Pisces Moon Studio

This is my studio, yesterday afternoon around 5:00 pm.

This drives me nuts. I cannot work in this kind of chaos. I can’t even stand to be in the same room with this kind of chaos.

I spent most of the afternoon and got about three-quarters of the “stuff” pulled out and sorted. My son and I went to the store and bought some wire shelves to go under the big double table in the center, and he put them together for me.

Then my shoulder went kaflooey. Picked up something wrong, I guess. (Debra, I am being very careful with it today, no worries!)

Today I’ve got the table cleaned off and the PFD fabric put away in bins on one of the shelves, sorted by type (cotton in big pieces, cotton in small pieces, silk here, old table linens to be dyed there, lace and odd bits and pieces in that bin).

Fabric waiting to be dyed, neatly stored on the new shelf.
Wonder-Under, Craft Fuse, Decor Bond in the tall box to the left of the bins.
The next thing to tackle is those bins you see under the table at the left, in the top photo. Those hold the African fabrics, some of the vintage stuff, and the Weird Stuff — sparkly organza, tulle, lamé, and sheers of many colors.

I’m considering selling off the vintage fabrics, or most of them. I seriously doubt that I’ll make very many more 1940-ish traditional quilts in my lifetime.

Updates and more pictures later, as the Great Cleaning progresses.

I’m ridiculously proud of myself. I replaced the clogged-up mineralized shower head in our bathroom and the house didn’t blow up!

(The old one wasn’t putting out water in GPM — it was measured in DPM — dribbles per minute.)

Now I can do anything. Maybe even change out a light bulb!

But first I’m going to take a shower.

[Update]: Well, Jenni made me feel totally inadequate. She’s installing a slate tile floor. Makes my knees hurt to think about it.

But first, another shot of my neighbor’s hydrangea tree, to give you a better idea of how huge this thing is.

The house was built in 1962 and I bet the hydrangea is almost that old too.

Azaleas coming up. Warning — there are a lot of pictures, and they are large.
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Teri bemoans the lack of beautiful azaleas this week at the Masters’. We in northern Alabama are overrun with them this spring, and I promised her some pictures (which I will post a bit later, after I’ve gone out with the camera).

Meanwhile… This hydrangea tree is flourishing in my next-door neighbor’s yard. I see it every morning from my bedroom window, and I’ve been promising myself for the last ten springs that I would photograph it in all its glory.

Thanks, Teri, for the reason to do so.

Deborah asked for an “after” picture of Millie the Adorable and Now Less-Hairy Beast.

She is outside on the deck at the moment, guarding the grill (you can see the handle at the right), because I am grilling pork chops. She’s very fierce about defending her pork chops from stray intruders.

Almost the same pose, so you can see the actual size of the dinner-plate back feet, and the fact that there really is a reasonable-size dog under all that fuzz.

This is the happiest and most affectionate dog I have ever been privileged to share a house with.

We got her at the pound almost seven years ago. She’d been discarded because her former owner wanted to breed her; she’d had her first litter and refused to suckle them. The lady was not cut out for motherhood. So the owner kept the puppies and dumped Millie, where my husband found her in short order. She came home with us, we had her spayed once she recovered from the birth (no more puppies for this baby) and the rest is history.

Worked on a new web site this morning. After lunch my son and I ran a couple of errands and I did some paperwork and paid bills.

Then we took an old bedsheet and two pairs of scissors out onto the deck and tackled the Adorable Hairy Beast.

She’s half Lab and half spaniel, almost completely black, with the Lab’s wiry outer coat plus the fine, curly, very dense spaniel undercoat. This picture is pretty contrasty, but perhaps you can see what I’m talking about.

Look at those back feet! You’d swear they were the size of dinner plates, but it’s almost all fur.

We normally keep her shaved down to look like a short-haired dog, but this winter, with all the cold weather we had, we let her go au naturel, like a Frenchwoman. Trés chic. It’s getting warm again, though, and she’s terribly uncomfortable. Also, she sheds. The carpet in every room is covered in fine black dog fur. Plan on changing the vacuum cleaner bag once per room and dismantling the rollers for cleaning when you are finished.

However… my groomer charges by the hour, and when Millie is in Little Black Bear mode, I can plan on an $80 to $100 total. (There’s a reason the groomer refers to “Millie’s Spa Day” when I call to make an appointment.) So today, since my son was home, we decided to try to take off at least some of the outer layers before we trundle her off to her beauty appointment.

