Road trip to see little Juniper

I just got back from visiting my sweet little Juniper in Spokane, where I gave her "mama and dada" my trusty old Toyota Venza. Since I have road trip driving anxiety, my ex flew down and drove it all the way up, through rain, sleet and snow under dramatic skies.

 

Here's the old Venza, at 122,000 miles and 15 years under a stormy northern Arizona sky, and my new sunny sky blue Subaru Crosstrek with the safety features this aging driver needs.

We ate well on the three-day road trip. Above is the colorful artsy decor of the Rocking V restaurant in Kanab, Utah, where I had a molten lava chocolate cake with a toffee caramel sauce and ice cream. Below is me holding a big piece of chocolate cake from Dixie's Diner in Idaho Falls.

One of our first orders of business in Spokane was to visit Michael's for Christmas decorations, where Juniper lugged around two huge stuffed characters.

She's obsessed with her Sesame Street finger puppets and was delighted to see that they could be put on the tree (and taken off and put on our fingers and taken off and put on the tree and on and on)!

I can't get over her curly blond hair, which she inherited from her other grandma.

 

One evening, my daughter's friend visited wearing this very cool coat made from a quilt. She bought it at an art market. She also brought a big pot of her delicious vegetable curry, which we all loved.

Juniper and Dad at work, supervised by Charlie the cat. All three cats curled up on my bed sometimes during the day.

Here's our parting shot on a cold and windy day just before I left for the airport. I sure do miss them. The doll that Jade's holding was Julia's when she was two and now it's Juniper's and she includes it in all activities. LOL

Have a colorful day

We are nature

That's how I feel. Sometimes we forget that we're as much a part of nature as are the wild animals and the mountains.

Every evening I wait for the mountains behind my house to turn pink as the sun slips down to a certain point. The glow only lasts a minute, then I turn around and watch the western sky turn into a brilliant sunset.

During the day, the Sonoran Desert is green under a brilliant blue sky, and it makes me so happy to be out in it. These photos are from this morning's walk at Catalina State Park

In a few days I'll be visiting this little wild child of nature, my curly-haired Juniper whose hair cannot be tamed. When her mom asked what she was doing, she said, "Tidying up." Good girl!

 

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Blue: Frida and a Crosstrek

There's a new exhibit at the Tucson Botanical Gardens called Frida's Garden, honoring the late, great Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and her cobalt blue house in Mexico City, La Casa Azul.

 

The garden is created within the famous "Frida Blue" walls and features a scaled-down version of the Aztec-inspired pyramid. Plantings in the new garden will honor the original, but with a Southwestern twist.

I visited the gardens with my friend Nancy, and of course I wore a blue top!

We ran into this person, who's obviously been hanging around the garden a long time!

I was also due for a new car, and I held out for a Subaru Crosstrek in that wonderful blue that looks like a Tucson sky and makes me so happy. I'll give my 15-year-old bronze Toyota Venza to my daughter. It should get at least another 100,000 miles, taking it up to when Juniper is a teen-ager!

That sky blue also cropped up in my current work.

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Luscious colors

I decided that instead of cutting up and reorganizing my painted piece, I would cover it with swaths of painted sheer silk organza to give it a dreamy, filmy, rich look. I just love layering sheers that I've painted over cotton that I've also painted -- it completely transforms it into deeper, shifting, rich, mysterious colors. 

I pinned through the silk, the cotton background and batting and then started hand stitching along the organza edges.

I have a luscious pile of silk and other sheers that I've collected over decades, but I still needed more blue and green so I painted another piece and put it outside where it dried in minutes in our hot desert sun. (It's still in the 80s here!)

I debated how to attach everything. Normally I machine quilt, but that would make too harsh of a line on what I want to be a delicate airy piece. I finally decided to use just two strands of embroidery floss and do a loose herringbone stitch along the edges of the silk.

It's not quick, but I love the rhythm of the slow hand stitching. I do it standing, with the work spread on my ironing table and the Grateful Dead providing the beat. On one hand I find the work very relaxing, but on the other the beautiful colors are so uplifting!

We also have some beautiful colors going on outside. Here are just a few photos from a one-block stretch near my neighborhood.

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New desert pieces

I'm working on more pieces for my Louisville show, "Homegrown Stories," which will have three artists sharing the entire PYRO Gallery. My take on the theme is "At Home In the Desert." 

The idea for this piece (above) was to layer sheers over the big piece of fabric that I painted. It was supposed to give the effect of the desert sky above mountains and green desert, but I don't think it works.

So I think I might cut it up and shift it around to be totally abstract, then layer it with sheers.

I'm nervous about just cutting straight into the fabric, so I took a picture of it and printed out two copies to cut up and play with. I think I'll go with this one. I cut it in the picture above and then shifted the blocks in the picture below. I haven't gotten up the courage to cut into the cloth yet!

Or should I stick with the whole cloth?

But I did finish this piece, "Sonoran Desert." My sister, who belongs to PYRO and is organizing the show, wants the three of us to each create an 18x24-inch piece in blues and greens to hang together as unmounted work. She's a painter, so hers is on a piece of canvas with raw edges. My quilt also has raw edges.

It started as a vertical, but when I realized that hers was a horizontal I changed mine to match. Here's my "palette," a jumble of blue and green fabric on my sewing room floor.

Ta da! Now it's a horizontal. Then I machine quilted it (see the first photo).

I was struck by how my succulent on the back patio echos the greens in my quilt.

Finally, this is my quick and cheap Halloween costume. I'm a Spice Rack!!! (I got the idea from Instagram.) And my shirt is the same blue as the desert sky. Having matching blue tape was serendipitous and totally unplanned.

Have a colorful day