More Garden Discoveries

I was digging out a weedy patch between the house and our newly laid patio in back when I unearthed a few bulbs and then remembered there had been daffodils here in the spring. Darn!

I am trying to go around and take stock periodically so I know what's hiding amongst the weeds before I dig, but I haven't been as diligent as I need to be with that. Julia had an abundant flower garden in this sunny backyard, and I'm told by neighbors that she kept up with it right up to her final days, when she was in her 80s. But the house sat empty for two years, and last summer when we moved in, our attention was on the inside of the house, so that made for a third summer of neglect. Now all the gardens are completely overrun with weeds, as well as with raspberries and daisies—which may or may not qualify as weeds, depending on how you look at them. I see them (raspberries and daisies) as plants with desirable traits that tend to be a tad too exuberant in their growth habits. A few more years of neglect and I think the whole yard would become a raspberry-daisy thicket-meadow.

Daisies and sundrops oenothera

The daisies are really pretty easy to deal with, and I do enjoy them when they pop up in the lawn or cluster around the clothes pole where the mower can't quite reach them; and they harmonize nicely with most of the other flowers, such as the sundrops oenothera.

But the raspberry thicket is another matter—I know that it's hiding some real gems under its thorny arching canes, and yet the promise of their sweet berries had me reluctant to start cutting them down and digging them out while it was still cool enough to wear long sleeves for the job. It's not that I have any intention of removing them completely, nor any illusion that I can—they originated on my neighbor's side of the fence and will continue to volunteer on my side for, well, as long as my neighbors have theirs. And that's alright by me, I love raspberries. But they need to be confined to the area alongside the fence that directly corresponds to where my neighbors have them, and the flowers that are growing in the raspberries need to be relocated—I wouldn't have even known I had a pink dictamnus (gas plant) had my neighbor Bonny not told me. I found it blooming in amongst the raspberries, almost completely hidden by them.

But I don't want to move them in the middle of summer, and not while they're flowering, and not until I have prepared a suitable new garden bed for them.

Coral bells amongst the weeds and an emerging hibiscus

So in the meantime, I am taking pictures and making notes, and really should be shoving plant markers into the ground to identify them, especially the ephemerals, before they finish blooming and I forget what they are! Even those that are easy to ID from their emerging leaves, like the lilies, need to be labeled as to their color and height, so that I can group them in vignettes that I find pleasing.

Even though we paid frequent visits to this backyard last June after our offer was accepted, and were here every day after July 1st when we closed on the house, and moved in at the end of July, I'm "discovering" all sorts of flowers that I didn't remember seeing last summer, or had forgotten their color. Here are a few gems amongst the weeds that are currently blooming or nearly finished.

Rosy lilies that were all but hidden behind the raspberries—until they bloomed.















A surprise discovery of a white penstemon mingling with the oenothera.

Some rose-colored salvia that will need to be untangled from the grasses. Behind this (on the other side of the downspout) are two platycodon, which are not yet blooming, but which I photographed last summer and so was reminded of them when I looked at those photos (below).

Last summer's platycodon: white ...

















and blue.

And more, many more. I have an abundance of perennials here, I just need to divide them and relocate them, after not only preparing new beds, but also making a plan for how I want to group them.

Good thing we're going to be here a long time!

An Urban Stone Garden Wall

Craig removes sod and starts digging out the slope

You'd think a guy would feel entitled to take it easy on Fathers' Day. But no; we had planned to build a retaining wall across the front of our yard this weekend, and yesterday's rain left us with only today to tackle the job, and Craig was determined to get it done. He had suggested that we allow ourselves a leisurely start to the day and that we would begin the project at noon, but at a little after ten, he was done with all that lounging around and ready to get to work. With shovel in hand, he headed to the front yard and started to dig.

The first layer is set on a ditch filled with gravel.

I rode my bike to Mother Earth Gardens to buy something to plant in the wall, and settled on a creeping veronica called 'Waterperry blue' (you may think that's a typo, and I would agree with you that 'waterberry' makes more sense, but it's spelled with a 'p' on the tag). Besides the pretty sky-blue flowers in the picture on the tag, and its creeping habit, and the notation that it's a good rock garden plant, and its tolerance for part shade, I was sold on the care instructions: "Thrives in nearly any soil and requires little attention." It came in a pack of six small plants, just right for placing here and there in the wall.

It's getting there

Yesterday we had gone to Klier's garden center on Nicollet and 59th to get some class 5 gravel for the wall's base. Klier's has gravel in bulk, and we put a tarp in the back of the car (a Honda Fit, which is a hatchback) and brought a couple of shovels. Just when we got there, it started to pour. The wet gravel was pretty heavy and dense (class 5 is a limestone gravel with the crushed dust included, which makes it pack down to a firm base while still providing drainage, but it also makes it a lot like cement when wet), so we soon decided that we had enough.

Craig sweeps up

For stones, we had decided to use the broken chunks of sidewalk that Craig has been removing from the backyard. That wasn't our original plan; we were going to have all the sidewalk chunks hauled away and then at some point in the future buy nice limestone rocks to make a wall. Then we had to admit that we're not as rich as we sometimes think we are, and, besides, there's something appealing about recycling the sidewalk on property. Also, a polite note from the city inspector persuaded us that it was time to do something with that pile of concrete by the alley.

So, we built a wall. Our original plan was to build one on both sides of the steps, but we're kind of rethinking that right now. We'll see how we feel about that next weekend.

A lady's mantle (Alchemilla mollis) accents the corner

Not Quite a Room of One's Own

My basement art room in progress

Ever since we moved last summer, I have been looking forward to having a real art studio space where I can get all my stuff organized, with enough shelf space to keep my work table clear so I can just plop down and dive in whenever I get the urge to create.

But it hasn't quite worked out that way. Just as the garden had to wait until other more pressing home-improvement projects were completed, the basement finishing, with art room and TV-watching room on either side, has been on hold, first because of those other more pressing projects (kitchen, bathroom, central air conditioning that still isn't working), and now because this is the time to act on those gardening and landscaping projects.

