We’ve had a rough couple of months. We lost our Sula in December.

Scooby was diagnosed with feline leukemia and lymphoma in February. His condition worsened quickly and we took him to the vet on Thursday, April 1 to relieve him of his suffering.

We will miss our little friend.

The House at Riverton, written by Kate Morton, was the first book chosen.  I borrowed the book from the library and read it shortly after I checked it out.  I’d call it a romantic mystery period piece - it was an easy read and went quickly.

I started reading People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks, immediately after finishing The House at Riverton and enjoyed it enough that the details of The House at Riverton were quickly lost in my forgetful head.

About the piece:

I decided to create a necklace inspired by the mystery of The House at Riverton.  Throughout the book, several of the main characters create secret codes, tiny secret books, and maps in a highly secretive game they invent.

I created the enameled portion of the necklace  at Penland last year.  When I discovered it in my studio, I  thought it would reflect the mystery/map theme very well.

The color of the enamel and exposed copper reminds me of something very old (and mysterious).  The sgraffito design is reminiscent of a pathway and the glass suggests a magnification of something hidden from view…

In keeping with the mystery/secret theme, I created a design on the back of the necklace to invite further exploration.

The chain I used was  hand forged by my grandmother.  I discovered it in a pile of her handmade silver jewelry.  Each link was formed and soldered by hand.

The story of The House at Riverton is told, in part, by the main character, Grace, from her nursing home.  I thought it was very fitting that I incorporate chain made by my grandmother, whose life before she met my grandfather has remained a mystery to the family.

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I’m looking  forward to the next Literary Rabbit Book Club challenge.  Anything that inspires me to finish things is a good thing.

I tried very hard not to spend any money on this new knitting venture. The good news is that this sweater is knit using fine yarn and, as a weaver, I happen to have many cones of fine yarn in my stash.  I chose a cone of Jaggerspun’s Lambswool and Baby Alpaca - I think I purchased this for some obscenely low price ($6.00?).  It is soooo soft.

The deal I made with myself is that I will use this cardigan as a learning experience and try very hard not to judge myself when I make mistakes.  Now that I’m actually knitting this project, it’s harder than it sounds.

Here’s a photo of the project and the yarn:

Note the gray office walls in the background - we really do need to hang the finished crop circle embroidery at some point - the pieces are framed and ready to go…just need to bribe K to come to my office & lend a hand.

Here’s a picture of the sweater body & the sleeve.  I’m almost finished knitting the first sleeve.  The sweater is too big (as usual, I chose a size that’s too big for me) <–oops!  sounded like judgment there.

The circumference of the sleeve is definitely too large.  I’ve decided to continue to knit - I’ll finish the sleeve at a 3/4 length with a 3″ ribbing in the hope that it might be cuffed.  If not, I’ll just deal with the clown sleeves on this practice piece. Oops!

Correction:  The large, non-tapering sleeves are an essential design feature of this sweater.

This positive thinking is difficult, isn’t it?

The sleeves are going very quickly.  I’m hoping to have them finished by the end of the weekend.   Then I’ll pick up the edges and knit the border.  I may have to enlist some help because I have no clue how to evenly pick up 2 of 3 stitches along the edge.

I was going to finish this post with some other news involving looms and enamel jewelry but I’ve run out of time to post.  So that’s it for now.

My close friend Lee , the knitting queen, recently wrote a blog post referencing my fit of I-don’t-know-what-to-do-with-this-Get-it-out-of-my-house. 

I had given her a bag full of Blue Heron Silk Rayon yarn, in various stages of knittedness.  The back story here is that I had splurged on this yarn for my birthday, intending to knit a sweater for myself.  I knit the sweater, only to find that it weighed 500 lbs and made me look like a colorful potato.

I carefully unraveled the sweater, balled it up, and proceeded to knit another sweater, this time in a lacy pattern.  Sweater #2 looked fine for about one minute, before gravity pulled it down to the earth.  Disaster!

So…I was unwilling to give this yarn a third chance.  In fact, I blame this yarn for some of my reluctance to knit.  (Another large portion of my reluctance to knit comes from a beautiful bag of handspun yarn that Keith spun from a sheep we knew - absolutely precious.  I knit this yarn into two unfortunate sweaters for Keith.  It currently resides in a bag in my attic.) 

