West Virginia

narcissus in the woods

 

waiting on the photographer to get in the SUV....

I guess someone made a joke about leaving him behind? 

rainy day view of new studio barn 

The barn studio isn't quite done. They just got the keys and will be adding some stone to the bottom & landscaping this summer. 

fire in a rusty pot warms the chilly evening air

porch sitters rocking in time to bird songs

wild service berry blossoms

view of the green studio barn and the cabin in the distance

Keith coming past the studio to see what is in the woods

diminutive yellow tete-a-tete narcissus 

We had the pleasure of a brief trip to West Virginia recently. Peter and Tom have a handsome cabin up there and they have just added a studio barn to the compound. Trees leaves are still not out yet but the gray bark and moss covered grounds made a soft backdrop for the white service berry blossoms and yellow narcissus. We spent down time rocking on the front porch and a later around a bonfire in a rusty kettle under a moon lit  sky watching stars and the passing clouds. It was fun chatting with the hosts and the next door neighbors who are building their cabin house themselves who dropped by to visit.  

We heard stories and earlier in the day inspected  the site where neighboring French kids with matches set fire to a hollow tree and the leaves on the lee side of the hill the day before we arrived. There was lots of excitement about fire and the crew come miles up into the back country for a children's' forest fire. Their old hollow tree had to be cut down and divided into sections to extinguish all the embers burning inside of the natural made chimney. Someone's daddy is going to get a bill for that handy service, so we hear. Rain came the third day of our visit and brought some much needed wet to the mossy forest floor. 

The flowering service berry trees are lower story tree and remain short and kind of delicate in the shade of the taller hardwood trees much like dogwoods and redbuds in the wild which bloom later. The white blooms are named to mark the return of the traveling ministers that long ago visited once a month during  fair traveling weather to small mountain communities cut off by winter storms and snow. Visiting West Virginia always reminds me of my family's Appalachian mountain roots and my visits there as a child. WETA one of our Public Television stations  in Washington, DC has been showing a four part series of programs on Monday evenings at 10:30 PM which I have enjoyed the past two weeks. Keith and I are both learning things we didn't know and refreshing some we did know. Cherokee Indians are featured a lot in the stories about Indian peoples who inhabited the forest before and after white men came. They say everyone up in the hills is related to the Indians including my father's family so whites didn't get rid of them entirely but they sure misused them and their environment.

I took a 30 second 360º view video from the driveway while I was there. 

Click this link to see it play on the weblog. 

You will be notice lots of rusty metal stuff around the artist's retreat because my friend and host Peter Wood is a metal sculptor who specializes in making his art works rusty! Visit his website  http://www.rustymetal.com/

to learn more about his work. We are discussing a two day event this October to show and sell our work together again called Light In October. More about that to come as time draws nearer. 

We all visited charming Berkley Springs on the last day we were in West VA where I really enjoyed a rare Book and Paper exhibition at the Ice House. The last time I visited the Ice House they had a show of quilts. Peter has large and small works available there year round. Then we went to the bird seed store and got our very own House Wren House which can be reused year after year. It has a trap door in the bottom to remove the small twigs every season so the male will be happy to come back and show off his skills to the discerning females who judge him on his song and nest building skills. It now hangs in our short lilac tree where the gourds have been for the past few years. 

Finally a fireside video... "dueling cameras" are me and Keith both shooting pictures of the fire at the same time. It is such a rare treat for us to see one, we both had the same reaction, "take a picture!"

Mother goes green for earth day

redbud flowers

Mom and her new green neutron lawn mower

I am just home from a trip to Manassas where I did laundry and errands and enjoyed the rain then a great day of sunshine with cool air and spring flowers. Mom decided that lawn care service last year was too expensive and that she wanted to try mowing her own yard with a new electric battery powered lawn mower. She ordered a small Neutron mower with a little encouragement from her best pal Mildred who has been doing her own with the same type of green mower for years. It was very exciting to see it work so well. I am still a little apprehensive about my mother who has some mobility problems pushing a lawn mower. Today we did it together while we both learned the way it works. We were glad the battery charge only lasts an hour. So to mark this wonderful day and my brave mother of mine,  I got her to model the mower for my camera in a brief video. Now if all goes well, she will be saving hundreds of dollars on lawn care with the big bonus of sparkling clean air, significantly reduced motor noise and free exercise. Hip hip hooray 

Also note that the lovely dogwood is just begun blooming and in the distant back ground a tall red bud.

