Page Two: Turtle Trax Diary for January 3, 2000, continued.
Page #24
by Lucky Magnolia (Susan Shie)
I split this diary into two pages, because it got so huge! Sorry! My New Year's resolution is to make them smaller and smaller!
Return to Page One now, if you like.
So then we got home from Passion Works, and this is what happened next:
Jimmy turned 46 on November 26, and I had a little party for him.
Front row: Jimmy, Laura Saeger, Floyd Cornelius. Back row: me, Kate and
Luis Arango, Rudy Christian (Laura's husband), and Duane Hart. Taking the
picture is our dear friend, Pat Cornelius, Floyd's wife. We really enjoy
being out, teaching, but WOW, was it ever nice to be home!!!! We truly
adored seeing a few faces of friends who go "way back!"
Jimmy's birthday was the day after Thanksgiving this year, and we were really worn out, between teaching, travelling, and the holidays. And I had a cold.
I bought Jimmy a bunch of the fly fishing things he put on his birthday wish list, and I scored greatly with my offerings! This man just gets more and more into the fly fishing vortex, as he goes! If you've never gone over to his leather site, you ought to check it out. He makes cases, that are truly unique, for fly fishing equipment, and you will never see the likes of these anywhere else in the world!
Elizabeth, this is the BIG ONE!!!!! Our daughter
Gretchen and her boyfriend Mike Miller got engaged in November!!!!!! They
will wed here in Wooster, next October 7, at Wayne Center for the Arts.
We are so happy for them! They are a wonderful couple and have already
been together for well over five years and are very much in love.
You know what will be one of our big projects in the coming months!!!! Our only child's wedding!! Mike's parents live an hour north of us, in Grafton, Ohio, and we have a great excuse to spend more time with them now!
Anyhow, here are Mike and Gretchen, having a champagne toast with us, on their visit home at Thanksgiving. Yippeeeee!
My
Aunt Nellie and Uncle Lester have been making between 500 and 700 pounds
of peanut brittle every Christmas, for as long as I know!!! They don't
advertise, don't label their boxes, and don't accept new orders. They make
the candy in five pound batches, and each batch takes about half an hour,
since they have it down to quite a science.
This year they invited us to come over to Orrville and watch them make a batch. It was so nice to spend time with them, learning. I used to hang around in the kitchen all the time, watching and helping my mom cook, can, and freeze foods. I can't even ask her for cooking advice now, with her Alzheimer's being so advanced. Haven't been able to get any advice from her for a long time, really. I can enjoy being with her, but no more learning of her wisdom. So, anyhow, it was great to be with Nellie and Lester, and feel that connection with them.
Above, Nellie's stirring the stuff, once it comes to a boil. I took pictures of the whole process, but you only get two images, since this month's diary is way too long, as is!!!! She's got her System down, and there's no fooling around, when the production line is in operation!
After Aunt Nellie cooks the candy and dumps
it out onto a marble surface; stretches it out, while wearing deerskin
gloves; and lets it cool, they whack it apart. Then Uncle Lester, my mom's
older brother, carefully selects a good variety of sizes to make up each
one pound box. He weighs the boxes, wraps them, and stacks them up.
When we asked how come they don't put their name and addres label on the boxes, they said they don't want to, because more people try to order it! After all, they are retired, in their 80's, and don't want to make a real job of it! At $5.00 a pound, there isn't any profit, and Nellie says, if they actually make anything, they donate it to the Orrville Boys and Girls Club, which she is still very actively involved with.
These two have gathered no moss. Zip! None!
Before we left Les and Nell's, Uncle Lester
gave us two five gallon buckets of Easter Lily bulbs and a peck basket
of Tiger Lily bulbs. He had thinned his flower beds, and his gardening
skills are just too nurturing for their own good! Those rascally bulbs
had multiplied like crazy!
We had thought we were too late , since we were too busy in October and November, to plant the bulbs. But here it was, a nice, warm week!!!! So, Jimmy spaded off the sod along the sides of the driveway, and dug as deep as he could. We planted hundreds and hundreds of beautiful bulbs!!!! Then we still had more, and Jimmy dug a new bed in front of the patio. We put more Easter Lilies in there, along with the Tiger Lilies. And more lilies went around Perleys' mailbox and in the Moon Garden. We were plantin' fools!
