Positively Burgeoning, I tell you!

Today's walk around the park yielded a motherlode of pix, to show HP when I got home, in the couple of days before either it rains and knocks the blossoms off, or it blows hard and blows the blossoms off, or we get one of our sneaky late frosts which freezes the blossoms off. Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, it's set fair.

I love walking in the park, because it's a constant human comedy. Yesterday I saw a woman walking briskly and reading at the same time. Now I could get a step or two before disaster would take over, but she was going at quite a clip, intent on her romance novel, I figured from the graphics on the jacket.

Today it was the little girl with a notebook and pencil, she was all of five, solemnly making notes about some tree she was looking at while her grandmother jiggled the stroller with her baby brother in it to keep him happy. Or the three women (all my fellow walkers are Indian or Chinese in the daytime) talking rapidfire in Hindi, waving bracelet- encrusted arms to make their points while a fourth right behind them, rolled her eyes toward me, and grinned, evidently she's heard all this dialog before.

Every year I think to myself, hm, should I take pictures of blossoms yet again? then I say, self, see how amazed you are to see them, that you're still alive and vertical and moving at speed, yes, take the pictures. So I do and I did and here they are.



Bradford Pear at the end of the street






Riot of color at the entrance to the street, not very great color combo, but you have to give it points for verve!



Looking up into flowering cherry



I realized that I could walk on the berm and look down into a flowering crab tree, a bird's eye view, so I did



oops, I did it again...and then one more before it's time for tea...

Threads in the fabric of my town

I spent some time in the newly opened Plainsboro Public Library, to take pictures and bring home to show HP, and thought I would share my huge joy with you, too.



I've been given at least three guided tours around different areas of the place already by the Powers That Be in the libe, when I stopped in at the weekend, first full day in operation, wonderful insights into what's there, but since it's three floors and was buzzing with activity on Saturday afternoon when I was there, I figured on having a quieter time, just sloping about with my camera and thanking the library staff as I met them, and here's Christina, one of my favorite library staffers, caught her as she was registering a new patron




I have some small insight into the endless work and struggle in all ways by everyone working there, to get this to be a reality. I have been given great opportunities here, too, to give input into stuff I would like to see there, and to my huge satisfaction, I can show you here in actual pix, ideas that have become materially real. But more important is that a lot of other people also got their say and were respected and included and it's just wonderful.

Considering this is only a town of 22,000 people, a lot bigger than it used to be, but still small, to have this fab. place is amazing.



The atmosphere, with the colors and the light and the open design, is just wonderful to hang out in. Many great details such as all the different fabrics in the furniture, and the changing colors of the carpet from area to area, and the plexi transparent "walls" on the staircases, and the different terraces, more and more to discover as you wander about and the color changer in the ceiling of the children's area.



The Quiet Terrace, awaiting furniture.

I have to show you the gallery, which is its own space, for exhibits only, not shared space, open but NOT a hallway, lovely shape, great light, and get that seating piece!



a real gallery where you go, sit, observe, study, enjoy the art.





You can see it from upstairs, and from the front and back doors, but it's still quiet. I think everything I was hoping for is there.

And the kids' terrace with the giant chess/checkerboard paving,



which I suggested, on the grounds that it would be no more expensive than plain paving, and would be a ton of fun. And the director went one even better: found giant chesspieces so kids can play fullsize chess games, walking their pieces into place. There was a line waiting to do this on Saturday!

Indoors, the children's area goes on and on, reading nooks and science exploration places, colorful and friendly.



And the plexi staircase sides, all etched with quotations, first lines from local people's favorite works. I was one of the lucky ones asked, and I more or less managed to get a picture to show you my quotation, at least fragments of it. Not easy to get pix of etching on clear plexi, but I gave it a shot.



My favorite quotation, took no time at all to think of it: There are various ways of mending a broken heart, but perhaps going to a learned conference is one of the more unusual, from No Fond Return of Love by Barbara Pym.



First line in the novel, sets up the whole thing, wryly and sympathetically and sets up the mood exactly right.

