Viola, Viroqua, Avalanche, Jug Creek. We each show up,  bringing what we have to offer, sometimes an apple salad, sometimes  what we've been weaving, knitting or spinning. Or, we bring our sad or funny stories about where we've traveled, what we've seen since the last time we were together.  Sometimes it seems hard to take the time out from work to get there. But, not one moment of our precious time is wasted with idle conversation, and the conversation (and laughter) starts right away, and covers a lot of ground.

We are friends, we are mostly weavers, and we are women. When I brought my freshly woven wrist warmers, I'd hoped to find a hand model. These women took the stack from my hands and spontaneously put them on. One pair was strung together, so two women had to stay very close to each other while they moved to the window to take a picture of their interwoven hands.  Angie took the beautiful picture with her new camera. These laughing friends of mine, putting their hands together in a circle, with my weaving on their wrists, was warmhand modeling I never imagined.

It was kind of wonderful.

Looks

Just purchased, new Japanese cotton/linen fabric, designed by Melody Miller for Kokka.   Just woven, a little red, Rosepath inlay on the loom.  Just wound, 30 paper spools of cotton and cotolin for Rosepath wristwarmers.

Chimney Smoke

 

 

There's a whiff of it in the air, and it's not a forest fire!  The sugar maples are about to turn that crazy orange they do.  Our first load of picture-book firewood arrived today.  Call it scarf weaving weather,  and I've started adding a little alpaca-silk blend yarn to the mix, for coziness. I'm still in the lost-in-the-woods mode, in soft smoky colors and Rosepath,  and I like it like that.

Rag mad

More we're not out of the woods yet rag and yarn panels, in Rosepath. When I have woven enough of them I plan to sew them,  cushion covers, and a deerskin bottomed sack, probably a back pack. My fascination with thready, raggedy weaves isn't wearing off. I hope I never find my way out of this woods. (On a walk up the road today, I practiced a little skipping, which felt pretty good).

April Fools Scarf

 

Early spring torments me. It's always been like this for me, like being invited to a birthday party that's supposed to be fun, but which inevitably will be chaotic. Nervous energy, too much coffee, too bright, too much old snow, too much coffee, wind, mud.  I start one thing, and then another, and finally there are a string of started jobs behind me, a trail of open stepladders, half wound spools, tax paper work, peppered with forgotten coffee cups, misplaced threading hooks and calculators.

Settling down to weave is important. Bringing my nose to some work at hand calms my innervation.  Color and Rosepath contain this flux of ideas I'm experiencing, and make some sense of it. Going outside is a big help, too.

I tried this scarf I just finished, on a walk up  the road to the quarry yesterday.  An experiment, Would I like it, or would I want to tear it off? I wound it on and checked the mirror.  It looked fine. With my old brown and green wool plaid jacket, it looked surprisingly fresh.

Then I walked up past Falk's old house, where the new neighbors are cleaning and clearing out what's left of his stuff.  It was late afternoon, and the crew of guys were calling it a day, standing around a smouldering brush fire of Falk's old overgrown lilac hedge, and his roses.  They looked like they were  well in to a 12-pack.  Some little kids stood on a heap of debris nearby. They all stopped talking and stared as I walked by.  I waved and said, Hi. Two of them raised their hands.  Maybe it was just the fresh air, but something changed. Or, it might have been my bright and shining scarf, but suddenly I felt good, like myself again.  I clearly knew what I wanted to do next,  check if the watercress at the spring is ready to pick, and look for pussy willows.

snow days

 

The bee boxes have snow tops, and look like giant petit fours in the snowy yard.  Cardinals, jays, 

titmice, juncos  finches, downies and sap suckers rush the feeders, with whirring feathers.  Every other day it snows a few more inches, and in the middle of the night we sometimes wake to hear Frank, the snowplow guy, clearing our driveways.  

These are good weaving days. I wanted to enter a textile show, and took some pictures for it. The deadline is today,  but I  couldn't manage to burn the cd, which was a frustration. Why am I so dull when it comes to this stuff?  I'm still weaving the little cuff alpaca wristwarmers, and rag, linen and cotton panels to sew into soft furnishings. The title of this weave series is We're Not Out of the Woods Yet. I made some good coffee and wove for a little while, and felt much better.  January is my new favorite month.

uphill

The wild clematis is a little garland of puffs along the hill road. The woods on the side hill of the valley is not so leafy now, but the Witch Hazel is in bloom with its small yellow starry flowers.
I wish my weaving could merge into the rough fissured bark of the century (at least) white pine. I don't try to copy what I see. It's usually after I've woven something, that I see what I have been looking at.

out of chaos

What my brain looks like, on the wall.  I look at other artists' inspiration boards and realize that most take down what they had up last, and assemble new things to look at.  I layer.  The first things were pinned here 10 years ago when we built my shop.  I want to see at a glance if I still care about the same things as I used to, and if I'm still on track.

Out of this scramble emerges some pretty orderly weaving, with organized color, and balanced designs.