Violets and moss

Violets are a state flower of New Jersey, which is ironic - they make me think of Paris and the 1930s. Though they are in abundance here. Really a perfect garden plant: a prolific ground cover that blooms and does not get in the way of other plants. I look forward to the day my garden is all violets and moss and the mower can be done away with.

The hat

This hat just happened. It is made out of Italian kid mohair with some acrylic. It is multicolored and the brim, of course is a similar texture little doo-dad of dark aqua mistery yarn from t.Ira's

chest of wonders. I have found it hard to complete a project without

adding at least a little bit of her jems.
The kids love it. Predictably, I have to make a second one for Fedia. There is a threaded ribbon, it gives it a nice shape. The scarf is one of Pat's and it matches beautifully - could not have turned out better if I planned it.

Spring

Slowly the outdoors catches up to what the sunroom has known
for a while - it is safe to come out and bloom your heart through.
The fish are glad of the warmth, mostly because it means they'll
be fed again. Every time the sunroom door opens the frog spastically drowns and the fish come up to the surface to look for signs of attention. All of the near water plants bathe their blooms in the sun as their roots take benefit in the moist mossy soil all around.

The skirt

Making things with one's hands is a millenia old tradition, it connects me to the past, it fills my life with a tangible kind of substance, it leaves a mark, a memory and a thing for the future. Crafting connects me to my great grandmother who embroidered a teapot cozy simply and beautifully, it connects me to my peers who make things in wonderfully talented ways, it connects me to an old Sumerian man who made clay pots in his mud brick house, it connects me to my nanny t.Ira whose smile and voice I miss so vividly so daily. She died in July of 2006, my daughter was born in September. In the hospital with this tiny little girl, there was a phone call I could not make. Her manhattan phone number was still programed into my phone. I talked to my baby as if she were a concerned 81 year old, realizing how heart-breaking and comforting the idea of re-incarnation is. Her death was like an atomic attack, unexpected, inexorable, far-reaching. It was hot, calm, sleepy quiet around the 4th of July. I've had a phone call from Moscow that something happened in the depths of upsate New York, but the prospect was so outlandish - I simply could not believe it. I left messages as if she were going to come home and call me and explain everything, laugh about it and all would be well. But the cloud started coming down and settling in a systematically devastating way for everyone who knew her.

Her life was excavated, her things went to some of us who craved little bits and pieces to soften the loss - I got hundreds of little balls of rolled up yarn that could never have been used up by her in a lifetime. Everything has a use, it's just a matter of finding a perfect match for the article. I have all of her unfinished knitting - a mix of seeds, big and small ... there is no way to know what they would grow into in her tender hands. Yet I need them to be something in our daily lives so we can all see it, use it, talk about it, remember her. I know
this was not meant to be a skirt, but it came out fine. It is warm and Irisha loves it, as part of her name brings back t. Ira to us... and when she smiles or does something silly, and gives a hug with her entire little body.

This is t.Ira's trandescantsia. I re-potted it in one of my favorite plain terracotta pots (it has embossed strawberries all around) and put it on top of the baker's rack right below a skylight in the sun room. It gets watered in the same sporadic way as the rest of the poor green darlings. A week or so ago I realized, this was the first time that I have seen a trandescantsia bloom - such a soft white cluster of loveliness. Nothing else to humble a plant lover like the most basic of neglectable green messes of stems and leaves turning into this swan of a flower.

Dragonflies

We love dragonflies in this house. They are so expressive and illusive at the same time with their fluttering frantic movements and risque flying atop the water. Their bulging eyes are endearing and so delicate - they seem near-sighted, almost disabled in the most human sense. So when I looked at heaps of yarn and little bits and pieces of all kinds and colors of strings inherited from t. Ira, it seemed to make sense to try to make these adorably fast and essentially summer, colorful little creatures. I hand-weaved their bodies with a belt weave my grandmother taught me when I was five, crocheted wings and added beads for eyes. Eventually it seemed to make sense to try for other wiggly little garden inhabitants. The strings they hang on are also hand-weaved. Both kids and cats like to play with them. These would look lovely hanging in a bright room with plants or as a mobile in a nursery.

Logs, shells and dry flowers

There is an organic farm we belong to and May through November get pretty much all of our vegetables there. Also flowers. Many I dry. Organic flowers - soo lovely. So I started making little dry arrangements in 2" clay pots, and then shells. And then Tom Truelove - our local tree man - brought an interesting log and I used that.