resurrection fern

and the winner is

                                                        RUTH!!!!

Lilith picked a page out of a book about birdies

it just so happened to be the roadrunner

perhaps she is planning to be an early walker

like her papa afterall.

He was up and running at 9 months of age.

I have heard through the grapevine that there will be another giveaway

for this fantastic book on a friends blog very soon.

So you will all have another chance to win.

We also had a sweet visit from my arounna and john yesterday.

i adore the photographs she took on the porch.

xxoo

oma and lili

 

celebration

celebration time 

something very very special arrived in my mailbox today

and it has sure made an impression on all of us in the 

land of resurrectionfern

especially the most adorable one

did you hear lili squeal with glee :)

The book is called Making an Impression by Geninne Zlatkis and is published by lark books

Each and every project is explained with so much love and care for attention

It is the next best thing to sitting in the studio with geninne and making with her.

I am really blessed to have a few of the original projects from the book.

Gifts from the author and dear friend herself.

I love them so so much and receive so many complements on them from strangers.

If you want a chance to win a copy of this book ( thank you lark ) please leave

a comment at the end of this post. 

lilith will choose a name on sunday.

good luck

even rock babies need cozy quilts

That was the line used by the ever adorable cathy gaubert when she asked me to take part in her soon to be released book, Pretty in Patchwork, Doll quilts. I just received my copy of the book today and it is as whimsical, colorful and wonderful as I imagined it to be. You can't help but feel happy looking through it. I am very honored to be part of this talented crew, especially since I don't consider myself to be a quilter.  

and a few of my photographs I took before sending it off to the publisher.

I also contributed a square to the round the globe friendship quilt in this other wonderful quilting book.

A Liberty Rowan Christmas Present

 

Hello to all Resurrection Fern readers, I hope everyone is enjoying the holidays and they are filled with joyful and cheery blog posts. Some of you dedicated readers may know who I am, my name is Deborah and I am the youngest of Margie's four children. This year for christmas, my sister Rebekah and I wanted to stray from the usual scarf or gloves as gifts for our wonderful and caring mother. My sister stumbled across a vintage knitting guide on eBay, where the knitting company Rowan and our favourite Liberty had a collaboration. Various designers such as Kaffe Fassett designed chunky knit sweaters inspired by Liberty patterns. The book instantly sparked inspiration and Rebekah knew what she wanted to do for our mother's christmas present.

 

As I was visiting Halifax to check out universities, we took the opportunity to make this gift happen. She assembled looks using only vintage Liberty pieces she had collected through the years, and big chunky hand knit sweaters that were often found at thrift shops. Although it had been solid rain all week, the weekend I arrived Mother Nature seemed to know I had arrived with a purpose and the weather could not have been better on the day we ventured to Point Pleasant Park to do the photoshoot. The story is a young traveller, new to the East Coast and excited to explore with nothing but her Liberty, knits, and suitcase.

I hope you all have a very safe and happy New Year's Eve! With 11 being my lucky number I am eager to see what good things this year will bring. If you want to see more photographs from the shoot please feel free to check out my Flickr here :)

"What more felicity can fall to creature, than to enjoy delight with liberty."

- Edmund Spenser, 1591 

trouble with trolls

Everytime I see this grass at this time of year I am reminded of one of our families most favorite Christmas storybooks, Trouble with Trolls written and illustrated by Jan Brett.

"you can see the white cotton grass waving wildly in the wind, It's all that is left from the day I had trouble with trolls."

Interesting when I was searching for the book link I was reminded that trolls is the name given to certain people.

"People of all ages in any walk of life can become trolls because the anonymity granted them by the internet gives them the freedom to sow discord, destroy the credibility of individuals, and even shut down websites and forums. Trolls like to argue, not for the sake of a stimulating debate, but to annoy and upset people. The more aggravation they create, the more they believe they have achieved."

Read more at Suite101: The Trouble With Trolls: Cyberstalkers And The Law http://www.suite101.com/content/internet-trolls-a193145#ixzz17o8HogGt

It made me think that individuals and companies that steal peoples ideas and designs are also trolls.  If you have a chance this weekend I would recommend you read this, this and this. This is happening to so many of us and it is high time we caused a ruckus. So tweet, facebook, put up a link on your blog or flickr. There is true strength and passion in the handmade community.

xo

m

book release giveaway

 tweet , tweet the little bird book has arrived and I have a copy or two to giveaway. Please leave a comment telling me your favorite bird, bird story or bird artist and I will pick one or two winners on June 7th. 

This little giveaway post is staying at the top of the page for one week but you will find the regular daily posts right below it. 

the bluenose ship jacket's return voyage

I promised I would share a little more about this jacket, the bluenose ship jacket, that was one of my gifts for my mom at Christmas. This jacket began on my kitchen table way back in May of 2008. The full story of it was blogged about here.

 

The picture of it's back is still my "most interesting" photograph of my flickr stream. 

A while after it was created it was sent on a journey to the west coast of America. Seattle, Washington to be exact along with detailed instructions for potential inclusion in a book that the wonderful Kristen Rask of Schmancy was writing. I had almost thought it had been shipwrecked or lost at sea some where in the north Pacific Ocean until just before leaving for Ottawa for Christmas what arrives in my mailbox but a box containing the jacket and news of the book being published. The book is titled Button and Stitch and has 24 projects designed to help you put your button stash to great use. My jacket is called the fabric collage jacket in the index and uses a great many vintage buttons as well as bits and pieces of vintage linens. The ship has come to rest with my mom and that makes me very happy.

 

I think the parrot approves. I hope to get my copy of the book soon and when I do I will definitely share some pics with you all.  The few pages you can see from the amazon look inside feature look wonderful. 
 

 

 

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.