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journal |
April 2006 |
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4-1-06 Brushy Fork Creek is about a quarter mile from the house. I won't say it marks the end of civilization, but beyond the creek, just across a one-lane, wooden bottom bridge, are the knobs, the stark straight up hills that mark the beginning of the Appalachian foothills. Each knob, each holler has a name - East and West Pinnacle, Robe Mountain, Christmas Ridge, Davis Holler, Wolf Gap, Pilot Knob, Basin Mountain. The creek has cut down through these ridges and formed flat bottom land on the far side of the bridge. It's there in the fields beside the creek that I often gather materials. This evening my husband and I wandered across the bridge and up alongside the creek and found a stand of last year's milkweed stalks, the pods still firmly attached. The pods have weathered gray on the backside, but most of the interiors are still creamy. We gathered a bag full. I'm not exactly certain where this will go, but I'd like to form several of these into a single piece. I'll cover the gray back side with paper, leaving the cream inside bare, then join the pieces. 4-3-06 I covered one of the pods just to see if it would work and it does well enough, but I'm at a loss right now what to do with them as multiples. I may end up joining them in a similar manner to the "eggs." Dunno. In the meantime, while I wait for inspiration to come along, I'm building the base of several vessels at once so I will always have something to work on. Because of drying time, I've often been caught with no forms that are dry enough to work with. Perhaps by starting several at once, I won't have that problem. This one, still in unjoined halves stage, was formed over a clay pot I've used before. This time I'm planning on adding a neck and possibly some weaving element. This piece was formed over a lovely raku fired piece by Laura Ross that I traded for many years ago. Here the two halves are being joined in my...um, drying area. I'm using denim, in part, because of the strength and thickness of the sheets, and in part because that's all I have right now for a base. These sheets were pulled last fall and frozen for use later. This works out well for me because it's still too cold here to pull paper. When I decide exactly what to do with them, these forms will be covered with some other, more appropriate paper. 4-4-06 I still have some hickory paper, both bleached and unbleached, and I used that to form this piece. I really like the effect produced by using half-and-half. It doesn't look finished, though. I'd like to decorate one half or the other in some manner to give it that feeling of completeness. While I was at it, I did yet another hickory piece using the grapevine tendrils I gathered last month. This one, like the one before, is still a work in progress. The rim needs smoothing and it needs something else to finish it off. 4-6-06 We're off to Bowling Green...my husband to participate in the Kentucky Writers Conference, me to listen to Zoe Speaks. 4-7-06 A few years ago, I bought a clay wind chime that Sandy Osborne had made many, many years ago. The chimes, clay disks with impressions of wildflowers, were strung on monofilament fishing line. Unfortunately, I didn't realize that this had deteriorated. The first good windstorm broke several of the strings, and the clay chimes fell and shattered on the walk. If you've followed this journal long enough, you know that I can't throw anything away, at least nothing that has potential and these shards most definitely did. Last month I did a vase from cotton rag with willow inclusions, then worked the rim in hickory. It was nice, but just didn't seem complete. The rim of this vase was a perfect place for the shards. They were glued on, then small pieces of hickory paper were draped over the shard edges and secured to the existing paper. I wasn't too concerned about being perfectly smooth with those first pieces of paper, knowing the second layer would take care of that. The clay pieces worked beautifully on the rim. 4-8-06 If you've noticed, on my homepage there are links to a number of blogs. From time to time, these change depending on my interests at the moment, but for the most part, they are all either nature or writing related. They represent my early morning "rounds," read and savored over a cup of coffee. A week or so ago, this was the day's entry for the Rurality blog. It set me to wondering about the cedar apple rust growing on the cedars behind the house. I have always called these things cedar brains because of their appearance. Usually I gather these before they "sprout" to slice and use as decorative dangles on baskets. They're soft enough to cut with a sharp knife and are a creamy white initially, but they very rapidly change to a light orange, then eventually into the deep rusty orange as pictured on the basket. I have a feeling they'll be quite attractive embedded on one of the vases, so I gathered a few and sliced them to dry. The weird sprouts really won't matter because they will be under the paper and may even help secure the slices. 4-9-06 [This is a non-craft related post, if you want to quit reading now.] Every year, Eastern Kentucky University sponsors a wildflower walk lead by a botanist. It's an excellent opportunity for city folks to meet and shake hands with rural plants. This year there are two walks - today at Raven Run outside Lexington and April 23 at the Berea College forest. It was a gorgeous day and I couldn't resist joining about 15 others for a three hour walk down winding trails to the Kentucky River and back. (Yes, muddy water and debris. We've had quite a bit of rain lately.) Of course, I took the camera, but it wasn't my best day of shooting pictures (more out of focus than in). I did get a few decent shots of the woodland flowers that are blooming now - squirrel corn, sharp-lobed hepatica, larkspur (which was just beginning to bloom), cut-leaf toothworth, the only twinleaf still blooming and yellow troutlily. I'm a rock lover, and because of the nature of the group, the trail we took to the river was easy (translate that as reasonably level and rockless). Only when we reached the overlook did I find limestone. My biggest joy of the day, though, was morels, morels and more morels! I suspect these popped up three or four days ago, because the stems are already looking grainy, but if I could have, I would still have gathered, cleaned and cooked them. Before I moved here, many spring mornings after rains were spent in the woods hunting "dry land fish." There is no mushroom that is better. Delicious! [Editing here to explain the "out of focus" remark. Earlier in the day I had turned my compost heap. Given that the heap will fill the back of a pickup and given that the stuff was soggy wet, it's no wonder that squatting and bending down to flower level was more than I wanted to do, even for the sake of quality pictures.] 