our little songbird

The oyster is a girl. A beautiful baby girl with big blue eyes and dark curly hair. And she is by far the best-smelling creature I've ever nuzzled into.

Wren Antonia was born July 25th and ushered Luke and I into the most intense and electrifying two weeks of our lives. Within minutes of her birth it became clear that she was very sick. She was admitted into the NICU with a bacterial infection that she battled for 10 days. But yesterday we got to bring her home. Home to her crib. To her books. To her chest full of onesies. To naps beside her mom and dad. And I can't stop kissing her cheeks.

I'm sure that in the future- once I've slept and pondered and reflected- I will share more about her birth and subsequent sickness. But for now the three of us are here and we are getting to know one another. We are getting to know Wren apart from antibiotics, wires, incubators and well-meaning nurses just brimming with advice. There's a lot of eye contact and cuddling going on around these parts. And a whole lot of just listening to Wren and how she communicates with us. The whole experience brings to mind a part of a Mary Oliver poem my friend Liz shared recently:

I had nothing
better to do but listen.
I mean this
seriously.

Welcome home, sweet baby Wren. It's so nice to finally meet you.

warning: I'm about to ramble

And so begins week 42. I have to say I'm beginning to get a bit impatient, which frustrates me. Maybe it's that I'm so big I can barely roll over anymore. Maybe it's that I'm kind of nervous about this whole giving birth thing and the more days I wait, the bigger this baby is getting. Maybe it's that it's been 100 degrees with tons of humidity all week which severely limits my activities. Or maybe I was anticipating epic storms last night that would call this baby down and out while simultaneously cooling things off. But this morning I woke up to dry ground, 87 degrees at 9am and no contractions for about 12 hours.

I'm trying to practice mindfulness, to breathe, to be open to possibility and timing that I cannot control. I'm trying to remain creative and active when I feel limited and sluggish. And I'm keeping my perspective- Luke has been a saint, each and every ultrasound and stress test declares that the baby is healthy and happy, and that Little Oyster is staying quite active and reminding me the he/she is very much alive and well. I might be sweaty and impatient, but I have so much gratitude underneath it all.

The last few days have been a bit sentimental, as I've had time aplenty to sit, ponder, read, and write (for which I'm also truly grateful). Poetry and stories are a real source of encouragement and hope. Everyday I glean bits of truth and reality from my favored 'mom blogs' who are so honest and open (and usually hilarious) about their parenting journeys. And every once in a while a good friend will pass along wise and beautiful words that feel like a mirror held up to my own emotions at the time. Such was the case when my dear friend Katie sent along a birthing poem that I just happened to read on my own the next day as well. And since I'm feeling sentimental, I will share with you some sentiment (by Nancy Rose Meeker):

Here am I,

myself,

but also vessel of creation.

Rythyms of the ages

stir in the womb of woman,

my own womb-

ancient pulse in my own heartbeat,

nourishment in my own breast.

This life through me

was fathered deep

in fire-consecrated flesh,

and here, behold!

A miracle,

that what was not before

is

now!

And speaking of life cycles, our mint forest has begun to flower in the late July heat. I ventured outside to gather some leaves for some labor-inducing tea and was shocked (also terrified) by the number of bees hard at work pollinating. I wish so badly I wasn't a wimp when it came to bees, but those little guys freak me out! So I asked Luke to be manly and harvest the mint for me. He also took some time to document the very real miracle that is bee pollination, and I thought I'd post some of my favorites.

Happy Sunday! I wish you (and myself) gratitude for the mundane, patience and perspective, as well as an eye for the miraculous!

Show me a day when the world wasn't new

Photo from here.

It's another warm and beautiful spring morning. Obviously I'll be inside earning a living for most of the day. But at least for the moment I'm reflecting on the stillness of this morning- the way the sky subtly shifts from black to grey to blue in the early hours of the day (can you guess who was up early to empty her bladder today?)

I've always loved the quote by a very astute woman named Sister Barbara Hance: "show me a day when the world wasn't new". It doesn't often feel easy to approach our mundane days with a sense of hope or wonder, but there are so many reasons to celebrate the rythyms of life inherent in the daily cycles of nature and even in our own schedules. I wish each of you a moment of that awareness and awe today.

Photo from here.

Morning Poem

Mary Oliver

Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange

sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again

and fasten themselves to the high branches ---
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands

of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails

or hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it

the thorn
that is heavier than lead ---
if it's all you can do
to keep on trudging ---

there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted ---

each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,

whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.

and a poem

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections

Or the beauty of innuendoes,

The blackbird whistling

Or just after.

From "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" by Wallace Stevens

spoiler alert

Spoiler Alert: If you are pregnant and I am giving you a gift, it will probably include a pair of these.

