Ida's Kitchen

Katherine picked out this pattern and selected the yarn.  She is working at a ski area and will be out on the water in Alaska all summer.  There will be plenty of hat weather for her this year.

Ida's Kitchen

Dike Trail

Between the Skagit River and the sea, there is a lot of water around here that needs to be kept in place.  We don't want salt water in our tulip fields so we have dike districts and miles and miles of dikes. Some of these dikes have fences and no trespassing signs but others are managed as public trails.

It was fun to get out yesterday morning and go for a run on a dike trail.   We saw flocks of green-winged teals, a big old rusty winch in the wetlands and Mt. Rainier in the distance.  It was great to have some sunshine; the cold morning became a warm afternoon. Yay, spring!

 

Spring Forward Socks

I am not a fan of Daylight Saving Time.  We all know that no daylight is saved; it is merely shifted forward and back. It is hard to believe that this country and most of the world agreed on something as silly as changing our clocks, in unison, twice a year.  Arizona and Hawaii wisely bowed out of the foolishness and they still seem to get their schoolchildren on the bus and the crops harvested.  Whatever. Enjoy the longer evenings. You can always make socks.

Spring Forward Socks

Drawing Lab

An artist in Mexico, Geninne Zlatkis, has a blog that I have been reading for years. She was recently featured in a book written by another artist/blogger, Carla Sonheim.

Drawing Lab

The creative exercises in this book are probably familiar to people who have taken art classes. Draw with your non-dominant hand, draw without lifting your pen, draw without looking at your paper. One of the quotes in the introduction is that the lessons make people feel like "being a child again, but you get to do it [draw] as an adult."

This was not the case for me.  I was a scared little kid when it came to art class at school.  Give me a stack of books from the library and I was happy for days but a blank page and a marker with instructions to do whatever I wanted freaked me out every time.  I remember drawing scalloped waves, a sun in the sky and a ship with curling smoke from a stack every. single. time.  I could never think of another subject.

Now the list of things I like to draw starts with A (animals) and ends with Z (zentangles).  There are birds, buildings, cars, doors, faces, flowers, fonts and many other things on my list and I am no longer afraid of a white piece of paper.  Sometimes it is good to grow up and leave your childhood fears behind.

Hats for Gary

I found a pattern (Joni) that is easily adaptable to both sexes and all ages. My first two versions of the hat were for a guy who lives in Montana and works on a ship in Alaska. He will always need a warm hat.

Big Trees

A year ago, in February, we met some friends out on the coast for some winter camping. The Olympic Rain Forest did its thing and poured buckets on us the first night.  The next day was unseasonably warm and we even saw a few young people out swimming in the waves. The screams made it sound pretty cold. 

We met a man at the campground who recommended a book about big trees called The Wild Trees by Richard Preston.  I remembered reading an article in the New Yorker about him and his interest in climbing trees.  The book proved to be a good read and inspired another trip in search of the largest trees in Washington.  Some are pretty easy to get to and they are BIG.  

Family Pictures

August 2009 - John Corso photo

December 2010