Hi everyone! I thought I’d give you all a vicarious blizzard experience since luckily we still have power, and a snug house, food and entertainment.  There’s a YouTube video as well as still photos.  If you live in New England, never mind…just go outside!  It’s still blowing with sustained winds about 25 mph here, with gusts to over 50! This first bit is some video I shot this morning. This is the first time I’ve ever tried to narrate, so apologies for any (all) mess-ups with the audio!

I have NO idea how neighbor-and-plow-guy Alex is going to plow the mountain of snow, and it is simply too windy for him to come out, as he usually does, and make multiple passes every time another six inches falls.  Besides which the wind would just blow the snow all over anyway!

The weather stations tells us what we already knew: it is cold and blowing lots of snow!  That is air temp of 8 Fahrenheit, -14 wind chill, and a momentary lull in the wind…only 17  mph!

Eli decided to take the dog out as I got ready to take pictures and video.  The dog was NOT amused.  He got 2 1/2 of his feetsies outside the door and promptly turned around to come back in.  Eli got him out:

Eli is excited. Widgeon is NOT.

Eli “encouraged” Widgeon to check it out (ie. dropped him into the snow). Widgeon is NOT amused.

As you can see, coaxing the dog to go pee by the pine tree (protected from the wind by the tree) wasn’t successful either, as the snow is much deeper than Widgeon is tall.  I think he’s saying “MAMA!  Come rescue me! HOW could you make me go OUT in this????”

And the before and after pics, first looking at the view (or what is left of it):

The view in mid-December 2012

In the beginning, there was an inch of snow over the previously bare ground. This was taken on Friday morning.

Twenty four hours later…

Saturday morning, couldn’t hardly see the trees at the bend in the driveway, let alone the hills beyond. It is maybe 1/10th of a mile to the trees. I promise, they are still there. In the blowing snow.

Then the garage, before:

Light fluffy stuff came down on Friday during the day, coating the roof and logs for next year’s wood burning.

and after:

Saturday morning, Feb. 9, 2013. All that coating on the roof and logs is now blown uphill and the snow is coming down heavy and blowing sideways.

The woods to the west of the house when the snow began.

And this morning. When I looked out the bedroom window in this direction when I woke up all I saw was white stuff going sideways.  In the lower left you can see where the wind has blown down to grass, yet other spots have 4 foot deep drifts.

And now I’m going to clean up the dishes and shower while we have electricity; if power goes out, so does the water pump! Then a cozy day at home reading and working on my watercolor class!  Hope you’ve enjoyed the blizzard…we are!  Joshua and Ashley are also home–most businesses (almost all?) are closed down, and texting works!  So we are snug in our home, together.

Just checking in! Have been really busy working on that quilt I can’t share until April and new handouts for my Quilting Design class which I’m teaching in a few weeks in Venice, Florida, hence the lack of posts! But thought I’d share the storm for those of you who prefer your snow vicariously!

The view from the kitchen sink window this morning

The snow has begun.  Camden and Hope are predicted to get 15-24 inches.  They cancelled / postponed the statewide wrestling meets (will happen next weekend, but at 3 high school venues instead of the Civic Center in Augusta which is booked).  We have buckets with water in the bathrooms for flushing (if the power goes out, so does the pump for the water) and will have in the kitchen for food/tea/etc.  The heavy stuff isn’t supposed to hit until tonight, but it is already coming down light and fluffy and thick.  School is cancelled (YEAH!) and we’re looking forward to a nice day at home.  I’m thinking scones for lunch and a movie with Eli; if we lose power, at least we’ll save the reading for tomorrow.

Last night about 5 pm. I meant to take the photo earlier in the day, but you can see the (how weird!) meadow/lawn area with NO SNOW. In late January/early February. In MAINE???? Wha’ happened to winter? I guess Mother Nature decided to deliver it in one whopper of a storm this weekend.

This morning, after the “school is cancelled” robo-call, we looked out the window to the west to see the snow coming down lightly, thickly.

And the view from the living room deck…the most beautiful view ever (well, maybe our view on San Juan Island was equally beautiful!).

Rather than the usual Winter Storm Warning, there is a Blizzard Warning in effect.  For the latter you need not just lotsa snow, but lotsa wind, and we’re gonna have it.  They are predicting some coastal flooding due to the winds–here in Hope winds are predicted at 23-31 with gusts to 55.  It’s odd because usually it doesn’t snow a lot when it is this cold–currently it is 5 with a wind chill of -2 or thereabouts.

The weather station shows that it is currently 5, which is cold for getting snow, usually it is in the teens or 20s to get snow. Just a slight breeze brings it down to -2 wind chill. By tomorrow morning it will be as cold but winds will be high!

