Last week in an envoi to my blog post, I wrote this sentence: "Hope things are warming up for you." And, you know, I thought at the time, "Is that really what I hope? Spring is already accelerated, the snowpack is low, and what we really need is some more snow." And sure enough, the same day I posted, I came home to an empty house because my dear husband was fighting a grass fire. Friends of ours had the horrible experience of a grass fire that threatened their home and other buildings, and it turned into quite a big deal. Everyone, fortunately, is fine, and no buildings were lost. But from dh's account, it was a near-run thing. This is scary, indeed. Early March is not normally fire season in our neck of the woods, and as he said to me yesterday, this year's fire season could be a long one. I shall pray for rain, if snow isn't forthcoming. We have three pieces of land to worry about now: the home place (160 acres), our new land (50 acres), and the woodlot, crown land on which we have the right to harvest wood (1600 acres). That's a lot of potential for problems, it seems to me. My dh would tell me that I'm borrowing trouble, so I"ll try to rein myself in.
In the meantime, above and below you can see what we got on Sunday for weather. Yes, we did get the snow, which made for a rather slippery drive to work on Monday morning. Fortunately, it was my dh at the wheel, not me.
So far in March we've been travelling back and forth through the seasons. Yesterday was a day of more climate contrasts, because my dear husband drove me to Osoyoos for my appointment with the dentist. I was worried about what the roads might be like, but by the middle of the day the highway was bare and dry and we got over the Anarchist Summit with not a single even slightly worrying moment.
As we came down through the switchbacks I caught this view of the northern shore of the lake.
In the middle of Osoyoos, the lake was a flat mirror, and sprigs of green have appeared on the sagebrush. Osoyoos is in the desert, right on the 49th parallel, so it's not surprising that spring is a lot further ahead there than at home. As is often the case, driving the hour from Greenwood to Osoyoos feels like travelling to another country. Some of the orchards were even sporting the first blossoms, while at home we haven't yet seen even a hint of a leaf.
But the real beauty, to my eye at least, was back up on the Anarchist: on our way home, we drove off the highway and onto the side roads that wind through ranches that consist of expanses of dramatic, bare slope, outlined with aspens and pines. Many years ago, my dh and I had an art date at about this point on this road: again, it was March, and that day of brilliant sunshine was so cold that my watercolour froze onto my paper before I could spread the colour around with my brush. Extreme plein air painting.
As dusk began to fall, this one slope was illuminated by low sun through a break in the clouds. Very dramatic.
We both admired this magnificent snag all by itself in a field.
This view reminds me of some of Russell Chatham's watercolour paintings, landscapes of receding fields and woods painted in a moody, subdued palette. Chatham's paintings grace many book covers, including most of those written by Jim Harrison.
This abandoned farmhouse is one of the icons of this part of Highway 3. Whenever we drive past it, I wonder what it was like to live there. It seems a lonely, windswept place.
Back at home, we are coming down to the wire in our library quilt-making saga. Each year, in January, we make an appointment with our long-arm quilter, and at this juncture we have about three weeks left to get everything done: both the queen-sized quilt and the lap quilt. But along with the pressure of time bearing down on us, getting it all done means a happy outing as a reward. It's just one of life's nicely serendipitous things that this date often coincides with the date that Michelle, the quilter and owner of Wine Country Quilts just north of Oliver, has a sale. This fortuitous timing amounts to another opportunity for the six of us to have a road trip and a fabric-buying spree, combined with lunch out somewhere special. Unfortunately, I can't go this year: the day we chose is a day I have to work. Oh well. I keep telling myself that I don't need any more fabric, but it's really the spending time with my friends that I enjoy. Especially the part where I encourage THEM to buy fabric. It's always a time of laughter and lots of fun. Fortunately, we have many other opportunities through the year for this kind of a jaunt: every quilt show within a two hour radius is fair game for another road trip.
Last week, Ann and Gerri took on the task of sewing and pressing (respectively) the remaining seams of the first-prize quilt, and they accomplished a lot. It's rather tedious work but they are in a groove and have the assembly process down pat. The rest of us embarked on the lap quilt. It took us an hour or more to decide on how we would interpret the pattern with the leftover fabrics from the main quilt, but we did manage to get started with the sewing. I want to launch another shoutout at this point, because it's at least partly due to Myrna's careful planning of our cutting sequence--including making templates and doing the math--that we have so much fabric left intact to use on this lap quilt. Ann was part of this process too, and created a coloured map to show exactly what we were going to construct. Valori Wells' interpretation of her pattern "Carnival Beauty" relies on warm/cool contrasts. But our large quilt is based on an analogous colour scheme: the main idea is blue, and our fabric choices expanded the notion of blue to include blue-violet and blue-green, violet, green, even an acid yellow-green. We left warm colours pretty much entirely out of the mix and so we weren't at all sure how well our available fabric palette would work for "Carnival Beauty." Judy brought in a rich yellow-orange/deep gold fabric just as an idea for adding some contrast, and we've decided that rather than a quilt balanced between warms and cools as in the original, ours will be largely blue spectrum fabrics with sparks of warmth in the "teeth" of the spiky arcs. We'll exploit the light-dark contrasts among our fabrics to add interest to the blocks.
