A Cool Morning

I'm up earlier than usual this morning, woken by the 7:00 AM stirrings of That Handsome Dog Gus who is visiting while his guardians are on vacation.  Turbo and Ben and I are almost always still in bed at 8:00, awake but catching up on the news and our emails.  But Gus is on an earlier schedule and Ben and I are taking turns getting up with him, letting him outside for a bit and getting his breakfast.  

I open the patio door to let Gus out and the cool crisp morning air rushes in, enticing me to go outside as well.  Though I'm in my bathrobe I escort Gus down the patio steps and out to the backyard.  It is a beautiful morning.  We have another month of "unsettled" spring weather before gardening can begin in earnest, but I'm heartened to see that the Columbine that I planted last year is up and looking good.

We're alternating between cool and warmer weather and we seized the chance to eat on the patio on one warm evening, the first patio dinner of the season.  

Turbo has woken and come downstairs now to join Gus for a morning nap.  

 

That's good because I want to show you this little piece that I finished recently.  It's about 12x12" and uses fabrics that I had painted or otherwise altered several years ago.  Does it look like flower stems to you? Well, it did to me, so that's what I named it.  

Here's a couple details showing the lines of hand stitching that I added.  

I think of these little pieces as "something from nothing" since I start them from leftover scraps of this and that, pulling the various bits from my drawers of scraps and putting them together until they combine into something interesting.  

Stems started when I came across some fabric that I had painted years ago and then set aside.  Sometimes I just feel like painting so I spend a few hours painting and stamping marks and colors on small pieces of white or light fabrics.  Here is a sample.  Once the painting fun is over and everything is dry I set the pieces aside and wait for some inspiration as to what to do with them.  The other day I was going through my collection and pulled a few pieces out to work with. 

Looking at Stems you can see that I started with a piece of pale pink marked with dark pink circles and lines.   

I found this contrasting green that I had marked with black circles and lines and cut some curved strips out of it and inserted them into the pink fabric.   

Then I found these two pieces of a luscious  hand-dyed burgundy that I had stamped with bleach-coated markers. The bleach pulled the color out of the fabric, a process which transformed the fabric into something interesting, but at the time I had no idea what to do with it next. 

Now I did!  Then came the borders.  I added the green binding and then some hand stitching to emphasize the lines of the green curves.  

I really like the results so I decided to enter it into a local fiber art show, "Threads of Inspiration," and it was accepted!  Pretty exciting!

I liked the whole process so I decided to play around with other scraps of fabric that I had painted years ago, and I have another design underway now.   I cut a piece of painted fabric into small squares and then added some strips of contrasting colors around the squares to make them bigger.  Here are some of the blocks up on the design wall.  

Then I arranged them on a field of white and off-white fabrics, leaving a lot of white space to machine quilt.  It's off to a good start; we'll see what happens.   

Oh, and before I go I have to say how two of my pieces were accepted into a different local fiber art show and were included in an announcement for that show, which was pretty exciting.  See if you can spot the two quilts in this announcement.  

Well, I see it's almost 9:00 and I need to get out of this bathrobe and get going.  Rain is predicted for later today, but it's still quite wonderful out right now. 

  

On the Camera

We're having a very quiet Fourth of July.  The city cancelled the fireworks since we're still experiencing a high risk of fire and our friends cancelled their annual July 4 party due to continuing Covid concerns.  But since we returned from a little trip up in the mountains on Saturday and  had friends over for dinner last night, we don't mind a relaxing day to catch up at home. 

We returned from our trip to find that the Shasta daisies, lace hydrangea and all the lavender bushes had bloomed. They were all so cheerful that I had to bring a few blooms into house to enjoy.  

Our yard is a pleasure to see this time of the year....

... and it's satisfying to compare it to how it looked just a few years ago.   

But the most vibrant and exciting flowers aren't to be found in our yard, but in the alleys and along the sidewalks around the neighborhood; the tall eye-catching hollyhocks.  I have hollyhock envy, and I guess I always will since I can't find anyplace in our yard to grow them. 

Luckily, I can take photos of them.  Aren't they amazing?

As I mentioned, we celebrated our wedding anniversary last week.  It is our 44th, and my sister Jean texted her congratulations along with this photo of the big day so long ago.  I wrote back, "I remember  those youngsters!"  

