beach jewels...

there isn't a windowsill or flat surface in my house that hasn't collected a few pieces of sea glass. who can walk on the beach and not pick these beauties up? not me. if our house falls off its' foundation, i know it will be from the tons of jewels i have been collecting. i finally decided it was time to share them, and am working on perfecting my drilling and wirework. i do love the feel of my dremel tool in my hand. we'll see where this takes me...

yessss!

hot dog, look up there everyone! at my new header! it has taken me so many frustrated hours trying to figure out how to get a nice banner up there, using a font i liked...i have shed tears over this, and felt all the worse knowing it could be done, because everyone else is able to....if i had champagne handy, this would be a mimosa moment. a very heartfelt thanks to karen, the graphics fairy, who shares such beautiful images with everyone.

is there anything more wonderful than a package in the mail?

i've spent all morning with my pile of mail. i'm probably the only person ever who even loves her junk mail. i read it all. but i always save the best for last, and boy howdy, did i get some great stuff. earlier this summer i joined the Good Ol' Summertime Mini Quilt Swap. i finished mine up and sent it off before i left in august. how fun to get home and open up this....

what an awesome piece! i am so lucky to have been the talented doris' swap partner! my quilt was made by doris from threads of conversation and i love it. she does beautiful work, the colours and curved piecing are fabulous. thanks so much doris!

i saved my last package for last because i knew what would be in it, and i love prolonging the excitement. halloween is my very favorite holiday, so when sarah (gypsy mermaid) announced a vintage halloween tag swap i didn't think twice. she is a great swap coordinator, and did something really fun with this one - each of us made 13 tags and mailed them to her, then she collected them all, and assembled them into books for each of us. after opening up my box and looking at each incredible tag, i am so amazed at how much art can be fit on such a small surface. each tag was so different, and so wonderful. my photo doesn't do justice to them at all, and i can't wait to visit everyone's blogs to see more of their work. look at these great treasures!!

i love them all. i can't wait to haul out all my halloween stuff now. thanks sarah, for putting these together for us!

hello, i'm finally back home!

hooray!

after almost 2 months, i'm home with the family. when i left, i had no idea it would be for so long, but what an adventure.


it's a bit hard getting back into the swing of things, it's taken me a couple of days to even be able to turn on the computer. i feel like i've been fast-forwarded back into civilization, and i'm most definately on overload. the grocery store almost did me in...

the first week at ugak i spent with my family at our cabin, in beautiful sunny weather, it was wonderful.

then for the next few weeks i moved over to our neighbor's working lodge, Alpenview, where i cooked for clients and staff. check out their website, it is pretty incredible, especially if any of you fish or have fishing husbands. what a fantastic time.

owners/guides dave jones and shawn finn have been fishing guides on kodiak for many years, and they sure know what they are doing. i had the pleasure of meeting and cooking for clients from all over the states and many countries.
alpenview has an incredible top-notch commercial kitchen for being out in a remote area, what a treat for me to create meals in. combined with the freshest fish and seafood ever, i was in heaven. i never thought i could be so happy getting up at 5:30 every morning, but it was so much fun watching folks from ohio, arizona, colorado, germany or spain get up at the crack of dawn and be thrilled about pulling on rain gear to go fishing....even when it was raining sideways from the wind. amazing, these fishing people.

before i left i packed up my baby sewing machine and some other supplies, thinking between meals i would have some great time to do my art, but that never happened...i did nothing but create food from sun up to sundown, and often much later. however, i have a head full of inspiration for this winter.
i did find a creative outlet while making meals - i began a "food as art" campaign. i have a long way to go before i reach julia child status, but the clients seemed to enjoy everything. we pulled the crab pots every week for a huge fresh crab dinner. i also made sushi every week, and made bread every day. so much different from cooking for my family - no blue box mac & cheese! and the wonderful clients were so gracious. (of course, it helps when the folks eating your food have been standing on their feet in water and rain all day catching fish, they are usually cold, tired and starving.) having an unlimited supply of fresh halibut, salmon, rockfish and crab to work with was wonderful.

at any rate, the days at the lodge were great. it was hard every saturday, the client switch out day, to say goodbye to our "family" of the week, but also fun to meet our new guests. now there are so many places i want to visit...after hearing folks talk about their homes, i'm pretty sure i need to see north carolina, spain, portugal, germany, and ohio...

as well as running guided fishing stays at alpenview lodge (where there is the wonderful kitchen, hot running water, showers, windows and floors...) dave and shawn also operate an outcamp on the ayakulik river, located on the southern end of the island, miles and miles away from...anything. the outcamp is definately camping, with a main tent for the kitchen/eating area, a tent for the banya (an native kodiak island steam bath, like a suana) and 5 sleeping tents. and the outhouse. all this is enclosed in a solar powered electric fence because the outcamp is located in the middle of kodiak grizzly bear home.