And there's the Bookmark Cafe, open soon, note the work still in progress outside,laying brick and setting up plantings



sitting and chatting area, far enough from the gallery to keep food out of it, but close enough to see from there.



Well, I was pretty carried away. This has been a long time coming, great sturm und drang for the professionals charged with getting it all approved, designed, built, finished, politics overcome, money located, years of work and effort, and I only know the edges of it. Such a deal to be a part of, I can't get over it.

So just consider this a huge personal thank you to Jinny B, Carol Q. and all the staff who have been there for us all along! thank you all.

Jane Austen shrug, she says nonchalantly...with a shrug

I just finished a new adventure in knitting, my first shot at knitting from the top, and of a cable and seed stitch raglan, and of a moving from two needles to four in the course of one small project. Five, really, since four were holding needles and the fifth was the working needle, mainly because my circulars were too big to do this, as I found out a bit late.

This is from Mason Dixon Knitting outside the lines, named the Jane Austen shrug, which I made in the smallest size, it being an experiment, sized for maybe a two year old. The pix include rulers to show sizes, and remember to click on the pic, then click again on the resulting pic to enlarge it, sorry but blogster has complicated our lives with this extra step, poor us.

And I must acknowledge the invaluable assistance and advice and encouragement of fellow Raveler, FionaFae, who provided essential tips, including getting me to use stitch markers, a first for me, I usually wing it, but couldn't wing this one. Thank you, thank you!

I had to figure out what to use around the house for the stitch markers, not having any, and ended up cutting up rings from a plastic drinking straw and using them, worked fine though they do have a tendency to fly through the air when you're busy with the cable, which I had to do with a skewer, not having a cable needle, either.

So when you consider the obstacles of my ignorance and lack of tools, balanced against the generosity of FionaFae's time and expertise, I think it came out okay.....FF, this is the second go at the shrug,the first one being too soft as I worked, so that the stitch pattern didn't show well, so I switched to a different color and texture of cotton.

It's in search of a little recipient, as a gift, if anyone knows someone who would like to be fitted with this, speak up.

Watch this space, Martha!

Today saw the fruition of the stacking planter idea I first saw in a Martha Stewart magazine layout, and I show you the results.

The idea is to stack one planter on a support, inside another, and a third smaller one on top, kind of Russian doll idea, plant all of them, to get a nice vertical display and make terrific use of the tiny footprint of the space at my disposal.



Now the astute reader will immediately note that there are features here not seen in Martha. Nowhere are the matching clay pots, carefully calibrated and probably hand thrown in some ceramic workshop, nor the perfectly amended and soil-chemistry-knowledge-laden potting soil, nor the handwritten waterproof labels, and nowhere will you see evidence that a plumb rule was used to attain a perfect vertical. Nor will they be planted with rare plants brought specially from the Himalayas by hand reared yak.

However, other than that, it's exactly the same. I used old coffee cans as the invisible supports, any planters that would fit into other planters, and the regular old potting soil I get at the hardware store.

And I made sure to do my special squirrel repelling process, namely to soak cotton balls in peppermint essential oil (not the flavoring stuff you get at the grocery, this has to be the essential oil, which I get from the herbalist), which you then poke into the pots, about three per pot.

Squirrels hate this stuff and avoid it for the whole season unless it rains heavily and dilutes it, then you just redo it. We specialize in squirrels and this is a big deal to stop the critters from doing their usual deal which is to dig out what you planted, upend it, chuck it about and then go play somewhere else. I'm told it works for mice and voles, too, but we have so few of them it's not an issue here.



And I plant with that wonderful flower roll carpety thing I had a ton of success with in previous years, before it wasn't possible to find it anywhere for a couple of years. That;s the green stuff you see in the planters -- seeds embedded in fiber with food and other useful stuff.

Now it's back, not in garden places at all, but in, get this, gift catalogs! some of my best gardening helps have come from Carol Wright and Walter Drake, most unlikely places considering they specialize in leetle tiles to stick behind the sink or special tools for accomplishing the sort of housework you wouldn't dream of getting involved in.

So today I did the Sunny Garden roll, sounds like a happy dance, and when my back recovers, I will do the Shady Garden stuff. This is the year of the Stacking Planters. I'm going all out to see what they will do. Out front, too, when I get my moxie back again.

