resurrection fern

blue sunday

Not in spirit but what I am noticing around me in nature, treasures , etsy purchases (thanks melissa)  and works in progress. 

I have so many projects on the go it is perhaps a blessing we are expecting a rain filled week leading up to our thanksgiving weekend. Are you even a little bit curious as to what some of these might be. I was looking for something after I wrote this post and found a long lost little collection of felt purses and necklaces the children and I made many years ago. Why am I telling you this ? More blues here of course and because the medallions that I used to make remind me so much of the work of melissa ( tiny happy). 

the four elements

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

- Thomas Merton

The four element stones that were lovingly created by the hands of Pat have been united. I was thinking about a creative way to photograph them for you. If any of you know a little about this amazing woman you would know she is very well read, writes beautiful prose and poetry, loves all things vintage and has a great love and respect for the natural world. I had been wanting to show you some of my favorite vintage children's books so this seemed like the perfect backdrop for the stones. I think it was Dicken's who said sometimes the best thing about a book is it's front and back covers. The thing about most of these books I have collected is that the inside is just as wonderful as the exquisite covers. At least that is my opinion.

Friday evening , just before the sun set I took Pat ( in the form of her stones) out for a walk to one of my favorite spots, Happy Valley. Yes it is actually called that. It is a very small portion of a very large trail system that follows the Oak Ridges Moraine. With all the rain we have been having the mosquitos were out in full force and very happy to sight some fresh blood. I did manage a few pictures before getting eaten alive.

As I was placing the stones a little visitor had come to see it's homage. I swear this wasn't staged. On the way home I saw a grouse family, wild turkeys, the most adorable little brood of skunks out for a stroll and a young buck in the front yard of an estate home looking like he owned the place. 

Thank you so much Pat. Your art will find a very special place in my home and in my heart.

REMINDER:  ETSY SHOP UPDATE TOMORROW , MONDAY, JULY 13 th at 4 PM EST

one covered stone and one merfish per customer for the first hour of the sale and then anything goes!!!

I hope to have a preview up later today or at least by tomorrow morning with what will be available. There will be no poetry stones for sale. I only have two left and I will be having a silent auction for those with the money being donated to autism research. More about that later. 

Nature Notebook Revisited

I posted about this beautiful first edition book I found at the thrift store a few weeks ago and quite a few of you asked if you might see a few pages from the inside. I am almost always willing to oblige but it sometimes takes me a while. Here are a few scanned pictures including the front and back cover artwork. I love the way it is written almost like they are taking you along for a nature discovery journey, very similar to the way some of us blog. The illustrations are really phenomenal.

I saw that there are a few used copies available on Amazon and one identical to mine on ebay if anyone is interested.  I decided to intermingle these pages with a few of my own photographs of similar things. I saw some really large deer in the forest yesterday but they were in a hurry and I didn't manage to get a photograph of them.

Some of you may remember the plight of the trillium is a subject dear to my heart. The greening of the white trillium is even more pronounced in the forests I wander this spring and seems to be spreading to new areas. I asked all the botany experts and even Canada's trillium expert ( he wrote an entire book on trilliums) last year and no one could tell me for sure why this was occuring. Answers I obtained were changes in soil properties and various diseases including viral infections of the plants. I suspect it is more than that and some of the green trilliums my husband and I observed this year appear to not even have "flowers" only leaves and thus they have no plant reproductive organs. That is about as serious a problem other than immediate death that a plant can have.

Here are a few pictures I took in the same forest as last spring.

I would love to get some DNA analyses done of these plants. I fight just fire off a new series of letters to the experts again. Maybe I should go straight to the top and send it to David Suzuki. He was recently picked the most trusted Canadian in a poll done for Reader's Digest. 

KUMIHIMO ( a bringing together of threads)

“ / Listen where thou art sitting/ Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave, / In twisted braids of lilies knitting / The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair.” John Milton I just love the imagery in those few lines of poetry and I love BRAIDS!!! I came across this old photograph of me with my hair pulled back and russian braided in the back and get a look at that beautiful folkloric top I have on. I am really wishing I still had that , it would be perfect for my russian christmas theme and it used to have cossack style pants that matched. Last weekend Tamara and I went to a fiber art exhibit in Toronto and saw a fantastic installation by local artist Amanda McCavour. This piece was untitled but I think it represents most of our lives at some point, the tangled threads with the beautiful maternal hands lovingly sorting and arranging. I am trying really really hard to arrange my life in a way that is balanced and functional. I don't want to use the word organized here. I want to bring together all the threads in an unique design. It was a wonderful coincidence that as I was clearing a closet for my daughter that I came across something I found many years ago but never found the time to learn how to use. It is a hand made maru dai , a frame used for kumihimo ( japanese braiding). On night last week I took out the book and some cotton yarn, prepared the maru dai, and began bringing together the threads. It took me quite a while to memorize the pattern of thread changes but once I got it the process became very meditative and relaxing. Some one described it as dancing with your hands. I think some of these braided threads may end up on some special christmas or St Nicholas Day gifts. Have a wonderful weekend. I am very sleepy this morning having had a late night at the Iron and Wine concert. The second song of the set was "resurrection fern" and it was so beautiful I shed a few tears.