coincidence?

or fate?
My stars today:
Leo (July 23 - August 22) If you have some spare time, you should tidy up your environment today. Being organized can contribute to being successful, so clear out messes that have been piling up in your office and around your home. Besides, you never know what you might unearth as you dig through the past month's clutter! You may find exactly what you have been looking for.

My mat knife (aka utility knife). I would like to find my mat knife -- or any of the half dozen or so mat knives that are scattered throughout house because I put one down, forget where I put it, and buy another. I think a squirrel could do a better job of keeping track of these than I do. It's always a happy surprise when I run across one. Oh, hello, there you are. . .

Today I painted. As it turned out, Provence Cream was too yellow. Vanilla Cream was too gray. But the two creams mixed together -- perfect. And with a yield of two gallons, no worries about running out of my even more customized custom color.

Tomorrow, the 'raising the design wall' adventure.

almost

Behind curtain #1

Is all the fabric that there is. On one, and only one, rolling shelf unit that fits neatly into the opening of the closet. (No, I'm not up to the Please iron those curtains, Melanie, my god, there are people here . . .)

I should say almost all the fabric that there is. There is more in the to-be-washed bag and a bit more in a bookcase in the office, all of which should fit on the bottom shelf, then I'm done. If there's more fabric in the house -- and there very well might be (get thee behind me, Satin!) -- it ain't staying. This is more than enough to sustain me for Quite Some Time.

Now that I've found the floor, I'm up to the sweeping/vacuuming/mopping part. And now that I can move around in the room relatively freely, I'm painting the walls. Behr paint #320A: Provence Cream. You wouldn't think it would be this hard to pick an off-white, but I've painted one wall to see how it looks and I can't decide if it's too yellow. More butter than cream. Ah me. Everyone should have problems of this weight -- and no more than this weight.

Stay tuned.

ai-yi-yi

I'm going to take some classes in the fall and thought it would be a good idea to have A Place to Work that was somewhat organized and had a visible surface or two to support school-related activities. Since it was more than time to unpack from the Crow class I thought I'd start by organizing my fabrics. In Creating Your Perfect Quilting Space, the author (Lois L. Hallock) suggests using a folding tool so all your yardage is in similar-size bundles and can stack neatly. She also says that you don't know how much and what kind of storage you need until you know what you have, so I stopped looking at catalogs of lovely shelving units and decided to go with what's here. What's here is a royal mess:
Even the cat is afraid to go in there.

But one must persevere, despite the skeptics.
The folding tool revealed that five across is a workable plan.

By the end of Saturday evening. I'd achieved this:

And by the end of Sunday, this:

Describing one client's do-over, Hallock says that the client and her friends spent 200 hours folding fabric. I believe it. Beau remains skeptical.

^I don't think this is his "Darling, I just love what you've done with this room" face. But it's a beginning -- the room, not the face -- and I'm encouraged.

the heat is hot

It is punishingly hot.
85F/30C (that sounds so much pleasanter to unaccustomed ears: 30 degrees, if only)
60% humidity
heat index 91

Ow.

Clearly it's time for buckets of iced tea. Here's how my Mom made it, by the gallon, with a syrup. Never cloudy, always bright.

In a small saucepan,
2 cups (or so) tap water.
No real need to measure, but you want to avoid boiling over.
5 tea bags
(Plain old black tea from the grocery store -- Tetley, Red Rose,
Salada -- whatever's on sale in the 100-count box)
10 tablespoons sugar
(ah, those were the days, and even so, Dad added MORE sugar
to each glassful he drank )
Have ready:
1 lemon
1/2 lime
ICE and cold water
1-gallon vessel

Bring the tea and sugar mixture just to boiling. Stir while heating to be sure all the sugar dissolves. Turn off the heat, let cool on the burner (or not).
While the syrup is working, squeeze lemon and lime juice into the vessel. Fill halfway with cold water. Add the syrup, ice, and more water to make one gallon.
Mom used to make extra syrup and freeze or refrigerate it, so as not to be stirring hot stuff when it was punishingly hot. And so as not to run out.

I make a 2-quart version with 4 teabags, 3 packets of Equal, 1/2 a lemon and 1/2 a lime. I just boil the teabags and add everything else after. I also keep extra brew in the fridge, mostly so that it's already cold when needed.

We always dumped the rinds into the tea, the oil in the rinds adds flavor. Back in the day, we didn't wash the fruit first, but these days I do.

We didn't fuss with greenery, mint and such, or with bush or tree fruits, but feel free if you like that sort of thing. And fool with the ratio of tea and sweetening until you find the balance of strength and sweetness you like -- which, now that I think of it, is pretty good advice for much of life.

piece process

So I'm back from the Nancy Crow extravaganza and I must say it was remarkable. Intense, as promised, but exhilarating and possibly exalting.

