more creative life — A journal of everyday adventures in quilting, writing, cooking, and living.

Dirt Update

September 26, 2011

Notice anything about this picture? For instance, the dirt mounds spread across our yard like… like… big ugly piles of dirt? Funny, I’ve been noticing that too.

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This last Saturday, our house hosted two competing get-togethers, one for each teenager. Driving a couple of Basketball Girl’s male friends down to the subway station afterwards, I got to listen in on an intense discussion of whether you could make a better bomb with dry ice and plain water, soda water, gatorade, or Coke. [...]

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Uh Oh…

September 10, 2011

It’s September, school has started, and I was quietly congratulating myself that our summer had been too busy (and we had been too cash poor) for my husband to put on Dirt Season this year. Then I came home from running errands yesterday to find that this pile had appeared in the yard while I [...]

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Handmade Gone Bad, Restaurant Bathroom Decor Edition

September 10, 2011

I made several trips to family camp this summer, stopping for lunch as always at my favorite taqueria in the hot Central Valley. This restaurant has always impressed me with the excellence of its food and the peculiarity of its decor. This time they had something new: empty window frames hung on the bathroom wall. [...]

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Harvest Time

September 10, 2011

There is an ancient apple tree growing in the semi-wilderness behind our kitchen. You couldn’t call this tree beautiful; it had been neglected for many years by previous owners and had large sections that had died off. What wasn’t dead was overgrown and ratty looking. Every year, though, it valiantly produced a crop of apples. [...]

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What My Tie-Dye Never Looks Like

September 5, 2011

My friend Mary is a tie-dyeing genius. Every year she brings mounds of clothes to tie-dye at family camp, and none of them come out looking like mud, as mine always do. This shoe wasn’t actually tie-dyed, which involves blocking out the dye in certain areas by banding them tightly with rubber bands. Converse fabric [...]

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Our Fearless Leader

September 2, 2011

It takes a special kind of man, a man with big dreams–a man, in short, who’s completely out of his mind–to decide that he wants to spend his summer (and a sizable chunk of the year before that) turning a group of teenage girls into international eurythmy performers. This is that man, wearing the Italian [...]

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Handmade Gone Bad, Part 8

August 27, 2011

I don’t know about you, but if I were a small child I think I’d be creeped out by having these two staring at me in my bedroom at night: You have to wonder just what they’re up to when you’re not paying attention.

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Two Great Cathedrals

August 24, 2011

I was lucky enough to visit two of the world’s great spiritual places this summer: Chartres Cathedral south of Paris, and the Yosemite valley in California. The inside of the Chartres cathedral is supposed to look like this: I was disappointed at first to find out that this summer it actually looked like this: Complete [...]

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Another Really Excellent Non-Birthday Present

August 24, 2011

My husband made me these cabinets for my sewing room. He worked on them all summer in his nonexistent free time, and they just got installed today. What can you say about a man who forgoes the annual dirt season to make his wife beautiful furniture? I’m speechless.