Neighborhood Memories: Good Things Come in Threes

Over the winter holiday, mighty fine neighbor Mark,  fixed up this vintage three-wheeler for use as a Kid-Mover.

Hiking Windy Hill: Wild Cream Colored Iris

California Native Wildflower - A Creamy Douglassi Iris 

Our California spring wildflowers are blooming like gangbusters at Windy Hill right now. The pooches and kids are enjoying themselves there too. You have to know where to go when you want to hike locally with your dog, and Windy Hill is a great place to take your best friend. Just make sure you choose the trail that's signed for dogs. There are no signs for children, so you can interpret that however you please.

Among the flowers we saw -  red columbine, brilliant blue hounds tongue, milk white hellebore, deep purple lupine, and plenty of pale rosy pink spring vetch in flower on a lovely, warm 7 mile hike yesterday.  I'd never seen the creamy version of douglassi iris I photographed above before. I double checked and found that it does occasionally occur in creamy shades and also hybridizes easily.

Another example of diversity in California!


              

Ench By Sew-006 Conversation with a Pirate Queen

Hot Dog, the latest "Enchanted By Sewing Podcast" is available in the pod-o-sphere! 

You can listen to the show right on the web by clicking on this link. Or, download this podcast free from iTunes, to play on your favorite mobile device/mp3 player (like an iPhone or an Android), by clicking on this link to iTunes.

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This conversation is about more than sewing, it's about a Californian who admits to having fun with her two teenage sons, drawn together by their shared joy in living history. How many boys this age have so much fun hanging out with their mom in social situations? I think Laura's found a secret that others might add to their parent-skills database!

What first drew me to Laura is that, in addition to costume sewing, she has a flair for  integrating elements of costume sewing into her daily wardrobe. Though she she sews for well-known living history events, such as the Renaisance Faire and Civil War Reenactment Days, it was our chat  about her experiences creating unique garments for  local San Francisco Bay Area personal theater - the Nor Cal Pirate Expo,  that had us both laughing, and me reaching for the edit button when it came time to clean up this interview to keep this podcast rated 'clean'!

Laura's enthusiasm and creativity in costume creation and sewing, is the kind of passion that keeps me enchanted by sewing!

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Please post other links and other pertinent information that you would like me to include in these show notes.

Tarantula Tango OR The Tarantula and the Shoe Box

      As a kid I lived on two acres that my parents christened “Lizard Acres”, in what was then a very rural part of Arizona. There my folks designed and built a cinder block house with their own hands. The house was well laid out, cool in summer, and the cinder block walls exuded naturally trapped heat in the winter, but it was also full of  places where wildlife could creep in. 

     Whenever we went to take a bath*, there would generally be at least four forms of insect life. Vinagaroones were popular. They look a good bit like scorpions - which we often saw outside the house.

All prepped to take our bath, we would scream bloody murder at the sight of those bugs. Then my mother would yell out “Oh just put the shoebox over it, and I'll be in there in a minute!” She had no patience with our fussing. So I ran around stony naked (my sister being older was usually more modestly atired) waiting for our mother to come and displace the insect life to the out of doors. I think they came up the drain in the tub, and from there they sometimes migrated on to the walls and into the rest of the house.

Also tarantulas came into the house. They were most partial to my sisters bedroom wall which retained the kind of heat tarantulas liked. I don't know how the tarantulas got in. Seems like they’d have been too big for the tub’s drain. Our good old dog, Blackberry used to (I’m not making this up) play with one of the tarantulas that came regularly. My sister was particularly unhappy to find this member of theTheraphosidae family on her wall one night at bedtime. My mother finally got fed up with our screams, and killed that particular visitor.

The dog moped for days and my mother felt awful, because she realized she killed Blackberry's friend. She never killed another and we learned to accept insects as part of life.

My mother drew this beautiful tarantula a few years after we left the wilds of Arizona for the intensity of suburban life in California.

It was a good move for economic and educational reasons, but we all kind of missed the excitement of bath time at Lizard Acres.

*Where we the only folks with a tub-only-just-one bathroom back in the 60's? As a kid, I thought showers were the kind of luxury people only had in motels. 

Any Bugs in the Bell?

Please CLICK ON THE PICTURE ABOVE to see all the great details

After 14 hours on a plane from Frankfurt, Wolfgang figures perhaps, there COULD be bugs in his horn bell. I played French Horn up through the end of middle school. Which made my position on the stage in Memorial Church, just behind the brass section from the Junge Kammerphilharmonie Freiburg even more enjoyable.

In my case, the drummers sat off to the right of us. Being the third french horn, lowest in the pecking order, I was the target of their happy-go-lucky juvenile male behavior. The only instruments with more time on their hands than horns are drums Though the french horns had a lot of rests to count, the drums had even more, and so they needed something to do to occupy their time, while waiting their time to play.

We practiced in the school cafeteria before school. These resourceful fellas would gather up old pieces of stale food and, when I leaned on my horn, counting, or was otherwise distracted by my best friend, the second french horn, they would toss old french fries and stale pieces of hamburger buns into my horn bell. Then when it was my turn to blow, out would come a fusillade of ancient bits of lunch.

At the age of twelve and thirteen, it didn't seem funny to me at all, but it sure does now.

Concert Details and

my other art-journal entries about this performance can be found at

* On Stage

* Playing Beethoven