We headed up into the mountains to stay a few days at the Mount Princeton Hot Springs Resort,  a lovely property near Buena Vista and Salida, known for it's numerous and pleasant pools.  This is one of about six large pools there and you can see what a pretty location it is.  

We did two nice hikes while we were up there, one of which was a killer two-mile climb up to the top of a ridge which offered a super view of Mt. Princeton.  The two-mile descent on loose gravel and down steep switchbacks was particularly exciting.

Mostly we enjoyed just hanging out on our balcony overlooking the creek.

On the way up I-70 we stopped in Idaho Springs to charge up the Tesla.  I have zoomed past the exits for this old mining town many times but had never actually gone in to see what the town was like.  Turns out it has a very well preserved downtown, some of which had been blocked off as a pedestrian mall.  

The Tesla charging station was right near the pedestrian mall and next to a "quickie mart" with snacks and restrooms.  When you are traveling and set your route up in the navigation system, it figures out when you'll need to recharge and suggests options for where to stop.  Charging doesn't take long or cost very much and I like the experience much more than pumping gas.  And while I really dislike driving on I-70, I have to say that the Tesla's acceleration power, smooth and fast braking, and ability to hug the road made it a pleasure to travel in.  

 

The caption for this photo is Where is the moose? On the way over beautiful Guanella Pass we stopped and hiked a couple of miles on the trail up Mt. Bierstadt, a 14, 060 foot peak that Ben climbed a few years ago with a friend.  Last time we were on this trail we spotted a big moose in the lake at the foot of the peak, but this time no moose was to be found.  I'd given up looking for him, but on our climb out the people in front of us stopped to take photos and when I looked to see what they were shooting, there he was!  (If you haven't spotted him, he's on the right side of the photo, just below the middle horizon line.)   

Isn't this a cute little flower?  I made it to include in a bouquet of fabric flowers made by members of the Visions Museum of Textile Art for its 15th anniversary.  This museum is in San Diego and I've been there a couple of times.  But I'm lucky that there are often good fiber exhibitions near Boulder.   

The Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum in Golden currently has its annual Evolutions show on display and I saw it about two weeks ago.  Its goal is to present cutting edge quilting.  Here's a piece by the First place winner for this year, Viviana Lombrozo, a Mexican artist who combines text and calligraphy using her own hand-dyed and painted fabric and extensive machine quilting.  

Here's a piece by Shannon Conley that represents new direction in fiber art, the creation of sculptural forms out of fabric.  She painted, stitched and manipulated cotton fabric into a 3-D piece, Cloud Rim.  

 

I loved this work by Kimberly Lacy called 20 Shades of Gray, which was inspired by her love of ammonite fossils found in the southwest. 

Tomorrow I'm going up to Estes Park to see the FACE of Fiber in the Rockies, an invitational exhibition featuring several local fiber artists.  I feel very lucky to be able to see so many great fiber shows. 

(I have been doing my own fiber art and finished I piece I'm very happy about, but that's a story for another post.)

Well, let me end with one last photo.  Here's Turbo meeting Mars, a "mini Turbo" who I spotted playing in the school playground across the street.  He looked so much like Turbo at that age that I went over and chatted only to find that Mars came from the same breeder as Turbo.   I invited him over to our yard to play and Turbo literally jumped for joy, something he doesn't do all that often when meeting other dogs.  He's polite and sometimes even enthusiastic, but I think it was the only time I've seen him literally jump in the air with excitement.  Very cute!  And Mars' owners were really fun to chat with as well, so it was a nice moment.   

  

Finding Joy

The other day I woke up and immediately started to think about the Russian attack on Ukraine, Colorado's drought and our lack of rain, the upcoming mid-term elections, and the new Covid variant.   I also was worried about three family members who are experiencing serious health problems.  

As I looked out the bathroom window at another day of high winds and fire-threat warnings, I recognized my unhappy mood and I thought "Joy is a hard commodity to find nowadays. " Then I noticed the flickering of branches on the big pine near the window. I watched for a bit until I realized that two black-capped chickadees were flitting about in the branches looking for bugs and pine nuts to eat.  We don't see many chickadees around our yard and these were mighty cute as they jumped around the tree branches.  While I quietly observed them I could feel my tensions decreasing as a lighter and happier mood replaced my earlier worries, and I remembered that I had a choice about how to greet the day.  

Melissa McMasters from Memphis, TN, United States, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Here are some things that have made me smile lately.  