4-17-06 I apologize for my absence. The galley for JimT's book, Things Kept, Things Left Behind, came from Iowa Press last week, and I offered a second set of eyes to read through it for errors. (I hope I did a better job checking his book than I do on my own journal entries!) The editor had done a beautiful job on TK,TLB. We only found a few minor errors. Today I'm playing catch-up with all the things I let go last week. Tomorrow is back to playing. 4-19-06 Spent most of yesterday and today redesigning my husband's website. (No, it's not up yet.) I did find time to finish off one of the vessels that felt incomplete at this stage. I had some strips of mulberry bast left over from basket weaving. When it's wet, this stuff splits along the grain easily by pushing an awl through it, then pulling evenly on both sides. It can be split down almost to single fibers if you're patient enough. I pulled one long fine strip, painted thick cooked starch across the face of the piece above, then let the wet mulberry strip settle onto it in a graceful doodle. After a few minutes, it had stabilized, and I painted starch over it again, securing the strip. I did work on one other piece, too. This was where I stopped with this one. I managed to find time today to cover it with hickory. It's about 8" tall and a gorgeous shape, for which I take absolutely no credit. That belongs to Laura, the potter who made the original pot over which this was formed. 4-21-06 Like everyone, I sometimes create a piece with a flaw. (Sometimes? Ha!) The way I look at it, there are usually four approaches the problem - fix it, hide it, feature it or throw the piece away. Today, I'm problem solving on a vase that I find objectionably lumpy. The piece was made from thick white cotton rag paper, and the thickness of the paper is the original source of the problem. Then I compounded the error by trying to fix it. The additional torn and attached pieces created lumps that were even worse. Okay. Approach one shot. Throwing the piece away is something I do only as a last resort, so that leaves the other two options - hide the lumps or feature them. What I've chosen to do is sort of a cross between those to methods. I'm adding quarter-size, tissue thin pieces of hickory, smoothing them onto the vase, then scrunching them and pulling them toward their centers with an awl point, forming star-like, raised embossing on the surface. (Four hyperlinks in one sentence...a new record!) The first "test scrunchies" in that picture are dry, the others are still wet, accounting for the difference in colors. I'm going to put the hickory pieces in groupings over the surface, leaving gaps between. I may or may not fill these later with a different color paper. We'll see what it looks like tomorrow and decide then. (The top section isn't finished yet. The rim will either be more regular or totally irregular, whatever appears to look best, that is, unless I end up using "Option Four.") 4-28-04 No, I didn't use Option Four. Actually, I haven't used any option. Instead of working with paper, I've been redesigning my husband's Web site. He had a nice, casual site before, but he has a book coming out in October and needed a more professional presence. I did the layout; he did the words. We're a good team. :) **I did take time earlier in the week to harvest and dry some Japanese knotweed. This plant makes an excellent paper - tough, smooth, clean - and I always feel good about gathering because it's an invasive. Feel almost righteous doing it. The only problem is that there is such a limited window of opportunity for gathering. Too small, and it doesn't have enough fiber. Too large, and it's nearly impossible to break down. And the doggone stuff seems to grow a foot a day. If I want knotweed to use later, it has to be gathered and dried now. I had a few minutes this afternoon and went back down to the patch. The plants in the front are about 3' tall, those behind are 5'-6' or more. The best size to gather is about 5' tall, when the plants have three or four small branches. I trim the branches off, then lop off the top foot of the stalk, which is really too tender to have good fiber in it. You can see the ends are just about the size of a quarter or just a little larger. After tomorrow, the weather doesn't look good for drying, so instead of cutting and crushing the stalks, I ran them through the chipper shredder so they would dry faster. Made a nice pile. (Cat in the picture for size reference.) While I was gathering, I found quite a bit of poke. Guess what we had for supper. 4-30-06 Bah! (Not the poke, the weather.) As anticipated, I had to move the Japanese knotweed into the garage to dry. (An aside...why is it that the weather forecasters are always right when I don't want them to be, and always wrong when I want them to be right?) I have the knotweed scattered out on a sheet between the two vehicles (in the way, of course), and will have to stir it often so it won't rot or mold. It will dry eventually. **FWIW, I have two cyber friends coming this week, one from New York, the other from Australia, so I'll likely be AWOL for a few days. Bear with me. I'll be back in May. |
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