home alone, what to do...

cut glass crystals actually refract the morning sunlight! 

After a nice Saturday which began with gay poets at the Out Write conference, I discovered I was in the midst of Dog Days on 14th St. which is a weekend when the stores and shops put up sidewalk tables and do summer sales.  I wondered down the street and enjoyed a stop at Miss Pixies second hand shop where I discovered a great strand of cut chandalier crystals I couldn't resist. My neighbor Dan Vera invited me to come here him read from his prize winning book of poems on a panel of three prize wining poets.

 Keith left for a visit with his family on Friday so I just wandered and enjoyed the great weather. I took my sketch book and got one victim on the metro for a sketch on my way down town.

 Earlier I drew some pretty flowers Keith left for me.  Feeling a little rusty with my drawing skills but they just need some exercising.

all sorts of things from the garden in a cut crystal glass. 

I ended up at Plan B Gallery on 14th and Q.Street. Where director David Kalamar asked about my quilts. He brought up the Rose Star quilt I had posted on Facebook last year. I didn't know which one he was talking about at first, since he didn't know the name. He reminded me by referring to my quest to choose a background fabric on Facebook. Black or white was the question, the answer as it turned out was off white with a printed bright white flower design. The Rose-Star quilt has been laying around for some time now and he made me realize that was a project I wanted to finish up soon. 

trimming the uneven edges of the rose star on the porch table  to prepare it for binding 

sewing on the red and white micro dot binding tape on the straight edges of Rose-Star quilt 

Having the place to myself I intend to spread out another quilt to baste it together for hand quilting in the coming weeks. This top is white and blue Dresden plates laid out in diamond format. I decided to add a white border on three sides to finish it out to a full bed size. 

lay up of off white top piece and white on white side piece for Dresden diamonds. 

Sides added and pressed and ready to lay on the floor for basting 

The garden is doing well and looking great with our new landlord's weekly lawn mower coming round to keep it looking tidy. I was surprised to find a kind of hard seed in the cotton plants flowers and a red freckling on the hydrangeas that normally turn red in fall.

cotton plant flowering 

pods forming at the bottom have a hard nut inside soon to be full of cotton balls

Lace cap Hydrangea is blushing 

Ironweed flowers are so purple this year it's looking great standing at six feet tall

Swamp milkweed flowers were pink now they are pointed pods spewing little fairies 

Lavender summer phlox and a little black and blue salvia

Bustling October

This has been a busy time of year as it usually is but I was astonished how many things were going on that I could not get to because of some climax on October 13th. The two big events I did attend were The DC Modern Quilt Guild's meeting at NGA's Sculpture Garden and my good friends Peter Montgomery and Dan Vera's wedding at the Thrugood Marshall Center. I got to do show and tell and enjoy a visit with 4 quilters in the garden from 10-noon and stitch a few stitches on my Williamsburg throw quilt and show them my bigger quilts in process. Then they showed theirs and it was just warm enough and very quiet down in the gardens where they are beginning to build the ice rink for skating that opens next month. Then I was home for lunch and packed up the 12 lovely mason jars of roses and garden flowers Keith arranged for Dan and Pete's wedding. I delivered them and got to participate in the wedding by tying a ribbon around their hands with all the Lavender friends and family and then enjoyed the picnic theme pot luck dinner and huge delicious wedding Cake made by Chris the baker! I think the plastic ants he brought and Dan's grass table cloths were really fun and made the picnic theme come alive with none of the real problems of out door events.

Pictures of the quilts and wedding are in my flickr.com collections here:

DC Modern Quilt Guild 

Peter and Dan's Wedding 

Things I had to miss included, Peter Wood's Art Soiree in Middleburg VA.
Mid-City Artists Open Studios, Washington DC
Sketch Crawl Internationale's quarterly sketch crawl in DC with Urban sketchers...
There was more but we can not do everything. What a splendid life of plentiful joys.\
Hope you got to do something wonderful this October weekend the best time of year in Washington DC to do almost anything.

National Sketch Draw Month

This is Day one of the month long July challenge presented by artist & poet Dan Vera to the Urban Sketchers of Washington DC and the world at large to draw a drawing and share it with the world each day of this month. He was inspired by the National Poet's daily poem challenge to invite us sketchers to do with sketches what so many poets do with poems in April. Make a new one every day for a month. We discussed this a little on the Sketch Crawl Washington DC facebook group page where many artists seemed interested and willing to post shared photos of their efforts. We don't have another big International Sketch Crawl until later this month but this is a great way to help everyone create a niche in their daily routine for some meditative drawing to prepare. 

I have been doing the daily sketch since about May of 2010 and I find that it is a great routine to begin each day. At first I started out small just line drawings in a very small book I made to fit in the hip pocket of my jeans. I quickly bored with still life drawing around the house early in the morning but I found that flowers in my garden were a great subject to attack early in the day and study closely. Soon I had a routine and found that public responses were much stronger if I added a little watercolor to the sketches. Over the winter season stuck inside I turned to cut flowers and colorful vases.  I had plenty more botanical subjects to report with my pen, ink and water colors. 

