Bathrooms, Textiles and Tea, late and early flowers

The Bathtub Adventure is in progress, after landing on a week with long-standing medical appointments I had to rearrange. It is ironic that the work to make the bathroom accessible, finally, conflicted with actual health care appointments. 

It's gone very well, and here are a few interregnum pictures. The insert is now curing for 48 hours, and on Friday it will be finished then tiling and painting will follow.

Chunks cut out of the tub

The insert door is to make the tub work for tub bathing. It locks and seals in place by hand, no tools needed

Those gaps have caps when it's finished, to look more streamlined and be waterproof 

Similarly here's the door in place without caps, until it cures completely.  The step is wide enough for your foot, also has a skid proof finish. So you can get in and out with minimal striding, no reaching your foot over the step.

Mike is a lovely craftsman, leaves everything looking beautiful, not a speck of dust when he gets done. 

He's very pleased that after much searching he was able to get tiles to match closely the ones in place. They don't make them any more, and we're only retiling a section around the toilet where some tiles got broken, helpful amateur work, don't ask.

Anyway he went to the Habitat for Humanity Re-Store in Pennsylvania, donated a lot of door hardware and tools and found half a box of the right tiles. Score! 

Today we still have a few late flowers 

and these arrived, for next spring, to be planted near the front door 

They're blue, so I'm hoping for a mass of blue as I come up the front path.

Once again I need to weed that same old patch, now with different weeds from the ones I pulled earlier. I was going to do this tomorrow but had a labor saving idea.  

I checked the first expected frost. Late next week. So that's when I'll pull the weeds, so they don't return this year, and plant the bulbs. Also finally clear the flowers from the patio, since their season will definitely be done. 

Textiles and Tea was unusual this week, with Neil Goss, a true free spirit, an environmental artist, who forages, dyes and weaves works to leave outdoors and eventually join nature. 

He also teaches and creates gallery work, but his outdoor pieces are really his mainspring. He likes community participation in his weaving, here at the backstrap loom he built from a bunch of sticks in traditional fashion.

He does have a traditional floor loom in his studio, a Macomber, on which he created a number of the pieces you see. His work all has a personal narrative but it's not vital to know it in order to get a lot out of seeing it.

When he does a weaving residency, he invites people to take part, add in items, try their hand at weaving, a great test of a weaver's patience and control issues, as he notes. 

He's a generous person and artist, and very aware that he's a white man working in an indigenous women's art form. He also acknowledges the Cherokee people who lived in his region on the land which is now his home.

Check him out. He's a force of nature.

Speaking of art, I just Freecycled this material to a local artist who's very excited to try it out.

This is paper backed silk chiffon which can go through the printer. You peel off the paper and have a beautiful transparent image to work with. 

I used to scan and print sections from my watercolors then use the silk in stitching. It's a marvelous visual experience to have your own work apparently floating in air, released from its original form.

Now that I have none of the electronic equipment needed, and have moved on, it's fun to give another artist a try at it. It's like image transfer raised to a new power.

Happy day everyone! I hope your day is raised to a new power, too.

Sez Ted and Big Ursy and Pony and Ursula