Who are these people?

Posted on September 21, 2014September 21, 2014 by KellyAnnD

So genealogy has never been my metier, but lately I have become somewhat interested in it. Pictures like this are apt to do that. Ever since I was a child I have been fascinated by these photos which floated around in a collection of old family mementos primarily because no one seemed to know who these folks were. They could be Bidwells (no near relation to the famous General John who had no issue, my Bidwells are descended from John Horace Bidwell, a very distant cousin to the famous Chico scion) from Shasta County California, they could be Clines from Canada, they could be Corbetts from Ireland, they could be Morgans from Wales; when you get back that many generations, the possible permutations begin to boggle the mind and you start to have an appreciation for the concept that the human race is really one big family. In any case, do your descendants a favor and write on the back of every photo in your house, the date, the location and the names people in it. I have another collection of old family photos for which this was done and I thank the organized person who attended to this detail. I think it was my great-grandmother Harriet Teel Cline, otherwise known in the family as “Hat Creek Hattie.” I’m planning a trip to Hat Creek one day to meet some of my long-lost cousins and see the sights that are depicted and named in these photos: the Pit River, Burney Falls, the towns of Cassel, Hat Creek, and the Millville cemetary where everyone seems to be buried.

It’s good to be back to the blog after a lengthy hiatus. More postings should come along in short order.

Cartooning

Posted on May 13, 2014May 13, 2014 by KellyAnnD

This year I somehow managed to get a few more illustrations done in the spring section of the Nature Poetry book. This first page was done a while back in Three Rivers, if not in a covert then certainly in a meadow after walking over a clear stream strewn with mossy stones. And there were birds singing. 2 out of 3 spring-ish poetic allusions covered, not bad. Unlike Christina Rossetti, I am averse to sitting in coverts and lingering near mossy-stone stream beds with the ticks, mites, fleas and mosquitos. Decidedly unpoetic of me, I know.

The second is of our olive trees in bloom. There will not be follow-up illustrations depicting the development of the fruit since we (again, most unpoetically) sprayed the trees shortly after I finished the drawing below to prevent a crop from setting.

Like most commercial orchard crops, olives grown in a backyard are not properly cared for to produce anything that will rival what a pro who knows how to control the critical variables can grow, but that doesn’t mean the crop won’t be abundant and cause no end of nastiness come fall. If you want to press olive oil, you must withhold water for 3 weeks prior to harvest. I expect some similar admonition applies if you are trying to create olives with interesting flavor profiles for curing whole. Well, the rest of your landscape would not appreciate the stress this watering strategy causes and your HOA association might call on you to make sure you are not neglecting your landscape in violation of the CC and R’s. So, no olives are to follow the bloom.

Many years ago, I had an old olive tree situated between my garage and the adjacent orchard that must have been treated with just the right amount of benign neglect because come fall, the elderly Armenian ladies I didn’t even know would come knocking at my door toting buckets and asking to collect the olives from my tree. Silly me, I didn’t even think to request a lesson in the processing of olives from them back then and now, of course, they are all gone and their descendants never learned the fine art of home curing olives. There just might be a poem hiding in that situation.

Any road, the olive drawing really belongs thematically (for me) to the poem on the facing page where it would not fit visually: In a Spring Still Not Written Of, by Robert Wallace. So, at “double nickels,” I guess I have become one of those he mentions who has time for poems that really are not written for me, sigh.

Why do I refer to these illustrations I’m doing here as “cartooning?” One of my instructors in the Filoli Botanical Illustration Certificate Program refers to the linework in drawings like these as “cartoon lines” in a very dismissive way and points them out as something to avoid at all costs. That certainly doesn’t stop me from doing work in this style of colored drawing I enjoy so immensely, it only stops me from showing any of the work to them, ever again.

High Anxiety

Posted on May 3, 2014May 3, 2014 by KellyAnnD

Just a few thoughts on why it is that I’m always feeling anxious when working at the computer, and why I’m not alone. I thought about this quite a bit recently when my trusty laptop died and I had to upgrade to a new version of Sibelius music scoring software, a program I’ve been using for years, because the old version on which I am quite competent just doesn’t run on the Mac platform. With the death of the old laptop, we are now all Mac, all the time with a new MacBook Pro Retina 15″ laptop replacing the last link to the PC world in our little world of computing.