i've enjoyed photos of the outcamp, but never ever had any longings to visit it. the clients who stay at the outcamp are hard core fly fishermen, usually there for king salmon, silver salmon, and what i believe is the holy grail of fly fishing - steelhead.

during the course of my stay at alpenview, i was gently convinced i wanted to experience cooking at the outcamp. and so, for the last 2 weeks, that is where i have been. i never took my longjohns off once the entire time, except for 2 quick banyas. i slept in my longjohns, wool socks and a hat and mittens.

my best friends were sweetpea, the bear, a little ermine, and several fox. and the heater in the kitchen tent.

i thought that ugak bay was peaceful, but the calm peace at the ayakulik was amazing. the outcamp is in a huge valley, the mountains are quite a ways off, so the sky is huge, bigger than i've ever seen. at night it is so pitch black the stars are overwhelming, it is like being in a 3D movie. there are always shooting stars flying by and once we even saw jupiter. the quiet was incredible. so quiet i could hear the bears swimming down the river. i loved it. then it froze. one morning we woke up to 18 degree weather. a very cold trip to the outhouse. a lot of water hauling. the clients were all so great, so happy to be there. it was fun seeing it all through their eyes, especially when they were from new york city & such. one mom bear we call susie mocha, and her three 3 yr old cubs we call the chocolate drops, were frequent visitors and fun to watch as she gave them lessons on fishing in the home pool by the kitchen tent. the cubs loved to visit in the mornings and caused many clients to cut their outhouse visit short...in all, it was a great experience. i'm glad i went. i made some great friends, learned how to fly fish, sort of, and created meals on a 3 burner camp stove instead of a viking range...i learned i'm not too old to haul water from a stream outside of the bear fence. also learned how incredible total silence can be for your soul. and i hummed the national geographic explorer song a lot. especially when trying to cook on the smoker outside in pelting cold rain with bears watching me.

anyhow, it's good to be home with the boys. and the toilet that flushes. and my flannel pj's. i won't be wearing rubber boots again for a while.

i remembered how to drive my car, and i survived my first trip to the grocery store in 5 weeks without too much culture shock. it is a bit hard to get used to the noise and bustle of life...and i admit, i miss conversing with sweetpea in the mornings, and dodging fox poop on the boardwalks.

i wish i could post all the photos i took while down there, but i have to say getting photos on this blogger thing sends me nuts...one minute they are there, then they are gone, or even more fun, jump to somewhere else in the post... but i did want to share my bear friends with you all, and some of the fellows i had the pleasure of meeting and watch fish. i am throwing in one of myself, which i usually don't like to do, but i am quite proud of my beautiful dolly varden i caught after shawn patiently taught me how to cast out the line and all the other motions of fly fishing. my fish was happy to be put back in the river and swim away from my bumbling efforts.

i have a lot of catching up to do here in blogland i can tell, and i can't wait. i have a huge pile of mail to go through also, i'm waiting for everyone in the house to go away so i can have a good cup of coffee and open up all the packets... fall has definately arrived here, even though it's not as cold yet as at the outcamp, the colours are changing. i will be glad to get back at the sewing machine and get busy with all the projects i've been carrying around in my head.

i would also like to say thank you to all of you who have visited & left me comments! it's so exciting to hear from all of you, everywhere! even if i never get off this little island, it's so awesome to be able to converse with folks out in "the real world" - so thank you for taking the time to share a few words with me!

off to the lodge...

our front yard

my son devon is impervious to the cold when it comes to fun

gill netting for reds (salmon)

it's time for us to be heading down to our other home, and my favorite, our lodge out at ugak bay. we leave on sunday (or tomorrow, whenever the captain says) and i will be gone until the beginning of october. we have no phone (the boys won't be able to text, i hope they can keep their thumb muscles in shape) or internet, so this will be my last post for a bit. we do have a generator, so this time i get to bring my awesome hello hitty janome with me & hopefully get some quilts whipped out.

the family vehicle

it's hard to explain how wonderful it is down there, like another planet. so peaceful and quiet, with just an occassional float plane flying by. time slows down, and at night there are so many stars - without electric lights it is amazing what you can see in the sky.

momma brown bear & fox family

we have game cams set out in a couple spots behind the cabin, and it will be fun to see what has been walking by. last year we got to watch the day by day travels of a momma deer & a momma brown bear before & after babies.

duffy loves a skiff ridethese are my seal friends who eat the urchins for me...

