harvest season

September 20, 2018 in family, garden, hank, quilts, recipe

i don’t know what factors came together to produce such an enormous bounty of fruit on my farm (i.e. my backyard) but the output has been tremendous. i decided to have a couple of neighborhood harvest parties so that i could get some help picking all the apples and then the plums that ripened a few weeks later. i thought i could pull off a tom sawyer “painting the fence” caper and make my friends think it would be FUN to harvest with me. i would provide snacks and drinks and my neighbors could do the labor. i was imagining something like the barn raising parties they used to have on little house on the prairie. pa would be out there entertaining everyone on his fiddle (i could play macklemore on my sonos), ma would would lay out cornbread, fresh, grilled deer meat and homemade pies (i made a run to trader joes), the children would be running around (i have a couple of those) and the grown ups would build a barn (the neighbors would pick my apple tree and plum bush clean) so i wouldn’t have to gather up any more rotten fruit or worry about the bears coming into my yard and leaving giant poops or mauling us.

what if... quilts by ann rhode

August 28, 2018 in family, quilts, photography, art

my mother, ann rhode, is the rare artist who primarily approaches her creativity with logic, rather than emotion. she is a problem solver who revels in puzzles and mazes and geometric explorations. she frequently alters traditional or established quilt blocks to construct new patterns and pathways for the eye to follow. she creates movement and depth in her quilts by varying color value or combining unexpected prints and hues. her pieces are both mathematical challenges and painterly in her color use.

my mother's quilts

November 29, 2017 in family, residential interior, quilts

around the time that my younger brother started kindergarten, my mother decided she needed a creative outlet of her own, beyond meatloaf and bedtime stories. i remember coming home to find the downstairs bathtub filled with long, skinny sticks soaking in water to soften them so my mother could make baskets. there was also the collage period when the dining room table was covered in colored bits of paper from my mother’s art class. eventually, she volunteered to help make a raffle quilt to raise money for our elementary school. and that, i think, sealed the deal.