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

poetry flowers birds in Brookland

narcissus poeticus

grackles walking in pairs in the oregano

narcissus poeticus

yellow eyed grackle surveys the garden

In my neighborhood of Washington DC, called Brookland there are an unusual number of poets or they are just better known to me because of an organization called The Brookland Area Writers and Artists (BAWA) I enjoy reading their poems posted in face book notes during the "poem a day challenge" for the 30 days in April last year. This year has been a little slow with the poems only coming from one poet for all 7 days of this month so far. Anyway two things remind me of my area poets because they seem to like them as much as I do. Black birds and narcissus poeticus, the white narcissus with a small eye at the center. This morning I was up early and met some of both, blue black grackles with their bright yellow eyes and narcissus poeticus with its red ringed yellow eyes! A beautiful black crow came visiting, yesterday but my camera was blocked by the blinds when he sat outside my window cawing at some unseen mate. Birds are having a hay day making nests with the dead grasses in our yard. I saw a speckled Starling pluck a fresh green mint leaf and carry it up on the roof top where he sat and squealed about it, standing over it's nest, situated in the eaves directly below.

BWAW holds a monthly poetry reading where all my poet friends get together and read poems of a certain predetermined theme for all comers the second Wednesday evening of each month at 7:00PM. I am looking forward to hearing this month's reading one week from tonight. By then I am hoping that this unusually hot weather will be gone. This dramatic heat wave 30º degrees above normal is worrisome just like the massive snow falls were two months ago. We are trying to conserve energy to reduce our carbon foot print and provide nectar and pollen for the local bees in our garden. The good news is there is plenty of pollen for the troubled honey bees and I have seen them all over the garden gathering it for their hives on the hill.

arts in Virginia

Lorton's Workhouse Arts Center, view of the buildings across the Quad near the front

Workhouse Barracks currently house artists open studios with a central gallery for each.

This view is looking from the outside in towards the Quad.

Fiber Arts display gallery in one of the barrack studio buildings

Since my show with neighbor poet Peter Montgomery opened last Oct. 24th at the Lorton Workhouse Arts Center I wanted to get my mother down to see the space and the show. It is open Wed. through Sunday and I was visiting last week so we made a date and went down to explore the new center. It was a nice drive down through the wooded parkway in Prince William County and just over the county line in Fairfax County we pulled up and began the exploration. First we got into the main building where the Associate artists have up displays and the gallery gift shop is open as well as the art supply store. We noticed a nice Art-o-mat® like the one I participated in back in 2001 with Clark Whittington the original man who came up with the idea to turn old cigarette vending machines into art vending machines to bolster young and new collectors. I did some of my most popular prints for the Art-o-mat ® It was fun but way too much work for the money. Exposure was great but the income was not quite worth the pains I developed from mass producing small folding prints, cutting cardboard and stenciling boxes... Still I had fun and if you want to see the prints I did you can find them in my web gallery Artomat page. We saw the first floor and then went up to the Poetic Art show on the second floor and read most of the poems and enjoyed a quiet look over the artworks which varied a great deal from my nude figure watercolor to abstract stenciled paintings, collages, photographs color and black and white and even porcelain sculptures that looked like real books.

From Poetic art we went on to the next exciting feature the artists studios in the barrack buildings that used to be prison quarters. This place has been completely gutted and rebuilt specially to suit artists with bright overall lighting and a central hallway for each artist to display some framed work. A gallery is situated at the front where an artist greets visitors who are free to roam and explore. Mom and I had a great time looking and I discovered the print maker Norma Pfaff who is doing an ongoing series of relief prints of chairs. Something that I have seen before and may try my own had at creating. She wasn't in her studio this day but clearly works there a lot and we met her studio mate Karen a painter who did lovely paintings and watercolors and had a nice talk with her. We also ran into my old class mate from Pratt Institute who lives in that area and is an associate artist, Cedrick Baker. He was also at the opening on the 24th so it was a surprise to find him there again in the middle of the week.

The concrete floors were pretty hard and the only drawback to visiting the Workhouse Arts Center for us. We spent about two hours standing and walking and were very happy to get back in the car for a ride back to Manassas. This place is full of history and the open studio model for this arts center was the Alexandria Art League and the Torpedo Arts Center in Old Town Alexandria, VA. also a historic building. I hope to go back and learn more of the history about the Workhouse where Suffragettes were held after a protest in Washington DC at the Whitehouse for several months and nearly died from rough treatment and starvation back about 90 years ago. Women's struggle to get the vote prevailed but not without suffering and the history is alive here. One whole barrack building at the Workhouse Arts Center is devoted to the history a museum at the far end of the central Quad. That will be my first stop on the next visit. Arts instruction, performances and concerts, readings and creative experiences are happy to change the history of the Workhouse but keep the record strong and straight about how this place got it's name.