Posie Gets Cozy

Be Present Retreat: re(discover)

I am truly excited to have been asked to teach at a very special retreat this spring (March 10-14, 2010) on the breathtaking, lifechanging, magical Oregon coast. Registration is now open, and I hear these things fill up quickly, so please check it out!

Created by the wildly talented Liz Lamoreux, the Be Present Retreats "are an invitation to pause in your life and gather in an intimate, creative community to explore, create, discover, and soak up the world around you." At re(discover), the third retreat in the series, we will be "rediscovering" some "old school" arts in a modern way in workshops that explore through-the-viewfinder photography (where you use a digital camera to take photos through the viewfinder of an old camera [how cool is that]), book making (by hand!), and embroidery (with your own initials, of course).

I am silly excited to be teaching with Andrea Jenkins and Stephanie Lee. Andrea's photos are just crazy good — generous and interesting and emotional (hmmm, very much like my friend herself, in fact). Stephanie is one of those people that is just seriously creative. Inspiring. She makes jewelry, paints, sculpts, teaches, and writes. She and I have yet to meet, but even her correspondence is effusive and generous. It has been a long time since I took a class outside of a familiar medium, and I am so into doing that right now that I can't wait to learn some new stuff here.

The fact that the retreat is in Manzanita, one of the absolute best places ever, well . . .

That has absolutely no bearing on how excited I am about this.

No, none at all

Sequins, Sparkles, and Sweet Stitches

Pretty little bags of sugared candy beads and sequins pile up on my work table, and I am making progress, which feels so good in a week that has felt more like slogging through molasses than what commonly passes for "progress." These are for the Walk in the Woods ornament kits, which are coming together around here and making me happy. (A few people have asked when the kits are going to ship, and, as mentioned in the original blog post about these kits and on the order page, we are aiming to ship all kits around mid-October, so start watching for them after next week! Oh, and I forgot to say yes — the patterns will be available as downloadable PDFs in a few weeks, too.) I love the busywork of actually putting together kits so much. I love going through all of the packing slips and seeing so many names I recognize from orders past, comments, emails, real-life and pen-pal friendships. I love that a little piece of our life here is going out to your cozy homes all over the world. I think about it a lot, and it makes me so happy to imagine you receiving them, and opening them, and making them. There is just something cool about that, so thank you for being part of it.

This year, I am also very excited to announce that I will also be able to make these kits with you in actual real life on a couple of occasions! The first is a very special one-day event hosted by the lovely Emily Ruth and Friends called Come Play: Portland on Saturday, November 7. Emily has such a totally adorable way of saying everything, I am just going to let her tell you about all the details when you click on the Come Play: Portland link, but in her words

we hope you will join us for this day of
sweet stitches,
old & new friends,
yummy treats,
& creative fun...

I can't wait to go play! :-) I hope you can come!

Backroads Afternoon

We all went to the Oktoberfest in Mt. Angel on Friday afternoon.

I was looking for the lady who sold the German Christmas ornaments last year, but she wasn't there.

The lady who fills the jelly doughnuts was there, though. . . .

St. Mary Church, which stands on a little hill overlooking the town, is so pretty.

Shelly drove, so I got to stick my camera out of the car window and take pictures on the way home. She grew up in the country, so she is not afraid to drive onto private property to photograph someone's cool old 1880's barn.

Man, if only we had a nervy, country-raised full-time chaffeur this blog would be so much better!

There was a ten-mile back-up on the highway, so we left I-5 and cut across the ditch toward a little frontage road, which took us to the back roads. (Country girls aren't afraid to leave the highway and cut across ditches to get to the backroads, either, FYI [I was biting my fingernails the whole time].)

We listened to Wilco Summerteeth.

It seemed just right.

But then, it frequently does.

Especially on the backroads, in the late afternoon.

Especially if there are apples and Queen Anne's Lace.

Remind me to go back to Boone's Ferry Road just north of Woodburn if I ever need a rusted-out turquoise blue car to use in a photo of an embroidery project. (Why wouldn't I.)

Fine. We'll bring the zoom lens. And Shelly.

Our Last Day of Summer

Late yesterday afternoon, we headed out to the Gorge for one last time this summer.

The air was cool, the sky cloudy, the hills hazy blue.

Vista House on Crown Point is one of our favorite places.

"My telescope."

(Do marry a hottie, if you can swing it.)

I was actually about fifteen feet away when I took these, or he probably wouldn't have let me.

It's been a good summer.