Last weekend was also our first day of using Myrna's suggestion of freezer-paper rather than golden tissue paper for the paper-piecing of this quilt. Rather than explaining the technique to you myself, I'll direct you instead to this video tutorial I used to learn how to do it. Except for Myrna, none of us had tried our hand at this process before last Sunday afternoon, so as usual when we're struggling with something new, there was a lot of muttering as we juggled fabric and freezer paper: "Now, this bit has to go THERE, at least I think so. Myrna, does this look right? How do I fold this paper? Am I trimming this seam the right way? Rats! I sewed this seam with this fabric upside down!" (the last one was me). But at the end of our session, we had enough of our first arcs sewn to see that it was working! And our first attempts looked great! Well, except for mine: I was using a photocopy of a template as my protective sheet when pressing and it wasn't until I'd sewed nearly a dozen pieces together that I realized that the ink from the photocopy had rubbed off onto my lovely orangey-gold spikes, turning them rather grey. So I'm in "start over" mode this weekend. But at least I know what I'm doing, and from now on I'll actually take Ann's advice and use a pressing cloth instead of paper to protect her iron and ironing board from the wax on the freezer paper.
Well (ahem) I thought I knew what I was doing. I was feeling a bit of time pressure to get things done since I had only one day in my studio this week. But I sewed merrily away until suddenly, something didn't look right. Last weekend, Myrna had cautioned against the risk of getting confused between spike and background. I thought, airily, "well, that's not likely to happen to me, for heaven's sake: I'm an old hand." And then this.
Yup, I got confused and missed one sewing line, meaning that I reversed the spikes and the background for the next few pieces. On the plus side, it's a heck of a lot easier to undo an error with the freezer-paper method than with the traditional paper-pieced method. In the past, a mistake discovered well after the fact was a huge headache because every seam is built on top of the one before and the paper was sewn into the fabric. Every single piece sewn on after the mistake had to be removed, in reverse order, until one was back at the point of the mistake. But with the freezer paper method, where the paper isn't sewn into the fabric, I needed only to fold back to the place where I made the last correct seam, unpick the error, remove the whole little package of what I'd done wrong, and start again from the last correct seam. Easy.
But I did get it right in the end, finishing it off this afternoon as we all worked together. Once again the influence of different lights is astounding: this is the same block in both photos, but the cold light in Ann's work space and the warm light in mine make the yellow-orange fabric look entirely different.
Ann and Gerri worked hard, as always, and Ann put in a lot of time on the project during the week, completely sewing together the first three rows. What a difference it makes to have all the seams sewn: the crispness of the lines and the sharpness of the points transforms that part of the quilt into something rather magical, in my opinion.
And the rest of us worked on the "Carnival Beauty" lap quilt: everyone had done some homework, so we started our session this weekend by auditioning this arrangement.
And by the end of the afternoon's sewing, we had these blocks pinned up on the narrow strip of real estate left on the design wall beside the large quilt.
And I'm glad that they look as good as they do, because for me, this session was a huge exercise in frustration. I made so many mistakes that I barely got one small block completed before it was time to go home. The points of my spikes were all over the place, I had several puckers when sewing the curved seams between the sections; I even managed to sew in a fold while trying to correct a pucker. The team came up with the reason for my random-length spikes: I wasn't ironing the freezer paper firmly to my completed work before adding another piece, which meant that the pattern was slipping under the fabric. So now I know what to do.
I've had to bring home quite a lot of homework to keep my end up as we work toward our goal of getting both quilts to the quilter in three weeks' time. Spring has hardly begun and already it seems as if the quiet pace of winter has given way to sudden acceleration as the "to-do" lists expand every day. I've got deadlines coming up for getting quilts finished for shows. And soon the garden will need attention, dh will have to hitch up horses and get the fields harrowed, fences will need mending so the horses can go out on pasture, and all the other ranch work will be underway again. At the same time, fishing season is about to begin, which means dh is overwhelmed with piscine dreams and the yearning to get outside, onto lakes and rivers, and make the fishing magic happen. And then there are the travel plans: in this country, spring and summer are travel months, and we're itching to get away and enjoy what my dh calls "landscape therapy," feasting our eyes on new patches of beauty we haven't seen before. So much to do!
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