the giving season

tis the season of twinkling lights and of giving
and i am well content
in a place that is dear to my heart

so
i am announcing a give-away to kindly followers of this blog

you have until December 13
to comment telling me what you would most like to read about here
and share this post via your blog [if you have one] or some other social medium [if you participate in such things]

i will write your names on windfallen eucalyptus leaves
toss them in the air
and ask Miss Martha to choose one at random

i think she will like that game

a similar give-away is running on FaceBook
that gives you two chances!

ai = love

i worked all day saturday
and then on sunday
i thought
i will just pop in and do a few stitches
and then i will go out and wander somewhere
take a look at Portland

the Dogs had other plans
when i looked outside
it looked like this

that window is my studio

i think it may be
that i am in love with blue
it is a colour that takes me to a quite specific place and time
James Tate wrote beautifully about it
[click on the audio icon to hear the poem being read aloud]
there's a good reason why the Japanese word for blue is the same as the Japanese word for love 

or so i have been told.

today i was thinking about our blue planet
and how the maps we have available are always too small
especially for someone has left footprints on four of the seven continents [gazing at Egypt from the deck of a boat on the Suez Canal as a toddler sadly doesn't count as stepping in Africa]; who keeps a bicycle in New Orleans, a cat in South Australia, her heart in San Francisco and "einen Koffer in Berlin"       ##
 
so
i played around in Photoshop
and made a map that is really useful for planning trips
because
it allows you to compare distance easily with a piece of string [well, except for the curly bits around the poles] and goodness me, what a lot of blue!!!!

got any good maps you'd care to share?



## i plant trees to make up for all this wanton wandering...

still following the thread below

Marianna has added her piece of the story
over at her blog
skip over the rainbow to read...

the flotsam dress

i promised my students i would show them how it turned out
so here are some quick images of the flotsam dress
now that it's dry and the shibori stitching has been removed

Kaz Madigan over at Curiousweaver has some shots of the bundle being undone [in the rain]

rather better images than mine
shot against the sun this morning

doesn't look too spectacular from a distance
the devil is in the detail

sea fossils on cloth,  perhaps

weather or not

two months is a long time to be out in the sun, given that 2 weeks in Australian sunshine is reputedly equivalent to about 25 years under museum conditions
so
as i'm away from home again [soon] for a while
and therefore shall not be able to sneekpeek inside the metal box
it seemed a good time to [once again] put some cloth to the test
the two pieces on the left are commercially produced cottons, the third from left is eucalyptus-dyed milkymerino, the four on the right snippets of silk dyed using the more delicate 'northern' plants

they are half in, half out of the box

assuming no birds try to steal them
or helpful family members decide to move them under cover

i shall open the box when i return home in November
and publish the results on these pages

a little time out

a columbus day

if you're in Columbus Ohio make a beeline for the Wex where you'll find an extraordinarily good bookshop, some interesting exhibitions

and

a building designed to make the most of the lovely light here

it has delicious details

narrow stairs that slip between tall walls and make one feel as if one is taking a secret passage. they'd have been outlawed by the nanny-state building code in South Australia, no hand rails for a start. shock. horror.

later if you're lucky you might spot some dainty pieces of machinery

for nicely plated, fresh and delicious food [presented with outstanding service] head to the Lemongrass in the Short North. 

there was even a baby grand armed with an above-average piano player. 

i leaned back from conversation to let my ears make the most of his improvisation on Gershwin's 'Summertime'

and mused on other things

wandering to the waterside