Paul says the NOAA (National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration) reports 1-3 inches today during the day, 7-11 more inches overnight, the wind kicks up, and then another 6-10 on Saturday before it peters out.  Old timers are saying this sounds like the storm of ’78, so if it actually is, you know it’s gonna be a big one.  LOVE our snug, warm, wood-stove-heated house (we also have thermostats and baseboards, but love the wood which also costs less than fuel oil) and gas range (the oven doesn’t work during a power outage, but the burners do).  So we will be warm and well fed.  <Beam>

Here’s the garage. I’ll use this view and the one from the living room to show the progress of the storm. Now there is just a dusting of snow, maybe an inch or less in this photo.  Note the huge logs on the right:  that’ll be our heating for the winter after next.  In spring our wood guy will come and chop and split the wood, then we’ll stack it in the wood storage area on the right end of the garage.  The third garage bay is for the lawn tractor and (to be bought) snow blower.  After building the garage, we decided we’d shovel one more year before spending more money on the snow blower this year.  Next year:  fix the drainage on the driveway and the snow blower.

Stay tuned.  I’ll take photos and, if we have power, post the course of the storm.

Have been busy with Eli’s wrestling meets and working on a quilt (which I can’t share until about mid-April), but wanted to check in, and to share the best moment from the Super Bowl:  The Dodge Ram commercial.  Eloquent.  True.  The spirit of America.  Will be back soon with more. In the meantime, enjoy:

PS: My Uncle Eddie was a true cowboy, a ranch hand, in a small town up in the mountains of Wyoming north of Yellowstone; this commercial makes me think of him. He literally rode the fence rails on horseback in driving snow to tend the herds. He died last year at the age of 98, and I shall miss him. I loved that he would call me around Christmas every year after receiving our annual newsletter–it was such a joy to hear his voice strong and true even up in his 90s and know that someone old could still have all their marbles and keep in touch. RIP Uncle Eddie. And thanks to all the farmers and ranchers and every day folk like Uncle Eddie who make our country great.

I blogged earlier about a wonderful lettering class I’m taking with Val Webb online; it was SO outstanding that I’ve also enrolled in an Herbs Drawing and Painting class.  I thought I’d share a few of my lessons, some good, some not so much.  All I need is a 37-hour day, with the extra hours for art!

P is for Pigwidgeon the Pug

One lesson was to create whimsical letters.  Val offered a pdf of a cat alphabet, but of course I had to attempt my dear (well, Eli’s dear dog) Pigwidgeon.  I didn’t spend a ton of time on the sketch so it isn’t quite spot on, but I love his little peeping face anyway!  This one is 3×3 inches.  And while not expert by a long shot, my control of the paint is improving!

Another lesson was Art Deco style.  Didn’t know what word, didn’t want something too long, and finally decided on Zelda, as in wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald (had to add that bit… Eli asked why Zelda, as the only one he knew was from the videogame Prisoners of Zelda!).  I was elated at how well this turned out.  The width of each section of letter is about 1/2 inch, they are about 3 1/2 or 4 inches tall:

Art Deco style lettering to simulate chrome–inked outline, watercolor,  used a teeny tiny size 1 brush for the shadows on the outer edges that are maybe 1/32″ wide!

Another WOOT was the “Decorated Versal” lesson.  Val had us try white ink with a crow quill dip pen.  Since I’m comfortable with nibs and dip pens, this wasn’t terrifying to me, unlike getting large smooth washes of watercolor (without blotches, which are HARD). Here are some practice bits using the white ink over a wash of blue watercolor:

White ink from a dip-pen on blue.

A Versal is a fancy initial capital letter at the beginning of a verse (had to learn that one ).  I wanted to do something William Morris-ish, so I created the vines behind the letters. I wasn’t sure what I would do to decorate the letter until I was actually muddling around, and decided to have the green vines turn to white on the letter to break up the space:

A decorated versal “S”. I like this, but thinks it needs something more to “weight” the S on the bottom. Awaiting feedback from Val!

Another lesson was to do letters that recede into the background.  You begin with a wash of a lighter color over a large space, wait for it to dry, then go back in with a darker color to create the negative space.  Instead of working within the box or rectangle in the class sample, I wondered what it would look like to offset the text and have illustrations on the edges.  Not so great is the answer!  You kinda loose the idea of perspective–of the darks going back to a vanishing point.  But it was fun anyway:

A less than brilliant effort.

But it is all about learning, and I am learning SO MUCH!  Now… I need those extra dozen hours a day to do more classwork, work on that quilt, exercise, sleep….. EEEK!  So with that I’m getting OFF the laptop and down to the studio!  Be back soon!

Went to turn on the lights in my chilly studio this morning, and saw this: totally frosted windows! I don’t think it has been that cold here before since we moved in. Temps this morning have warmed up two degrees to -2, wind chill now only -15. At least this is pretty!