There are enough perennials going on around here that it won't exactly look barren if they don't flourish as expected. And I have a passel of houseplants just waiting to get outside for the summer, like going to camp. So there will be Stuff Growing.

It's just fun to see seeds come up and wonder idly what they are -- the carpets have many species, some wild, some tame, and you get to research what you have growing in your own yard.

So, watch this space! no doubt you will be regaled, or bored to extinction with my excitement as the season progresses. And if you try this yourself, send pix!

When the forsythia blooms, you know it's March going into April

Pictures taken on the last day of March, then early April, with forsythia blooming wildly, flanking the walking path




reflected in ruffled water, since there was a stiff Spring breeze blowing.




And framing up new willow green



And the eternal Canada goose triangle being worked out before mating and nesting



And a squirrel busy with an acorn defying me to do anything about it,



in front of an evergreen sapling, which makes the squirrel look about ten feet tall, at least that's what he thinks.

And a fallen tree, casualty of the recent storms, one of many,



and you see the place where the pinesap leached out of the rings and crystallized in the cold.

And a picture of a fallen twig, complete with gall, which seems to have wasp activity.



And nature taking a hand with a piece of buried glass, which mosses used as a kind of natural terrarium



And finally Bradford pears just coming into blossom. I know a lot of people disapprove of them since they only blossom, never fruit, but they are still a great sight at this time of year.




Great material to just look at, and draw, and paint and just generally bask in.

Of Books and Readers and Writers

I often wonder if there is any connecting thread among and between all the books I get through, since my ragbag of a monkey mind is constantly in action in all directions, and any insight you, dear blogistas and blogistos, can shed would be welcome, heh.

Anyway, the current crop is a wild mixture, I think, ranging from How to Get Things Really Flat by Andrew Martin, which is a man's guide to housework, and one of the funniest and best approaches to this everlasting problem I've ever read.




He is a Yorkshireman, of course (!) and points out what a Southern, i.e. southern UK, friend of his said about northerners, that they are totally arrogant because, since they come from the source of the industrial revolution, it's in their DNA. To which I plead guilty, since everybody knows that nobody knows how to do things better than a Yorkshireperson...speaking as one meself.

Anyway, he came from a working class household, in the city of York, mother died young, and his father and he with some help ran the household, his father being an unusual northern man in that he tackled cooking and housework in a soldierly spirit, not seeing it as beneath him, very refreshing. His son went from there, on the grounds that it wasn't about doing women's work, but about being independently able to take care of your own life wherever you lived.

Worth reading and you have to put it down now and then to just laugh and wipe your eyes, just warning you here.

Then there's the other end of the spectrum, the Bag Lady Papers by Alexandra Penney, a lady who lost her entire savings and all via Bernie Madoff, whom she refers to throughout as MF. Not bitter, noooooo. Anyway, it's an interesting insight into one of the people who put every penny of their assets into one person's hands and wondered why it all went wrong.

The book came from a blog she was invited to write, for lovely $$$, after the crash, via contacts, some of whom also jetted her around to various island paradises to recover from her sudden descent into what she thinks is poverty. Oh well. But admittedly, this is all relative.

She was genuinely frightened and panicked and angry since she had earned all the money she had. She fails to note, or realize, that she was pretty much born into circles that would bring her in contact in a credible way with people who could put opportunity in her path. But this is rather typical of people who are born on third base and think they hit a triple, so we won't hold that blind spot against her, since she really did work hard.

But it's hard to sympathize with her since the one person she does not get angry with is herself, for being so foolish as to put ALL her money into one place. Heck, even a squirrel knows better than that. And this is a story you hear over and over about people who lost a great deal via Madoff's supposedly surefire secure asset building.

They seem to have an all or nothing mentality, a very high risk approach given that they were so unsure about investing that they needed an adviser. And she fails throughout to note this, which would have served her very well in future ventures.

It's a good read though, even if you do grind your teeth here and there when she discovers you can have a nice party without Baccarat and Limoges and high thread count tablecloths, etc. And then goes to the other extreme and has paper cups and plates and soda, and oh dear, will she ever learn.

