Marry Whomever You Love !~!

We started it here and we're rocking it all the way home.

What a weekend we will have here by the Bay. Gay Pride is our baby and we have watched her grow into such an individual and come to be part of the entire world.

New Skill for a New Year

Weaving Caught my Eye

A few weeks ago, I went prowling the streets of Berkeley and found an artists' studio wherein two women shared space: one a painter, the other a weaver. I stopped, stood stock still and fell in love. My weaving class starts in less than four hours. Happy Birthday to me.

I have pinned nearly one hundred pins to my Weaving   board since this interest began and there seems to be no end in sight. Each day I find more pieces that draw me further into the world of warp, weft and warmth.

My bestie has shown me gorgeous items that her mother wove while she was still alive; I have gone through rack after rack at the second hand stores scouring for Linen and other woven fabrics. I want to touch each of them and bring them home to wrap about me while I sleep. I may never buy cotton again...

Other News-Littles Birthdays Approach too and So...

Piper will be five next month. She arrived in the wee hours in late July 2008. What an amazing little blessing she was to our entire courtyard. Flowers bloomed, trees thrust branches skyward in joy; we eagerly peeked out our windows for glimpses of her as she made her way safely in papa or mama's arms to and from their car. From the Netherlands came Oma as Piper neared her first birthday. Watching them bond brought such rejoicing and exhilaration; the six weeks was not nearly long enough. Oma's return home brought Piper into our little apartment three days a week just before she turned one and learned to walk. Here you can see Ormond gently holding her hand as she puts one foot in front of the other successfully. Soon she trotted and within a few months running took hold and we had to get creative about chasing her !~! She always minded us so beautifully and continues to be generous, compassionate and tidy...

Slowly and surely synapses closed.
She only needs one finger for balance in this pic.

At nearly five, she wants to wash her little car
before she drives it around the old stomping ground.

Tie-dye remains a favorite for all us hippies.

So I make quilts for them now that they are old enough to appreciate and enjoy the warmth and uniqueness of their special blankets. 

Piper chose the blocks and the colors; I played with layout.

Piper is first in the birthday parade of summer with a fifty by fifty inch number. I have finished the flimsy and washed the batting and backing. No problem finishing it in time, she says confidently.

Following right on the heels of Piper's special day comes Ginger's fourth birthday at the end of August. Her color choices have been in place for weeks: Red, pink, white, and purple. Here's what I have come up with for her.

Blue Dot - Our Mote in a Sunbeam

These images are not mine. I see them in many places on this wide wide web. Too many to try to credit any one individual, so to whomever it was that posted these the first time, probably some Science Magazine, thank you very much.

To Carl Sagan, whose words are below the pictures, I can only say: You are missed, loved and remembered every time I look up into the vast, immense, unending sky. Gratitude, from deep in my soul.

Earth as seen by Voyager 1 

from the edge of our solar system 

more than twenty years ago. 

Voyager was approximately 3,762,136,324 miles from home. 

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

May Wrap-Up

Finished Project

May was an interesting month in the sewing section of LyndaLand. As much as I wanted to be spending lots of time at the machine life saw otherwise. This most important piece saw completion. I link up with Barbara's 2013 FO Challenge.

Lucia's Graduation Quilt

Lucia and I met when she was a wee baby and I went to work with her family. She now graduates from fifth grade at the best school I have ever had the pleasure of coming to know, Head Royce in Oakland. For this auspicious occasion, I made her a quilt. With purple and gold silk-screened fabric in two corners and my signature blocks in the other two, I created my 'four-blocks in four blocks' quilt that finished at about four feet by four feet. The backing is a soft and sweet pastel striped linen and silk that I thrifted a few weeks back at my favorite little joint in El Cerrito; with a piece of the extra I made her an infinity scarf to wear when she feels chilled. The purple fabric came from the Africa Store (cannot remember exact name or I'd link it, sorry) on Shattuck Ave in Berkeley when they sold their inventory at great prices so they could remodel back in 2001. I have a long piece of it between my living room and hall; I never tire of its subtle print and gorgeous color. Lucia loves purple too. You can see it best in the bottom picture.

Bringing the backing around to form binding.

Showing that magnificent backing.

Completed and ready to gift.

Lucia and I
hiking one afternoon in late 2009.