I've loved taking pictures of it. Thanks for letting me share it all with y'all. xoxo

The Oregon State Fair

This week is also the Oregon State Fair in Salem. We went (yes, we go from one fun thing to another around here — that's how we roll, baby) last weekend, and it was so nice. The weather was absolutely perfect. We took the back roads to get there, like last year and the year before. The fields stretched out yellow across the roly-poly hills. Queen Anne's Lace and other late-summer wildflowers bloomed in the ditches along the old highway for mile after mile. The lavender clouds gathered and moved on.

I'm glad that the fairs happen at the end of the summer, during the crisp, yellow days. These days, the precious last ones, are the best part of the summer in so many ways. But I just don't know exactly what else it is about the fair that makes me so emotional. It's something.

I guess it's everything.

The fair always feels like an old dream, to me — a place I'd spent a thousand childhood afternoons imagining, a place I knew only from books, and pictures in books: strange but oddly familiar.

I was always sure that, if ever I got the chance, I would know exactly how to muck out a stall. Milk a cow. Collect a pale blue egg from under a ruffle-y feathered hen. 

I could shear a sheep and spin my own wool. I could braid a mane and tail. If someone would just let me, I could build my own bunny hutch, make clover salads and daisy chains.

 

Storybook stuff.

I am naive. I do know that farms are about hard work and food, both animal and vegetable, and that the Future Famers of America don't get to indulge in many fantasies about that, as we city girls do.

I know.

Kinda.

I still cried just a little bit in the horse barn on Saturday, while petting the soft, soft neck of one of my old friends.

It always sneaks up on me, somehow. That old longing.

About more than just a horse, no doubt.

You know how it is.

Short and Sweet

Thank you for all of the super sweet comments on Arden's quilt! It was so much fun to make that with and for her — the best kind of sewing in every way. I love that girl. She makes everything sparkle.

On Monday afternoon, Andy and I headed out to Silver Falls State Park, about an hour from Portland, to spend the night. We stayed in one of the little rustic cabins — ours had two little bunk rooms and electricity (I bring lamps and extension cords and we unplug them before bed), with a picnic table and fire-ring outside. Alas, no dogs allowed in the cabins, so Clover Meadow had to stay home (boo).

Though we don't camp very often these days (the last time was our Mosquito Anniversary in the yurt), we both come from serious camping backgrounds, believe it or not. I think we should make an effort to go more often. Andy makes it so dang easy. He is a natural. He takes care of all the cooking.

I sit around reading and taking pictures, waiting for dinner. It's fantastic.

He made rosemary-and-garlic-marinated chicken breasts and sauteed Portobello mushrooms, with S'mores for dessert.

Looking at this photo makes me wish we were still there.

A bitta butter.

It was all delicious. We brought one of the chicken breasts home. Maybe I'll have it for lunch today. I'll eat it outside, since everything tastes better outside (why is that?).

It's getting darker earlier now. This was the last night of August — always the last real night of summer, in my mind, anyway.

The double bed was cozy, but short. And skinny. Around 3 a.m. it rained, and you could hear the sounds of the raindrops on the roof and the leaves. It was lovely.

The next morning, we got up early to enjoy the quiet. There were birds I'd never heard before.

And percolator coffee, and pancakes with honey syrup.

After breakfast, we packed up camp and set out to explore.

This is the covered footbridge behind our cabin.

And the creek.

But the real beauty of Silver Falls State Park are the many waterfalls of Silver Creek. On the eight-mile Trail of Ten Falls you can see them all. This is the South Falls, and it is just gorgeous. I found it quite impossible to really capture how beautiful it is there, and what a sense of vertigo it gives you to be standing at the top.

Man.

This is at the top of the falls, looking away from it.

Toward the bridge. It's beautiful. Monet-esque, non?

It's almost hard to believe it's all real.

On the bridge, I took our picture.

Then we looked down the creek to the edge of the canyon, where the falls begins. It's a strange intersection — this meandering, peaceful little creek slowly gurgles toward the edge of this giant hole, where, just feet away, it will effortlessly become a massive column of water.

Golly.

Camping for twenty-four hours. That was a good day.

The Clackamas County Fair

Oh, how I dearly love the fair!

We love to visit with the animals.

We say hi to the snoozing pigs.

We feel nervously scrutinized by chickens.

We wish we could pet a pile of ducklings.

We contemplate the doves.

We are contemplated by one.

We wonder which egg is best.

We take portraits of bunnies. Here's one I call "Bunny #1."

"Bunny #2."

Aw! "Bunny #3"!

We eat marionberry shortcake (the marionberries and the shortcake are in there somewhere, I think).

We admire the winners.

We appreciate the skills.

We offer a strand of hay to the dairy cows.

We share frozen lemonade.

We feel our stomachs drop while watching.

We giggle (along with their dance teacher) at the dragony dancers.

