Wherein I Befriend a Speckled Hen

Fifteen years ago (gasp! How time flies....) we moved to Florida from the midwest. It had been cold in Minnesota but one compensation was that there was a quilt shop on (almost) every corner! At first glance Florida seemed to have none. Fortunately, that is not the case. It just took me a while to find them! 

And so. October found me back in quilt country, the Northwest this time with, you guessed it! A quilt shop on every corner! I had plenty of "explore alone" time on my visit as The Bean and The GF had to work most days. I could have caught up on reading, but really? With the entire Willamette Valley at my doorstep and Fall colors at their peak? 

 Miss Google and I took to the roads.

Chances of getting lost were slim. In college I took a course in orienteering  which did not in any way prevent me from getting lost regularly for the rest of my life --- until now. Now I have an orienteering device in my pocket way better than those wiggley old compasses. I even know how to use it. And it comes with an imperious female voice that instructs me to make a legal u-turn whenever I look like I'm about to go astray.

Three minutes down the highway, three more on leafy country roads ablaze with red and gold, and we were at our first quilt shop.

The sign was hanging in front of what seemed to be a residence, not a shop, but I soon spotted the quilt shop in a separate building back behind the house.

It was a slow day. Most area quilters were preparing for a big quilt show slated for the coming weekend so the owner, Karen, had plenty of time to chat as she invited me to look around.

 Many of the display quilts on the walls were her own designs, and everywhere my eye fell there was something to marvel at including hens everywhere, speckled or not. 

I felt like a kid in a candy store.

The wide variety of fabric included some of her own lines. She prefers more traditional than wild and modern. 

 The antiques in Karen's shop are a carry-over from her original business - antiques. As she gradually added  more and more fabric, her business morphed into a full-blown quilt shop. Her antiques look perfectly happy in their new life displaying quilts, fabrics and notions. Karen's patterns have been featured in several national quilt magazines and also in a French magazine ---- oo, la, la! I was hanging with the big kids now!

 I resisted the temptation to buy any fabric since I have enough already to open my own quilt shop, but I did find a sweet little vintage fabric panel for a baby alphabet book ---  perfect for my new little grandniece.

  Since the weather forecast was for rain, Karen invited me to come back the next day and spend a few hours sewing. No need to ask twice! The sights of the Willamette Valley would still be there when the sun came back.

Shortly after ten the next morning I pulled in at The Speckled Hen. The day was grey and damp, perfect for sitting and stitching. Karen worked on samples for the shop and I set about making the cloth baby book. The Guinness Book should take note: I actually finished it the same day I started it - unprecedented.

It's no surprise that people who love quilting share many of the same interests. We chatted about everything under the sun - families, quilting, children, travel, grandchildren, cooking, quilting, gardening, quilting again and antiques.

Several times the ping of the doorbell announced the arrival of customers most of whom knew Karen and each other. In addition to whatever they'd come in search of, the chat looped around to how families were doing,  who'd gotten married, who'd had a new grandchild and whose son had a wonderful new job. Phones came out and pictures were shared as grandmas have shared them forever, only now they're using fancy new gadgets!

That's Karen on the left with some old friends who used to help out in her shop.

The friends obligingly took a picture of me and my new friend with one of her designs on the wall behind us.
And a chicken.

It seems like all the quilters I know are gardeners too. Before I left I stopped to drool at the flowers on 

Karen's front porch...

The eye for color and design does seem to carry over from quilting to gardening or possibly the other way around.

The moral of my long, meandering story is - if you're feeling lonely go visit a quilt shop. Chances are good you'll make a new friend. 

As I did.

Creativity Manifests in Ways Unexpected

I've been feeling uninspired this past week. Nothing I think of writing seems worth the bother. So, with no creative pistons firing I decided to at least get some drudge work done yesterday. I hemmed a new pair of sports trousers for the OC. They'd only been sitting for three, maybe four, months waiting for me to spend twenty minutes stitching them into wearability. When it was done I felt ridiculously triumphant! Yeah! One tiny space cleared in my sewing room!  