(Oh, and I’m not even going to talk about the next year’s birthday splurge sweater - knit from beautiful alpaca and Cascade yarn…this is still in sweater form, but just barely.  Do you know how HOT a sweater knit from doubled strands of thick alpaca is? )

So.  I’m a yarn destroyer and there is a point after which yarn is reluctant to play nice.  The Blue Heron yarn was reaching that point, so I thought it would be best to provide a good home for it.  Lee, the best knitter I know, was the perfect person to adopt the yarn.

I thought the yarn was gone for good.

However, Lee surprised me last week with the most wonderful gift.  She was able to tame the yarn and whip it into something beautiful.  A wrap.  For me!!  I’m so grateful.

Here’s a picture of the wrap with a copper closure that Keith made.  I think they look very nice together (please excuse the poor quality of the picture).

Thank you, Lee!  I really appreciate your patience and the time it took you to knit this beautiful wrap.

This is an embroidered picture of me with a bee buzzing around my head.  I have one of those brains that doesn’t shut off when it should.  Leads to a lot of insomnia - Keith calls it my head full of bees.  I think of it as my hamster wheel brain (hmm…maybe that’s the subject of my next embroidery).

At any rate, this is an embellished self portrait.  I traced the picture of me that we used for this website and made a rough pencil sketch directly on the fabric.  Embroidery followed.

The next self portrait was a different experiment.  Keith helped me to drop a picture to black & white.  I printed this onto fabric and began embroidering.  The challenge here was to create different textures using one color.  The background is two shades of green blended together on the vertical trees and the darker shade used alone for the horizontal background. 

I am looking forward to exploring this technique in more detail.  I’m still trying to decide what to embroider…hopefully inspiration will strike soon.  If not, then it will probably be a hamster in a wheel.

This is one of my favorite photos from 2009. I snapped this shot during a crane-watching excursion with some of my favorite people.

2009 was a very eventful year. K & I had the opportunity to explore Scotland in glorious weather. I traveled to Penland with my mother and explored enameling in depth. I am very thankful to have had such wonderful experiences in 2009 and look forward to what 2010 has in store.

We said goodbye to our little Sula last month. She was a very sick little kitty and we’ll all miss her.

The bathroom’s nearly finished and it’s time for me to start decorating. I had a lot of fun designing the bathroom. I gathered design inspiration from a number of places, but the main starting place was an IKEA hack I saw at Modern in MN. Modern in MN is a fabulous blog - incredibly motivated people building one of the coolest homes on the planet.  They’ve just finished constructing an outdoor pizza oven, much like the one Keith learned to build during his class at Zingerman’s Bakehouse.   I’m in awe.

…but back to my bathroom…

The countertops and shelves are butcher block counters from IKEA, but that’s about where the IKEA hack stops and the regular construction comes in.  For the first time ever, Keith let me make all of the design decisions.  This was a bit scary.  I was concerned that the faucet might not play nice with the sink, but it really does function well.

We haven’t decided exactly how we’ll hang the shower curtain, so we’re using a tension rod for the time being.  We asked our contractor to construct things to accommodate a ceiling track or a frameless glass door.  I’m thinking that we’ll probably hang the curtain from the ceiling (again, inspiration from Modern in MN).

I’ve also got to make a decision about the window treatment.  I was pretty sure that I liked the idea of an unobtrusive roller shade or insulated blind, but when I put my handwoven curtains up to the window, they looked pretty darn good.

I’m planning to make some terrariums to sit on the top shelf so that there’s a little bit of life in the bathroom.  I really like the idea of moss and stones as accents in the bathroom. However, I’ve also got an idea for a bunch of strange spiked ceramic objects.  Maybe I’ll do both.

The corner opposite the tub will (I think) have an arrangement of hanging blown glass candleholders and vases.

Everything has to be out of reach of the kitties, though.   I’m not sure whether installing dangling glass balls is a good idea in the bathroom.  We’ll see.   If you see a post entitled “Broken Glass, Bleeding Feet, and A Visit to the Vet,” you’ll know what happened.