We buy moccasins from the mountain man in the Pioneer Village.

We peer into his rustic cabin.

We see the ladies' sunlit, quilt-covered tent.

We watch how brooms are made.

We wonder how many calicos there are in the general store.

We think about the people in the Pioneer Village.

They're friendly enough, but it's clear we're just living in their world when we're here.

We do love visiting.

We are always so glad to be a small part of it all.

We are just overgrown 4-H kids at heart.

Who really want to be cowboys.

August Eve

We went to Pickathon, a roots music festival out at a farm not far from our house, on Friday afternoon.

As you may have heard me mention, it has been seeeeeriously hot in these here parts.

Luckily, we carry quilts with us wherever we go, so when the grass has turned into hollow brown straws, we have, at least, a small oasis of calico on which to lay back and nap while the music plays.

Sweet Laura Gibson was wearing the cutest dress. She reminds me of a poem: You have to be quiet, and listen, and then . . . there they are: the little sparkles everywhere. Lovely lady.

At Pickathon, there are bands playing continuously in several different locations at the same time. In the Galaxy Barn, it had to be 110 degrees. Hillstomp was letting loose and people were flinging themselves about.

It was music made for flinging yourself about in a 110-degree barn, though, so what could you do?

Andy was deep in the thick of things — the faster, the hotter, the louder the better for him, and he'd been waiting all day for the Hackensaw Boys to take the stage. When I couldn't stay inside anymore, I went outside and around the corner to the horse paddock, and the mister (an old hose with holes poked in it, strung up like a garland and spraying over the straw-covered allee).

This freckled mare was nipping. Eventually a barefoot lady in a paisley dress came and got on her and rode her away, using nothing but a blanket for a saddle, a halter and lead for a bridle, and a little tree branch for a crop.

The moon started to rise over Pendarvis Farm. I sat on a log and thought about stuff.

Like how pretty the world is, for one thing, and how it was almost August already, for another.

Summer Sunday

Sunday was a day of absolutely perfect weather. It was also our twelfth wedding anniversary. We celebrated by driving along the old Columbia River Highway through the gorge, one of our favorite things to do.

These are the views from Crown Point, looking up and down the river. It is so blue, and so green, and so blue and green you can hardly believe it. It almost feels like you're looking down on a little diorama, a model of the place.

These are different streetlights (not the same one, over and over) that dot the circumference of the viewpoint. They have always added something special to the scene, for me. They also look almost exactly like the streetlights I had on my street when I was growing up.

It's so pretty.

The road winds through the woods. Everything is green and dappled.

We drove to the end of the 22-mile old highway and looked at the campsites at Ainsworth State Park, then wound our way back and forth, stopping at waterfalls. This is Latourell Falls, a short walk from the highway.

We'd brought some sandwiches from town, so we stopped and sat on the wall, and ate them while looking at (and listening to) the waterfall. We talked about the waterfall, how it was falling twelve years ago while we were at St. Edmund's getting married; how it was falling almost a hundred years ago, when the highway was being built; how it was falling millions of years ago, when the gorge was being formed.

I can tell you that it's tall. I can tell you that it's deafeningly loud. I can tell you that it's primeval-seeming. But really, pictures can't capture it.

Though, I must say, this one comes close. These girls are walking just to the right of the falls. It's amazing that you can just walk right in there. Aren't they afraid that a brontosaurus is just about to come thundering out of the trees? Brave girls!!!

Oh, but the greens! The greens. They are why I moved to Oregon. I treasure and adore the little greens.

Down the way just a few hundred yards is Shepherd's Dell. Here you are close to the top of another waterfall. It crashes and churns down its rocky way into a series of whirling switchbacks.

These photos look better if you click on them and view the enlargements. There is so much detail that is lost, even then. By the way, if you are taking a photo of a waterfall and you want the water to look ghostly and silky, set your camera to Aperture priority, and just turn your f/stop up to f/8, or as high as it will go. This will give you a smaller aperture, and keep the shutter open for longer, allowing the water to appear sort of blurry and soft as it moves past your lens:

You probably knew that.

I love how these delicate little flowers live and thrive so near the gushing torrent. It's a metaphor for marriage, I think: You create, day by day, this humbly fragile but amazingly resilient thing, right alongside the gushing torrent of the world, with all its drama, noise, and spray.

I live for the quiet moments together, though. The ones just off to the side, in the dappled light, where soft currents swirl and ebb.

Waffle Window

On Sunday morning, we rode our bikes down to the waffle window for breakfast.

There's a reason they call this one Berry Bliss. Almost enough to make me stop wishing I was on vacation in Europe all the time.