I found that drawing every day showed me that some days the drawing skills are great and some days they are less great... it seems to give me a measure of how I am feeling by doing the drawing and judging the results. I see if it is early in the day and you are a little off center or tired or just not liking the weather it shows in the lines and the care you use to compose the sketch but even a poorly result is worth the effort. The 10-30 minutes of sketching helps me know where I am in the world and how well balanced I am feeling. 

 I am truely looking forward to seeing all the sketches from the other members of this group. I am very glad Dan Vera came up with the idea and presented it for July.  I hope lots of artists will share their work and the news about this national drawing sketching challenge with all their artist friends to give it a try. If you aren't ready to draw this year  you can follow the results and enjoy the sketches at our facebook group page. Urban Sketchers of Washington DC on facebook. 

My first sketch for the challenge Friday July 1, 2011

the newest books

books 1

books that fit in my hand

books 2

Lavender blue, hot pink, grass green and soft gray are a few of the colors in my newest handmade coptic bound books. Last night at the BAWA poetry reading of curses, rants and revenge of the poet a great theme for poems, I was telling my poet friend and young neighbor Dan  Vera     about my newest book and the colors I chose to use.  It is always fun to select the textures prints and colors: lavender-blue two tone taffeta cover cloth, navy blue and purple print end pages,  hot pink fly pages and a softer pink spine paper instead of beads. These are all pulled together with a dark blue bee's waxed linen thread. I soon found I had quite a pretty little hip pocket sized book.  I am waiting for some poet to take one of the smallest books 2"x3" to write a poem in for a rare, one of a kind, book. Meanwhile I wanted to show the book selection is growing each day. These will all be available at the Light in October show I am doing on Saturday Oct. 18th. 12-8:00 PM in Arlington, Virginia. 

cliffs by the bay

new butterfly eating minerals from the sand

stairs from above

butterfly, shells, crab with blue plastic bag 

Now plastic garbage is on every beach in the world. 

This is why we now use cloth shopping bags.

luna moth drying new wings

cliffs 

scientist's original log cabin

storm clouds over the beach

lots of green grows at the edge

tiger swallow tail on slippery clay cliffside 

swallow tail butterfly on sand

I got a surprise gift for Keith's and my own birthday. It was a trip to the amazing cliff house where we spent a couple days with Dan Vera the poet. Dan Vera who is finally getting his first book of poems published after years of writing and editing and being a very creative guy. He took me to the cliff house once before,  right after he & Peter first visited, because they had left a bag of tomatoes on the kitchen counter that they didn't want to leave behind to rot and greet the owner on her next visit.  I had a one hour visit and tour of the beach and cliff house to collect those vegetables. I instantly fell in love with the place and dreamed of staying there some day but it seemed unlikely because it was a house on loan to Peter by a coworker. Now a year or two after that visit I got my chance and we jumped at once planning and packing. It is very hard to show you what this house looks like because it is set in the woods on the edge of a 100 foot precipice that is surrounded by shrubs and trees and bushes and vines. The long wall of windows are truly Bay windows looking from on high over the vast Chesapeake bay. The house is full of interesting furniture and artworks that relate in some way to the bay or sailing or nautical things and has been put together with style and good taste. We took long walks on the edge of the Chesapeake bay beach at the foot of the cliffs. This is a place where nature is all around and scientists discovered ancient fossils in the bank of clay cliffs back in the 1930's and built a log cabin there to come and study them now it is a visitors center and museum. Around this cabin a little community of houses sprung up and developed into a very fine retreat only one hour's drive or 45 miles from downtown Washington, DC. I was happy to have this time there with Dan and Keith and Rufus the black dog who is so sociable and friendly. Keith made flower arrangements and I made photos of butterflies and a wasp, sky and bay and cliffs and trees. My favorite Bay laurel was everywhere along the edges of the cliffs. The scent is one of my favorites and these bushes were very aromatic with only a few berries showing. 

We had fun cooking with Dan and the big kitchen that was fully stocked and outfitted with some fine cooking tools and dishes to dine upon. All in all it was a devilishly good time. I was delighted to discover the sky full of stars from the bay balcony after the first night's dinner. We saw several shooting stars and the deck's Adirondack chairs were perfect for star gazing.  A dramatic rain storm passed the second day and gave every thing a needed drink and we watched as it passed on the Internets' weather radars. No rain fell in DC for our flower garden but it looks like today finally some of that Tropical Storm/hurricane Fay will be passing and give us downtown our first taste of rain for this month. The trees in our neighborhood look like they are dying from thirst many have yellow leaves from drought. We waited all day and not hardly any rain has fallen on our garden even with tropical storm Fay at our door step it is being held back by a high pressure system. It is so odd watching the rain stuck to the south of Washington, DC. There were lots of young butterflies at the beach and a few moths. I got my first Luna moth and several other butterflies in great detail while they sucked up minerals from the sand and clay cliffs. They were all very new and without damage to their colorful wings. The moth was so new it's wings were not yet flattened out enough to fly. Keith found it and knew I wanted to make a picture of one and came all the way back up the stairs to the house and took me back down to get this shot. When we came back it was right where he first spotted it drying in the breeze. The storm passed and the fog and gray clouds rolled in, the wind stopped. The bay went still except for soft waves you can see and hear in this video at the end. If the video isn't in your email you can go to the blog to see the video. In closing I noticed that the woods and beach side flora is all under attack by numerous invasive species like English Ivy &  Porcelain berry vines that crowds out all the native plants that should be growing in the woods and along the shore. The beach didn't have a lot of plastic garbage but we did see some when we looked carefully. The butterfly and the blue bag is one example. There was the barnacle covered Clorox bottle, I didn't take pictures of that sort of thing. We felt sad to see such a beautiful natural place filling with disposable society's trash. Even with all that sad stuff the natural world still worked it's magic on Keith and I and we had a lovely time and were reinvigorated. It reminded me how much I was uplifted last summer while visiting my pal in Ipswich, Mass. at the beach and Ipswich river's marsh. I would like to make a habit of going to the shore at the end of the summer for my birthday. 