And, to be fair, it's not that I'm constantly feeling the urge to create stuff with no place to answer the longing. For a while, I was digging around in the various boxes in the basement whenever it was time to make ATCs for a monthly exchange I participate in with a few friends (two of whom I've never met in person, but still regard as friends—or perhaps I should say comrades in arts). I would bring the selected supplies up to my desk in our nicely appointed home office in the second bedroom on the main floor, complete my project-in-miniature (ATCs are artists' trading cards, and they are the same size as other trading cards), then, eventually, gather up the tools and supplies and bring them back downstairs.

An art bunny photo shoot using the natural light of an east window in our first-floor home office

When I brought things back downstairs, I also started to gradually move them into the space that was slated to become my art room, and get them somewhat organized in some freestanding shelves that didn't require finished walls behind them. That was going pretty well, and I was beginning to think that I might be able to create a serviceable interim studio, when I was persuaded that my art room and the family TV room—really two sides of the same large room—should switch places.

Now, my husband is far more expedient than I am, and I will sometimes admit that if it weren't for him, nothing would ever get done around here. So, he moved my shelves and various storage containers to the other side of the room, and, to be fair, tried his best to keep everything in the same order that I had it. But, since my "order" follows a spacial logic that exists only inside my head, he failed.

So I found myself back to spending fifteen minutes looking for something so simple as a glue stick. Compounding that was the return of my creative and lovely daughter, whom I adore, from college for the summer. She tends to borrow my stuff and doesn't tend to get around to always putting it back.

Grandma's sewing machine, from the factory

If you follow my Etsy shop at all (see how cleverly I slipped in that link?), you may well wonder how I could post so many items there if I have no space in which to work. I will tell you. All of the drawings were done before 2010, the note cards are made with scans of these drawings, and most of the rest is either knitted (which I do in my living room chair) or sewn. My sewing machine (a fabulous old factory machine that my grandmother used when she worked at Lockets Liberty Garments in the Wyman building in downtown Minneapolis in the 1930s and '40s) is located in the laundry room, and my small projects don't require much table space to cut out.

Grandma at the factory, ca 1940

And a good thing, that; because it is my capacity to create something, at least, that keeps me from being completely frustrated these days. The garden, too, involves a good deal of creativity, both in the form of problem-solving challenges and good old freewheeling artistry.

But I don't intend to wait until gardening season is over to get back to doing some paper arts, including making ATCs. In fact, with some muggy days in the forecast, and the a.c. sitting idle until Wednesday (crossing my fingers), I may be spending a little more time in the basement soon.

Rescuing the Peonies

Last June, before we actually closed on our purchase of this house, I stopped by with a handful of Popsicle sticks and a Sharpie to label the peonies along the south side of the then-empty house, noting  the color of their blossoms. I reasoned that by the time we moved in, their petals would have long since dropped and withered and I wouldn't know which were pink and which were white, and I thought I might want to dig them up and move them in the fall, with an eye to some to-be-determined color schematic.

But our house offered plenty of projects to keep us busy and I didn't get to the garden at all last summer. That's just as well, because it allowed me a full growing season to observe and photograph the garden. Among the things I observed was that nearly all the peonies were afflicted with splotches on the leaves and spots on the stems, most likely caused by one of several fungal diseases of peonies, especially if their spent stems and leaves are left to rot in place over winter. It also looked like some of the buds had failed to open at all.

Not remembering the blossoms themselves as anything special, only that some were white and some were a medium pink, I had pretty much decided they weren't going to be worth the bother and that I would just discard and destroy the plants and start over, planting new ones in a different location to avoid infecting them with the same problems.

Bloom of, possibly, Peony Annisquam

Then they bloomed, and I was smitten. As I hope you can see from the photos, the "white" ones are really a very pale pink, and their blossoms are so full of petals that even after dozens of the petals fell to the floor when I was rearranging them for the picture, they're still large and voluptuous flowers. And of course they smell wonderful, as do all peonies. A Google image search has me thinking these are probably Peony Annisquam, a 1951 introduction, and available from a Minnesota nursery, Hidden Springs Flower Farm. Since Julia Johnson had tended this garden from the 1950s on, and, from what I have learned from her children (who sold us the house) and our neighbors, was a pretty sophisticated gardener, it's likely she would have bought a few stylish new plants to enhance her yard. At today's prices, the several specimens that grow alongside the house would cost me $25 each to replace. I think I'll keep them.

Even the "ordinary" medium pink ones are, of course, beautiful and fragrant. How could I have thought I could so cavalierly discard them? Besides, ridding peonies of a disease such as this is pretty straightforward and amounts to nothing more than a few good cultural practices: adequate sun and water, good drainage, good air circulation, and—especially important in this case—a thorough cleanup of all plant debris in the fall.

Note the spots on the stem and browned edges of petals

Since I want to move them anyway, preferring a good swath of prairie next to the house (the reasons for which will be the subject of another post), I'll do so in September, a good month for dividing and planting peonies. When I do, I'll rinse the roots to remove the soil, which likely carries the spores of whatever is infecting them, and plant them in fresh soil amended with compost and manure. And as soon as the first frost zaps them, I'll cut all stems off at the soil surface and discard them and all the leaves (or, more likely, bury them at the bottom of a hugelkultur bed). I have treated similar peony problems this way before and did not have to do anything more, except to continue to remove the plant debris after frost.

Peonies are extremely long-lived perrennials, and I'm looking forward to many years (decades, really) of these luxurious flowers. It's also sweet to imagine that long after I'm gone, those peonies will still be here to delight future occupants of this house.