Casting about for the next thing that would jusify the space I occupy on the planet, I decided to bake Irish soda bread. With the bread in the oven and buttermilk to spare, I measured out ingredients for scones. If I couldn't be artistically creative I could at least play house. As soon as the bread was done, and the kitchen smelling divine, I popped the scones into the oven, set the timer and got busy cleaning up my mess.

"Was I born yesterday?" I groaned when the scones had been in the oven at least six minutes. My eyes had just fallen on a small bowl on the counter containing --- you guessed it! --- something that should have been mixed in with the the other scone ingredients --- but wasn't. Because I'm a scatterbrain.

 "Fine waste of one and a half sticks of butter!" I thought, but then --- an idea! Maybe I can salvage them! You know how they say when faced with sudden death your whole life flashes before you? Well, what flashed through my head in a nanosecond was the memory of me and Eve McDonnald baking a cake at her house when her mother wasn't home. We didn't have a recipe but hey! We were ten years old. We knew how to make cakes. Hadn't we seen our mothers do it plenty of times? Flour, sugar, butter, eggs --- we could do this, no problem!

We scooped, we stirred, we whisked, we poured. Feeling very satisfied, we opened the oven and slid our creation in, two uber-chefs in the making.

After what seemed like a reasonable amount of time, the aroma of baking cake sending our salivary glands into overdrive, we decided to have a peek.....

Consternation! 

Our batter had turned, not into the delightful spongy confection we were anticipating, but into a swimming lake of liquid, buttery mess. 

What had gone wrong? And then we saw it - the bag of flour, sitting untouched on the kitchen table. We had meant to add some flour, but, obviously had forgotten. All was not lost however. We were creative children. We could do damage control. We took the offending cake pan out of the oven, stirred in a goodly helping of flour and popped it right back in.

When it emerged some twenty minutes later, looking all golden and puffy as a good cake should, we were overjoyed and agreed it was the best cake we'd ever eaten.

With this flashing through my brain I wondered what damage control could be exercised in this situation, and how I had progressed not one inch from when I was ten. The scones were already starting to crisp up on the bottom. Hardly thinking what I was doing, I grabbed each one and tossed it in the bowl of --- sugar, unsure if I had mixed the baking power and baking soda in there too. Working frantically I pummeled each little scone a few times to work in the missing ingredients, plopped them back on the baking sheet, shoved the whole thing back in the oven and, as the last vestiges of my inner domestic goddess evaporated, crossed my fingers that those poor little scones would survive.
  
When my mother made scones she never let us have one straight from the oven.

"They'll sit like stones in your stomach," she told us. We had to wait until they cooled. And so, dancing with impatience, we waited. Mum's not around anymore R.I.P. I think, with no disrespect, that she was full of what we call here "bokum halah!" I think it was her ploy to protect the scones from the ravages of the savages so there'd be some left for supper. I always eat one straight out of the oven now and it hasn't killed me yet, though this batch might be about to change all that.

So there's my tale. Turned out there was at least a thread of creativity in the whole business 'cause my first reaction was to dump the lot right into the bin. I will admit they're not the tastiest or the fluffiest scones I've ever made, but unless you have a very delicate stomach they're still edible, if a little dense! The OC's stomach is made of cast iron so he had a few with his cuppa last night. He did not however go into raptures, just choked 'em down without comment and I knew better than to ask. 

The Irish soda bread, on the other hand, was delicious!

Lesson learned: I am not genetically wired for multi-tasking. Take note me!

It's the Little Things....

Beautiful day at the nature preserve.

 Blue sky, warm sun --- felt good.

Quiet as we walked.....unless you count

the hum of insects, 

the whir of bird wings,

the lap of lake water,

the rustle of reeds,

the fall of footsteps

the racous cries of cranes,

the splash of fish jumping,

the swish of sand as a tortoise hurries home....

Okay, not quiet,

but the best kind of noisy. 

Setting Intentions

At our first yoga class of the new year our instructor mentioned intentions rather than resolutions.  We set an intention at the beginning of each class. Which is nothing new. The nuns always had us praying for some intention or other. If life was hard they told us to offer it up for the intention of --- the holy souls in purgatory, peace on earth, an end to world hunger, nuns and priests in the missions, one of the older nun's recovery from illness, that another would have a happy death, that God would bless the Pope, that we'd all be on our best behaviour, and not disgrace them, when Mother General of the order came to visit from Italy.......

There was no end to the intentions. I guess they were trying to toughen us up --- there was greater suffering in the world than our trivial problems.

Get over yourselves girls.

Pray for those less fortunate.

But, back to yoga. Angie suggested we keep our intentions for the new year positive. Not "I'm going to lose weight," but rather "I'm going to be fit." Not "I'm going to give up eating dessert," but rather "I'm going to eat healthily "...and so on.

My positive intention? Not "Do not darken the door of a quilt shop this year," but rather "Get thee to the sewing room woman and git 'em done!" Every year for at least a decade I've half-heartedly resolved to get a grip and finish all my half-done quilting projects. It never happens. I just end up feeling guilty. And who needs more guilt? The nuns made sure we had enough to last this lifetime and well into the next.

Last year I finished one major quilt that had been on the go for too many years. It felt so good to put in that final stitch.

 I want more of that! So this year I'm doing American Patchwork and Quilting magazine's UFO Challenge for 2017. And harassing all my quilting friends (want to join me?) to sign up too.  For those not familiar, UFOs are Unfinished Objects. In my case -- quilts, or similar sewing projects. Make a list of twelve, no excuses.  Twelve whole months. Fifty two weeks. Three hundred and sixty five days. Roughly eight thousand seven hundred and sixty five hours.

So what has been my problem??

No deadlines, no structure, no-one to answer to, the lure of shiny new projects, no focus.... But the sands of time are not slowing down. Structure! Death to procrastination! Determination! (says she optimistically.) I'm on it already. And you thought I was just blowing hot air. Since Christmas is coming again soon, only three hundred and sixty two days away, I decided to jump right in with a Christmas project that's been languishing for years. It's small, it's applique, it's do-able.....

And then I'll tackle layering, quilting and binding the quilt for my niece's baby (already four months old - Oy!)

And that's just my first intention. There are more --- but, another day. I have a feeling this blog is going to morph into a mostly-quilting blog this year, so --- you have been warned! Of course books, photos and random bits of other stuff will undoubtedly creep in among the stitches....

 I wish you all a very good year and, if the shoe fits, happy stitching!

Tidings of Comfort and Joy

I lost my Christmas spirit somewhere along the way this year. It was still missing until last evening. I'm not sure where or how or why I lost it.

It may have decided to disappear when it saw the nonsense that was our election last month.

Or maybe the bizarre juxtaposition of two news items --- one a picture of terrified residents of Aleppo fleeing with the caption "women and children being shot at point blank range," the other a smiling Princess Kate with the caption "Kate's festive Christmas dress," scared it into hiding. How, I wondered, could anyone give two hoots about festive Christmas dresses after seeing the first picture?

And then the grandkids arrived.

Us grownups have lots of advice for each other as we scurry about in our too-busy world.....

Be kind.

Do unto others...

Make eye contact.

Smile.

Look for the good in everyone.

Listen....really listen, without rushing or interrupting.

Show an interest......


But words are cheap and slide so easily off our tongues.

The real test is putting all that advice into our actions.

Gifts fly back and forth at Christmas. We worry that we can't find the perfect gift for someone. The Grinch sets up house in our heads. Not pointing fingers, I'm as bad as the worst.

But last night I saw an angel in action. He had no wings. He wasn't surrounded by heavenly light. No celestial robes. The teasing about his un-color co-ordinated shorts and T-shirt rolled right off  him. His hair was sticking up in the back.  But I saw this blue-eyed angel, with his wide open, generous heart give someone the best gift of all, the gift everyone longs for --- the gift of his interest, his acceptance, his ears, his love, the gift of  his undivided attention. The gift of his time.

 It restored my faith that peace is still possible for our hurting world, as is an end to poverty and hunger if we could all be a little bit more like that angel......

For all my friends and everyone who ever comes here to read, I wish you the same comfort and joy that I found this Christmas in the the blue eyes of an angel with a boyish grin and a generous heart.

