A cup of tea can be an act of love. Filling the kettle, turning on the flame, selecting a variety, opening the tea and inhaling the floral scents, dipping and pouring, stirring and dripping in honey or a squeeze of lemon or a splash of milk. Tea is ceremonial and one completes that ceremony by delivering that steaming, trembling cup, all hot and fragrant, as an offering, a gesture of attention to one you love.
Our Annual Sale
Coming up!
Onions
I just hung work at Morning Glory today. Go have breakfast there. Everything tastes better with onions!
small herd
I’m so proud of these girls! Stop by Morning Glory Cafe sometime this month to meet them in person.
the alchemy of slow
I just finished this one’s outfit. It was a stunningly slow process. Hand stitching each tiny panel, turning it right side out, stitching it onto her small stuffed chest. She waited placidly while I dressed her. I embodied patience, manifest new realms of patience within myself as I worked, a millimeter at a time, executing almost indiscernibly small movements with my needle, making hardly noticeable progress, dwelling at the apex of SLOW.
AI can make beautiful images, compose elegant pros, but can it go slow? Can it mull over many inconsequential things (gophers in top hats, paying taxes, eating popsicles…) while continuing the central work at a plod? What is the alchemy that emerges from this kind of two speed focus, the mind buzzing circles around the measured and deliberate march of the hands?
Feeling Mary Shelley
This week I finished several pairs of hands. I stitched and stuffed this one’s legs and sewed some decorative stripes down them. She blinked her eyes and whispered something in my ear just as I was attaching her final hoof. The moment they come alive never ceases to stun me, thrill me. How bits of clay and cloth transform from some intention I only held in my mind’s eye (a wavering and shadowy imagined thing), into a real and solid manifestation of an idea. I am always WOWed by this alchemy.
Antler Efforts
I resisted my urge to branch out into other shapes; the curving rippled horn of the Dahl Sheep, the dangerous dark spike of the Texas Longhorn, the elegant, spiraling regalia of the Impala. I wanted to try each of these. How would I bend the copper and stitch the fiber skin to render each miraculous horn shape? My curiosity will have to wait though. I am committed to deer for now, and where there is one deer there are always more.