A (mostly) leisurely South Minneapolis bike and bistro tour

A flowering tree at the Lyndale Peace Garden (rock garden)

Last Tuesday was our wedding anniversary, so Craig took the day off from work and we planned a day of leisurely bike riding, ending with dinner at Cafe Maude in SW Minneapolis's Armitage neighborhood. We chose Cafe Maude not only because it is a very nice restaurant and we especially love their lamb skewer appetizers, but also because going there by bicycle means following the bike trail along Minnehaha Creek for most of the way.

Never mind that we chose to head west on a day when winds from that direction were averaging 25–35 mph, with gusts up to 40 mph! (Hence the "mostly leisurely" reference.) I kept thinking that once we got down by the creek and more or less into the woods, the wind would be buffered. But not so much. And, of course, the creek being in something of a valley through the city, as soon as we parted from the bike path to head into a neighborhood, we had a steep uphill climb. So, we got a good workout as well.

We left before noon and stopped first at Patisserie 46 at 46th and Grand where we shared a sandwich and salad for a light lunch. Just as we approached the counter, the barista announced that he had made an extra latte by mistake, and he offered it to us. That plus a delicious chocolate chip cookie make a very lovely dessert. After browsing a cute and friendly gift shop at 48th and Grand called A Little Bird, which featured a chic/trendy mix of old and new items, we headed over to the Roberts Bird Sanctuary by Lake Harriet for a stroll.

Roberts Bird Sanctuary on May 31

All of our recent rains had rendered parts of the sanctuary more like a bayou, and in places the plank path along what should have been the edge of the bog was either submerged or squelching mud when we tried to walk on it, so we turned back and chose an upland route instead.

Jack in the pulpit in the bird sanctuary

The overhead branches of aspen and cottonwood swayed vigorously in the wind, and may have blown the birds away! The only one I recall spotting was a glimpse as we were leaving, shaped like a black-crowned night heron but smaller; I didn't get a good enough look at it to ID it. We did see of lot of jack-in-the-pulpit, with its huge leaves and distinct hooded spadix, and it was a pleasant walk anyway, despite the mud and absence of birds.

It was still too early for dinner, even after our stroll through the bird sanctuary was followed by a walk in the rock garden, so we pedaled uphill again into Linden Hills to Cafe Twenty-eight to enjoy a cold drink and a snack. After lingering on their outdoor patio for an hour or more, we rode to the Paperback Exchange used-book shop on 50th and Penn, where Craig found a Barbara Kingsolver book (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle) and I found a few gems, including Words Fail Me by Patricia T. O'Conner, to add to my collection of language usage books.

Cafe 28 in Linden Hills

We arrived at Cafe Maude in time for their "leisure hour" specials on our salads and wine. We then split the lamb skewers appetizer and a steak dinner (splitting everything so as to pace ourselves, still), but didn't stay for dessert. Instead, we headed back east along the creek, with the still-strong wind at our backs this time, and finished the evening at Three Tiers Bakery Bistro in what Craig likes to call "downtown" Nokomis, for a couple of petits fours and some rhubarb sauce over house-made vanilla ice cream. We thought we had carefully paced our eating, but we were quite stuffed after that!

In the whole day, we had probably biked about 14 miles total, not exactly an ambitious day of bike riding. It really felt like we had spent the day as tourists in our own town, appreciating a few of the delightful cafes and bistros and bike paths and serene natural spots that Minneapolis has to offer.

Not everybody's cup of cappuccino

I wandered around on my bike yesterday, wanting to pedal a little more than a trip to my usual neighborhood haunts would require. So I headed west along Minnehaha Creek, our wonderfully wild and natural urban bicycle byway that leads through little passages of woodland right in the city, then turned north at Pleasant Avenue and headed up—literally—through the neighborhood known as Tangletown. It's so-named for the rabbit warren of curving streets that lace through and across each other as they climb up from the creek. It's an excellent workout, especially since there's no way to get any kind of momentum before you find yourself on a rather steep incline.

I intended to end up at a new little bakery and cafe known as Pattisserie 46, at 46th and Grand, but discovered that they're closed Mondays. So I headed over to Anodyne Coffee, just a few blocks (and at only a slightly higher elevation) away.

The baristas were in good spirits, as they usually are there. A regular customer came in and the barista asked how's it going, and the customer said she'd been working in her yard all morning, digging weeds. "My back yard is almost completely purple with creeping charlie," she said with a weary sigh.

"Sweet," said the cheery barista, her gaze on the espresso machine as she prepared the customer's drink.

"And my front yard is full of dandelions," added the regular.

"I love dandelions," said the barista, seemingly oblivious to the exasperation in the regular's voice.

Gotta love that barista.

Sweet Violets

I've been seeing lots of violets lately, in lawns and gardens and the crevices of sidewalks. They appeared about the same time as the dandelions, right after we had a hot day followed by lots of rain. I have no understanding, and certainly no sympathy, for those who consider them such a menace that they'll part with their hard-earned money to have some chemical company come and poison their lawn just to get rid of them.

Amongst the various definitions of insanity,  I'd suggest that poisoning your lawn and, subsequently the birds and other innocent creatures who visit it, in order to destroy a harmless little flower growing amongst the otherwise boring blades of grass really ought to be one of the top ten.

Common sweet violets (Viola odorata) and their cultivated cousins the pansies (Viola tricolor), and also all members of the viola family, are not only pretty, but also tasty mixed in a salad or decorating a cake. They're mildly sweet and, in truth, offer more in the way of edible decor than flavor. One of our neighborhood bistros, Al Vento, has grown pansies in the planter boxes surrounding their patio, and last spring, I remember the waiter snipping a few for the chef, who used them as a garnish with dessert.

Of course, we're not the only species that can enjoy violas as food. Rabbits will happily munch on them rather than on your garden plants, if the supply in your lawn is plentiful. Fritillary butterflies prefer them as larval plants, and recently emerged bumblebee queens appreciate the nectar after their long winter nap—and anything you can do to get bumblebees to stick around will increase the yields in your garden, especially on the tomato plants, which bumblebees pollinate better than any other insect.