OK…so I’m working on a new quilt, and nothing on the shelf was quite right, plus I really wanted the sheen of silk for the water.  That meant it was time to bring out the dye-buckets and implement some of what I learned in Carol Soderlund’s Think Silk workshop last April.  I knew that I wanted deep blue water with glints of moonlight on it, so I checked my dye swatches and found I wanted a color made of Navy dye and a tiny tiny bit of red.  In my stock of dyes, I had two containers of Navy, one from ProChem (with hardly any dye in it…not enough really for the yardage I wanted to dye) and one from Dharma Trading, so I used the latter though it was old–there was plenty of it, so if I used a high percentage of dye to water, I could still get the deep values I wanted.  Right.

This photo shows cotton on top (overdyed) and silk on the bottom.

This close-up of the top fabric is washed out because of the camera flash, but it shows how PURPLE the cloth became…from navy dye from Dharma.

It took a while to figure out what went wrong….I was getting way too much red!  I KNEW I was using the proper method to fix the dye to the silk:  an acid bath using citric acid (not soda ash as on cotton).   I thought at first that the purplish color was because my Dharma navy was old and the red was doing what Procion MX reds do:  overpower.  So I tried a second dyebath with ONLY the Dharma navy.

Round 2 of dyeing. Nice, but not what I wanted. Yet.  The long strip on the right is close, but that is the cotton.  The black shibori on the far left is an overdye of a black dye-vat I did in the Think Silk class, but hated the green cast from the dye (YUK).  Better now.  The center top is a scrunch of cotton, where I over-dyed the original cotton because it was too purple.  The silk on the bottom center is an overdye of one of the first two pieces of silk, again to cover up that purple.

So I dyed with ONLY the Dharma Navy, and I STILL was getting purple.  Then I noticed that the dye powder, when it touched a paper towel, had RED specks in it!  I had thought the Dharma Navy was the same as the ProChem Navy.  NOT.   The ProChem Navy is a pure dye, meaning it won’t split or “halo” red or any other color, whereas the Dharma Navy is a mix of pure dyes.  AH!   Light bulb flipped on!  There’s nothing wrong with the Dharma dye, it’s just not what I wanted or thought I had–I thought the “navy” was a pure dye, not a mix.  Now I know to check more closely!

The striping is OK, but TOO much purple still showing. Silk (left) and cotton (right). I wet out the cloth with plain water, then “pleated” by hand into tucks. Next, use a sponge paintbrush to brush on the dye, trying to keep white bits.  And this was my last piece of sandwashed satin silk.  Erk.

Close up of purple halo-ing from the red in the Dharma Navy (a mix, not a pure dye I learned).

It took about 2 yards (OUCH, kaCHING) to get exactly the color I wanted.  Plus on my first go-round, the print paste or the cold wax resist (which I had used to preserve some white areas for moonlight glints) mix did not want to leave the fabric.  I called ProChem’s technical staff (LOVE that business) and spoke with one of the chemists, who confirmed my suspicions about the navy dyes.  She told me that the manufacturer had offered the navy mix to them, also, but they wanted the pure dye so folks like me would be happy and not get “splitting”.  She also suggested using Metphos, a water softener that is one of the ingredients in Calgon water softener, to try to remove the stiffness I was getting from the print paste and/or cold wax resist.  Some of that stiff feeling went aweay, but on another test, I still couldn’t get it out of the silk, so I’m glad that when I got to my last piece of silk, I opted for careful painting of dye!

After speaking with Nancy at ProChem (waving hello!), I then took out my small remaining bit of ProChem PURE navy and went back in to the last piece of silk and tried one more time. FINALLY! Some purple still shows, but I can knock that back when I go in with the quilting thread. PHEW!

I also wanted some specific deep-dark hues for another part of the quilt, and my batiks were too contrasty.  What to do?  Paint!  I tried both acrylic inks and Setacolor paints thinned with water and settled on a Setacolor to darken this black-and-charcoal:

Charcoal and black batik with the contrast minimized by a thinned coat of blue-and-black Setacolor paints thinned, mixed and applied to the cloth.

And a lighter mix of  blue to gray and darken this lighter batik:

And a lighter wash on the “rice grain” gray batik. As the cloth came from the bolt it is too bright, too distracting. This muted over paint is just right!

Some folks love the hunt for the perfect fabric.  Not me.  I am too busy and stores are too far flung.  And I don’t want THAT much stash!  I’d rather get a good selection, then modify when I can and dye my own when I can’t!  Next on the fix-the-studio agenda:  a deep sink in the basement so I don’t have to dye in the kitchen.  The bathrooms are too small, and I don’t want the dye in  the food prep area!  So if there are any guilds out there that would like to hire me for 2014 and 2015, I’d appreciate the donation to the studio-improvement cause! <GRIN>