Summer Gardening and Sewing

This summer took a heck of a long time to get here.  While the rest of my friends were scorched through June and July, here in the Portland area it has been almost uniformly cool and rainy.  But since the 4th of July we have had some sun mixed in with the clouds at least!

And that means gardening around here.
My husband does almost all of it...I just take care of a few flowers here and there.
Have a look!

This front border is kind of wacky, as the plants are the wrong heights in the wrong places...but the colors are nice!

The dogwood in front has gotten so big since we moved here 20 years ago that I have a lot of shady places to fill...

Little blasts of hot color are nice in the shade.

But the real action this year is out in Robert's garden...

Here are the wildflowers, potatoes, and squash.  The potatoes are insanely good eating this year.

Here is part of his Tomato Plantation...the indeterminate varieties make long vines that he carefully suspends and supports.  This system took years to evolve but this year he has got it down.

The Sungold cherry tomatoes are almost ready....

This bed of brassicas--cauliflower and broccoli--is about done, the cauliflower all harvested and the broccoli flowering...it got away from us before we could harvest it all.  I love its yellow flowers, though.

This is the Fig Plantation.  Robert took cuttings off of our neighbor's fig tree this spring, and has nurtured those little sticks into the baby trees you see here.  It's been a whole lot of work...but he loves fresh figs.

He EVEN is talking about rebuilding our funky greenhouse--which I have been encouraging him to do for years--so that those figs will have a full time place to live in the winter....

I have mostly been sewing instead of gardening...and very happy at it too.

The only problem is, I can't blog about any of it.
This makes me sad...  ;-(  .....but it is for a nice reason.  So you won't be seeing too much of my current work here for awhile.
I of course will keep my teaching and workshop pages current just under my header up at the top of the blog.

Thanks for stopping by....and Happy Summer!

Sewing Room ReDo...Old Work Discovered

After the epic dual shelf collapse in July from which I found no time to properly recover, my sewing room got so bad that it became literally unusable.  Finally my schedule opened up so that I could take the three days required to dig to the very bottoms of the piles, the backs of the drawers, purchase new shelving and bins, and generally do an archeological dig through my sewing life of the last 17 years.

I thought I would show some of my old work that predates my blogging and crazy quilting.  I found a bunch of color copies in the bottom of a cabinet....this from the Age Before Jpegs....
So come on along, setting the Way Back Machine to the mid 1990's or so....   ;-)

I was into Broderie Perse, at least my own take on it, in a big way for many years.  You will notice the flowers were as much in evidence back then as they are now; I must have cut out a jillion of them from commercial quilt fabric.  This piece is 8" X 11".  I probably made 35 of these little "sayings quilts", as I called them.
Here's another one:

This was for a friend, using her chosen phrase and favorite flower, the iris, and bug, the dragonfly.
I was into cutting out a lot of letters back then, too.

This is skipping ahead to early CQ days, but the letters and flowers are still there.  It was for a friend's doctor's office.

She's a gynecologist. ;-)

From there the stained glass quilt phase began.  I found a picture of one that I had totally forgotten about making.

I think this must have been for a church Christmas bazaar.

Then the fabric collages veered into landscapes.  I miss doing them and may have to circle back to them one of these days.  (There is a small one in my book, though.)

I remember being very inspired by that birch bark fabric, and using up every inch of it.

Pale winter sunlight....   This was for my oldest brother who likes it c-o-l-d.

Maybe my strangest piece, this is a collage (a work in progress shot) rendering of one of my Uncle Bill's kachina dolls.  He hung this in his fancy office when he was the head of the F.D.I.C. in Washington, DC, which made me very proud.  In exchange for it, he gave me his mother's oak workroom chair, which I am sitting in as I type this.

I read every single one of the 20 Brother Cadfael mysteries during those years, and decided to make a fantasy rendering of what I thought it might look like in the old England of the books...

This was large, very detailed, and kind of burned me out on landscape collage!
The next piece is a small embroidered wool landscape that I loved doing very much, for my friend Cindy Thury-Smith.  She fulled the wool in it.

Cindy loves lavender, so I used a Van Gogh painting of lavender fields as my inspiration.  Notice that the trees are needlepunched? 

Sometimes it feels good strolling down Memory Lane... But now, everything is re-organized, slightly rearranged, and ready for new work.

This view is looking into the room....
 

...and this view is looking out, back toward the rest of the house.
But what is that on the table?
In the foreground are the contents of an envelope of goodies my friend Tracey Brookshier sent to me.  On the end of the table is this....

A UFO!  This is when I was using all vintage cottons, I was just in love with them.  I had bought some rubber stamps for the precision "paper" piecing, except that the guidelines were stamped on muslin.
I really like this and will have to finish it...someday....

I've got lots of threads I can use....   

Vintage CQ...Flower #7

Fitting the motif into the space is the biggest challenge of these little blocks.

I thought I would try something a little different this time....

....and have my flowers "hanging" from the top.
If I were to do this over (which I'm not), I would have moved the whole thing slightly down, as it seems a bit top heavy to me. But on the original quilt, the motifs aren't perfectly centered, either!

I have been piecing up a storm on the outer blocks...not quite ready to show that part yet as I have 4 more blocks to go.
But what the heck! We're all friends here....so welcome to my chaotic mess....

Eeek! Pretty pathetic, isn't it? Now you know!
It is hard to walk in here so I have to take a breather to clear things up....

"The Mess Where Pretty Little Things Are Made"

...This is the title of a post that Alma Stoller (whose blog I read with relish) just put up on her blog, showing pictures of her workspace. Then she dared her readers to show theirs.

OK, Alma, yours was just chaotic enough that I feel brave enough here to reveal my own!
When I am going full bore on a project, I let keeping things organized slide...I'm just too busy using stuff to put it away! I need everything out where I can see it! I only clear the decks when it gets to the point where I can't find something as soon as I put it down in here....

Do I really want to do this? It is actually quite embarrassing!....

I was so proud of myself when I got all my threads organized in these little plastic boxes from the Dollar Store. All that silk floss dumped out is my Vickie Clayton stash from last Christmas. On the window sill are my Dodger Barbie, Jake and Elwood Blues, my grandmother's matador dolls from Spain, and the other girls in my collection. Beneath the table are bins of silk and velvet fabrics, occasionally all folded.

The crazy quilt "small pieces" stash, organized by color. Art supplies and fabric printing stuff piled on top. Yes, I do know where exactly everything is...

Machine threads, books, craft supplies; sky, Sonji, and repro fabrics, wools and odd yardage on top. More cottons in bins below the books.

OK , the bead storage definitely needs help. (Really, I feel so exposed here! What a little exhibitionist I am!) I can hardly fit all the drawers in at once anymore. Wide silk ribbon and funky craft ribbon live here too. See how nicely my rolls of paper fit crammed against the wall?

Here is the central work table (I'm not showing you the sewing machine table or the desk table or the second table under the windows with all my new stuff from Houston on it) where I am actually sitting and typing to you all now. The design wall is blank at the moment, as the H quilt takes possession of it while I am not working on it. You can see more boxes of fabric beneath it. Max made that handsome wooden step stool in 9th grade shop class and I use it every day.

This room is a wreck!!!!
OK, who else is game to give an unvarnished look into their Creative Mess?

Tomorrow I must leave this fecund aerie, however, for a long week-end/fantastic family reunion/early Thanksgiving/celebration of my niece's 30th birthday in San Diego at my sister's house. Back at you all next Tuesday!