Last Monday (gosh…a week already? It has been, as usual, a crazy busy blur of a week) I met two of my fellow Frayed Edges at the opened-this-year Maine Botanical Gardens in Boothbay Harbor (north of Portland, south of Camden about an hour plus a bit). The gardens were incredibly inspiring, so I’ll just share a bunch of photos.

As you approach the entrance to the visitors center, this glorious stone wall (and Maine has many!) greets you, with a bit of garden sculpture in the mid-ground on the right. I’ll do another post on the sculptures around the grounds in a few days….

This is the “zen” or meditating area. Frankly, I never slow down enough to even THINK about meditating… my life seems to be on permanent fast-forward. But the steps and stonescape up the hillside are gorgeous:

Part of this Zen area is a path that to us looked like a strand of DNA:

At the bottom of the hill is the river / fingerling of the bay, with a typical Maine vista:

And on the path back was this glorious stump…how can you not love those colors and textures?

Then there is the tracery of tree roots

:

And the beauty of a stump atop cracked rocks:

Last week I made my journal quilt, and tried a new-to-me technique: screening with Thermofax screens. My attempts to get the screens “burned” at the local tattoo place didn’t work (he had a Vista machine, not one of the 3M, so it didn’t work with my screen materials). SO, I mail ordered from Flying Images (check at the bottom of the page here, on Jane Dunnewold’s site–click on suppliers then scroll down). Talk about FAST service… I e-mailed and called on a Monday morning to see if she could do a quick job (I had been told she has one-day turnaround), e-mailed her jpegs that morning, and by suppertime the screens were made and in the mail…WOWIE!

In the photo you’ll see her printouts of my images of origami-cranes and, on the bottom half of the second screen, a design I did up printing with half of a sliced white onion. Because I was sub-dividing the screens into smaller pieces, I framed them up myself…some with purchased white plastic frames, the others with cereal box and duct tape.

I used textile paints to screen onto fabric for the journal quilt. This year, instead of doing one journal 8 1/2 x 11 inches each month, we are to do one quilt 17×22 inches (the equivalent of four pieces of paper) using at least three techniques from the Creative Quilting Book (which I really am going to review, soon I hope). We can’t share the journals with you, but I can share these faxes and some playing around that I did before beginning my 2007 Journal (which went in the mail on Tuesday… two full weeks early!).

This first piece is a pastel batik. Along one edge, you can see where I daubed paints testing for the right color. Around the edges I tried out the cranes in various colors. When I blobbed the blue paint on the screen, I had rinsed my brush and it was a bit wet, leading to too-thin paint that bled under the screen; lesson learned! In the center, using low-contrast metallic green (Lumiere paint) and gold (also Lumiere) I screened the onions… oh OW am I gonna love using this one for subtle background texture:

This second piece is one I gave to Kathy, since it is her (and my) favorite turqoises and teals. I began with a piece of my hand-dyed fabric…one that admittedly was a bit lacking in oomph. As in blah. So I used Jacquard Textile paint (the white), then mixed some Setacolor (a dark-ish teal) with some metallic (I think it was Pebeo / Setacolor also) along with a bit of white to get the middle-value screened onions, then more of the same but less white for the darker value. I was thinking of adding a bit of gold, but Kathy is really good at painting on fabric, so told her to take this piece and feel free to add to it and play with it:

After a long, hectic and sometimes dramatic summer, life has blissfully resumed a little bit of normalcy, and some of the best of it is the Frayed Edges. We were only three today; Deborah is, of course, in Texas (the link to her blog is on the left, but I know many of you know her and her blog!), and Hannah was home with her girls today. They are finally in their new house in Harpswell, where we’ll meet next month.

So today, Kate, Kathy and I met at the new Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in Boothbay Harbor. Maine is made up of many, many peninsulas, harbors and bays carved by the receding glaciers, resulting in lots of rocky, forested coastline. These Gardens opened to the public this year, but clearly have been years in the making. The picture above is of the visitors center, with an arbor on the left. The more formal gardens are near the center, becoming more “wild” with distance, with lots of cool sculptures throughout.

