The inspirational sculpture continued as we walked farther away from the visitor’s center, and then looped back around. Near the Zen / Meditating Garden, was this reflecting rockery. From a distance you’d think it might be a stone found there, with smaller stones around the perimeter, but you’d be wrong, as you can see when you get close and see the finely carved opening. I loved the reflection of the trees, and hope to go back and take pictures again on a sunny day, and yet again when just enough of a chill is in the air to start freezing the water into frostlines on the edges:

The path we took followed along the edge of the river where we saw the sun and moon, a carved wood piece with gold on one side and silver on the other. Here are Kathy and Kate walking ahead of me near the piece:

The light was low, so alas a couple other cool pieces I photographed didn’t turn out since I blurred them. But, tucked into the back woods was the Circle and Line “bowl” with the trough of moss:

On the Birch allee, which will be glorious when the array of different varieties of birch trees matures, are a number of pieces including the raven-woman in my previous post on the sculptures. This piece doesn’t photograph as well as it looks… I think it was called legs:

And saving the best for last, I loved loved LOVED this standing stone:

With my family’s roots in Ireland, I have a “thing” for old standing stones, along with a just-me “thing” for circles, and for sinuous lines (is it because my name begins with an “S”? What if I had been named Brigid, would I still love swoopy lines?). I can definitely see some of this imagery working its way into my pieces based on the gardens.

If you liked gods in Alabama or Between, Georgia you’re in for a treat, especially if you are an art quilter. Joshilyn Jackson, author, mom and quilter, has written a new novel about an art quilter, inspired by the irrepressible Pamela Allen. Joshilyn has blogged about the new book, The Girl Who Stopped Swimming, here. And you can read Joshilyn’s blog, Faster than Kudzu, here. And to see Pamelala’s creative mind at work, click here and here.  After reading Joshilyn’s intro to the book in the blogpost, I think I’m gonna be booked for late September… READING time!

In the meantime, I am reading and LOVING Stephen King’s Lisey’s Story.  I am normally not a fan of horror, though I quilt like fantasy and some (non-techy) sci fi.  This book isn’t really a horror story, though it does have its scary  moments… perhaps all the more scary because they are so close to possibly being real.   It is a novel about an intense  love story between Lisey Landon, widow of a famous and successful novelist, and her late husband.  Personally, I thought King’s On Writing:  A Memoir of the Craft was a 200+ page love-letter to his wife; it is about writing, but it is also about a deep and enduring love between him and his wife, author and poet Tabitha King.  Lisey’s Story is dedicated to her, and is an even longer love-letter about a love that extends beyond every day life.  So now I need to get back to doing (and finish!) the paperwork for various teaching gigs next year so I can escape to the back porch while the nice weather lasts and keep reading Lisey’s Story!

The sculpture at the Botanical Gardens is as wonderful as the hardscape and the landscaping, and is exquisitely placed. As you approach the entrance to the visitors center, one of the first sculptures to greet you is this woman and owl (there was a sticker on the tag, so it seems some pieces are for sale, like this one, and others are permanent installations):

There has been a bit of talk over on Rayna Gillman’s blog about working in a series as well as on the SAQA yahoo group. Well, I’m one of the “don’t think I could do a series” types (as in I don’t want to!), but after seeing the woman and owl and this next piece by the same artist, I’m thinking maybe, just maybe, there *might* be a chance of a thematic sort of thing…..

One of the pieces that most captured me was this yellow-orange blown glass flower / reeds / whatever was in a large pond near the entrance and large open grassy areas (where weddings happen, we are told)…. Kate and Kathy weren’t nearly as enchanted as I was… I took gobs of photos of it:

On the way down to the river, you come around a bend and see this glorious glass orb. We don’t know if it is solid or hollow, but it appears to be made out of sheets of glass. Even on an overcast (ok, just finished raining and still drippy) day, it was lit up, and when the sun is out the photos of it make it seem to float. The siting of it on a mound above the path is perfect:

I’ll share more photos of sculptures in a few days.

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: