Dreaming in the Garden

When my daughter was around 8 or 9 one of our favorite books to read was the Lost Flower Children by Janet Taylor Lisle. It is a wonderful story about how we deal with the pain of loss and the redemptive power of the garden. When I look at my mid summer garden I dream of fairy children playing under the canopy of leaves,

coloring the blossoms

swinging from the tendrils and whispering in the ears of each plant words of encouragement.

How does the earth know what to do with the seed?

How does the flower know when to release itself so that the fruit may spring forth?

How does such wonder come about? Only the fairy children know for sure.

Rebecca Ringquist Sampler

One of my favorite bloggers is Pam Garrison. She does a lot of creative stitching using old fabrics. On a recent post she talked about a sampler that she got through a friend. It really caught my eye as I love embroidery. As a young child, embroidery was my first creative outlet. Both my mother and grandmother embroidered ( see my previous post) so I consider it part of my heritage. Anyway I was dying to get a hold of one of the samplers which was created by Rebecca Ringquist, an artist in Chicago. Lo and behold on Pam's next post, she reported that Rebecca had started an etsy shop and was selling her samplers. She also has a flickr group for people to post their rendition of the sampler. So here is what I have done so far. I'm using bits and pieces of threads left over from previous projects so I not really going with any particular color scheme. I think it will add to the sampler feel. And here is the whole sampler. Isn't it lovely?

I'll be posting my progress on the flickr group. Maybe you would like to join too. Here is all the info: www.rebeccaringquist.com (website) http://www.drop-cloth.blogspot.com (blog with a link to her etsy shop) http://www.flickr.com/group/sampler/ . And for some fun and beautiful reading http://pamgarrison.typepad.com/pamgarrison/

Sunprint retreat

My husband and I took a long holiday weekend and went up to our mountain cabin. We hiked, biked, sat by the creek, read, ate, painted, fished and made sunprints. I should say I made the sunprints while he fished. I love doing this. I think I enjoy leaves more than the flowers in my garden. There just seems to be so many different kinds and shapes. I never get enough of their beauty.
So our cabin has a huge picture window that faces the afternoon sun. In the afternoon when the sun was shining through I put a big piece of plastic down on the floor, laid out some squares of fabric and painted away using Setacolor paints. I had pressed all the leaves the day before so they would be nice and flat and make good contact with the fabric. And the best part of doing it through the window was that I didn't need to worry about the wind kicking up and blowing the leaves or fabric away.
Enjoy looking at these beautiful gifts of nature.