September

It doesn’t seem like we really had summer this year. It was 47 degrees this morning! But it’s September, and I welcome the new month.

I am really enjoying the circle garden. The native plants are all doing well. The spotted beebalm is especially spectacular. Such a carnival of colors! The yellow flowers with brown spots are appearing, sheltered beneath an awning of pink bracts.

Here it is in the circle garden. The blue vervain is behind it and the mountain mint is to the left. It’s started to get white flowers. The smaller plants are mostly milkweed, which didn’t grow as fast as I thought it would.

In the making arena, I mostly finished the golden houses. I might add a few more stitches. They are listed on a webpage here: Golden Houses Embroideries. I added titles from The Poetics of Space, by Gaston Bachelard. It was a research project trying to find and match titles. I thought about framing the pieces around stretcher boards, and I spoke with a framer. She gave me a piece of advice in the form of a question – “Do you really want to get into framing?” One of my friends wants a house as is, to use as a patch to attach to a jacket. I think I will frame a couple and leave the rest as patches. I really want to get into making small-ish quilts to hang on the wall, so I will experiment with framing.

But right now I’m working on quilt mending. A very different project, since I’m following the pattern of another maker, and trying to make my stitches like my grandmother’s.

And still cleaning. But the art room is much more accessible now. A learning experience. There are a lot of decisions still ahead. Time eventually makes the decisions for me. There’s a lot of waiting. Tolerating it.