Ahhhh, summer

After all my preparations, complaining, weaving, gardening, and brow beating, the Studio and Garden Tour is OVER! A big sigh of relief and on to summer.
We had about 280 visitors over three days of miserable heat. What troopers they were.I had a guest artist, Norene Mara, that paints and makes jewelry:
I also had a guest artist, Rose Poe, that makes beautifully colored baskets and also weaves.
The gardens could have used more work, but at 90+ degrees, not that many people were taking time to look at them ... out of their cars and into the air-conditioned studio!
The "weaver's garden" had a new umbrella for shade and some cute purse pots (an idea I stole from a friend) hanging on the shepherd's crooks. The purses got a LOT of comments.

The loom room was a demonstration and display area:The plate garden needed washing ... too bad. Pike was watching for cars ...Too hot to sell clothing ...

The positive comments make all the preparation work worthwhile. But I'm ready for pool time and to get back to weaving for the fall shows.

Studio Tour preparations

Every year, for the last 10, we have taken part in a county-wide tour of artists' studios. It's called the Brown County Studio and Garden Tour. Originally the tour included spectacular gardens in addition to the studios and then morphed into gardens AT the studios. Many of the artists (32 this year) already had gardens at their studios but we pretty much started from scratch. ... and kept going. The gardens now are a big part of the preparation for the tour and take about 4 months of my husband's and my time.
Meanwhile, we have been having odd weather ... high temperatures and lots of thunderstorms, tornado warnings, high winds. Just keep the good thoughts for those of us living here in the tornado belt of Indiana.
The studio is being cleaned and rearranged to make room for my two guest artists on the tour: Rose Poe, who does baskets and weaving, and Norene Mara who is a painter and jewelry artist.We usually have about 400 people through the studio during the 3-day tour. Lots of fun and meeting and greeting.
On another note, our primary phone line, which also includes our Internet service, has been down for one week. As I write this, it still isn't repaired and AT&T has missed three chances to fix it by their "estimated" deadline. I will be briefly borrowing a family member's dialup number to upload this, which I have written offline.
I guess the bright side, if there is one, is I've spent less time online in the last week than any other week since we went on vacation last year. I have been using this extra time to organize and make room in the studio for the guest artists.

As a final note, I received an email this morning from an overseas company who was wanting to sell me rugs. I was particularly intrigued with their salutation:
Hope you are leaving life with great pleaseure.

Well, I hope so, too.

More gardening and meditating

When we bought this house in 1999, the landscaping was pretty minimal, although there was a nice picket fence along the front.After me moved here, a local woman befriended me and gifted me with an enormous amount of perennial plants: hostas, Siberian iris, miniature Japanese iris, day lilies and other items she was thinning from her beds. Every June, when the day lilies bloom, I thank her for her generosity. She was also very helpful with getting beds started all along the inside of the picket fence ... about 150 feet of flower beds ... and that's just one of the 16 gardens or beds on the property. Another friend has given us many varieties of day lilies which she and her husband collect and grow.
Here's what it looks like now.
Getting back to the meditating ... as I've been thinning the beds, it's given me time to reflect on lots of things ... getting older, taking control, and how tangled parts of our life can become. It has been a very cathartic exercise because there really IS no plan ... for the gardens, for life, for the future. It is whatever we make it, good or bad. Do we control our own destiny, or was it decided for us before we were born? What do you think?

Gardening and meditating

I've been working in the dirt. Nightly. Daily. Whenever the heat was bearable.

We have had a lot of rain this spring and weeds are everywhere. But so are flowers ... so many that I'm thinning out the beds. If you want to stop by, there's iris, day lillies and hostas to the first comers.

The pictures are the newly reworked plate garden. I've doubled the plates so that it's pretty from both sides now (sounds like a Joni Mitchell song!) ... the gate is a wrought iron creation of cattails and iris from an Indiana blacksmith, Dean Howard.

More pictures later. Back to the weeding.

Apologies to my followers ... both of them!

I had the most wonderful surprise visit this week from Ingrid and Richard from Wisconsin. We had emailed a couple times and I knew they were coming to the area for a vacation and wanted to see the studio, but they really just "dropped in" Tuesday around lunch time. She was "technically" here to buy some rug warp, but we had a great time discussing looms and jobs and travels and anything else that came to mind.
Ingrid is a fairly new weaver and hasn't found other like-minded fiber folk in her area of western Wisconsin so relies on the Internet for support. Including my blog ... who would have thought that? I didn't think anyone was reading this! So, Ingrid, this post is for you!
And Ingrid's visit really made me realize why I have the open weaving studio. I want to be a place where people can come and ask questions and get advice about problems they are having with their looms and weaving. I don't know all the answers, but I definitely have opinions on a lot of topics and do my best to help.

Enough of the snow already!

This is my meditation circle. It's an area in the woods across from the house and studio that has paths through the trees and a few places to sit and think. There has been plenty of time for that this winter, but it's not been happening out in the snow.

Dear Saint Francis looks like he has his work cut out for him.
Everyone has probably seen their fill of snow pictures this winter. So that's it from me.
I've been weaving in the house for the last month because I have an art show in Indianapolis tomorrow and Sunday. Hoping for good weather and to see some friendly faces ...

Hungry for color

I have a new toy. It's a walnut scarf loom. I don't usually warp without a sectional beam, but this one doesn't have one so I wound a "spool-cleaning" warp where I get rid of odds and ends of yarn left from other projects. This is a rather southwestern colorway, and it feels warm. It helps that the loom is right in front of the wall heater, too. Pike, the studio cat, loves the loom.

The snow was coming down in big puffy flakes when I spotted this gray squirrel hunting for missed acorns. He'd walk a bit, dig, walk some more ... all the while dragging his tail behind him. It just kept collecting snow on top of it. When he got some distance from the oak trees, he flicked the snow off his tail and scampered away.