Despite their delicate appearance, violets are tough and sneaky little flowers. Hence, all the efforts to eradicate them from lawns eventually fail. They spread by underground runners as well as by seed, which is why they tend to colonize a given area once they get started there. And when they are ready to go to seed, they nod and tuck their little inconspicuous seedheads out of site and near the ground, so regular lawn mowing doesn't even affect them.

They have some medicinal uses, too, though I've never tried to use them in this way. According to this site, the ancient Greeks used them to "moderate anger" and strengthen the heart, and one of the common names for both violets and pansies in old England is Heart's Ease. A delicious bit of irony, when you think of the people so irritated by them that they'll do anything to kill them.

Julia's Garden: Emerging and Transforming

Julia Johnson was the former owner and gardener at this house. She passed away a few years ago and the house sat empty for a couple of years while the family waited for the market to improve, or so I understand. I'm glad they decided to sell it when they did, because it was right when we were looking last spring (actually, I think they had listed it in January and by spring when we saw it, they had lowered the price—must have reached that point when an asset becomes a burden!)

We closed on the house on July 2 last year, spent the month of July madly doing as much as we could to upgrade and spruce up the house, as well as simply to make it better suit our own tastes, then moved in at the end of July. So, our focus all last summer and fall was on the inside of the house (except for installing gutters to redirect the rain from the roof, but that was for the sake of the inside, as well, of course). Now it's time to start on the outside, my favorite part!

Julia was quite an avid flower gardener, but apparently not a vegetable gardener. The space at the back that we had assumed must have been her kitchen garden because it enjoys such terrific sunlight and is completely overrun with weeds, raspberries, and a random assortment of flowers, was, as it turns out, where the family used to park their second car. That would explain the two slightly skewed rows of heavy concrete pavers we've been hauling out of there! (We hardly noticed them last summer, when the weeds were three feet tall!)

Our neighbor Joe informed us that Julia "threw some raspberries in there" because she didn't know what else to do with the suckering canes. Ah, raspberries; a mixed blessing, indeed! There is a thriving thicket of them against the fence that we share with Bonnie and Joe—a thicket that grows on both sides of the fence, and it's not clear which side it started on! Taming that thicket is one of my daunting tasks this summer. But, fortunately, we all love raspberries, so it'll be a labor of love.

I imagine the same explanation applies to the clumps of lupines, blackeyed Susans and echinacea in the former parking space, all of which also grow elsewhere in the garden. Chances are she needed to divide these robust perennials and couldn't bear to discard them. Who can blame her? I have started potting up clumps of them to bring to a spring plant swap or two. It'll nice to have something other than orange daylilies to offer!

And then there are the daffodils, tulips, and grape hyacinths. What a treat to see these emerging and opening up this spring. I should not be surprised there are so many daffodils, because it would seem that Julia really liked yellow. We painted over a few faded yellow walls last summer, and when we visited the estate sale for this home last June, I selected this figurine dressed in yellow as a memento of Julia. The daughter-in-law taking payment said, "This one looks like Julia, too." Whether that's true or she just said it because I told her why I was buying it, I like to think of this pretty little lady as Julia's totem, or maybe I should say "avatar." I named her Julia, anyway. She's too fragile to keep outdoors, but I brought her out to the garden to pose alongside Julia's daffodils for a photo.

Cabbages and eggs, again

Boiled eggs, chopped red cabbage, turmeric, & vinegar

I wasn't going to color Easter eggs this year, what with Nora away and me not into doing the whole Easter Bunny thing anymore. Last year I announced to our two adult children that the Easter Bunny had retired, but if they wanted to hide eggs for each other, they should feel free to go right ahead and do so.

Here the eggs are inside the bowls

But I still enjoy coloring eggs, especially since I started playing around with food-based natural coloring agents a few years ago. It kind of seems more magical to me, to make your own dyes from foods and spices; or maybe it's just more appealing and kind of a novelty. It always makes me want to experiment with dyeing other things, like linen bookbinding thread (which I've done) and paper (which I've also done, but only with tea and rust—but not together; that is, I have used them together and it just turned the paper gray, so now i know better).

It's the one time each year that I buy white eggs. All the rest of the year I buy brown eggs. Either way, they're organic, free-range eggs from the co-op, but most of the time the brown eggs just appeal to me more. But I don't expect they would color up very well, would they?

To keep things simple this year, I just did two colors, with three eggs of each. I boiled up seven eggs Friday morning, and ate one of them for breakfast (taking it out of the water after only three minutes so the yolk would be soft), and let the others sit until I had finished my tea.

Not bad!

So, this year's egg dyes are from red cabbage and the spice turmeric, following the directions from Lakewinds Co-op. After letting them sit in the refrigerator for a few hours, I took the eggs out and rinsed them off and was pleased to find I got a deeper blue from the cabbage than in past years—and some little white splotches that make them look more interesting than if they were just evenly colored. The turmeric always produces a nice rich gold color. (Compare the result from a couple of years ago in this blog post.)

Next: make deviled eggs, of course. And cole slaw—there's always more cabbage than I need just for eggs. And maybe next year I'll try some different foods, like beets, too.

Another postal treasury on Etsy

Vintage postage stamps from Verde Studio on Etsy

I do love getting and sending fun stuff in the mail, it's the reason I joined Postcrossing, and it sometimes inspires me to look on Etsy to see what handmade and vintage items I can find to make mailing stuff even funner.

So I curated a treasury in anticipation of Mothers' Day, Write Your Mother.

My most surprising and delightful find? Vintage postage stamps that haven't been used, so you can use them to send mail. Sure, you're paying more than face value for them, but, even so, what fun!

Little knitting/felting projects

My new crafting zine, with three knitting patterns

I like to knit, but I have kind of a short knitting attention span; I'd rather not start a project unless I can reasonably expect to see it to the end in short order, before events intervene or I just get sidetracked. On top of that, I prefer to use quality yarns, but I don't like to spend a lot of money. So, I look for things I can knit from a single skein of yarn or less. This also allows me to sometimes rummage in the yarn shop remnant bin, for that discounted skein that's the only one left of its dye lot.

