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The Frayed Edges, October 2007
As usual, it was another wonderful day! Despite the look of autumn all around us, like the photo above which is just a mile or so down the road from Hannah’s house (on the peninsula south of Brunswick / Harpswell), it was a mild and balmy day fit for t-shirts…a last gasp of warm summer air. We had fun sharing, food (of course!), gifts and projects before flying to the winds as kid-duties called us home in the afternoon.
Hannah’s b-day is late September and mine (something like 15-17 years earlier!) in early October both happened since we last met, so we had a double celebration. Deborah sent goodies from Texas, and we exchanged gifts and grins and thank you’s. It is so wonderful to have creative friends!!!! Here is Hannah enjoying some hand-dyed fabric from my recent workshop (I promise, those posts are coming!)… but I had to tell her to keep unrolling to find the socks in the center–she told me she had been lusting after my bright socks and was having a hard time keeping quiet, so it was perfect!
And here is my loot… from Deborah’s lovely sprigs and twigs (and LOVE the way it is mounted! off to find a frame!), to Kate’s damask table cloth (ready to dye, of course, from a small treasure trove of old linens she lucked into recently) and batik, to the Japanese desk Calendar (I LOVE and am so inpsired by Japanese woodblocks) from Kath to Hannah’s happy, crazy, jump-roping girl made from found beach glass (near her home) and beads she bought in China when adopting Nina. The crazy lime hair is perfect for my state of life these days!
I shared my hand-dyes, and Kathy treated us to an in progress visual FEAST. She is making a bed quilt as a commission for some friends, interpreting their vacation photos from over the years. I SO WANT THIS. Aw heck, I want to be Kathy! I want her creativity and vision and color sense and style. But since I can’t have them, I will be more than content to sit and look and learn and enjoy and be thankful she is my friend. She is constructing the quilt in panels and quilting them, then will join them together. Here is one panel:
And another:
And LOOK at this quilting on the back….she’s as nutso as I am about quilting!
SIGH. I also REALLY like the way Kathy combined low-contrast deep-dark batiks in squares for setting the “photos.” Will keep that in mind for the future…. plus it’s a great excuse to buy more batiks… grin!
For lunch, we had calzones made by Bart the wonderful (aka Hannah’s hubby), one tomato-y and sausage and veggies, the other spinach and riccotta (which I’m going to try to duplicate tonight), followed by a true Maine treat: Whoopie Pie. However, this may be the largest whoopie pie on the planet, found and brought by Kathy:
The “cookie” is a dense chocolate cake, the filling is more like frosting, and it is super rich. Oprah loves these, and her endorsement sent the maker from a mom making whoopie pies at home and then commercially for her friends from local to stratosphere / nationwide. Another Maine mom makes good! So we indulged. Here are the birthday girls with Kathy (Hannah on the left, Kathy plus Whoopie Pie, and me in a shirt I dyed at the workshop).
After our visit to the Botanical Gardens last month, we stopped at On Board Fabrics in Edgecomb and all purchased canvas to make floor cloths or something similar. In a nutshell, you buy heavy canvas, paint it, goop on (Mod-Podge, fusible, glue, whatever) fabric, then polyurethane the daylights out of it. Finally, hem the edges, put non-skid stuff on the back, and have a colorful floor. Well, I figured in my house that’s one more thing to collect or trap cat or dog hair, so mine will be washable placemats (a surprise for the family for Christmas, unless Joshua reads my blog while internet surfing at school when he is supposed to be studying….ahem, sport!). Kate was better prepared than the rest of us and got the most done. Here is a blank green-painted canvas to make a runner, plus that glorious mango color runner on top of it, with some Kaffe Fassett prints on top. Isn’t that enough to just make you smile when you look down at your floor?
Finally, on the way home, I actually got stopped for a train (!!!!) at the edge of the Wiscasset bridge and had the chance to snap this picture of the ready-for winter tree and the still-summery screaming blue sky:
June 29th, 2008 at 11:22 am
[…] the canvas in varying widths. So, on our Frayed Edges field trip to the Botanical Gardens (see here1, here2, here3 and here4 for those […]