A Little Travel, a Little Art

We recently took a little trip to Michigan, a state I've never explored before and it was beautiful. From the amazing turquoise waters of Lake Michigan (I thought you had to go to the Caribbean to see such lovely water) to the fruit trees, lavender farms (we hit two of them) art and food.

A day spent on the beach relaxing was capped off with a visit to one of the many wineries. We sipped some wine at Mari Vineyards while overlooking the lake.

A visit to the Dennos Art Museum was the perfect thing for a dreary day. A wonderful show by Gerhart Knodel was on display. It is always a nice surprise when I happen upon a show by a well known textile artist. I was intrigued with his work because it was inspired by pieces of a Chinese textile that had been cut into pieces and he played a version of a surrealist game Exquisite Corpse, to extend and explore the images on the textile. You can watch a very interesting 22 minute video of him talking about his work here.

I always feel excited when fall starts and now that I'm back from vacation I've started teaching one of my favorite classes at the Textile Center of Minnesota, Interlace Embroidery. It's an eight week class and we all get to learn a lot of embroidery stitches, techniques and get to know each other. I even get to see finished works by the students, something that never happens in short form classes. I hope you are all having a wonderful beginning of autumn.

I'll leave you with a fierce little transformer floating his way around Lake Michigan and a beautiful wall of drying lavender.

Aaaaaand, I’m Back...

Seacoast at Rye NH

I find that I often begin a blog post with the phrase, "Well, it's been awhile..." or something like that. It has and it's been a needed break but I have been thinking about why I blog, why I have changed the focus of my blog and do I want to continue. First off, I really like my blog and haven't been able to bring myself to take it down. There's a lot of good stuff on here, at least I think so, and I often refer back to it to find a recipe or post that I put up awhile back.

I think I got sidetracked with blogging because there seemed to be a lot of pressure to be the best kid on the block - ads, metrics, followers, blah, blah, blah. It was so daunting that I gave up. I also got exhausted thinking about recording every aspect of my life that seemed blog worthy. Sometimes I just wanted to admire a sunset, or enjoy the flavor of some food I made, or look at art without recording every aspect of it. And then somewhere I read that blogs should be focused so I turned it into a blog with only textiles and embroidery. Oy vey!

A few months ago Austin Kleon posted a link in his newsletter to an article by Marc Weidenbaum called Bring Out Your Blogs and it got me thinking more and more about getting back to blogging. Here's the thing though, I want to blog my way, the way I began. So, you will find some food and recipes, certainly some textiles, especially embroidery, the daily happenings of my life that I think are fun to share and it will be all mixed up. I hope you will find it inspirational and follow along and comment once awhile. That would be fabulous but if you don't, that's ok too.

What you wont find here are a bunch of pop up ads that prevent you from seeing the content...one of my pet peeves that prevent me, frequently, from reading a blog post that sounds interesting. I know that if this isn't fun for me, it won't be fun for you. So, here's to starting again, my way.

FYI, the photo is of the seacoast at the Seacoast Science Center at Rye New Hampshire and the site of my nieces wedding last weekend. A beautiful place and an equally beautiful wedding.