Consider knitting for a minute. I learned to knit when I was 10. I wasn’t very good at it at first, but I got better through practice and now I feel confident I can knit anything if I just follow the instructions. There are new and better tools now and lots of interesting techniques out there of which I was completely unaware back when I learned, like circular needles, Entrelac and Moebius knitting for example, but if you gave me those same needles and yarn from 1968 (or 1668 for that matter), I could still knit with them successfully and make something useful. Also, after a knitting interregnum of almost 20 years, I was able to take up my needles and start knitting again as if I had never stopped. K2tog still means knit two together.

How different with computers: I first started working with computers at 16 in high school and did some simple programming, first in Fortran on CARDS and then Pascal in college. The language, tools and techniques I used then are of absolutely no use to me now and probably would be unrecognizable to anyone under the age of 50. After I took about 8 years off from computers between college and working in a library, I was unable even to start up a computer and make it run a program, much less do anything useful. Unless you use computers every day, you are constantly out of date. Even if you use them every day, you are out of date if you don’t upgrade every program at every opportunity. The new skills required don’t build on the old skills in the virtual world in same way they do in the analog world. Old tools have no utility. There is no mastery built of long experience, there is only the constant fear that the small world of utility you have created for yourself will collapse at any minute if your computer crashes and you will be starting all over again at ground zero in a new world that is several magnitudes more complex than it was last time your computer crashed, taking with it all of it’s comfortable software. This creates a sense of dread looming in the background at all times as you work with the certain knowledge that your skills are woefully out of date and when the inevitable crash comes, you will not be able to do at all what you can easily do now.

This is one of the reasons I prefer knitting, which, by the way, I often describe as the original binary code. Just knit and purl. That’s all there is. Everything is built upon a base of knit and purl, from the simplest cotton washrag to the most complicated Estonian lace shawl. So, I’m going to take a deep breath, shut down the computer, and go finish my latest knitting project, the instructions for which I admittedly downloaded from the Internet, and very easily from the lovely Ravelry.com site. Slip one knitwise and call me in the morning.

Sweet Violets and Healthy Vegetables

Posted on May 3, 2014May 3, 2014 by KellyAnnD

One of the requirements of any new home was that it have a place to grow violets. I guess the new house passes muster. This is the second display of this magnitude we’ve had since we moved here in February and some of these plants are still sending up new blooms stalks!

Another requirement was a place to grow tomatoes, cucumbers, green beans and zucchini.

Check, check, check, check and check. As you might guess, there are a few other things to check off the list, but vegetables and violets are a very good start. We got the white raised planter boxes from New England Arbors. We’ll see come July how they perform for raising vegetables. We know the Tomato Boxes can raise great tomatoes because we’ve used them before. And there’s always the Farmer’s Market in case of crop failure on any front, but I do love putting vegetables on the table at noon that were still growing on the vine at half-past 11.

Forbidden Fabric

Posted on May 2, 2014May 3, 2014 by KellyAnnD

These new crops could use a press, but I just pulled them out of the dryer after wearing them today and it’s late and I’m lazy, so there you are. You’ve seen this top before. Now there are crops to go with. Really, this is a test of a Burda pattern that I want to use for some nice solid twill in a deep khaki/taupe from the ever-diminishing stash. Okay, I confess I bought some t-shirt fabric when I went to buy the zipper(s) for these 2 pairs of crops, but that’s still an overall reduction and if I sew the t-shirt fabric right away, it won’t ever add to the stash. And it’s so rare to find a decent t-shirt knit at a local fabric store I buckled under the pressure.

The reason this post is titled Forbidden Fabric is that when I moved and sorted the stash, I had help and my help declared this fabric out of bounds and tossed it into the charity box. In fact, the last two projects I’ve sewn are of rescued fabric I was forbidden to sew/wear. Since the garden of Eden, forbidden things are the hardest to resist.