In Praise of Doodling.....

.....and fidgeting, and bouncing, and walking in the park, and getting one's head up in the clouds.....

Remember how a nun's ruler would rap your knuckles if she caught you doodling?

I have news for the good Sister. According to recent studies "doodling has been shown to increase attention in monotonous tasks and to improve recall." So, what was with all the knuckle rapping?

And surely you remember fidgeting in church and getting "the look" from your mother? Now it comes to light that "fidgeting is theorized to modulate focus!" I hope my dear departed mother knows this now and is repenting.

Our creativity workshop on Saturday afternoon touched on the effect of movement on creativity.
Turns out that fidgeting and doodling entertain the part of our brain that is starting to get bored so that, with the rest of it, we can pay better attention to the task at hand. And, right off the bat, I can hear the OC's voice demanding to see the "data."

 I don't have any. I have half-formed, fuzzy ideas. Scientific American is not begging for permission to publish my findings (though, come to think of it, wouldn't that be nice!) Off he goes, no longer interested. He's partial to hard facts verified in a lab setting. Anything less and he starts to fidget and grow restless.

But back to the doodling and the fidgeting. It doesn't take a Department of Education study, at great cost to the taxpayer, to figure out  that people need to move. Especially little people. I was horrified to hear, a few years ago, that some schools were doing away with recess. Someone high up in an administrative ivory tower had obviously lost his mind. Any woman with children could tell you, for free, what an insane idea that was.

Even the nuns knew we had to move.They circled the playground like Border Collies, nipping at the heels of those inclined to clump together for chatting purposes. "Run, girls! Play ball! Jump rope! Play tag.....Move!" They knew our brains would balk at declining Latin verbs, or wrestling with Algebra, if we didn't energetically oxygenate our blood during that brief ten minutes on the playground. Anything to increase the flow to the grey matter. But they seemed to have a blind spot when it came to doodling and fidgeting. Neither, in their books, rated as exercise.

I make no claims to be a scientist. I'm merely reporting random tidbits, bandied about by a bunch of women at the library, some of whom were fidgeting as they spoke.  And nobody rapped their knuckles. All the tidbits related to how movement encourages productivity and creativity. One woman told of taking part in an experiment where, in a set amount of time, participants had to connect two lines on a sheet of paper. She only managed to draw nine connecting lines in the given time. All participants were then asked to stand up and jump around for a few minutes. They then repeated the exercise and everyone drew a significantly higher number of lines after the physical activity. Ergo, as the OC cowers in dismay, whatever about creativity, the activity certainly increased production.

One study done in the UK in 2005 concluded that "kids who are allowed to fidget during class learn more quickly than those who are not." One of our group told of autistic children being allowed to bounce up and down in their seats as they worked because experiments had shown that, when allowed to do so, they would learn more and get better scores.

Interestingly, the effects on the teachers of classrooms full of  bouncing, fidgeting children were not reported.

Curious, I  turned to Google and read the introduction to a paper on this very subject. Thinking I had hit the mother lode, I scrolled down to the meat of the article only to have the writer switch from the English of the introduction to her native Swedish, leaving me up the garden path without a shovel. But from the introduction I had at least gleaned that she believed we fidget the better to focus, relax, explore new ideas and to delay the onset of boredom.

Those are some ideas I could raise a glass to.

Another paper set out to compare highly creative children with those diagnosed as having ADHD. The implication seemed to be that it is sometimes easier, and more convenient, to label an energetic, creative child as hyper active and to medicate him, than to actually provide the level of stimulation that such a child needs.

I'd done nothing more active all day than boil the kettle for tea and drive to the library. The hyperactive child who lives and bounces around in my head had been lacking inspiration lately so, based on what I had so recently heard, I stopped at the park on my way home from the library. It was busy ---  parents pushing toddlers on the swings, hordes of teenagers playing basketball, tennis balls pinging back and forth and kids kicking balls around the soccer fields. I set off at a trot on the walking path....Well, as close to a trot as my aging knees will allow.  The sky overhead was blue. Red leaves shone among the green along a fence, cheeky squirrels squatted in my path, palm trees stood silhouetted against turquoise and peach as the sun started sinking, the scrubby oaks arched over my head and my mental cobwebs got swept away, at least for a while. And here you have the result --- full of the usual half-formed ideas, woefully lacking in hard data.....and not one call yet from Scientific American.