day light

This week we began with the clocks moved forward. My illness the common cold is long gone. My life is in a new phase with the addition of my Dad in a rehabilitation home across the river in Crystal City. I am now the family member closest to his new home. Since I am close to this home, I am going to visit as often as I can without drastically disrupting my normal life. I have not been feeling very upbeat because of what I have been seeing. My Dad is 77 and suffers from heart disease, kidney failure, diabetes, glaucoma, and worst of all for me Alzheimer's and this isn't so noticeable when he is home in a controlled environment with few challenges besides eating and every day tasks which my mother helps to see him through.  In the rehabilitation center he is on a locked floor with many other patients who are also challenged mentally with unique dementia's and mental disorders. Going there to visit is a really upsetting experience. I have been going about every other day after the first week when I went every day. I realized he didn't remember if I was there or not and that I couldn't quite see clear to go so often and keep up my own mental health. 

Dad had a seizure which came on suddenly and sent him to the hospital for about 6 days and then once they had done all the tests they could to discover the cause of this seizure they decided he was ready to go to rehabilitation. No cause means no treatment except physical, speech and occupational therapies which he has needed even before the seizure. It is a struggle for me seeing him so down and coming back pretty fast and even now improving to watch the people around him and wonder what effect they have on his sense of well being. I can imagine that living with so many people who don't know what day it is and where they are or who they are ... or how to talk and make sense would, really throw your own reality off center. They certainly upset me when I am there among them by talking in funny languages or singing or yelling for no reason. They tend to notice that I am different and come up to me to make contact with one they think is from the outside world and others are lost in their own minds all together; staring or just watching what ever passes in their field of vision without comment. 

It is very sad to see these beautiful people so pained or lost or lonely. They have each other but need people who are not so off center to help them. Nurses and aids do what they can but some outside help has got to be a big boon for each one of them that can get it.  I have a great pen pal in Holland who does just this every week he goes and visits group of special friends he has been assigned at a retirement home. He acts as a good friend and does things like take them out for a coffee or a walk. He goes with a small group to a local swimming pool and helps supervise a days swimming. He now runs a painting group because he is an artist and knows that making art is uplifting and every one can paint a little. So Cor Windhouwer who has been my pen pal for about 5 years has been a great inspiration to me to visit my Dad and do the best I can to make each visit a fun experience to enrich his time in recovery. I am going today to visit for a while and I am thinking of taking some prints and a box of watercolors to fill them in with colors. I have a lovely vase of sunflowers copied from a Van Gogh painting that I plan to print and use for myself and since my Dad was an architect I will take him a castle to paint. 

This week was hard beginning with the new time and a lovely tour of the Whitehouse with Scott Brooks and Mike and Kim before dawn on Monday. My model sent email to say he was sick so I didn't find out until the last minute and had to cancel the drawing group that night. 

I had a blast visiting with Scott and Mike who just got home from a trip to Italy. They got to visit with Doug Kingsbury and Bob in Florence. Scott had a show in Rome with the low brow artists from Los Angles he is loosely part of  for a couple years. Check out Scott's web gallery and blog for great photos of his work and the trip to Italy. Scott's Blog

Yesterday after a trip to the 14th St. laundry mat with Keith and a visit to Whole Foods on P. street NW we came home and napped then went to our Brookland neighborhood poetry reading. Every month Dan Vera and Michael Gushue host a reading of local poets at a gallery down by the rail road tracks. Those trains rolling by add a lot of color to the evening's palette of back ground sound. The poems are by all sorts of poets and include work by the reading poets sometimes. Dan read a funny one about Elliot Spitzer's tragic news this week gleaned from a New York Times article he read. After the hour of poems we retired with Dan and his partner Peter to Brooks Tavern for a late supper and to catch up with our neighbors. 

This week we have light later in the evenings and after a meeting with my father's care takers on Tuesday I know that taking him out for fresh air and visiting him are important tasks for me to keep up. He is going to be in rehabilitation for another two or three weeks. I am excited to see him improve his physical strength and hope to challenge his mental fitness to improve his quality of life.