Tourshee

Posted on April 15, 2014May 3, 2014 by admin

It’s been a while since we had Tourshee, but I’ve been craving it lately. Last time I made it I burned my hands so severely while pouring the boiling brine over the vegetables that I had to go to the nearest urgent care center and they slathered the second degree burns with cream and wrapped my hands in gauze. What happened was that the brine sloshed over one hand and then my reaction caused it to splash back over the other hand. Then I dropped the pot. I was lucky it didn’t splash back into my face, really.

Next day when I went to my own doctor, he declared all the gauze wrappings to be overkill and introduced me to Aquaphor ointment which quickly became a staple in the household first aid kit. I was ready to get back on the pickle horse right away, but the family was too traumatized and begged me not to make Tourshee anymore and I haven’t until now.

But enough about that, let’s talk about the actual Tourshee, a life-saving Armenian staple. Basically Tourshee is any pickle, but the way we make it, it’s a brined or marinated pickle. It could be a fermented one, or a traditionally canned one, depending on your choice of recipe.

I say Tourshee is life-saving because I remember when there was a terrible earthquake in Armenia I read about a man who was dug out of the rubble that had been his home and rescued 3 or 4 weeks after the event when the hope of finding survivors was virtually gone. He explained that he had been making pickles and carrying them down to his basement when the earthquake struck. He survived all that time by eating the pickles and as I recall, was in pretty good shape when they found him.

I’ve been craving them because they are a perfect low carb food as long as you don’t eat the onions or carrots and I’m bored with my usual fare. Trust me, there is nothing boring about Tourshee! Oh my, the vinegar burn and the heady garlic and onion fumes will knock your socks off. Nothing subtle here. The only other Armenian food I’ve tried that comes close in assertiveness is Basturma, a preserved meat that shares a common linguistic heritage with Pastrami, but let’s just say I’ll never be ordering a Basturma sandwich even though a nice Pastrami on Rye used to be my standard deli order back in the sandwich days.

Recipes abound on the internet for mixed pickles. Nothing too special about this one I got out of an old Sunset book on Canning and Preserving, the vegetables do all the work. So I won’t post the recipe. If you have a hankering for pickles outside of the ordinary, pick the recipe that sounds best to you and get going, just be careful handling that hot brine!

…and the quilt frame

Posted on March 30, 2014May 3, 2014 by KellyAnnD

This project was put on hold indefinitely for a few reasons. In the meantime, smaller projects have been finished on the frame and the problems/reasons for not working on this beast have been resolved. Namely, there is now space for the frame with this over-size quilt on it and I have learned to discipline myself to no more than one hour of hand quilting per day to avoid repetitive stress injuries.

What a happy surprise when I uncovered this quilt I hadn’t seen in ages. Why, it’s lovely! This project began as a case of “careful what you wish for.” Rarely do I win anything in a lottery-style drawing, but I had my heart set on winning these Block-of-the-Month entries back when I was a card-carrying member of our local quilt guild, Country Crossroads Quilters. It was an unusual project in that everyone had a small piece of the same theme fabric and each quilter was to add companion fabrics and use a block design of her own choosing. Those of you familiar with these types of activities know that generally participants are given a general color scheme and/or one theme fabric and a designated block design. So the winner gets a number of blocks that generally coordinate color-wise and are all the same design and she sews them together and has an instant quilt top. That’s the general theory.

Giving people carte blanche on the design of the blocks made for an interesting assortment and giving a theme fabric with so many colors meant that there wasn’t even really a consistent color theme as some quilters opted to bring out the Christmas theme of the fabric and others opted to showcase the purple.