I probably need my knuckles rapped.

There Was Once a Little Tiger With a Very Big Roar

On November thirteenth, an unspecified number of years ago, I became a mother for the first time. The universe had not researched my qualifications, just plopped her in my lap. She was the most beautiful and the most terrifying thing that had ever happened to me.
I could not believe that, after less than a week in the hospital (those were the days!) they turned us out. The OC, who was at that time a very junior curmudgeon and better at bluffing confidence than I was, came to take us home. When I suggested they should send a nurse to live with us for that first year they only laughed and told us everything would be fine. Really? I could not believe their cavalier attitude towards this precious new scrap of humanity.

But, to my everlasting surprise, everthing was fine.

She grew and she thrived and she taught me not to be such a scardy cat and to have a little faith.

She changed and enriched our lives forever.

Now she is all grown up - a smart, kind, gentle and beautiful soul, with two children of her own.

Today is her birthday.

Happy, happy, day EB!

With love,

Mom

Embracing My Inner Pollyanna

My California Girl called me the day after the election. Distraught. When you're distraught about something you call your mom, right? She should be able to fix it, make it better. But I couldn't fix it. I couldn't make it better. As I tried, she only became more enraged that I wasn't as devastated as she was. She's an intelligent, articulate woman, who thinks faster on her feet than I do on mine.  The penny drops s-l-o-w-l-y here. It takes a while for stuff to sink in. Clunk. With her though it had sunk in right away and she was undone.

 .

 It is beyond comprehension that a person who has said such vile things about so many people could be elected president. Since nothing I said to try to calm my daughter was perceived as helpful, I want to let Kahil Gibran have a shot at it.....


"Your children are not your children. 
They are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so
He loves also the bow that is stable."


It humbles me that five intelligent, articulate and very individual "arrows" arrived here through me. Makes me feel like a "portal" of some kind. I can no more imagine "the house of tomorrow" than my parents could have imagined the "house" of today. Each one of my children "have their own thoughts" and I am sure that they and their peers will step up to this challenge with the can-do attitude and creative thinking that, it seems to me, is typically American.

When I channel my Inner Pollyanna, people (husband, daughters, sons) smile indulgently, shake their heads and roll their eyes. I grew up in a world that has vanished, a world that protected me for a long time from some of the harsher realities of life. As a resident alien (will I be asked to leave now?) I do not have a vote, but if I did I would have chosen to abstain. There is no good choice between a rock and a hard place.

(It may look like I'm changing the subject here but I'm not.) They say there are no such things as co-incidences. Maybe "they're" right. Doing some badly needed dusting on bookshelves this week, I came across a book my oldest son sent me several years ago. I had good intentions at the time. I meant to read it. But, like lots of my good intentions, it disappeared under a gradually growing pile of other books. I sat down on the floor and started reading (this often happens when I'm in the throes of a spurt of domesticity.) And the further I read the more I found myself smiling.

Best book I could have read this week.Validation! Someone else agrees with me --- there is nothing wrong with having your Inner Pollyanna control your view of the world. The title of the book is "A Quaker Book of Wisdom - Life Lessons in Simplicity, Service and Common Sense," by Robert Lawrence Smith. It made me think I must have been switched at birth and should really have been a Quaker.

I wish I could quote all of it to my children and anyone else who thinks we're on our way to hell in a hand basket, but I'll confine myself to quoting only one passage ---

"Accept the fact that our lives are only partly in our own hands. Luck, the actions of other people, and a host of circumstances beyond our control will invariably affect the outward shape of our lives. Often we don't have the luxury of making choices. Our lives are lived as if we were riding in a canoe down a strongly flowing river, just trying to stay upright and get to the end. Character is measured by how we deal with this reality. Why do good people suffer and live in misery while others, arguably not as good, experience life as a warm, sunny day? The beginning of understanding is when, after asking why, we become silent."