I very much enjoyed making this colorful and easy quilt recently.   I started with lucious hand-dyed suede-like fabrics from the "scrap grab bags" sold by Cherrywood Fabrics and inserted a batik strip into each scrap, randomly choosing the strips from a variety of prints and widths.  Then I cut the scraps with their inset batik strips into 5" blocks and placed them on my design wall, rearranging them until I liked the flow of colors across the quilt.  I loved the glow of the fabrics and the patterns made by the inset strips.

I quilted the top with straight lines, enjoying the process on my wonderful Bernina Q20 quilting machine.  Unlike some projects, this one went smoothly at every stage and I feel happy every time I look at the finished piece. 

And the back is a lot of fun, too! 

The other day Ben and I got a real kick out of helping Paul when he needed to buy thirteen jumbo bags of popcorn from Costco.  Paul works at a bakery that makes salted Caramel covered popcorn and he offered to pick up the uncoated popcorn when the regular supplier couldn't make the scheduled delivery.  We went with him just for the fun of it.  It's not every day you get to buy so many giant bags of popcorn!

Packing the bags into the Tesla was a good test of its storage capacity.  Since there's no engine or spare tire to take up space, the bags all fit into 1) the trunk, 2) the extra trunk under the main trunk, and 3) the "frunk," which is the smaller trunk up in the front where the engine would usually be.   

Although we've had many wind-filled cold days lately, we've also had a couple of pretty sunny and warm ones, too,  which were perfect for cleaning off the patio and unveiling the fire table and the grill.  Sitting out on the patio is one of my favorite things and especially fun when Ben is with me.

One evening on the patio Ben took some interesting photos of me on the iPhone using settings available when you're in the Portrait mode.   Cool, yes? 

Not to be outdone, I took some of Ben on another night. 

We couldn't leave Turbo out of our portrait sessions.  

Although we've had many "red flag" days lately with high fire warnings,  we've only had one additional fire and it was a small grass fire that was extinguished quickly.  On Monday Ben and I did a hike over near the NCAR fire which had evacuated 19,000 homes a couple of weeks ago.   We walked up to a spot that appeared to have been used by the fire fighters as they staged their work.  In the foreground are the stumps of trees they cut to establish a perimeter and you can see the blackened area where the fire burned across a gulch before it was stopped by the fire fighters.  

Here's a couple of other views across to the burned gulch.  The fire burned about 100 acres, but we could just see a small part of it. 

 

We've been getting out more lately, which certainly makes life more interesting. Yesterday I went with a friend to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science to see an exhibition featuring Egyptian art.   

Once upon a time I studied Egyptian art as part of my art history degree, but it's been a long time since I've seen any.  The exhibit included several statues, such as this one of a scribe dating from 2400 BC., which rang the memory bell in my brain.  I must have had to memorize this one for a test! 

There were many bas reliefs on display, and I really liked how the exhibit designers superimposed broken reliefs on drawings of the full piece, so you could easily see what was being depicted.  

And Ben and I actually got out to hear live music that wasn't Paul's band.  We attended a small and casual performance by an artist named Emma Rose and her band, The Sound of Honey, at ETown, a local venue primarily featuring folk musicians.  Emma's soft and honey-like music, along with a nice spread of food from several local eateries, was all very enjoyable.   

courtesy of silverliningmag.com

Tomorrow is Easter and we're celebrating over here with Ben's brother, John, and his family.  Ham and mac & cheese with lobster are on the menu and I made us a little Easter centerpiece with eggs and a bunny to mark the occasion.  I dyed the eggs with natural dyes from cabbage and tumeric, using instructions from Gabriel Blair's blog at Design Mom.   

Easter means Spring, and while it is still cold here, plants are beginning to show themselves again and the spring garden cleanup is underway.  I've cut back the lavendar plants and trimmed most of the old stalks from the perennials,  so the big bed on the north side of the house is looking good. 

I always enjoy this work since it reveals the plants hiding under the leaves and pine cones.

This year we plan to replace some of the north side lawn between the perennial bed and the bushes around the house with xeriscaping.  With the continuing drought, it makes sense to eliminate water-hungry grass where we don't need it.  We'll have plenty of pretty green grass in other parts of our yard.   

Here you can see how we've used a rope to outline the placement of the new mulch.  All the grass to the right of the rope will be gone, leaving just a green path between the area next to the house and the perennial bed by the street.  Watch this spot!