I like to knit socks, too, which are actually rather time-consuming, but they don't use a lot of yarn and the whole project is easily contained in my small knitting bag (it's a canvas tote that's less than a foot deep and wide). That's my other criteria: I want the project to be small and easily portable, so I can knit at the coffee shop or wherever I like. And I don't mind sticking that project out to the end, because I end up with a pair of handknit socks, which is a wonderful thing. No less an authority than Pablo Neruda has extolled the virtues of hand-knit socks in his poem "Ode to my Socks."

The other beauty of knitting socks is that you learn some skills that can be applied elsewhere; the short rows used to turn a heel can also be used for other rounded shapes, like little critters with well-formed behinds that allow them to sit up.

A couple of years ago, after knitting a bunny from a Fiber Trends pattern, which turned out much bigger than I had hoped it would (it was felted after knitting), but taught me a lot about how to knit  an animal, I started thinking about making up my own patterns. There were things about the Fiber Trends pattern I didn't like, too: it seemed unnecessarily complicated, and, like all their patterns, it's printed on a kind of dark teal paper, which can make it a little hard to read. I assume they do that to discourage people from photocopying their patterns to share with others, and I find myself simultaneously sympathetic and disapproving of that. Why shouldn't friends share patterns? Knitting is such a social activity, it just doesn't seem right to be too proprietary about it.

A random free form cat toy

I've knit some cat toys totally freehand, without a plan or a pattern, using wool yarn so that I can then felt them in the washing machine, which makes them firmer and stronger to hold up to the kind of abuse cats dish out. I can't find the mouse to photograph for this blog (it's probably under the sofa or something), but here's this random alien-looking thing that I made when I first learned how to do an i-cord. Making cat toys is a fun way to do improvised knitting, since it doesn't really matter how they turn out.

Other small projects I've made are a coin purse, a needle "purse" (like a needle book, only it resembles a purse more than a book), and a frog. With each of these, I took detailed notes, and made revisions, and finally got around to typing them up and publishing them in a little booklet, which I decided to call a zine and name it Remnants, with the intention of sharing more scrappy projects in the future, not always about knitting. It's available at my Etsy shop, and it's printed on white paper, with permission granted to reproduce and share it with your friends, because that's what I would do.

So, if you're a knitter, you might like to check it out here.

Julia's Garden in Spring

When we made an offer on this house last May, it was after most of the spring bulbs had finished their blooming, and I really don't remember seeing any evidence of bulbs at all. Yet it was clear that the former owner, Julia Johnson, who lived to a ripe old age and died a couple of years before we bought the house, had been a gardener—the peonies and phlox and black-eyed susans and their many floral companions attested to that! (They weren't all blooming in May, but were tall enough to be identified by that time.)

It was a hot spring last year, and that tends to shorten the life of the early frost-hardy blooms—they take the cold with cheerful abandon, but they whither and fade in the heat. Also, the garden had been neglected for a couple of years at least, so there were plenty of weeds to hide the fading foliage of any ephemerals that might be there. Fortunately, bulbs tend to thrive on neglect: The reason for tulips' reputation as not really being all that perennial is because the bulbs rot from too much water and fertilizer during their dormancy in mid to late summer.

Yet, even though I had plenty of reason to expect to find spring flowers emerging in this bountiful backyard, it's still been a series of serendipities as each day reveals a little more of Julia's legacy. First I spotted tulip tips emerging near the house, followed soon by daffodils—more and more daffodils around the perimeter of the yard, coming up through the thicket of raspberry canes and aggressive perennials—which are already swelling in the bud, very near ready to burst open.

And today I spotted the squill, first in a patch next to Julia's patio, mingling with the seedheads of last summer's black-eyed susans, then a few sweet little blue buds in the lawn by the clothes pole.

But no crocuses, which I find rather curious. I guess I'll have to plant crocuses this fall!

Window shopping on Etsy

Since I've discovered how to curate a "treasury" on Etsy—that's their term for a mini online exhibition featuring 16 items from Etsy shops—I've found it to be an enjoyable way to browse the rather overwhelming assortment of handmade and vintage objects on offer at that online marketplace. A friend called it window shopping, and I thought that was a pretty good way to describe it.

Spider robot by Practical Creativity

I start with an idea or a theme and start searching the site using a few key words, selecting items that strike my fancy and that seem to complement each other in some way. Although I start with one theme, soon other commonalities emerge, such as a certain color palette, and by following that, my collection becomes further refined and hangs together rather nicely. I think I just like playing curator—how often do we untrained art admirers get to do that?

The first treasury I gathered was inspired by my desire to see if there were other artisans out there making oddball things from found objects as I like to do.  I was pleasantly surprised to discover a lot of really quirky junk art, so I further refined my search by limiting it to small things, and named that treasury Scrappy Miniatures.  That got a gratifying number of hits, and a friend even bought one of the items (Llama Boy), so I thought, "Hey, I helped somebody sell something, how cool is that?" Which naturally made me want to do more. But how do you follow an act like that? (The spider robot pictured above is one of the objects in the Scrappy Miniatures treasury. All but one of the images in this post are from the treasuries I've curated.)

Robot paper doll by KellyNewcomer

Well, it was February, and there were a lot of Valentine-themed treasuries that were all about romance and sexy this or that, which just makes me yawn. I think the way we celebrated the holiday as kids was more fun (which I wrote about in this blog post), so I put together a treasury of upbeat Valentine things, named Happy Valentine's Day with Love and Good Cheer.