Neutron Mowers rock. 

Here in the movie you can see the flowering trees and the mom in action in the last bit of the front yard. You know you can only see this video if you are reading on the Orange Explains it all web-log 

yellow bellied sap sucker ?

sap sucker 

sap sucker

more sap sucker

woodpecker

woodpecker's holes

cedar tree trunk detail of holes

yellow bellied sap sucker 

drilling

waiting for the sap

This past few days, looking out our north facing window perched on two white cedar tree trunks, I have been watching the most amazing bird. A woodpecker.  After I noticed it was returning to the same tree over and over I took the trouble to wash my window and raise the blind to have a better view. I wanted to photograph this migratory traveler less than ten feet from my desktop. It is a speckled bird with a red patch on it's head and a short pointed beak. I  looked it up knowing it was a woodpecker but not which variety. Two are common in our area that look sort of like this one: the downy woodpecker and the hairy woodpecker. It's markings  are not yet fully developed making the identification more difficult. Yellow bellied sap sucker adolescents keep youthful feathers all through the first winter. Spring is pretty much here now and I think this fellow is mature enough to have partial markings of an adult but the behavior is clearly that of a yellow bellied sap sucker. The Yellow Bellied Sap Sucker is a name common to us cartoon watching adults from the old Bugs Bunny character Yosemite Sam (short angry guy with a big red moustache and a couple of six shooters) who always called Bugs a "yellow bellied sap sucker"intended to belittle him, poor rabbit Sam hated rabbits. It was funny as a kid but now I am sitting looking at a real yellow bellied sap sucker out my window for the fourth day in a row. The behavior I refer to above is that the sap sucker drills series of holes in a a row on a tree to collect sap. They drill and wait for the rich sap to run which they then lap up and they also eat bugs that are attracted to the sap. Other wood peckers don't have this talent to draw the sap out of the tree. The sap sucker doesn't dig deep, only far enough to get to the layer just below the bark where this sap flows down from the leaves to feed other parts of the tree.  I have seen the local squirrels come chase the bird away and lick the sap off the tree trunk too. It must be full of rich nutrients. The article I read on Smithsonian National Zoological Park explains the whole mystery of how they feed themselves on sap and has another gallery of photos which includes babies and fully mature adults, male and female. 

I really enjoy the birds that come to visit us here in the city. The more exotic ones especially inspired me to keep looking more carefully and to use binoculars and a book to help identify which ones were in my area. I was surprised how many there when you bother to look and listen carefully. Sparrows come in many varieties, starlings change colors throughout the year, Crows one of my favorites travel in pairs when they are mature and in flocks or "murders" when they are adolescents before they mate for life. I think people tend to over look birds and many exotic songbirds get get lost in the mix of common city birds. I recall once noticing a blackish bird on the median strip of route 66 one day when I was stuck in rush hour traffic moving inches per hour rather than miles per hour. I saw one that had a brown head but was in a crowd of blackish starlings which do not have  brown heads. I came home straight away and pulled out my bird book and hunted for a brown headed black bird. It was a cow bird and since I know what it looks like now I see them more often. Before these cowbirds were just another starling to my lazy unobservant eye. 

This is a video of the yellow bellied sap sucker on our cedar tree today. Twelve seconds of a bird watching a man in a window. To see it you have to follow this link to the webpage where it is posted on the blog. 

new orange flowers

orange on the dresser 

orange flowers on the asian carpet 

close up on the orange flowers

next to the clock

This past week got some orange flowers that are just so beautiful and the florist chose all orange just for the woodcutter. He is such a thoughtful guy. 

quilters room

embroidery of crazy quilt panel

this shows the work on the panel I brought home from Manassas last Sunday. Slow but steady progress. You also see the gray damask in the center which came from Richard's fancy Italian shorts mom dissected for me to include a memento. 

Manhattan special orange soda

I saw these bottles in an old Italian grocery  found hidden in the DC Wholesale Market district after Dan Vera's poetry reading earlier this week while on my way home with some long time residents who gave me a ride home to Brookland from the reading. I can't drink this sort of stuff because it is to acidic but it does have a great orange color to enjoy. 

crazy quilt set up

crazy quilt panels laid out on top of double bed 

closer view of crazy blocks on the bed

Last weekend I made a trip to Manassas Virginia for a couple nights. 

