Welcome to my blog! This is a sketch book of things I'm drawing, photographing, writing, or just thinking about when I'm not busy designing fabric.
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This isn’t widely known, but I’m an animal behaviorist in a parallel universe. I sit for hours in a forest and stare at whatever shows up and I take copious notes. I do this for months at a time, thanks to my automatically-renewing research grant. Sometimes, when I get bored, I slap myself on the forehead (except I don’t really, because that might startle the pack of wolves I’m observing), and I think: Man! I should have become a fabric designer!
In this universe, I live in a city and sometimes take pictures of crows. I have this fantasy that after I die (years from now, of course) my treasure trove of crow photos will be discovered. And the spokesperson of some university will be quoted as saying, “Two million photographs of crows! Kind of high on the OCD scale. But still…what a gift to science!”
I’m not sure how many people walk across the Ballard Bridge for fun. It’s not what you’d call friendly to pedestrians. Its sidewalk is narrow and, for most of the bridge’s 1/2 mile length, there’s only a small curb to separate the sidewalk from traffic.
BUT, if you can deal with that, then there’s all sorts of interesting stuff to see.
For instance, if you’re on the east side of the bridge, look to the north and you’ll see a little house surrounded by a big building. That house was owned by Edith Macefield, an elderly woman who refused to sell to the developer of the property. The developer built around her. You can’t see it in these pictures, but the new building wraps around the house…there’s a massive concrete wall at the back of the house…leaving only the front of the house open. Edith Macefield has since died, but she left a remarkable stamp on the neighborhood.
There’s a little cove at the north end of the bridge where I’ve often seen a Great Blue Heron. Once, Tom and I saw a Kingfisher scoop a small fish out of the water and retreat with it to the trees at the left of the photo. (Beyond the cove, you can see the little house, and the building that surrounds it.)
There are also boats, of course. The water here is the ship canal, leading from Lake Union out to Puget Sound. The bridge opens to let large boats through. As a pedestrian, it’s pretty much required that you imagine the bridge opening, with yourself caught on one of the opening-skyward sections. Even though I’ve never heard of a pedestrian actually getting caught on the opening bridge, you should have a strategy. Just in case! Then, if you’re walking across the bridge with someone, you can debate the merits of your two strategies, which are bound to be different from each other. I should have taken more pictures of the scenic expanse of the ship canal, but I was looking for animals over the side of the bridge.
There’s a crow. The paved area in the crow picture used to look like the two pictures below it. Those were taken at the bridge two years ago, before the repaving project. There’s a Great Blue Heron in each of those pictures. And a Red-eared Slider Turtle.
To finish up, one last animal sighting, before the end of the bridge. A dog! That means I could’ve used this for Wednesday’s Dog, but wasn’t that an awful lot of stuff to wade through before getting to the dog?
Wednesdays are Dog Days
It seems like whenever I spend time trying to organize my stuff, I come across things that didn’t quite work out the way I wanted them to. And right here is an example. After my “XOXOXO, The Cat” and “Feathered Friends” fabric collections were released, I decided that a dog-themed collection was the next logical step. I thought an urban dog park would be fun. And…I still think it would be fun, but this collection didn’t quite come together. But look, there’s an urban dog park! It’s even got a dogwood tree. And see the squirrel? Doesn’t it make you want to go outside? It makes me want to go outside.
OK. Back to organizing.
It must be the lack of meetings in my life that makes me imagine them all the time. I see something new and I’m instantly transported to meeting fantasyland. So. Big table. People in suits. Saying something like…
How can we differentiate our shopping carts from other shopping carts? Add a baby-carrier! That’s been done. Smaller carts? Done. Larger carts? Done. Plastic? Done. Cart shaped like a space ship to amuse the kids and build strong muscles and navigation skills in the steering/pushing parent? Done.
What about…a cup holder! It’s easy to install and cheap! It provides value to the customer by transforming the shopping experience into a…a…a coffee drinking experience! We’ll test drive it in Seattle. Trust me on this one, folks. This is going to be big!
For me, 2009 has been all about having a positive outlook. I’m not talking about big things like war, or famine, or pestilence. I don’t spend any time trying to come up with a positive spin on the great tragedies. But, with smaller things, I figure it’s worth looking for a bright side.
I had to admit failure though, last weekend, when I realized that I could find no love in my heart for either ferrets or drumming circles.
If I had to be trapped in a room with one of them though, I would probably pick the ferret.
Wednesdays Are Dog Days
I’ve been working on an epic “tagging” project, where I’m giving all of my digital photos (from the past two years) identifying tags so I can easily search on whatever subject I want, and see all the photos that fit that category. So, in the midst of this project, I came across a folder of photos that I took at a classic car show last summer. You’d think I could tag them all as “classic car” and be done with it, but no. It turns out that there is not a car, classic or otherwise, in the entire collection of photos. There are just dogs.
Part 1
This is Part 1, not because I have a Part 2 (I don’t), but because I think that chances are good that, sooner or later, I’ll see something else that’s strange, in a tree.
Especially if Tom is with me, since he’s the one who actually spotted the deer in the tree. “Hey, look at that,” he said.
“Cool,” I said. “I wonder who put that there? I better take a picture.”
Things start off easy, and then they get so complicated. Take Penny, for instance. She’s got one superpower (freezing things with her breath), but other than that she’s pretty normal. So, she can (theoretically) save the arctic, but she needs to get there first. (See Penny’s story so far here, and here.)
As near as I can figure, it would cost Penny $4,500 minimum to get to — and stay at — somewhere in the arctic for a week. She doesn’t have that kind of money laying around and it’s really tempting to just give her a cape and to decide that, like Superman, she can fly. That way we could get right to the superhero adventure portion of this story.
But that would be cheating.
So, for now, Penny is feeling depressed because what good is it to have a superpower if you can’t use it?
Meanwhile, there’s a rumor floating around the coffee shop. Penny’s friend and fellow barista Tiff (only her mother still calls her Tiffany) tells Penny that a newly-hired barista, working a different shift, seems to have the same uncanny skills with hot drinks that Penny has with cold drinks. That gets Penny’s mind racing. She knows that her own skills are due to her superpower. Does that mean…? Who is this new barista?
Penny will have to wait a while for that answer.
Wednesdays Are Dog Days
I’m not a big believer in the Law of Attraction, which seems to say that if you want something, and think really hard about it, that the universe will deliver it to you. (For instance, I’m still waiting for my million dollars.)
BUT. Just last week, I was thinking I didn’t have much going on for this week’s Wednesday Dog, and moments later a friend gave me some Happy Chihuahuas swatches. I’m slow sometimes, so it took me another three hours to realize that I’d been handed Wednesday’s Dog.
Then, I had the revelation that more likely than not, my million dollars has also been handed to me, but I’ve been oblivious to it. Sort of like you see something as one thing first (cute swatch of fabric), but then recognize that it’s something more (Wednesday Dog).
So now I’m trying to figure out what my million dollars is disguised as. I’m pretty sure it’s around here somewhere.