So for once in my life, I did win the drawing. It may have been rigged by my friends in the group who knew I wanted these blocks and knew I had been a faithful participant in the Block of the Month project for ages and had never won the blocks whilst some had won multiple times or worse, some had won the single time they threw a block in the mix. Or, it may have been the universe out to teach me that careful what you wish for lesson. Either way, I “won” the oddest assortment of blocks. In the end, there were only 13 that were really useable. Yes, 13. Hmmm. So I took the 5 that went together the best (accent on Christmas, no additional purple) and made a medallion out of those, which you can see in the middle of the photo above. I confess I did add the Celtic Applique myself to the otherwise perfectly serviceable 9-patch block that just needed a bit of a lift and a shift of scale to be placed center front and play well with the rest of the Christmas themed blocks that had lots of white. The rest of the blocks were used “as is.” There were a few more that would not play well with the group no matter how I tried to make them settle in. I waited to set these blocks until the makers of the unused ones were no longer around to see that their blocks were not included. That took a while. And the quilting has taken even longer. Because of the medallion setting, the quilt got huge. It’s the largest I’ve ever made. Also because of the medallion setting, there is a lot of design space that cried out for hand quilting, although in retrospect, sending this off for custom machine quilting probably would have been the wiser choice. (Close-up below showing the block I contributed and some of the designs I adapted.) I am determined to finish this before my hands and/or eyes fail me. I’m currently more than half-way and it’s only taken me 15 years or so. And when I’m done I’ll have a HUGE Christmas themed quilt. But it will be gorgeous.

Back to the Drawing Board

Posted on March 29, 2014May 3, 2014 by KellyAnnD

It’s time to get the studio up and running in the new place. Since it’s been a while with no regular art production, I thought it best to start with some small exercises to get back in the swing of things. In the move I found this project, a book of nature poems I got at a library book sale years ago that I felt needed “alteration.” Altered books are a new phenomenon to me, schooled as I was never to write in books or deface them in any way. I’m not sure I’m quite ready for some of the more radical alterations I’ve seen, but this book seemed to be crying out for more and different illustrations than it was born with upon publication, a sample of which is shown above. There are 3 or 4 more of these, one at the start of each section, and that’s it for illustrations. The paper is nice and thick, with good tooth but no noticeable texture and it has aged to a lovely cream. The poems are organized seasonally, so I decided to add little illustrations of my own surrounding the poetry in the generous margins each according to it’s season, like this:

Now, that’s more like it for illustrations in a book of nature poems for me. Spring in my new neighborhood means Loropetalum Chinense, also known as Fringe Plant, blooming wildly in almost every yard, including my own. After bloom, these shrubs provide the red contrast that every landscape designer seeks for relief from overabundance of green. It used to be only Flowering Plum provided that in these parts. Happily, we now have many more choices. My favorites are red Japanese Maples and certain cultivars of Heuchera, also known as Coral Bells. I’d like this Fringe Plant much more if it wasn’t so ubiquitous all of a sudden. Plants go in and out of fashion in just the same way that hemlines go up and down on the runways of Paris and New York and this is the must have shrub of the moment, at least in my new neck of the woods.

Fresh eggs

Posted on March 22, 2014May 3, 2014 by KellyAnnD

The next best thing to having your own chickens is having a friend with a few too many.

Here’s an omelette-making secret I picked up by watching the pros do it at a buffet brunch: put only the cheese in the middle. Any vegetables or meat should go into the pan first and be cooked or reheated to your satisfaction first. Then drop in the beaten eggs and proceed with standard omelette procedure. When it’s ready to fold in half, put the cheese in. Give it some time on each side to finish cooking and melt the cheese. So much better than having a pile of mixed vegetables and cheese 2 inches high inside plain eggs.

Post and Toss

Posted on March 20, 2014May 3, 2014 by KellyAnnD

Or, this why I don’t do sculpture. Or, why moving is good, bad and ugly.

This little cow was my first attempt at sculpture in at the tender age of 6. I remember this being an assignment in first grade and that the sculpting medium was starch and sawdust. Can that be right? I also remember my poor little hands cracked and bled from working with the stuff. How we suffer for our art.

Why my mother saved it and gave it back to me 30 years later is a mystery. Why I kept it for 20 more years is an even greater mystery. I assure you it is now where it belongs, in the trash. Why the cow has a dark shadow on it’s back is not a mystery. I believed at the time that was what the teacher wanted us to do. It had something to do with shadows from the sun. I think I got it backwards and we were supposed to shade the under side of the cows darker because the sun came from above. Perhaps I was fascinated with the hairs growing out of the teacher’s chin and missed the point of the dark shadows lecture. Who can say? I do think it serves well as a reminder that 3-d art is not my strong suit and that letting go of things is healthy. Letting go of things is healthy. Letting go of things is healthy.

Oh, did I mention that I moved??? And that’s what I’ve been doing for the past several months? It’s good to be back.