I am enamored with this free shoe pattern I found online a few months ago. I decided to give the little slippers a try this weekend using some great vintage fabric scraps from an antique store in the area. They were rather simple to make (which surprised me) and only it only took a few hours one lovely Saturday morning. In fact, these baby shoes are so cool I am going to endeavor to enlarge the pattern to make a pair for myself! This particular pair is en route to a friend who will bequeath them unto her sister at a baby shower, but be assured that more variations on these shoes will appear in the future.

And now, a poem (in honor of autumn, and of life, and of love):

In Blackwater Woods
Mary Oliver

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

the ethical implications of old t-shirts

These days few things invigorate me and challenge me as much as seeing people creating new stuff out of old stuff (my high school literature teacher would cringe reading that ambiguous last sentence, but bear with me here). Since I rediscovered sewing last year, my ultimate goal has been to focus on the construction of clothing and learn how to tailor. I see salvaging old clothing items as an act of stewardship, simplicity, recycling and great respect.

But as you probably very obviously notice, I tend to get distracted by more pretty and frivolous things like baby quilts. But even in my quilting I'm trying to buy as little brand new fabric as possible and focus on reusing other materials or second-hand, unused fabrics. Those projects are by far my most gratifying because I love looking back over a quilt and identifying the epic journey each of the materials has taken. And I apologize because if you've ever seen any of my projects in person I know that I've spewed out the entire quilt lineage to you with excruciating detail.

I'm fortunate enough to have friends who also see value in the act of re-purposing and reusing. One such couple (who also happen to be my brother-in-law and sister-in-law) have the added bonus of an adorable 4-month old daughter. And to make this situation even more perfect, they love free stuff. So when they handed me a short stack of my brother-in-law's old landscaping t-shirts last week, I was ready for some action (in the vein of Wardrobe Refashion).

Here is what I came up with, using a baby sundress pattern, two florescent green shirts, and a certain giraffe fabric that's been getting a lot of face time on this blog as of late:


ps. Due to my lack of technical savvy, you may want to click on the above collage to better see the gratuitous details I typed.

one wild and precious life

When my old friend Emily requested a baby quilt for her cousin's little offspring I was psyched. When she suggested an African animal/safari theme I was ecstatic. Not surprisingly, I bought a bit too much yardage of the Michael Miller fabrics used in Differing Rays of Light (I have to learn the fine art of measuring my fabric needs with great precision), and I was looking for an excuse to design another quilt with them. On top of that, another friend (Megan) recently bequeathed unto me a host of material she bought in a marketplace whilst living in Uganda. I quickly computed the following awesomeness equation:

safari fabric + Ugandan fabric = awesome African-themed baby quilt at the request of a friend whose heart, in many ways, is still in Africa (Tanzania, to be exact).

I went about the business of graphing a quilt top based on a series of 5 1/2" blocks. I decided to try the 'crazy 9-patch quilt block', which is a design I've seen in many beautiful quilts lately. At first glance it seems like a challenging undertaking, but in reality it's really quite simple.












The blocks are placed in a strategic pattern with Kona Ash for the sashing, and a border in Kona Lime that is 2" wide on two sides and 1" wide on the opposite sides.



















The backing to "one wild and precious life" was a great big surprise to me.



I decided to try to use up whatever substantial pieces of the safari prints and solids I had left over, but the scraps' strange sizes left me limited in my design choices. In fact, they are cut and arranged in the only way I can mathematically conceive them fitting together and creating a 41" square quilt. I'll be honest, it was a close one with very little fabric to spare, but I think that in the end I might actually like the back better than the front. But why play favorites?

Emily's cousin's baby's quilt is named for the last line in Mary Oliver's "Summer Day". Oh, I like it so very much:

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"

they were born to go

A wonderful poem by E.E. Cummings that came to mind during the course of the day.

let it go - the
smashed word broken
open vow or
the oath cracked length
wise - let it go it
was sworn to
go

let them go - the
truthful liars and
the false fair friends
and the boths and
neithers - you must let them go they
were born
to go

let all go - the
big small middling
tall bigger really
the biggest and all
things - let all go
dear

so comes love

A Timbered Choir

"A Timbered Choir" was a work of brainstorming collaboration with my friend, Becca (of "My Little Matroyna" fame). We adapted a pattern for a crib bumper from a baby-quilt book. We were agreed that the mix of embroidery and applique was simple, cute, and a resourceful way to use smaller scraps of some really nice fabrics I have just waiting for such a time as this.



There are 8 woodland creature blocks featuring Denyse Schmidt's "Hope Valley" greens. Most of the animals were straight from the crib bumper pattern, and I added some evergreen trees, a sun, a flying bird, and a bear to complete the set.