We began with an exercise in black and white. So far, so good, b&w is my comfort zone. Nancy gave us a list of widths to cut and sew together, and we were set loose to make a composition out of the pieces. I started out working horizontally.

But as the thing evolved, I liked it better vertical.

That long strip of black in white at the bottom was something I stuck in as a place holder because I was (already) getting tired and we were running out of time. It is also, of course, the one thing Nancy remarked on: "I'm not sure about this piece." she said. Me neither.

That was Monday. On Tuesday (into Wednesday), we began piecing together colors in prescribed assortments (warm/cool, neutrals, neutrals and brown, brown with blue, etc.) and ratios. We were exhorted to do 16 of these. I managed 12, one of which (the rust and purple one near the bottom) was not on the list. I had confused and combined two instructions -- not the most auspicious start.

Wednesday into Thursday, we were to do another 14 or so assortments of "bold graphic prints", plaids, and stripes. I HATE plaid and refused to get any even for the purpose of the class. I made do with some batik and brights. I may have added 4 or so fabrics to the 12 from the first exercise.

Midday on Thursday, we got the final instruction: create a composition in the form of a ribbon quilt. Damn and blast!, I thought. If I had known we were going to make a ribbon quilt, I'd have approached the whole piecing exercise completely differently. Which, I realized in the next moment, is the point of not knowing.

Onward. Sorted and pinned things, hoping for a composition to emerge. I am very fond of that sparrow-color gradation of brown and gray at the top, but it didn't make it into the final piece.

Adding and subtracting and shifting things up, down, across, and around on the design wall, by midnight or so I had this:

A somewhat coherent something with a big hole in the middle. I could not resolve the void, so I gave up and went to bed. First, for levity's sake, I filled the hole with one possibility:

(That's a scrap paper label stating: "Your Name Here." My mind was not the only thing that wouldn't come into focus . . .)

Friday. Fresh perspective. At breakfast I had an idea that amounted to "retreat to your comfort zone: go for b&w." As I was working, I was uneasy about the T-shaped purple bit, but Nancy said, "Keep that. It makes the whole piece." She also was complimentary about the use of b&w to resolve the center. Okay then, be it resolved:

It was 5.30 on Friday. I had made it through -- and finished something -- and was jumping up and down chortling:"I survived Nancy Crow!" She had the grace to smile.

Saturday, I went to an exhibition of Nancy's work at the Schweinfurth Center in Auburn, and then I came home -- with renewed enthusiasm and a great deal to think about. I think this is going to be the event I look back at and say "That's where it all changed and came together."

as promised: roy g. biv

I think I may be ready for Nancy Crow's class next week. Behold:

^That's about 90 yards of solid color, 100% cotton fabric in at least 1-yard lengths. "Do NOT," Crow says, "bring marbled fabrics." Well, some of the greens are a little mottled because I'm not wildly skilled at hand dyeing. And I tried doing some hand dyeing in an effort to be somewhat economical about this extravaganza.

^Red, orange, yellow. In the back, that lovely wood-rose color I like so much (and because the store had a clear run of 6 shades). Tan to brown, and not enough gray. In my usual palette, you can never have enough gray. The pieces in the front are the hand dyes (Rit), the ones on top and in the back I bought.

^Green, Blue, Violet. I tried to buy blue violet and red violet, but in life they're closer in tone than in the picture.

Plus (not shown) 4 yards each of black and white.

Plus, Crow says, "bring bold graphic commercial prints. Do NOT bring fat quarters. We will be working selvage to selvage." (For those of you not up on the jargon, a fat quarter is a half-yard cut in half to yield a piece roughly 18 x 22 inches.)

Ai-yi-yi.
"Bold graphic commercial prints" is so not my usual thing. So I'm packing pretty much anything for which I have yardage and -- ever the iconoclast -- some fat quarters. Because in a class with Carol Bryer Fallert, she said that if she needs a bigger bit of something, she just pieces it. "And," she said, "no one has ever called me on it." If it's okay with the woman who has many, many more awards and accolades than cats have lives, who am I to argue?

The class is next week. I'm very interested to see how it goes. I've been away from color for a long time. Not out of anxiety, but because I think color is so seductive, it can overwhelm, or overcompensate for, other aspects of the work. I like the way a limited palette forces attention into the other aspects of design. Nancy Crow, on the other hand, asserts that she uses a palette of 500 colors. This is going to be so interesting.

in the summertime

I'm pumping my word count -- 12,000 and a little bit. Of course, I started with about 8,000 for the most recent NaNoWriMo exercise, but still, I'm chuffed. 12,000 down, somewhere between 38K and 53K to go, depending on how things shape. For example: The Great Gatsby is about 50K. TC Boyles' The Women (which is on my nightstand now and which will likely stay there since I'm finding it tedious) is about twice that. There are about 250 words to a printed page.

Beau, on the other hand, has about all he can manage just working on his tan.