My most popular treasury so far has been one about postal correspondence, in which I included some vintage items for the first time ("vintage" meaning not handmade, but purchased at an estate sale or something and then resold on Etsy). I'm disinclined to buy vintage stuff on Etsy because I'd rather score my own finds at estate sales and garage sales, but it's fun to look at what others have out there, and sometimes it gives me an idea of the value of those old hankies I thought I was splurging on when I spent a couple of dollars on them, and then found similar (or once, even, identical) ones for $7 or more plus shipping.

Tea Time assemblage by Lorelai Kay Designs

One treasury came about because I was doing "research," to help me better position something of my own. I had created a pattern for a small fabric bunny, and decided that I wanted to use it as a basis for making art dolls, because it's more unique and fun than just making bunnies, and I don't really want to be a one-woman factory trying to crank out stuff in quantity. To get an idea of what might be a realistic price range for comparable art dolls, I started searching for them on Etsy, and, wouldn't you know, got inspired to create a treasury of them. I'm disappointed this one hasn't had more hits, because I think art dolls are tremendous fun, even if most of them are quite expensive (but it doesn't cost anything to look!), so go have a look at Playing with Dolls, OK?

Pietra the un-Easter bunny by Arty Didact

Now, contrary to what I said above, here's a picture (at left) of one of my art doll bunnies, since I mentioned them anyway. (The cat just had to get in on it when I was photographing.)

I've just got two more treasuries to show you (you are clicking on all these, right?). One that is color-themed, but where I took my Etsy shop name, Arty Didact, to heart and offered a little etymology to go along with "In the Pink."  And the last one, which was inspired by our recent snowstorm, which I posited as the real reason for the expression "March madness."

So there's your little Window Shopping with Arty Didact for today, kids. I should explain: We used to have a local newspaper that was really just a shopper, and there was a regular column called Window Shopping with Wendy, and it was really just an advertising column—all the mentions were there because the stores paid to be mentioned. It was pretty darn cheesy, and maybe this is, too, but I have found it quite enjoyable to browse this online marketplace in this way, and I thought you just might, too. Cheers.

Messing around in books

I like books. I like to read them, of course, and I like the look and feel of them, and I like messing with them—writing in them, sometimes drawing in them, and, if the book's not precious and I don't want to read it anymore (or at all, in some cases), I like to carve the pages or otherwise alter the book.

Truthfully, though, I've done very little of that, and tend to get rather intimidated by the sculptured book as art form. Looking at the work of artists such as Jennifer Khoshbin and Brian Dettmer doesn't help, either. No, that's not quite right. These amazing and accomplished book sculptors are certainly intimidating in their skill and artistry, but also inspiring. I don't have to attempt to engage in the same level of intricacy and precision to take inspiration from their wonderful creations.

I'm not as inspired by most of the altered books that come up when I do a Google image search on the topic, though. It begins to look like a fad, and a highly redundant one, to me: too many images of fairies and butterflies and other things with wings (not that I don't love things with wings as much as the next person), and an overall similarity of images and textures and colors. You know, kind of pseudo vintage romantic whatever. And, it seems to me, not really responding to the book as a starting point, but just using any old book as a platform. Pretty soon you'll be able to buy books just for altering at Michael's (an arts/crafts supply store chain in the Twin Cities, and probably elsewhere), if you know what I mean.

Which brings me to The Beasts of Tarzan, a book I picked up at a used-book store a long time ago and, enjoying the imagery and melodrama of the text and its illustrations, thought I could have a bit of fun with it. It sat for a long time before I did anything at all with it, and then I got the idea to carve out niches and use it like a curio case to display some sort of little beasts, to play off the book's title and theme.

I found some guidelines on creating niches (that link isn't where I got my guidelines, but it pretty much says the same thing), and got as far as making a block of the pages by gluing the edges, and cutting my niches, and then pretty much stopped there, with the book, that is.

I was drawn to the "blocks" of paper that I had lifted from the niches as I was cutting them out, and so I turned my attention to those, making them into miniature artworks, two of which I traded or gave away, and three of which I've listed for sale in my Arty Didact Etsy shop. (Didn't I just sneak in a bit of shameless self-promotion there?)

Meanwhile, the book awaits my further ministrations. I'd really like to play a little on the metaphoric idea of beasts, and so, as I usually do, have made it that much more challenging to myself to come up with the kinds of objects and images that will convey the vague notions floating about in my head. Usually, I just need ample time to ponder an idea or theme before I create anything with it; but I keep discovering, in art as well as in writing, that it helps to get those thoughts out of my head and share them with others in order for them to coalesce into something more concrete. Like talking to my husband or a friend about it, or writing about it in this blog. Even just this much, just voicing what's in my head, is enough to get my creative practical gears churning, I find.

So, thanks for listening. And if you care to use the comments feature to say something about your particular beasts, I'd love to read what you have to say.

On Saints and Birds and the Commercialization of Holidays such as Valentine's Day

In today's Minneapolis Star Tribune, artist Larry Hanson illustrates a quote about St. Valentine, from Episcopal priest Howard B. Harper, which says, "Poor old Valentine, a third-century priest, who was clubbed and beheaded on February 14th, in the year 270, would certainly be surprised to find himself a lovers' saint." And on the always-entertaining blog of Cul-de-Sac comic creator Richard Thompson on Friday, we have "A History of Valentine's Day Cards, Again," with the assertion that "every word of it is true," in which he illustrates the oft-repeated myths that (a) Valentine's Day is really just a re-creation of the Roman fertility festival of Lupercalia, and that (b) St. Valentine  was arrested and eventually martyred for performing illegal marriages (banned during the reign of the emperor Claudius because it hampered his military recruiting efforts), and that he corresponded with his jail-keeper's daughter, signing the letters, "Your Valentine." (The image at right is from one of many sites that purports to relate the "true" story of St. Valentine.)

I love both Larry Hanson's regular "You Don't Say" illustrated quote and Richard Thompson's Cul de Sac comic. But while both are claiming to be presenting some truth about Valentine's Day that is little known, they are really only repeating what others have said, without question.