i look forward to catching up with everyone when i gat back. and boy am i glad i managed to get my spooky halloween tag swap tags done!!! phew!

my small white dog

this is my pal duffy. he had a very busy day today. this morning before i woke up he slipped his invisible fence collar and had a lovely trek to the other side of the bay, where he found some nice, fresh bear poop to roll in. he came home & let me know the coffee was done by jumping in bed with me, sharing the bear poop with me & my sheets. there is probably nothing in the world that smells not nice like bear poop. i changed the sheets and gave duff a bath, went to get my coffee & knocked over a tote of supplies i had out for a project i'm working on...glitter went flying. i decided to have my coffee first. when i went to get the broom to take care of the glitter, i find duffy, in the above photo, sitting on cloud 9 with his toy squid, ready to play. his cloud 9 was a bag of stuffing for the previously mentioned project...i had set it out in the entry way (on the floor, my mistake) where i was going to do the filling later today...at least duffy knows when he's pushed his last cute button with me, and apologizes...

majestic sea swap...

my partner in Gypsie Mermaid's Majestic Sea Swap was rebecca from Bec's Shabby Dreams in australia. she has created a beautiful, light, french-y shabby chic home, and i tried to create something to compliment it. she also has three sweet children, so i started by printing three scallop shells on a piece of fabric right out of the dye bath, and went from there. bek mentioned liking aqua also, which isn't a colour i use a lot, but lucky for me i remembered one of my daughter's tutus from a few years back was that colour, so i snipped away at one of the seams i had taken in. she'll never miss it. i stitched on some pearls, a couple of mother-of-pearl buttons, and some seaglass from my fave beach out back. it was fun doing something so frilly for a change.
on a very not-related note, has anyone else lost their followers? i've lost mine, and can't figure out how to find them...:(

ABAA's bird challenge~

rosie & linda of Rosie & Linda's Awfully Big Art Adventure put out a challenge for bird-themed art. i was mulling what to do when i heard chainsaws start up at the neighbor's. they are fairly new to the neighborhood, having moved in last year. within an hour and a half they had cut every single beautiful ancient moss covered old growth sitka spruce tree down (almost 2/3 of an acre). all the huge trees you can see behind our banya in my previous posts are now laying dead on the ground. it's just about the saddest thing ever, and changes not only their home, but the look and feel of ours as well. no fuitcake for them this xmas. even sadder, as the days have passed i keep finding tiny newly hatched baby birds on the ground...and am enduring the wrath of many families of homeless squirrels in the aftermath of what my kids are calling the sitka spruce chainsaw massacre. so, i made my bird themed art with a heavy heart. i created a little 2" copper wire cage, enclosed an egg in a soft nest, and locked it up safe & sound with a tiny key, until it hatching time.

for 48 very short hours...

... my daughter thea rose came home. she turned 21 on the 9th, and was able to get a friday off of work to fly home for cake, her first glass of wine with me, and her new license. it was a painfully short amount of time, but the sun was shining, the sky was blue and we crammed as much home as we could in. we walked on the beaches, ate king crab, hiked up to see the new wind generators on pillar mountain, and dad took us on a skiff ride over to long island for a few hours, where we found a hidden cove of sand dollars. she was scheduled to leave sunday morning, but true to our island we got fogged in and the plane couldn't make it in until dinner time, which was fine with me. i can't believe i won't get to hug her again until xmas...but it was wonderful to have her while she was here.

summer mini quilt swap

i just finished this little starry~eyed halibut quilt for the Good Ol' Summertime Mini Quilt Swap i'm in. it's a pity the real fish isn't this cute, but they do taste quite good and i guess that's what really counts. we've caught some big ones this summer, always weird to haul up a big old flat ugly fish longer than yourself out of the water. anyhow, i hand appliqued him and machine quilted it, and will be sending it off in a day or so. hope my partner likes it.

why i miss my little girl so much...

this morning i got an email from my daughter. this was all it said ~

"I believe that always, or almost always, in all childhoods and in all the lives that follow them, the mother represents madness, our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met."
-Marguerite Duras, French Writer

i am very blessed to have a child who knows this is the best compliment i could ever hope to get.

the latest project

i'm taking part in a round robin with 5 other local artists. we were all to draw a design on a fabric background measuring 144 total square inches, then divide it into six even portions. it then gets passed to the person under us on the list. we have 3 weeks to embellish one portion any way we like, then pass it on. we get to fill in the last portion of our own piece. we should be all done by xmas. this is more of a challenge than i thought it would be, but that's good. i know most of the gals, but not all, so sure hope everyone likes purple and green - ha. at any rate, i got pj's tree first, and needle felted & beaded her leaves. i'm looking forward to getting the next one now, and seeing what everyone else is doing. now on to finish my piece i'm working on for the majestic sea swap.