Those of us who frequent dumpsters and thrift stores and Freecycle know that you can have elegance along with thrift, but this is not about us...

She reminds me of a friend close to me in age who, years ago, lost her entire pension, she said, in a financial adviser's putting it in tech stocks right before they plummeted. She had simply handed it over to him, and watch it fail, oh dear. Since she had been forced into early retirement by a merger, she was in a state over finances, and told me repeatedly she had no income at all coming in. Single woman, mortgage holder, very scared.

Since she was old enough to take early Social Security, and I had just got through that process, I suggested she follow up on that, and since she was paralyzed by fear, I looked up all the documents, and directions to the SS office and generally helped her get that option going. I spent a lot of time reassuring and helping and thinking I was being useful. She did sign up, and then said, now I have to find another adviser for my other savings.

Oh. She had not mentioned this, and I suggested she simply take it on herself, now she had time to learn about finance and make prudent investments on her own, maybe using index funds (my fave). Whereupon she said, oh, it's far too much money for me to handle alone. And told me the total. The interest alone was more than my own net worth.....so I decided she didn't need to waste any more of my time. Yet she was genuinely frightened even though it would have taken the second coming to really put her under a bridge with shopping bags! so it's all relative.

The best part of the Bag Lady Papers is the graphic design. Wonderful crumpled brown paper made into a posh bag and dress, and background for chapters.

And the book on Chinese watercolor techniques by Lian Quan Zhen, is a beautiful read and look and it doesn't matter if you're an artist or not, it's wonderful to see and just feast on the images. Great classic techniques, reminders of the basics, just a wonderful, encouraging and humble book by a master of the genre.

Then there's E.F.Benson, the author of the Lucia books, which are some of the funniest comedies of manners there ever were. Made into a wonderful tv series, too, Miss Mapp and Lucia, which I have on tape and watch on my little old tv with the tape playing option. Perfect characterization by Geraldine McEwan, Prunella Scales, Nigel Hawthorne (hi, Trish!) and other great character actors. Just pitch perfect. And you either get it or you wonder what it's all about!

Latest rereads are a collection of short stories by Benson, who also wrote a lot of ghost stories which I don't plan to dip into, as well as other short material, and Dodo, about a society type lady, inadvertently funny. Quirky books but worth at least taking a look.




And there's Wilson's The Victorians, which I will sort of skate through, not reading every bit, but settling like a heedless moth here and there on the best bits...

So that's it for the Field and Fen Bookshelf today.

Easter is icumin in!

On the way to Easter, which as usual took me by surprise, how can I be expected to remember all that about the Spring equinox and the full moon and the Sunday after it being Easter, when we had 12 inches of rain in March, and moon's entire journey was eclipsed by drenching rain...anyway, it's about to be here.

So I have done my main form of celebration, which is more about celebrating spring and life in general, very nonsectarian stuff. I blow eggs, enough for HP, HS and me and one eggstra, sorry, in case of disasters, and decorate them differently each year. It's one of the few times I venture into the third dimension of painting, and I have to remember it all over again each time.

This year here are the blown eggs (blowing eggs is no doubt very good for your lungs and patience and you need to sit down afterwards..) and the contents in the pitcher next to it.



And the resulting omelet, we always eat the contents, was a particularly nice omelet as it turned out, with ham and tofu and cheese and scallions, quite popular, along with roast potatoes.




Finally, this year's eggs are rolled out:



then another view, other end, other side:





These were painted watercolor fashion, allowing colors to mix and blend. Then a coat of nail polish to seal them and make them stronger, then decorating with gold and silver pens. All this with the eager assistance of two kitties, resulting in cat hairs having to be carefully removed from the artwork.

And they will join the complete collection, eggs, not cats, after HS has chosen which of this year's crop he wants to keep.




This collection includes a Boehm bunny guarding the eggs, a Wedgwood miniature cup and saucer containing miniature eggs, from my long gone but never forgotten lutino cockatiel, a little Lenox kitten playing with a ball, cats get in everywhere, and the eggs are resting on a collection of rocks and shells with memories of Cape May for HP and me, some of the shells being of more recent vintage, coming from wonderful take out Italian seafood for various birthdays.