We all do that, of course, me included. When we learn something that sounds new to us that also happens to confirm our worldview, we are eager to embrace this new "truth" and even disseminate it to enlighten our friends and acquaintances. And while this sort of repetition of perceived fact without investigation has been going on for ages before the Internet was invented, the easy access to everyone's learned opinion makes the Internet an especially prodigious rumor mill. Which is sometimes fun, but also has the effect of helping myths to spread even more quickly and widely than they did when we got most of our information from the much slower but often just as misinformed print media of various kinds.

As Charlotte said to Wilbur in E.B. White's classic children's story, Charlotte's Web, "People will believe anything they read in print." Had he written the book today, surely he would have happily punned, "People will believe anything they read on the web."

For some reason I can't exactly explain, I have been obsessively curious about the history of holidays of late. I read The Battle for Christmas by Stephen Nissenbaum earlier this winter, which led me to read part of The Invention of Tradition, a collection of scholarly articles edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger. Soon a kind of intellectual domino effect was triggered in my mind, and I found myself hunting down articles in  scholarly journals, which I found I could access online after logging in to the Hennepin County Library website and following the research page to the databases link. It was an exhilarating discovery: A person can do real research online instead of relying on Google, which tends to lead you into an endless loop of sources quoting each other and often all leading back eventually to Wikipedia.

Without delving any deeper into explaining the processes of my particular strain of geekiness, and with the advisory that I am still researching this and looking forward to putting together a zine or something on the topic of various holidays (And dubious saints! Maybe trading cards!), I thought I ought to take a moment to share some of what I've learned so far. I'll apologize for not citing more sources at this time (I've dropped in a few links, even so), but it's nearly midnight and I thought I ought to post something about Valentine's Day while the topic is still timely.

Herewith, a few things I've learned about Valentine's Day, which probably don't confirm anybody's worldview, unless you are an avowed skeptic of everything you've been told so far:

Lupercalia, which was celebrated by the Romans on Feb. 15 or thereabouts, was a patriotic holiday, a kind of founders' day, if you will. The etymological root of Lupercalia is lupus, Latin for wolf, referring to the wolf mother who raised Romulus and Remus, the mythical founders of Rome. If Valentine's Day were a reinvention of Lupercalia, surely we'd be setting off fireworks and waving Roman flags, not eating chocolates and sending cute love-themed greetings.

Valentine was a popular name amongst Romans. The name shares the same root as the word valor. It meant a brave, strong person. Who wouldn't want a name like that? Of course there were lots of people named Valentine. And of course some of them would have been Christians and some of them priests, and it's entirely possible that some of them would have been martyred for their faith. Persecuting Christians (and Jews, btw) was what many Roman emperors did. (But not all of them, and it appears unlikely that it was a predilection of the emperor Claudius who was in charge during the years in question—there also appears to be no record of any marriage ban during his short reign, from 268 to 270 A.D.). The early martyrologies had, in fact, identified at least two saints named Valentine who were both said to have been martyred on Feb. 14, in 268 or 269 or 270 A.D. But in the mid-20th century, the Catholic church concluded that the evidence about Saint Valentine, whether there were two or just one of him, was dubious enough to remove his feast day from any official observance. In other words, the church isn't sure of any historical facts about the saint.

The first recorded association that scholars have been able to find of Valentine's day with love and romance—and birds, incidentally—was when, in about 1383, Chaucer published his fanciful story poem The Parlement of Fowls, in which he describes an imaginary gathering of birds choosing their mates. Scholars think that he may have been connecting certain phenological observations—birds begin singing again around mid-February (I heard some especially bubbly house finches just yesterday), and the earliest signs of spring begin to manifest about this time—with the saint's day that falls at a convenient point in the natural year.

This association of Saint Valentine's feast day with courtship really caught on amongst the aristocracy in the 15th century, because it fit in so handily with the courtly love traditions already established there, and was a welcome diversion in late winter, before things got really busy in the spring (this was still an agrarian economy, remember).

The peasant classes appreciated a little late winter fun, too, and young unmarried people celebrated the day by pairing up as couples and going carousing in the taverns in groups. It appears that this folk custom was more about partying than about getting serious about romance, however. In a preindustrial agrarian economy, there's a certain amount of downtime that would be coming to an end real soon about this time of year, so why not party while you can?

Valentine's Day was largely unheard of in America until about the 1840s, right around the time people started getting into celebrating Christmas (coincidence?). A great deal of marketing by American businesses had something to do with it. What? You thought the crass commercialization of holidays was a late-20th century invention? It wasn't all crass, though, people had fun with it, and many of the 19th-century valentine greetings were quite clever and often humorous. And from these early beginnings in America, children were included in the exchange—it wasn't just about adult romantic love, but also about parents' affection for their children, and children's friendships, too.

The Hallmark company has a collection of historic American valentines at its headquarters in Kansas City, as does the Hennepin History Museum. (The image above is from Indiana University.) I like to think of this fanciful correspondence as early examples of mail art, but that might just be me seeking to confirm my worldview. The mailing of valentines peaked around 1850, at which time the post offices were swamped with seasonal mail, much like they are now at Christmastime.

It appears that ever since Chaucer's time, the holiday has taken on many meanings, from birds singing and pairing up, to courtly romance and poetry, to more lighthearted gestures of love and affection. I suppose people over the years have made of it what they like, according to their preferences and, dare I say, worldviews. And isn't that really the best sort of holiday?

I hope you had a happy Valentine's Day, however you chose to mark the day.

Let's put the fun back in Valentine's Day, OK?

Remember exchanging playful silly Valentines in school when you were a child? I hope you weren't traumatized by this practice in some way (by being left out, for example), in which case I apologize for bringing it up. But what I remember about it was that it was fun to get all that pretend mail (and the teachers made sure everyone was treated equally by sending home a list of all the kids in your class); and I really liked the small size of the cards and the silly invitations to "Be Mine" when we all knew that none of us was exactly looking for a soul mate in third grade; and the candy hearts; and then when Dad came home he brought a heart-shaped box of chocolates, supposedly for Mom, except my siblings and I ate all the good ones and left Mom the ones we didn't like.