Mother offered to let me bring my crazy quilt parts back out to her house and use one room to spread it out and get back to work putting the whole thing together. What a boon this room is to my quilt project. I do not have room in Washington DC in our apartment to work on anything bigger than a single panel. Last weekend at Mom's suggestion before we left to go see the big quilt show we set up the equipment in the room for my project so it would be ready when we got home. I opened up the box that has been stored in a closet floor for several years which is full of materials. It had a number of pieces I had forgotten about making. These are extra blocks of crazy patched  background fabric, almost ready to embroidery and add to the quilt top. I include some photos of my work room and panels on the bed once it was all laid out and set up. I am using the old Singer treadle  sewing machine my Grandmother Nunley left me as a table for my mother's more modern electric 1960 portable Singer. I have an ironing board to press seams and connect parts from Great Aunt Mary Ellen with my mother's vintage steam iron. After attending the big quilt show, where we saw nothing quite like my project, we went to lunch and rested our dogs after two hours of standing on hard concrete floors. Then first thing after breakfast Sunday I got to work using the great light that fills this room with a north east exposure. I spent about 5 hours working on two panels. Mom offered plenty of team spirit and encouragement and she ripped seams of some fancy Italian damask shorts I wanted to use in the new panels. That was a pair of shorts that belonged to one of my friends from Pratt Institute who died of AIDS in 1992 Richard Hoffman. Before dark  I packed up one panel with muslin backing brought it and my embroidery kit  home to DC where I am slowly filling in the embroidery of the center. This new panel will in turn will be connected to the side or top of the panels you see laid out on the bed in my photos. Then all those edges of panels will have areas of connections that still need to be embroidered to finish off the top. I expect that will take most of this year to complete if my arthritis in my spine doesn't kick up requiring me to take another break. I began this crazy quilt in 1999 and took a few years off due to spinal arthritis three times over these past ten years. I hope this year to put it all to bed now that I have a place to spread out and work when I visit Manassas and Mom. 

orange tulips

orange tulips 1

orange tulips 2

orange tulips 3

This past week Keith got a bunch of Orange Dutch tulips for mom. I delivered them and spent a few days with her enjoying them and quilts at a show at the Prince William County Fair Grounds. I have lots of pictures to share. The quilts I liked I took photos of and tried to get some detail shots. Those  are on my flickr.com photo pages in a set titled Quilt Show. 

quilting- in my life

crazy quilt details 

crazy quilt block 

crazy quilt details 

yo yo quilt pieces laid out

closer yo yo pieces  

yarn tied quilt

yarn tied quilt on the bed

antique quilts booth at the antiques show 

Great Grand Mother Mary Spangler Cassell circa 1903

this is a family portrait that includes my paternal grandfather as a 5 or 6 year old boy center who was a champion speller and rode horse over the mountains to visit his sweetheart and deliver US Postals. His nick name was Judge and his father there on the left was nicknamed Squire. This was a German/Irish Appalachian family that ended up with 9 kids by the time they finished growing.  

Great Grandmother Cassell's quilt

It was made when she was a teenager for use once she was married, then it was passed down to great aunt MaryEllen then my mother Phyllis.

detail of Great Grand Mother Cassell's quilt for closer look at the fabrics 

detail of my new crazy quilt 

Since I was a young boy, I was interested in sewing and my grandmother Sallie Smith Nunley was the first to let me do some sewing on a machine after showing me how to do simple work by hand. I recall Grandma often asked me to thread her needles due to poor eyesight.  She used  a cast iron black Singer treadle machine the family bought her years before to do repairs on clothes back when patches were an everyday backstop from running around with holes in your pants. I was fascinated by that foot peddle which I could sit and pump as long as it was detached from the machine. I found no end of  fun pretending to sew. She first allowed me to use that dangerous machine to help sew together striped blue/white and pink /white sections of  seersucker fabric for a quilt to fit on my small twin bunk bed. The story of how she sewed her index finger right through with that machine was my warning to be very careful around it every time. The index finger extended to show her scar as proof this was no wives tale made only to scare me. I think I was about nine years old when we sewed up that pink and blue quilt top and I had to wait a couple years before the church ladies finished adding the backing and quilting it all together before I got it as a highly cherished Christmas gift. 

