We are nature

That's how I feel. Sometimes we forget that we're as much a part of nature as are the wild animals and the mountains.

Every evening I wait for the mountains behind my house to turn pink as the sun slips down to a certain point. The glow only lasts a minute, then I turn around and watch the western sky turn into a brilliant sunset.

During the day, the Sonoran Desert is green under a brilliant blue sky, and it makes me so happy to be out in it. These photos are from this morning's walk at Catalina State Park

In a few days I'll be visiting this little wild child of nature, my curly-haired Juniper whose hair cannot be tamed. When her mom asked what she was doing, she said, "Tidying up." Good girl!

 

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Blue: Frida and a Crosstrek

There's a new exhibit at the Tucson Botanical Gardens called Frida's Garden, honoring the late, great Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and her cobalt blue house in Mexico City, La Casa Azul.

 

The garden is created within the famous "Frida Blue" walls and features a scaled-down version of the Aztec-inspired pyramid. Plantings in the new garden will honor the original, but with a Southwestern twist.

I visited the gardens with my friend Nancy, and of course I wore a blue top!

We ran into this person, who's obviously been hanging around the garden a long time!

I was also due for a new car, and I held out for a Subaru Crosstrek in that wonderful blue that looks like a Tucson sky and makes me so happy. I'll give my 15-year-old bronze Toyota Venza to my daughter. It should get at least another 100,000 miles, taking it up to when Juniper is a teen-ager!

That sky blue also cropped up in my current work.

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Luscious colors

I decided that instead of cutting up and reorganizing my painted piece, I would cover it with swaths of painted sheer silk organza to give it a dreamy, filmy, rich look. I just love layering sheers that I've painted over cotton that I've also painted -- it completely transforms it into deeper, shifting, rich, mysterious colors. 

I pinned through the silk, the cotton background and batting and then started hand stitching along the organza edges.

I have a luscious pile of silk and other sheers that I've collected over decades, but I still needed more blue and green so I painted another piece and put it outside where it dried in minutes in our hot desert sun. (It's still in the 80s here!)

I debated how to attach everything. Normally I machine quilt, but that would make too harsh of a line on what I want to be a delicate airy piece. I finally decided to use just two strands of embroidery floss and do a loose herringbone stitch along the edges of the silk.

It's not quick, but I love the rhythm of the slow hand stitching. I do it standing, with the work spread on my ironing table and the Grateful Dead providing the beat. On one hand I find the work very relaxing, but on the other the beautiful colors are so uplifting!

We also have some beautiful colors going on outside. Here are just a few photos from a one-block stretch near my neighborhood.

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New desert pieces

I'm working on more pieces for my Louisville show, "Homegrown Stories," which will have three artists sharing the entire PYRO Gallery. My take on the theme is "At Home In the Desert." 

The idea for this piece (above) was to layer sheers over the big piece of fabric that I painted. It was supposed to give the effect of the desert sky above mountains and green desert, but I don't think it works.

So I think I might cut it up and shift it around to be totally abstract, then layer it with sheers.

I'm nervous about just cutting straight into the fabric, so I took a picture of it and printed out two copies to cut up and play with. I think I'll go with this one. I cut it in the picture above and then shifted the blocks in the picture below. I haven't gotten up the courage to cut into the cloth yet!

Or should I stick with the whole cloth?

But I did finish this piece, "Sonoran Desert." My sister, who belongs to PYRO and is organizing the show, wants the three of us to each create an 18x24-inch piece in blues and greens to hang together as unmounted work. She's a painter, so hers is on a piece of canvas with raw edges. My quilt also has raw edges.

It started as a vertical, but when I realized that hers was a horizontal I changed mine to match. Here's my "palette," a jumble of blue and green fabric on my sewing room floor.

Ta da! Now it's a horizontal. Then I machine quilted it (see the first photo).

I was struck by how my succulent on the back patio echos the greens in my quilt.

Finally, this is my quick and cheap Halloween costume. I'm a Spice Rack!!! (I got the idea from Instagram.) And my shirt is the same blue as the desert sky. Having matching blue tape was serendipitous and totally unplanned.

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Sorting through memories

My sisters, brother and I converged from around the country at my parents' house in California over the weekend to sort through things we want to keep before we put the house up for sale. It was a big trip down memory lane.

We found this photo of us as kids gathered around our dining room table in South Park Township outside of Pittsburgh. And here we are today (plus Terry's husband), gathered around a table at Eat At Joe's in Redondo Beach.

And here we are in my parents' kitchen sorting through dishes, and on the back patio.

This is my great aunt and great uncle's family cottage in northern Pennsylvania where we spent wonderful summer vacations running around the farm, fishing in the creek, shucking corn grown by Uncle John, running down to the outhouse and hauling water from the spring. The cottage had no electricity or running water, but as kids we didn't care! My aunt and uncle lived in their more modern home in Bradford, PA, but the farm stole my heart.

My sisters and I took a few photos of us. Do you see any resemblance to the photo of my mom in her much younger days? There was no date, but I'm guessing she was in her 30s or 40s and we're all in our 60s. It was the first time I had seen that photo of her.

Besides oodles of photos, we found this poem written by my paternal grandfather, who loved writing and painting. I'm wondering if he painted the background picture.

It was a quick trip, so one morning stroll by the water in Redondo Beach was as close as I got to doing any SoCal.

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