I picked up the long (51″) stitched piece this week and hung it where I wanted it….over the small couch where I stitch upstairs.
I sat under it and looked across at the TV with all the NZ flax baskets hung around it. Where to put them all where the cats won’t get to them…..the only cat who jumped up here to race across the cupboard tops was Spooky….now gone. Patches and Sadie can’t even show an interest.
Next fill the now empty wall with all the pictures, well almost all the pictures.
Prints by Lucious DuBois hang together on a side wall…..these here are mostly egg temperas that wrap the corner to the right and hung with watercolors to the left.
And the cow painting from 1984 ended up here. Lee always loved the cow.
Just one thing added to a room and everything else looks “off”. Now it is loads tidier.
I bought this book because I could not resist the premise of it. Losing words in dictionaries that have to make room for others that have nothing to do with Nature.
Irresistible illustrations and thoughtful words by Jackie Morris and Robert MacFarlane respectively.
I love these big sweeping pictures that know no bounds….they just run out of paper.
Here is what is left of the lotus in the kitchen window.
It still seems to be making an effort so can stay another day before I find something to do with its remains.
And a follow up on going to the framers to have mats cut for the pile of stitched prints. Did you know that it costs $7 per cut for a mat plus the cost of the mat board? Then the cost of frames! So my framer encouraged me to return home and frame them up myself the way I always have. Three hundred dollars later all the sizes of frames I need will be here by the end of the week…..and that is buying mostly in bulk.
Some I will paint with the lovely gritty grey that Home Depot quit carrying a few years ago but would order it for me if I bought a case…..I have several cans left.
Now I will cut the size mats to mount each print on and order the glass when the frames come in.
My framer was right….costs have gone up! And she has twenty-eight orders to fill.
Now all I need is a place to sell the framed prints so I can recover some cost and keep on going.
For now I will carve some more wood blocks and stitch more slowly on the resulting prints. The stitching part is closely watched by my couch friend, Patches.
I just started a new book….unfortunately on my kindle and not in page form to mark up margins. I read the first page to Lee….read aloud it is even better. The author is Paul Howarth and the name of the book is , Only Killers and Thieves. It is set in 1880s Australia.
Howarth writes like a poet would…..like Cormac McCarthy or Peter Matthiessen. The descriptions put you right there waiting to breathe in the next sentence.
Like my stitching, I am going to read it slowly, very slowly.
And one final thing….the book makes me want to write so today I may be able to take a bit of time from watching Lee to do just that.
Til later.