I machine quilted across the vertical stripes, and made a faux binding with 2 1/2 inch leaf print. The back of the quilt was finished with a muted green fabric where I embroidered a leaf and an acorn to resonate with the woodland theme on the front.

"A Timbered Choir" is named for the poem by one of my favorite authors, Wendell Berry. In this case the correlation between the quilt and the poem end there, since this sweet and light-hearted design stands in contrast to a stark and admonishing work by Berry. But the world needs a bit of both of these realities, so I'll let this inherent contradiction rest as it is.

quilted cards, version 2

Some more quilted note cards! These are my two newest card sets, made with a mix of embroidery and applique.

The bird set is called "Bright Wings", which I named for a poem called "God's Grandeur" written by Gerard Manley Hopkins in 1918. The "Taste of Leaves" thank-you set gets its name from a poem called "Tea" by the writer Leslie Harrison. And it is so lovely that I will include the poem in its entirety:

Tea

Nearly dawn, I’m watching the trees

march out of night, surround again
this house; the dogs

twitch in final dreams; the stove—
this orange, unsteady heat and black iron box

breathes warm mirage into the cold,
into the sky; the yellow enamel teapot
does the same inside.

The tea leaves in their white paper pouch
in their skyblue mug—I’ve brewed thousands of cups

like this: wood house, wood fire, the woods
leaning out of the night, of their stubborn life,

the taste of leaves
hot on my tongue.

my little Matryona

What could be better than a quilt and a pillow? How about a quilt that IS a pillow!! That's right, and herein lies the genius of a "quillow", which is a quilt with a pouch sewn to the back so if you fold it into thirds it can be turned into a pillow. I like to refer to them as the popples of the quilt world.

This is my first attempt at a "quillow", and I think it has quickly become one of my favorite projects. This was a commissioned piece for a dear friend who gave me full freedom to create a quilt for her daily use. She studied in Russia and has a sincere fondness for Russian history and culture. So when I found this nesting doll (matryoshka in Russian) fabric by the Japanese company, Kokka, I knew I wanted to use it for her quilt.

The design for the project went through several stages, and even I was unsure what it would look like until it was finished. In the end, I cut out eight separate rectangles (4 are larger and 4 are smaller), created borders for them of a dark brown and a teal , and finally placed them alternately in a sea of a cream colored muslin. For the outer border I sewed strips of the colored fabrics at 45 degree angles (as though making a binding). The pillow section of the quillow is appliqued with three dolls I cut from the Kokka print, attached with fusible webbing, and used a simple zigzag stitch to secure them to the fabric.

I think what draws me to this particular design is how it manages to look both old fashioned and modern simultaneously. The colors are exactly the dark and rustic tones I (inexplicably) associate with old Mother Russia, yet the design is simple with straight lines and without too much clutter. The name for it comes from a poem by Teresa Pfeifer called "Matryoshka".

Thirsty

I love the poetry of Hafiz, mostly for his ability to relay very serious or disconcerting realities, in a light way without accusation. His words are invitations to a better way of life, not pressing diatribes. He inspires me to express my own excitement, adventure, experiences and beliefs without judgment or blame or anger. So here is one of my personal favorites, a comfort to me when I feel like daily expectations and activities are draining and a bit unnecessary. Alcoholics Anonymous famously asserts that the first step to recovery is to admit that you have a problem. I like to think that's what the fish in this poem is doing: admitting he's just not in the right place and he should probably do something about it.

Dang Thirsty

Hafiz

First

The fish needs to say,

"Something ain't right about this

Camel ride -

And I'm

Feeling so dang

Thirsty"

all sweetness and wings

Without doubt, "all sweetness and wings" is my most time-consuming and intricate quilt to date; but for many reasons it is one of my favorites. It is a pleasure to look at all the different swatches of fabric that have gone into it, and recognize them from past projects and fabric-bundles from friends. There are 10 insects on this quilt, and each one was cut from scraps and attached to the fabric using fusible webbing and machine embroidery (another apt name for this project would have been "satin stitch galore!") I was pleasingly surprised to see that each bug has a unique facial expression, which happened quite unintentionally. Yet the result is a slew of colorful, individualized bugs, ranging in emotion from startled to coy. I machine quilted the layers together echoing the right angles and straight lines of the seams, and finished it off with a chocolate brown binding.

This quilt is also special in that it will likely be my first one to sell publicly, as it will be displayed in a Midtown art show in the month of April. Oh, and so as to give credit where credit is due: the quilt's name is derived from a Mary Oliver poem called "Happiness" where she writes, "I saw her let go of the branches, I saw her lift her honeyed muzzle into the leaves, and her thick arms, as though she would fly – an enormous bee all sweetness and wings"

for what would a day be without a poem?

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.