First we got together for a brief chat in the cafe (inside the curved walled part of the center), then went for a long walk/stroll, while Kate and Kathy letterboxed (you’ll have to ask them about that…). There were SO MANY wonderful shots, that I have photos for many blogs, so am going to skip most of the photos today. One I’ll share here is looking up through the center of the arbor… I love all those angles!

And here are Kate and Kathy in the Meditating Garden.

I don’t do that… I’m always too busy and life is too crazy for me to manage to sit still long enough, and I’m glad to say I’m not alone… Kate too is living life on “more than full”. The hardscape in this place is amazing!

Kathy’s birthday is in late August, so we had gifts and lunch in the cafe. Here’s the birthday girl enjoying Hannah’s gift (books about decorating, since Kath and hubby will be…yipppeeee lucky me!… moving down near me in a few years):

And here she is opening mine (more about what that is during another post later this week):

And instead of delectable pastry treats, I said I’d make a little cake instead, so Kathy who loves the sea got a little Maine Seascape of a cake:

And in a small miracle, Kate took a picture in which both Kathy (who always looks good in photos) and I (who almost always look awful in pictures) both look good! It must be the wonderful company:

And finally, a bag of fingerling potatoes –grown by Kate in her own garden and joyously shared with her Frayed friends… and potatoes may be one of my favorite foods on earth, even more than…well no…. not quite…. but nearly as good as chocolate!

And oh yeah…the beautiful details extend even to the Ladies’ Room, which had two of these lovely little moss-scapes:

In other words, it’s the first day of school! Moms across Maine are celebrating today. Jan and I are extending that to tomorrow when we are finally going to meet for coffee in downtown Camden at Zoot–we’ve been trying to get together since school let out. Hah!

Of course, since it is the first day of school, there are the requisite back-to-school photos. First, Joshua was up at 6 to be at school by 7:15 (starts at 7:35) to go off to Camp Kieve for four-plus days (they come home Saturday), an 8th grade ritual. How did he get to be in 8th grade already? Anyway, here he is:

Then, Eli’s school starts an hour later (he’s in 4th this year…next year for 5th on he’ll be up early, too!). While I was dropping off Joshua, his sleeping bag, and box of bandages and meds for the week, Eli got up and dressed. At 7:52, out we went to the bus, with the dog-beasts in tow. Eli, of course, had to hold (Pig)widgeon for his pics:

And here is Widgeon doing his Stitch impersonation (as in Lilo and Stitch….there is no way the animators for that movie didn’t have a pug.. I mean color him blue and add a couple extra legs and he’s Stitch!):

While out, I snapped a picture of something that isn’t too rare this year:

Yes, it seems fall is coming early. I have high hopes, since they say the best fall colors come from warm days and nippy nights, and that is what we are having. We still have the fan on in the room, but are sleeping under sheet, quilt and duvet.

And then you find odd stuff in the notch of the trees when you go to snap a close up of the reddest low-down leaf around:

Gee….wonder how that got there?

And if you don’t hear from me for a couple of days…guess why? I’ll be in my STUDIO! What a miracle! Time for art (and in this specific instance, getting my journal quilt done before it is due!). WOOOOOHOOOOO!

Toodles, and I’ll be back….eventually <grin!!!!!>

Sigh…. art and quilting seem far, far away as summer winds down. I’m REALLY looking forward to six days from now when the boys will be IN SCHOOL! In the meantime, Eli has begun soccer and found a moth (way back in June) that we wanted to ask if anyone knows what it is. We got slightly distracted by Joshua’s accident and hospitalization, then Paul’s surgery (they are all on the mend… in three months Joshua will be fine and Paul will still be mending….). Anyway, does anyone know what kind of moth this is?

And here is Eli in his very first soccer games–this is during the second game up in Hampden on Sunday; Eli is on the far right in light blue shirt:

and here he is, the kid in the foreground just left of center:

and on the far right, sorta behind the boy in purple and to theleft of the dad with the red backpack:

and he also got to play goalie, and had a couple of great saves, and only let through one goal:

Now…off to the last SeaDogs game of the summer.  I miss making art and sewing!  SOON……