So.  I’ve been back from Penland for nearly a month.  It was an amazing journey.  Ever since I returned home, I’ve been trying to get used to the fact that I now have to cook, clean, and earn a living.   

It’s been difficult for me to realize that my normal life doesn’t include hours upon hours of uninterrupted creativity or daily restorative yoga.  I’ve been resistant to the brutal fact that it’s nearly impossible for me to return home from work and make myself sit at the jewelry bench (or pick up the embroidery, for that matter). 

So here I am.  Back to the normal routine.  I’ve sorted through the pictures for a couple that are representative of my experience.  I haven’t yet taken pictures of the pieces I made, but I’ll get to that soon.

The journey started with a stay at the Wildwood Inn Tropical Dome and Theme Suites.  We stayed in the Arizona Cave room.  It was quite authentic.  (I know this because I’ve been to Sedona.)

Note the flamingo’s neck. I don’t think they survive this injury in the wild.

After our stay at the Wildwood Inn, we traveled to the Buffalo Trace Distillery, where I purchased a lovely 20 year bourbon, Pappy Van Winkle.

We arrived in Asheville that evening and drove to the city center for dinner and the nightlife.  This here’s the nightlife.

The following morning, we took a little hike at Tom’s Creek Falls.  It’s a beautiful, beautiful place and well worth the short time it takes to reach the falls.

We arrived at Penland in the afternoon.  It was a happy day.

The view from the dining hall.

 This is the class necklace.  Every student contributed an enameled charm and the necklace was donated to the Penland student auction.   Mine is the “rock” third from the top on the left.

I’ve been busy preparing for the trip to Penland.   Electroforming, etching, reading books, gathering inspiration, and sketching.   Oh, and stitching.

I’ve been experimenting with ways to combine my love of fiber with my fascination with metals.  This is an example of one of my pre-Penland experiments. 

I’ve combined the hand-dyed shibori felt with hand embroidery and a torch-fired enamel shape.  

A view from the side:

 (The resemblance to cake is accidental.  As a matter of fact, I rarely think about cake.  Rarely.  Especially not the homemade lemon cake that Lee brought to the 4th of July gathering this past weekend.  Nope.  Nosiree.  Don’t think about cake at all.)

A view from the back:

I’m not crazy about the color selection, but this is just a sample so I’m trying not to care.    I can’t wait to actually learn how to enamel and to be able to predict the colors of the fused enamel.  I’m planning to take a little pile of felt with me to use as inspiration. 

The piece on the left is a combination of  shibori felt and embroidery without metal. 

I’m planning another way to combine the embroidery with metal.   We’ll see what happens.  Sometimes my ideas outpace my skill level.   I’ve got so many ideas that I can hardly keep them straight.  

I can’t wait until I’m at Penland.  Not only am I going to be at one of my favorite places, I’m not going to have to look at this shell of a bathroom any more. 

 I’m hoping the project will be finished by the time I get home.

One of my first entries here on this blog is about my journey to Penland to take a weaving class with Liz Williamson.   This was my first visit to Penland and I fell in love with the place.

Keith and I went to Penland together in 2003, while we were in the process of selling our first house.  We sold the house “by owner” and the purchaser had a dishonest realtor.  Needless to say, this created a lot of stress for the two of us and did not allow us to fully enjoy ourselves.   That’s all I’m going to say about that. 

This trip will be very different.     I’m traveling with my mother this time and I’m not in the middle of selling or purchasing real estate.  

This time I’m taking an enameling class rather than a weaving class.  I am very, very excited.   I’ve been trying to learn how to bezel set things in anticipation of the class. 

Here’s an example of an enameled piece that I’ve set with fine silver bezel wire.

I think I understand the process, but I still need a lot of practice.  It took me three tries to solder the bezel wire.  I was a bit frustrated.

I’ve been putting a lot of pressure on myself to prepare for the class.  I broke out the rectifier last weekend to conduct some electroforming experiments.  I’m pretty pleased with the results, but haven’t had time to take pictures yet. 

I’m also experimenting with ways to combine enameling with fiber techniques and sketching, sketching, sketching.    There are so many ideas floating around in my head.  I’m hoping that my time at Penland will give me an opportunity to bring some of them to life.