It took us two hours, and the hair that didn’t fly away in the wind weighed almost five pounds. (I briefly considered buying a spinning wheel…)

All I can say is, the groomer earns her pay. And I’m ready for a nap.

I had such good intentions yesterday.

On Saturday I had finally figured out how to correct the latest problem to crop up on the current work in progress. I wanted to get the grocery shopping done early early early so I could get back into the studio and get some work done on it.

I was up at 6:00 am, made my lists (two stores involved; one of them Costco which does not open until 10:00 am). Cooked breakfast for my guys, cleaned the kitchen, slipped quietly out of the house before 8:00 to get to the first store. Put away the groceries from that run before either of them was out of bed.

By 10:30 my husband and I were at Costco to get the remaining items for the week. He looked at movies, I commando-shopped, and we were home again in less than an hour. Packaged the meat into single-meal sizes for the freezer, started two whole chickens roasting, put everything away, cooked lunch, and cleaned the kitchen again.

Shortly after noon my daughter called and wanted to come over. She had a couple of projects to do, including making new curtains for her bathroom (okay, I need to paint fabric and can get that done while she is sewing… this will still work out). But first we had to make lunch for her (cooking lesson — how to make an omelet), take the meat off the bones of the roasted chickens, package it and put away for quesadillas Monday night, start a pot of vegetable beef stew for her to take home to freeze (another cooking lesson), clean the kitchen once more.

Remember the street art that I posted a couple of months ago? Daughter said that she had found a new mural by the same artist and we had to go take a look at it while the light was good.

The photograph isn’t all it could be, because the only place the tag is visible is from the interstate, and I refused to park on the shoulder in heavy traffic while she took the picture.

Back to the house, and she finally began work on her curtains. By that time it was approaching 6:00 pm and time to start dinner. And set the table, and serve, and eat.

And then clean the kitchen. (Have we done this before?)

I packaged her stew in single-serve containers for her to take home. Took the chicken bones and scraps and set a pot of stock simmering. Got the laptop out of the studio, where she was sewing and watching tv, went to bed, and listened to music while working on the computer for a while. Finished up the chicken stock and put it in the fridge to cool so I can package it and freeze it.

For some odd reason, I never did get to work on that quilt yesterday.

But I have such good intentions for today….

Mulder was wrong.

The truth is in my microwave.

My dear husband, who is the world’s worst about remembering things like birthdays and anniversaries, actually sent me a bouquet of mixed flowers for Valentine’s Day this year. They wilted almost immediately, which he said ruefully was just par for the course. The one time he remembers, and they die on him.

I think that the arrangement had probably been made several days in advance because of the crush of business on Valentine’s, and some of the stems just didn’t last very long.

So late last week I bought two dozen roses and made my own arrangement. I noticed the texture of the rose petals in the morning light yesterday and decided to try photographing them before they, too, go the way of all flowers.

The “beauty shot.” This is the equivalent of the Olan Mills portrait of the little girl leaning her chin on her hand and smiling at the camera. Not very exciting.

Better.

And despite the somewhat distracting background, I like this one the best. The light brings out the pale blush color of the petals as well as the soft texture.

In other news, the bronchitis is back and I haven’t felt like doing much work. I did clean the studio last week (stirring up the dust may have something to do with the lung problems, you think?), so I hope to be back in the saddle again soon.

Up the mountain, about three or four miles from my house, is a simple little hamburger and hot dog place called the Tip Top Grill.

Located in a former gas station, it’s across the street from the barber shop where my son gets his hair buzzed. (The barber’s name is Les Moore. No joke. And when Jay needs a haircut, he tells me he needs to go get “Les hair.”)

The neatest thing about the Tip Top Grill is that it sits right on the edge of Shades Mountain. After I took the second picture, I walked across the road to the left-hand end of the building and took another looking out over the valley:

The rock you see just beyond the fence is known, of course, as Lover’s Leap. These next two were taken late last fall, when there was still some color on the trees:

Trains still run through the valley below and you can hear their whistles as they approach the Shannon crossing.

I’d love to have a view like this out my window at work. Of course, I’d never get anything done for watching the birds and sunsets and listening to the trains as they pass.