Color found

I posted the last week about craving color. A trip to Yoder, KS, provided that.

To begin with, I saw YELLOW daffodils and YELLOW forsythia beginning to bloom.

A friend and I went there for the Parade of Quilts, an annual event during which handiwork of local residents is displayed in several of the town's businesses. Now, that dished up lots of color!

Debbie and granddaugher Zoie

Zoie and me

My indulgence: blackberry cream pie

It's always fun to visit this Amish community, though it being a weekday, we didn't see any horses and buggies. Usually I go on a Saturday, which is the day families go to town to shop. I've always been intrigued with the Amish way of life, its simplicity, devotion to family life, strong faith, hard work, superior craftsmanship, dedication to basics. I've written before about this fascination, and I always come away from there  re-inspired. I'm ready to dig out old sewing projects and start new ones; to go through photo files and scrapbook memories. 

I even want to spring-clean—shock. 

In the past few days, spring has been popping out all around. Trees that were nothing but bare twigs last week are graced with delicate green fringe. Grass is greening—and growing (is that a mower being tuned up?). Charlie had the rototiller out in the garden this morning and has gone to the nursery for seeds and seed potatoes. 

Green forcing its way up through the dead remains of last year's perennials

The piece de resistance is this:

Barely above the ground, this tiny hyacinth sensed the urgency to bloom and provide a bit of color to its drab surroundings.

HAPPY SPRING!

Craving color

It's raining, dark and chilly again today. 

As usual, I'm inspired by reading other blogs. Sometimes the author puts into perfect words exactly what I am thinking, but unable to articulate. This was the case when I read a post by Kelly Letky here:

http://www.theinspiration-studio.com/2011/03/in-like-lamb.html

Then there's  http://prairiegirlstudio.blogspot.com/, where the photography is as beautiful as the prose.

It has been a long winter, with more snow that I can remember in years and years, especially since I've been in Kansas. An honest-to-goodness blizzard, followed one week later by record low of -17° and 17" more of snow. 

At least while there was snow, there was brightness. When the flakes stopped coming down, the sun lit up the sky, a brilliant cloudless blue.

But something happened. The snow melted, the skies became endless varying shades of gray, the wind blew harder, and the landscape was nothing but drab gray and brown and beige. It rained, it sleeted, a little more snow fell and melted, and the mud deepened. I fell into such a funk.

Shades of brown, beige and gray

I got a new camera March 1 and began looking desperately for color. The only bright spots outside were the cardinals who frequented our feeders and an occasional bluebird. But they flitted away as quickly as I approached the window. Winter sunsets, however, provide a feast for the eye.

January sunset

Progression of a winter sunset

I was, as Kelly so aptly put it, "craving color like chocolate." And more aptly, colorful flowers. I settled for the pots of geraniums in my bedroom window. 

Geranium

Then my bougainvillea—all winter a bare, thorny brown twig—began putting on blossoms. Fragile looking paper-like flowers with tiny white star-shaped centers. As the days lengthened, the clusters became more profuse. Still barely a green leaf! 

Bougainvillea mid-February

Bougainvillea in full bloom, a month later in Mid-March

Then yesterday, while walking through the yard, I saw these tiny (1/8"—¼" blue flowers with white centers. Their official name is Speedwell or Veronica, but I've always called them Little Blue Eyes. Hurray! Color, outside. 

Speedwell/Veronica aka Little Blue Eyes

And I noticed the frogs and robins singing and saw buzzards gliding overhead. I do believe it's finally happening! Spring is coming.

It's a bit late, but I'll close with this Irish blessing, taken from prairiegirl's blog:

may you have warm words on a cold evening,

a full moon on a dark night,

and a smooth road all the way to your door.

Plain and Simple

I've been rereading a book that years ago made such an impact: Plain and Simple: a woman's journey to the Amish by Sue Bender http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=sue+bender&x=0&y=0.

Lately I've been drawn back to the Amish, as I have been various times through my life. Recent trips to Yoder, KS,
 http://www.yoderkansas.com/ an Amish community may have triggered it. Seeing their simple, basic life. The practical hardware store, horse and buggy transportation, a country store where I found fabric, canning lids and rings, where there is no television. And the Quilts on Parade….our main reason for visiting this little town on the prairie. 

Was it a coincidence, then, that as I looked through my bookshelf for something to read when I finished my last book that my eyes fell upon Plain and Simple? 

A restlessness has seeped into my life lately, after months of mostly sedentary life. Content during that time to read, scrapbook, surf the 'net, I balked at physical activity. Then the days became warmer, and green sprigs poking through the ground in my herb and flowerbeds beckoned me. It was as if they cried, "Help! Clean away the leaves and debris so I can stretch and feel the sun."

Spring is a piece of God's patchwork. Spring, summer, fall, winter. A definite pattern. And yet, within it, differences, tension and harmony: calm spring days when one feels at peace with the world. Turbulent spring storms that threaten to destroy everything with their wind, hail, pounding rain.

Awakening of life, growth, waning and dying. 

Bender's description of the Amish quilts: 

"The relationship of the individual parts to the whole, the proportion, the way the inner and outer borders reacted with each other was a balancing act between tension and harmony."

"How could pared down and daring go together?…calm and intense at the same time?" 

Nature's pallette: Brilliant indigo iris that looks like velvet, pale apricot tree blossoms; vivid red tulips, soft lavender phlox.

Balance.  

Sometimes I think I am learning, as I grow older and (I hope!) wiser. But I used to relate all too well to Bender and her lifestyle, rushing toward goals, not stopping to smell these spring flowers, busy busy busy, trying to do it all.

Bender: "I wanted it all, a glutton for new experience…accumulating choices was a way of not having to make a choice…I pushed myself, trying to make each piece (of pottery) more original than the previous one." 

Ah! So me. My cooking, my art, my life. The other night, as we were cleaning up after dinner, Charlie said to me, "You always make it so complicated." I told him I don't know how not to.

When I discovered Simple Scrapbooking and The Big Picture 
http://bigpicturescrapbooking.com/ , a style taught by Stacy Julian and a few others, it was another Aha! I was drawn to the basic, uncluttered, simple approach to scrapbooking.

When the magazine SS was discontinued a year ago, I mourned. Then I rediscovered Cathy Zielske http://www.cathyzielske.typepad.com/
and, going back through my collection of the old SS books and magazines, rediscovered what had drawn me there in the first place. I had been lured away by the plethora of scrapbook products flooding the market: embellishments, bling, tools. Not to say these are bad, but read on….

The cliche' "back to basics" (photo, paper, story) within a simple pattern speaks to me. I've always been attracted to the nine-patch quilt pattern more than any other. After reading Plain and Simple, I understand. It is ordinary, common, providing a framework within which to be free. Sounds contradictory, but it is not. I've been doing some layouts based on Cathy Zielske's digital templates that are the framework for her page designs I like so much. They are so freeing.

Freedom to be creative within a framework, just as the Amish women use quilting stitches (feather, tulip, wreath, pineapple, star) in their seemingly austere, minimalistic quilts to exercise their creative selves. Often their flower gardens are reflections not of a rigid lifestyle, but of vibrant color and artistic expression. 

I balked at first at using the scrapbooking templates. I didn't want cookie cutter, look-alike pages. But then I discovered they are like using a recipe to cook or a pattern to sew: again, they provide the basic framework, freeing me from that initial hard decision. I can vary the photos, the fonts, the colors, the text within to put my own stamp on a page.

This thought process leads into more I want to say, but as always, I have more to say than space and time allow. So, I will continue this another day because it seems I am leaving this unfinished. 

Meanwhile, Ali Edwards, a "life artist" and scrapbooker I find so inspiring along with Cathy Z, is exploring something that fits well here. She and Cathy are both doing "Week in the Life" projects this week. Read their blogs and tune in here later to see how it all fits together—part of the whole pattern of life and creativity, The Big Picture. 

Now I'm going out to check the progress of the garden Charlie's been planting. From the window I can see the rows of green already making a pattern within the square of the whole.

Party Time!

Spring is Nature's way of saying "Let's have a party."

—Robin Williams

Blue Eyes, Veronica or Speedwell (left); daffodil

We're about to have a party here in Kansas. Seems like it's been a long time coming, but spring is creeping in on little frog song and robin wings.

Bright spots of tiny Blue eyes (veronica or speedwell) dot the prairie and magenta henbit carpets the fields.

Buzzards, phoebes and red-winged blackbirds.

Forsythia and daffodils bursting forth like sunshine.

Smoke hangs in the air from prairie fires; some hills are blackened, and some already are covered with a green haze of new grass.

Fragrance of freshly tilled earth in the garden.

Blue herons rising majestically from the pond.

Flocks of turkeys gathering. Deer grazing tender new grass in our yard. Gentle rain and soft breezes.

These are the soft signs of spring, sighs as Earth is awakening.

Sometimes, though, it is more like a sleeping giant awakening from hibernation: stretching and clearing its lungs with great gusts of wind, blowing limbs off trees and threatening to turn everything inside out. Lashing lightening and booming thunder. Filling the creeks with rushing water.

These storms—or showers—will bring more flowers.

Yes, one way or another, it's Party Time.