Patterns: Two Ways

South Carolina storms are intense with patterns. They come in quickly, starting with a canopy of clouds, then a light patter, a flash of lightning.  I count the seconds like a child. How far away will it strike? Then the bolt of thunder.

Six, seven miles. I’m not that accurate when my heavy head is pressing hard into my memory pillow.  It’s the middle of the night.  My mind wanders several miles to say the least. And I start talking to myself about patterns.

In my “awakeness,” I had admitted to someone in Week 16 that I don’t like patterns, following patterns, that is. I don’t like the constraints forced upon me by a list of directions to make something that looks like the original.

With two baby girl quilts in my gifting queue, I must consider a design. There is room for improvisation with this pattern.

Six or seven times I’ve constructed Marston and Moran’s Garden Party Ladies for little girls.

But the longer I’m at this craft, the more I prefer to discover the end at the end, playing with the parts, the pieces of cloth, untangling the surprise of their fit.

Letting it evolve…

It is not the simplest way to the finish, but the journey is more interesting, for sure.

So I took another look at my sketchbooks.

What I discovered in revisiting my designs is that blanket assertions are foolish and potentially dangerous.

I do like patterns. the kind that recur organically, intuitively, almost genetically.
So here is a short list:

The semantics of words, for one thing
and puzzling over a design
the unbound dress,
the silly little bird,
the feather and the house.

I constantly return to these icons ( and a couple more) on the circuitous thread that is my creative search, that is, in itself a pattern: the recurrence of an image, a theme, an idea.

Where do you get ideas? What are your patterns?

Week 15: From Farm to Table

 

Said dumpster from my favorite sawmill of Week 14’s post.  I love the wabi sabi of its rusty (red) sides and the mystery of what’s inside.  The search for a farm table has continued right back to the sawmill, where we found the perfect mantle board a while back.

Earlier this week, my table sat at the top of this particular stack. How did we decide?  On any given day, wood for much larger jobs than ours is laid out for review.  We had come across some antique heart pine a couple of months back, when we had popped in.  The project seemed dreamy but daunting at the time.  After exhausting our search for the serendipitous thrift shop score,  we returned to this recycled lumber trove to reconsider.

About a dozen split, knotty, nail-holed beautiful boards were waiting for us.   After doing the math, we needed three full boards from which came the middle and ends of our table.

Daniel cleverly cut around precarious grain and knots to give us the necessary length and width for the table. (the hardest part of the job)  The spray of sawdust and scent of pine sap escaping from the cuts brought tears of emotion.  The wood is alive again.

And it became this…

so far…

CyberPlay: The Search for Red…

 

Mushroom: Bluffton, SC

Coastal Discovery Museum:  HHI, SC

Street stencil: tel aviv, israel

Flea Market: Savannah, GA

Dog Park: Bluffton, SC

Thanks Jennifer Coyne Qudeen and Julie B. Booth!

 

Week 14: Rain

This morning I went to my favorite reclaimed wood place (Timberstone) to discuss buying some heart pine planks for a table we’re making for our tiny dining room.  The young man who keeps the place running while his boss scouts for wood to buy, seems to have the gentlest of hearts.  Daniel encourages our ideas for projects, pulls wood down from big stacks for us to audition, waits patiently while we decide on grain,  and generally responds with a positivity and grace that inspires my whole day.  We made an appointment to come back on Saturday.  They are a bit behind in their orders, he told us, because vandals stripped their electrical conduits of all its copper and shut them down a couple of weeks ago.  Before we left, he generously jumped into a dumpster to toss us otherwise useless wood pieces for the raised beds in our garden.

I took some of the beams to our garden today, anxious to see how they would lay out.  Some, I’m saving for the garden gate I plan to make for the entry.  The storms of the last few days and nights have flooded our space.  The edging I had carved was six inches deep with rain water and and the remaining soil is as greedy as quicksand.  It actually made it a bit easier to etch the  ground for placing the wood.  I used the longer pieces I was gifted and backfilled with sandy, very degraded mulch, some stones that had been left near the mulch pile and the slushy soil clods I had started to till before the rain.

 

It drizzled a bit, as I worked, but it feels incredibly good for my back to ache a little as I collaborate with mother nature.  There were a couple of other farmers working among the gardens today, but I feel cozy in the damp solitude.

An hour, three wheelbarrows of mulch and lots of slushy digging flew by.

 

Very wet and abundant leaves were collected for bundling.  Some might say “too dead,” but they still have life in them.

 

And before I left, I planted the gate post.

Fallow with Possibility: New Roots

While the new year beckons  “starts,”  I’ve  had a good week 12 sorting some projects that are waiting patiently to be finished.  Now that the move is a short distance behind us, even though there are a couple of “house” projects remaining, I am setting my sights on my real work. “Real,” of course, is relative:  that of continuing my art work, (themed appropriately)

making new connections, taking stock and restocking and grounding myself in a concrete way, to the land of the Low Country by signing on to a garden plot as part of the Okatie Farmers.

We adopted this bereft patch of ground with great excitement and anticipation on Sunday, like parents adopting a puppy.  We will train it as best we can, its attributes still a bit in question.  It has a nearby hose bib and a dozen stakes that we can recycle as fenceposts when we build up the perimeter of the  garden with more lumber.  It has sun from all sides,  centered on the power-line alley.   We will put it to work to occupy us and feed us,  as our neighboring farmers are successfully working this land.

 

The other gardens show the promise for this orphan.  Organic cabbage, rhubarb and pumpkin waiting for last pick before we begin the new season.  Peas, beets, the more sensitive greens being discussed or just peeking above the ground.

January, perfect squash!

Flourish of nature’s compliments

This enormous system of small personal gardens share space and sunshine beneath the power lines that stretch for miles in Bluffton.  I had spied one of the smaller garden plots while driving though on a random day of house hunting.  But it was only when I entered the spectacular rabbit hole beyond my new front door, dog walking and exploring, ( Thank you, Nellie) that I discovered it was literally in my backyard.

In South Carolina “winter,” vegetables still grow.  There are  two planting seasons,  I’ve learned, that encompass most of a calendar year.  The Farmer “Establishment” offers serious advise and farming expertise.  I’ve had my crop of tomatoes, here a year and there a year,  in past houses, but I expect to learn amazing things about how to get organic food for the table in abundance.

I am also excited to plant and hopefully harvest some Indigofera for dyeing cloth, as well. According to the club president, she doesn’t know of any other Indigo patches here, but South Carolina is perfect in climate to make it happen.  Sea Island Indigo is the local template. Like my dyeing, farming is an experiment with surprises worth trying.  Here’s to a joyful, colorful and edible New Year!