My parents slept under a beautiful quilt  made my Great Grand Mother Shannon Cassell when she was just a teenager back in the 1880's whom I never met. As a kid there were quilts and comforters a plenty down at Grand mother Sallie's in Narrows Virginia and other homes we visited in Appalachian where my family is from. At home in Northern Virginia we didn't have any but this one that my mother protected carefully on her bed. I can remember as a boy laying on top of it admiring the little patches of colorful antique fabric trying to imagine what the dresses looked like that these small samples came from and who wore them and where they went before they ended up on our quilt. It was a comforting to imagine all those people I never met but I knew had been thinking of their family of the future when they made these quilts to share with us. I can still get lost in those swatches of fabric and I was delighted when visiting home recently to find it added to cover my bed. This quilt is lined with lambs wool instead of cotton for batting for extra warmth and perhaps that gives it the special perfume of it's own that makes those memories of childhood naps come back today.

It is with all this in mind that about ten years ago I began discussing with my sister Jenny Leigh the idea of making a crazy quilt. The crazy quilt is different from our family quilts, in that it is usually made of more fancy fabrics and is asymmetric in design with elegant embroidery to decorate the top. Crazy quilt was less often used as a layer for warmth but more to show off intricate stitching and to emulate the Japanese asymmetric designs that swept the nation first when shown at the 1876 Bicentennial Exposition in Philadelphia. I didn't know very much about embroidery in 1999 but I knew that Jenny did and sought out her help and advice. Jenny is also a fashion merchandiser and I wanted her to help me with some fabrics to make the quilt together or as it worked out on my own. She was great offering me her embroidery floss and fabric samples and a box which houses the floss. I visited her in Houston Texas Feb. 2000 for some first hand advice on French knots and found I was pretty good at the rest. There I was embroidering  small patches of black fabric with flowers of all different varieties that I invented to reflect my love of gardens and flowers. I got a book on the crazy quilt "The Magic of Crazy Quilting" by J. Marsha Michler which I discovered has pictures of a few quilts that were on display in last weekend's antique show. In the book, which is in partly online in Google books: I found many great examples of the old crazy quilts and the history and all the various types of stitches used on crazy quilts and a long section on embroidery stitches that were developed to edge the crazy quilt panels. The Smithsonian helped me a lot as well by displaying a crazy quilt at the Renwick American Crafts Collection early on where I did some sketching of stitches I liked and got a good close look at a really beautiful work of art done in fifteen years from 1895-1910 by one woman Georgia Maltbie and given to them in 1999. It was very delicate and this quilt was made of small squares that were only about 10 inches square and all stitched together to make a large bed sized quilt. It had fine cotton velvet and silk satin and all sorts of lovely animals and flowers. Once I saw that I was hyper motivated to get to work and make a "turn of the next century crazy quilt" with all the family fabrics I could find and any other fabrics that I could fill in to give my quilt colors and stories of my life. I had some set backs but after ten years I think I am ready to begin finishing up the Frederick Crazy Quilt. It is home in a room of it's own now ready to work on in Manassas. I have most of the top ready to piece together, it is large enough to cover a double bed and some areas of extra embroidery to tie them all together then it will need a backing and the edges and that will be my millennium quilt by a gay man of the 20th-21st century. 

There are a couple other quilts I wanted to mention. There is the yo yo quilt I began when I was about 11 or 12. This one is simple circles of multi colored fabric sewn into little gathered up pouches that then flatten out. These are sewn together to create a overall random pattern. I discovered this quilt on a trip to Connecticut where we visited some college friends of my parents who had one on the bed I got to sleep in for a night or two. I fell in love with it and because I figured out how to make the circle pieces I began my own version soon after our visit. The think I liked about the antique one on my bed was that it was incomplete with no backing. It is just a simple lacework of little circles stitched together to decorate the bed. I have a bag full of circles but not yet enough to cover my big bed. Last but not last is the quilt my partner's mom had made for his bed. It is a sort of simple Appalachian design of rectangles joined by long strips of yellow and the backing is red and tied with bits of navy blue yarn. A simple quilt still keeps the bed warm as does a fancy one. What do you sleep under?