That is #5 in a list of ten life lessons listed at the end of the book. From silence, the Quakers believe, comes wisdom and it doesn't take a genius, or Pollyanna, to connect the ubiquitous lack of silence in the world today to a woeful lack of wisdom.

So call me Pollyanna.

I can take it.

And R? I hope this helps.

A Quilt for Miss P

There should have been a drumroll, or several; also a parade with marching musicians; lots of balloons released into the heavens; maybe an air raid siren or two to alert the natives; possibly a leading story in the local newspaper; or, at the very least, a letter of congratulations from the president of the National Quilting Association. 

Inexplicably, there was none of that when I finally finished Miss P's quilt this summer.

 But look what I got instead.  Far more satisfying than all of the above... That smile! 

It all started with this, back in February 2013.

After the initial oohing and ahhing and wishing she weren't on the other side of the planet, my next instinct was to make a quilt. Each grandchild has to have at least one me-made quilt.

 I decided to make her a 

Little Red Hen quilt.

 I knew that, as she grew, she'd be spending time with her UK grandparents who are lucky enough to live closer to her than we do, and therefore with the chickens and guinea fowl, lambs, geese and pigs that live with them.

The fact that there's a well worn copy of The Little Red Hen among the books from our own childrens' childhoods' was a factor. And it certainly helped that "In The Nursery" by Jennifer Sampou and Carolyn Schmitz had a helpful pattern. I had used another pattern from this book for a quilt for Miss P's big brother,





which, I am ashamed to say, was also eons in the making.


I cringed at the instructions which said to fuse the applique shapes for the Little Red Hen and her friends onto the background fabric. Choke, gasp, splutter! Depending on your point of view, I am either a purist, a masochist, or seriously deranged. I'm arguing for purist. I like handwork. Glue would be fine for a paper collage, but for fabric --- never!


The Little Red Hen finds a seed and asks her farmyard friends to help her plant it.

They decline so she plants it all by herself. Here she is, well most of her, digging the hole....after I had first back basted her parts in place (my absolutely favorite applique technique.)

After the seed is planted it has to be watered and the ground around it hoed. Otherwise it will die (as I know  from personal experience.) But when the Little Red Hen asks her friends again to help with these chores they are, once again, too busy, and our hard working feathered friend has to do it all by herself.

Meanwhile the lazy little pig was taking shape, and plans for the cute, but unhelpful, kitten were coming along.

The seed grows into wheat and the Little Red Hen again asks for help harvesting it, but the other critters are  too busy, so she does it all by herself.

Then, all by herself, she grinds it into flour.

Ever the optimist, she asks her friends if they would like to help her bake some bread.
 But no.
They are still too busy.

So she bakes the bread all by herself..

 When the heavenly aroma of bread baking wafts through the farmyard all the friends rush to the Little Red Hen's side to help her eat it. But, the Little Red Hen has managed thus far without any help from her friends and decides that she will eat the bread all by herself, thanks for offering though.



While the Little Red Hen's wheat was growing, so was Miss P. When she was six months old we went to visit.

Her first b'day came and went. Her second birthday came and went.

She had a third birthday, and shortly after that

she came to visit us.

Was the quilt ready and waiting for her? Alas. Again. No.

 The Little Red Hen and her friends were still scratching about in my sewing room, unfinished.

But , as you can see, Miss P was a lot less bothered by the whole business than I was.

The creatures were all assembled, the center panel was finished, so what was my problem?.

It is possible that my brain is disfunctional, considering all the chances I had to get it right .......

When they left, I got to work and, finally, finished the quilt top.

But I wasn't out of the woods yet. Now more opportunities for procrastination presented themselves.
 Should I hand quilt it?
And risk taking another three years to finish?
Threw out that daft idea.
Piecing and applique are my comfort zone. The actual quilting fills me with terror so, I did the sensible thing, and took the quilt to a friend of a friend and paid her to machine quilt it.

It was a long road but it's finally done. I had such fun making it I think I just wanted the process to go on and on and on...
I am always more about the journey than the destination.

And, best of all, reports are that Miss P loves all her quilted farmyard friends.