a year of living creatively

Well, here it is October and I have not posted in almost a year. However, I have been doing a lot of creative projects. It is very late, so I will not post a full update now, but suffice to say, since we last met I re-did my house, worked hard on my painting, finished a few knitting projects, started a few wonderful embroidered pieces, and cooked macaroons! Photos to follow shortly. Stay tuned and please "like" my new Facebook page "Knitting Hill"

Hello everyone, Please meet Delphina Aurora. She had a very very long gestation period, and, to be totally truthful, she is missing her undergarments. Since people are very curious and relentlessly lift her skirt I will be knitting her some lovely pantaloons over the Christmas break. Stay tuned! I love Delphine. She is the product of a fantastic book I bought last summer at a knitting bazaar I attended with my fellow crafter Trine the magnificent. We have now been close pals for two years, having met at an embroidery course at Liberty. I give thanks for her every day as she is my closest friend in London, my second home. Today in Los Angeles you find your faithful (well, really, not faithful at all, I am a crap blogger, do not update this page nearly as often as I keep promising) packing up my house in a most disorganized fashion. I have made the possibly catastrophic decision to do some home re-modeling. It will either be totally beautiful and worth the agony, or expensive, du

How Facebook nearly ruined my Thanksgiving I am a sucker for holidays. Thanks to the media and our consumer culture, I have long fallen hard for the fantasy of Thanksgiving dinner, huge extended family gathered for a perfectly cooked meal, fire roaring, children playing, the sound of laughter rolling across a warm home full of love. Although I have much to be thankful for, this year that Kodak moment was going to be hard to accomplish. We lost our mother three and a half years ago, and with her passing the glue that held our small family together seemed to dissolve. My sisters live in other states with their children, my husband lives in London (another story), and, at this point, it’s just me and my dad here in Southern California. My husband, a Brit, understandably has little feeling for the holiday, but he was coming out to visit, and we talked about how we could make the best of our Thanksgiving. We were invited to friends, but dad wouldn’t be able t

hello, today my friend trine and i (she is visiting from london for the sole purpose of crafting) took a class in encaustic something or other. it was a very interesting technique, having to do with wax and varnish and collage and burnishing and the like. however, it reminded me of something i already know. i admire collage but seem to have no talent for it...and, i have to admit (and this will sound judgemental) the whole collage thing seems to be the apotheosis of why non-crafters sneer at us..you really will make fairly useless clutter from it nine times out of ten. however, on the positive side, the store in south pasadena was lovely, the other women were delightful, and trine and i enjoyed a very pleasant morning making fairly useless crap. so, here are some pictures from today and a photo of a rather incompetent camel i drew yesterday in my drawing class. more tomorrow!! in other exciting news, my garden is going so well, tiny and hardy tomato plants, lovely artichokes, and s

So, here's a lovely photo of a fuchsia from my front yard. i took it with the super groovy hipstamatic setting on my Iphone. I have lots of other things to share but i am too lazy to find the cord to connect to the phone to download all the photos. So, I will just ramble a little bit about how my creative life is going. I have to say, it's going swimmingly. I finished the job I mentioned last time I was here...time really does fly, and in addition to being pleasant due to the fine folks i was working with, it gave me the mental permission to just take it easy for the rest of the summer. and, finally, eight months (more?) after leaving my job, things are really making sense to me. Every day I find my creative energy level rising. I have been knitting, thinking about knitting, reading about knitting.. and taking drawing classes, which is just....well, indescribably pleasurable. I LOVE THEM!!! And, the odd and fantastic thing is that the more things I do that I like th

as i mentioned earlier, i spent the late afternoon at the v&a museum enjoying the quilt exhibit. it was truly amazing. many of the quilts were hand done, and the attention to detail was astonishing. i just stood there staring at them and trying to picture the women who had to painstakingly and lovingly designed and created them. the quilts ranged from the 1700s to today. one of the more recent ones was called 'in memoriam' and was an evocation of a woman's impressions of her mother's loss of identity from alzheimer's. she had twisted metallic wool around the edges to symbolize how her mother compulsively twisted her hair. it was unbelievably moving and powerful. the whole exhibit was amazing for exactly the reason i had hoped it would be. it was a celebration of a craft that traces our history and is so little respected because it is just seen as a way for women to pass the time while men get about the important business of industry. more later after dinner....