I almost forgot, look what came in the mail!

Getting mail is often the highlight of the week for me. Very often the weather is so bad here the mail planes don't come in, so sometimes there is nothing, other times it can be like xmas. sometimes the only thing i get is the Home Depot flyer, and there isn't even a Home Depot around for several hundreds of ocean miles - but i read the darn thing anyway. But yesterday i hit the jackpot when i got a box from julie at Cupcake DD. i won her cottage charm give away, and look at the fun stuff!! red rubber gloves!! an angry housewife pin cushion! yeehaw! and a 1950's ground beef cookbook with things like Heart Patties with Gravy (using ground cooked heart) and Frosted Lam Loaf. my husband is all over this, sticky noting the ones he thinks i should try. Anyhow, it made my day, thank you julie. check out her blog & etsy shop!

housework...

since my last post i have done nothing but...refinish our deck. blick, what a job. the only creative part was choosing the colour of the stain. (the choices...clear, weathered cedar, old barn red, or dark brown. geez. i went out on a limb & chose old barn red.) after 2 days of pressure washing in full rain gear, it was ready for the weather sealer. only, it started raining. two days later it stopped, i swept it all off again and got all jazzed up to start rolling the stuff on. with the slick roller thing. sadly, we waited too long to do this, and the boards were so split and dry that the slick roller thing was useless, and i did the entire deck on my hands and knees with a stinkin' paintbrush. i alternated between painting, chasing the little white dog off the wet parts, and kicking myself for arguing to extend the deck the full length of the house when we rebuilt it...what was i thinking. eight hours after my final brush stroke a cloud splitting downpour started...i had visions of sticky tacky weather sealer having to be rubbed off with solvent...but then the sun came out, it all dried up, and it's perfect. the boys and i hauled the table, chairs, grill & cooler all back up and had the beer iced and the prime rib on just in time for dad to get home from work on father's day and enjoy the sun on the old barn red deck. it was a real norman rockwell moment. and now i can get back to my fun stuff. with a dog who is now half old barn red.

ABAA's sea shell challenge

in an earlier post i mentioned Awefully Big Art Adventure's shell challenge... i've been working on my offering for that the past few days. i finished it yesterday, i didn't realize i would get so wrapped up in it, but i'm awfully fond of the thing. our ugak bay home is also home to a pod of harbor seals, the sweetest things. they thrive on sea urchins, and this year left me a bumper crop of empty urchin shells washed up on our beach. i love everything about sea urchins; the spines, the subtle colours, the patterns. so i combined one perfect urchin with a piece of my beloved weathered dock, which made it through this winter but my husband assures me is destined for the midsummer bonfire in a couple weeks... and i have a princess urchin sitting on the dock of the bay... it makes me smile. hope it makes you smile too. the best part is i got to create it all outside, in the sunshine!! in two days i broke a sweat, got a sunburn, wore shorts, and got a bee sting. these things don't often happen here on kodiak. happy summer! and please take a minute to go look at all the beautiful shell artwork at ABAA's blog!

summer solstice is coming...

this week i've spent working on pieces for the Summer Solstice Small Art Show hosted by liz at emerald isle framing. artwork needed to measure 6x6" square, but could have dimension. i was feeling non-dimensional this week.

this is my first piece. the center of the sun is made from a pile of the fuzz ball scraps i snip off my hand dyed fabrics before i dry them (i really am i mess, i can't throw anything away and have jars of these fuzz balls lining shelves in my workroom) i added some machine quilting and some beads. it was a little jump from my usual colors and i had fun with it.

this is my second piece. i started with the collage center and the midsummer mermaid. included the tide table for june 21, added a pearl and some beach glass, and last, a photo of the old ferry the kalakala, which used to run between kodiak and bremerton washington years ago. it was abandoned here in kodiak until a salvage company came and towed her back down to bremerton several years ago with plans of turning her into a restuarant. we haven't heard anything since, but i hope they did something with her, she was a beautiful art deco ship. anyhow, i sewed that down to a piece of marbled cotton, gave it some quilting and sent it on it's way.

and this is my very first ATC i've ever done. i've had a stash of angelina fibers forever and not used it for anything other than some fairy wings for a dance recital a few years ago, so thought i'd try it out. i sure love the sheen and sparkle of the stuff. i raided my son's fly tying bench for the fuzzy stuff on the edges. the color in the photo isn't really correct, in real life the purples and olives all blend nicely together instead of shouting at each other. i hope to catch on the the photo thing soon...