And that was pretty much the extent of it. It was fun and playful and sweet, and then it was over and we moved on.

Then when I got to be a teenager it started acquiring baggage: Will I get invited to the Valentine dance? (no) Will I have a boyfriend to exchange Valentines with? (no) It wasn't really fun anymore, at least that's how I remember it.

I didn't like the expectations followed by disappointment that the holiday had come to represent, not just for me, but it seemed like that was the case for a lot of people. And I especially didn't like the advertisements promoting all sorts of expensive, elaborate ways that we're supposed to show our love. Especially how men are supposed to shell out the bucks to buy expensive and sexy things for their wives and girlfriends.

So when Craig and I were dating, and later after we were married, I really played it down and said I had no expectations of the day. Which wasn't really true, of course, but Craig took me at my word, so again I was disappointed—but this time it was my fault!

So one tearful Valentine's Day (I was either pregnant with our first child, or else she was a baby—either way, hormones had something to do with it), I expressed my disappointment and we started going out on Valentine's Day. Eventually I realized that I didn't really want a candlelight dinner or jewelry or a mawkish card, I just wanted some thoughtful and cheerful acknowledgment of the day.

I mean going out to dinner is great, I love going out to dinner. But going to dine at a restaurant on Valentine's Day is, well—talk about mawkish and expensive!

So we've been making each other Valentine cards for several years now, and they're generally lighthearted and humorous and clever and I've really enjoyed it. I craft something a bit unique, like a bottlecap charm or a card involving a bit of paper engineering, or whatever craft I'm into at the time. He has made me a card featuring a collage from junk mail (with all its hype and promises), or quotations about flirting (including a great one from Oscar Wilde complaining about women flirting with their husbands in public!) with images of famous flirts, as he called them (Lauren Bacall, Mae West, etc.). Last year's featured a red paper heart pasted onto a sandpaper card and said something about loving me through rough times and smooth. When I mistakenly used it recently to sand some wood, he said that was OK, he had intended it to be practical, as well!

One year, when Craig was working at Utne Reader,  I made a whole bunch of mini Valentines (about 2 inches square) with the greeting "Happy Heart Day" and had him bring them to work and distribute them to everybody. He reported back how delighted everyone was to get them. (And he said that he kept saying, "These aren't from me, they're from my wife." Especially to the women.)

So it was in that spirit that I went looking on Etsy, the forum for crafters and artists to sell their handmade things, to find items for a "treasury" of lighthearted Valentines. While I didn't find much that was as silly as I would have liked, I did find some clever, cheerful things worth showcasing. It's considered bad form (downright tacky, in fact) to feature yourself in a treasury, so my Valentines are not in that treasury, but are found on my Etsy shop, or at the Barton Handmade Arts from the Heart fair on Feb. 12, which I guess I'll have to tell you more about in a separate post.

Itty bitty craft fun in the mail

I'm a sucker for tiny things, and I love projects that allow me to use bits and pieces of leftover craft supplies to make stuff. So I'm browsing on Etsy, and I search "zines," and I come across Tanglecraft's shop, in which she offers an issue of Craft Leftovers Monthly because she has a project in it, on how to make your own mini matchbox. I had a little money in my PayPal account, so I bought it for $12 including postage from the UK, and it came pretty quickly, like in a little over a week.

There's a section in front, "A few of my Favorite Things," with brief descriptions of some items on the Web, some to buy and some to make, that all fit in with the miniatures theme of this issue. Not surprising with the way things change so quickly online, and how easy it is to get a long url wrong (she has them all shortened through a service that uses the beginning "ow.ly/", kind of like the more-familiar-to-me bit.ly or tinyurl that people use), there is a bad link (just one that I found), but it was pretty easy to locate the correct site because she tells you the name--a blog called How About Orange that had a tutorial on making miniature origami houses (which, since I located it, I'll connect you to here). But, as I see it, without this mention in this little zine, I wouldn't have known that blog, and that tutorial, even existed, so it's still a plus.

Also in this issue are instructions to knit a dollhouse-sized cat, with photos, how to make a mini fabric banner, the afore-mentioned match box instructions, an interview with a crafter who crotchets miniature animals (and how to find her Etsy shop, where she sells the patterns), and several more features, including a little story by the editor/publisher about making a doll house with her dad, a recipe, a coloring page and a word-find game. The whole thing is just fun and clever and playful, I'm really enjoying it. And getting it in an envelope from the UK is part of the joy--who doesn't like to get mail, and foreign mail especially?

Holiday postage stamp choices

About halfway through the holiday correspondence season, it occurred to me that, since I always notice what stamps people choose to put on their envelopes, why not make a survey of it. I already had a little stack of stamps from the cards we had received so far, but since I don't usually save stamps I find uninteresting (namely, the Liberty Bell and flag ones, although I'll grant that the newer flag ones are more artistic looking than the old ones), this isn't a very accurate accounting. Even so, of the 30 or so cards we received, I have 18 stamps. I'm going to assume that most of the 12 I didn't save were Liberty Bell forever stamps, because I remember noticing quite a few of those and wondering why people were using them when there are new forever stamps with images of evergreen trees on them. Of course, I do know why--because they bought a roll of 100 of the forever stamps and they're going to use them up before buying more stamps.

I know you're dying to know the results of my stamp survey, so, here we go. Of the 18 stamps I saved, evergreens are the clear winners, with all other categories, including the more explicit Christmas stamps, trailing far behind:

evergreens — 10
flags — 2
Liberty Bells — 2
Miss Liberty — 1
lute player — 1
Madonna and child — 1
English Christmas stamp featuring a snow-covered postbox and cartoon character — 2 stamps, both on one envelope
Original artwork matching the card, on a Zazzle stamp — 1

So there you have it.