Happy Oestre, all! and Happy Spring and good Passover and Great Equinox and just good days all around.

WIP

(Please note new Blogspot thing: you used to be able to click once on my pix to enlarge them. Now you click once, the pic appears same size in its own screen, then you click again, and it will finally enlarge! I think this is supposed to be one of those improvements...)


WIP means either Work in Progress or War in Personality, and in this case, it's both.

It's that time of year when the days get longer and lighter and I have that annual urgent need to paint watercolors, and it struck today. So I show you a Watercolor in Progress, probably nearly finished. You do know the old joke about how an artist needs an assistant with a mallet, ready to hit her on the head and say, STOP, it's FINISHED..

The other Work in Progress, and War in Personality, is that I have an equal and opposite urge at exactly the same time, to knit and crochet stuff at this time of year. So here you see the front and back of the lovely pullover thingie I designed for The Great Me. It's all about varying blocks of garter and stockinette and seed stitch.



This is made from the undyed yarn Heather's fiber farm share brought to me, what a wonderful gift it is, and may or may not end up being dyed with Koolaid, we'll see how it goes. What happens next is that I stitch together front and back and crochet the neck and arm edges to give them a bit of body, this yarn being very very soft and wonderful to handle and knit.

Next time I will use bamboo needles, though, since the aluminum ones I had in the right size were like knitting on a skating rink, the yarn being so soft and biddable that it would fly off the needles at the slightest move, needs to be lodged firmly on wood needles, I guess. A special feature of this yarn is that I probably saw the owner of the fleece last spring on Lambcam, frisking about with her fleece ready to go.

So today ended up being productive despite one of the most totally hopeless shopping expeditions of all time. The thrift store has NO SWEATERS!!!!! I was all ready to get one to unravel for my first foray into knitting a sweater from the top down, all systems ready, instructions marked in the Knitting Outside the Lines book, even stopped at the store to get some circular needles, since I don't use them and need them for this poipose. It was supposed to be the Next Big Project on the Needles.

I also wanted some frisket (masking liquid) for use in watercolor painting, you apply it to areas you particularly want to have sharp white edges, couldn't get that either, so painted without it, and it worked okay anyway....but I digress...and there was the thrift store, jumping the season, and all about shirts and tshirts and useless garments of that kind that you can't unravel..dangit. I hadn't realized there were seasons to the Unraveling Cult. So now I know. I guess I should have known that the Yarn Harvest would take place at the normal harvest time. What was I thinking???

Or, since it was 32 degrees today, what were they thinking at the thrift store...one good thing about the weather was that it prevented me from acting on the third overwhelming urge at this time of year, to go out and chuck potting soil and containers and spades and stuff around and lug stuff here and there in the garden.

No breaking news, just Spring pictures, enjoy!

I went for a walk today to collect images to show HP since it's sunny, the trees are breaking out into bloom, and he wanted to see them.

I thought I'd pick just or two for in here, but then couldn't bear to leave anyone out! I like the moon and cherry blossom ones pretty much. Very Japanese!

So instead of a select one or two, here's a collection.

The Milkweed Project, late breaking wonderful news...

Right after I wrote my blog this morning, I checked into the Ravelry website and found that the Milkweek Project group installation is being assembled, wonderful work, created by about 200 artists, including this one.

Please follow (you may have to cut and paste, I don't think I can make hotlinks in here) to see the very latest pix, just taken and posted about an hour ago.

If you scroll down, you'll see a twirly piece, and there behind it is the ladder piece I made! looking very happy in such good company.

She kept me going, being my knitting in the operating room waiting area, the ICU, the telemetry unit, the hospital lunchroom, and now she's getting the credit for it!

I was able to stay in the art life designing and making this piece, through one of the most awful years of our joint and several lives, thanks to the Milkweed Project.

So, please, cut, paste, click, scroll, and enjoy!

http://sticksandstitches.squarespace.com/the-sculpture/