Nettles, Treadles and Love

Yes, it has been a little over a year since my last blog post.  I unintentionally took a sabbatical because I was unknowingly getting ready to make a big move.  One month missing a post turned into two, then three, then a year.  I kept telling myself that I needed to use the time that I was not blogging or crafting to start getting rid of years of accumulated stuff in preparation for moving out of the city, which we intended to do someday, even though we were not actively looking at the time.  But I felt the urging.  And did I heed that urging?  Not even a little bit.  I just kept looking at my garage full of boxes of who knows what and thinking I must shed, but not one box did I open.  Nope.  Not until the day in August when we went to look at a cottage for rent on the property that friends of ours had also been renting at – a large cattle ranch in unincorporated Novato, Ca.  That day we knew that this was the place that would get us out of the city, and we had two weeks to pack up everything and make the move.  I guess I need a deadline to get things done.

We’ve been living in Novato since September 2014 and are loving it beyond our imagining.  Getting really settled of course took a while, but now it feels like we’ve been here forever.  In terms of indoor space we did have to downsize to make the move, but even so there is actually a tiny room big enough for a lovely craft space.  And let’s be clear, in terms of outdoor space, we have monumentally upgraded!  We have access to 900 acres of rolling cow pasture and native woodlands.  Right out our back door (the buildings in the picture at the top are where our house is.)

out our back door

We also have permission to tend and care-take the immediate space around our cottage, and I have a feeling many future posts will be about this space and the work we do there.

Another deadline that I set for myself was to get my craft room up and running by January, and get the blog posts going again.  So here I am honoring my commitment to myself and getting things in motion.

My new craft space.  It hasn’t been actually utilized yet, just getting organized and ready for use.

I was worried about both treadles fitting, but they just do.

gourd art made by my mama. basket by me.

The treadle-powered serger is quite the contraption.  There have been many steps in the process of getting it all together, but it is still not working yet.  I have all the hardware needed – bought the thread stand online – but I was only able to get two of the threads successfully threaded.  The third is a mystery.  I will have to search out a sewing machine expert to come and help me figure out the threading.  So complex.  There will be a whole blog post in the future all about the serger saga.

The photo of the hands was taken by my aunt Amy Cantrell and is of my grandmother’s hands when she was slowly being crippled by Alzheimer’s disease.  Lillian was a prolific sewer her whole life, and I have a blog post about her here.

The framed image on the right is a Seasonal Color Wheel of plants that grow in the SF Bay Area used as plant dyes, during different seasons and with different mordants.  You can read a nice blog post about the artist who made it here.  ‘Make Art Not War’ is a print of a piece by Shepard Fairey.

I recently got my dream sheepskin from Meridian Jacobs at the Fibershed booth at the Temescal farmer’s market

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Pictures of my parents and grandmother.  Leaf bowl by mama.  Collage cigar-box by Judy Beck.

Let’s hope the space will be as functional as it was fun to decorate!