During the Thanksgiving holidays, we were prepping
23 quilts, to send to our solo show at Adams Art Gallery in Dunkirk, NY.
Actually, I spent a lot of time on some of the pieces, in the months leading
up to this show, reworking and adding things to them. I had done more stitching
on some of the pieces for the Riffe show, too, so I guess I was really
into the swing of it! I got to know some of the quilts well, all over again,
and that made me feel good. I also put small brass D-rings all along the
backs of all the quilts, so that one option for hanging them will be to
use small nails, rather than rods. The Adams show is all hung this way,
and they said it was really easy to prepare.
Here is a central aisle shot of the show, with "Po-Mo Rainbow," our collaboration with Therese May and Anne Warren, in the middle. Our first collaboration with them is on the far right: "Black Velvet." Those are the only quilts the four of us ever made together, but they both helped us paint our front door, too!
Between Jimmy and me is Kay Barlow, the retiring director of Adams
Art Gallery. At the gallery, I found out that she's an alumna of The College
of Wooster, like me. The day of the opening, she did a radio interview
with us, which she used on her Chattauqua NPR program. (We haven't heard
it yet.)
Behind us is "Rainbow Garden," our 1997 Quilt National piece, which had just come back from its QN tour of two and a half years. This piece has, in the top corners, two 12" x 10" paintings on wood. There are many other 3-D forms on it, and lots of diary work, mostly hand embroidered. It was built during the six months of our garden season, from the time Jimmy tilled the patch, til the first frost. Many stories of our daily lives are woven in with stories of the many processes of gardening. Four smaller quilts, some diary chairs, and two birdhouses were also made during that time. We had a solo show at Wayne Center for the Arts, with all these things, called "Garden Party." That was in 1996, before we had this website!
The piece on the left here, "Prayer for the Serpent Mound,"
wins the prize for being the flattest piece in our show. It's 73"
x 62," and is really a painting, which Jimmy quilted on the machine.
I love to paint big! This one deals with an incident, in which a developer
wanted to build a private luxury condominium area, right next to The Great
Serpent Mound, a sacred prehistoric Hopewell Indian earthenwork mound.
It's way out in the boondocks of southern Ohio, and is the world's largest
effigy mound. Not only would the construction of the development ruin the
sacred feel of the place, but the dammed up creek, turned into a resort
lake, would have eroded the limestone bluffs, beside the mound, possibly
destroying it. My writing on the quilt is all about this eco-spiritual
crisis. Happily, after we finished our quilt, and totally apart from its
making, some Ohio natural resources departmant refused to give the man
permits. You can visit the Serpent Mound in Adams County, near Peebles,
Ohio, about an hour from Portsmouth. It's in a small state park.
Here is the first series of 28 paintings I
made as Christmas gifts. They are all St. Quilta the Comforter Blesses
the New Millennium. Like the paintings
I make of her, to sell, these are each drawn freehand, one after the other.
I number, sign, and date them. Then, as I paint, I work on them all at
once, with each color. They're made on heavy painter's canvas, with acrylic
paints. I used some Lumiere pearl and gold on them, as final touches, along
with using a Uni Marker paint marker to do the writing. the Uni Markers
have zylene in them, so you need a respirator, and they wear down super
fast on fabric, so you need tons of them. They're hard to find, but Sanford,
makers of the Sharpie, distributes them in the US. They're actually made
by the Mitsubishi Pencil Co. of Japan.
I put St. Q's heart and cross doily on her
muu-muu and her Fiesta Ware teacup on her head, in the first series, but
she didn't get her tomato pincushion or our baby cat Marigold, whom she
likes to keep around. So, when I got to the second series, I switched things
around a lot, and she became more playful! But maybe less "profound?"
Above you can see part of the second series. They look entirely different,
because, after making 28 of the first set, I couldn't stomach doing 21
more of the same! So I flipped out and did those!
Well, finally we got to Christmas itself!!!!! We decided
that this year, we would finally get a tree with a root ball on it, and
try to keep it alive afterwards, in our yard. It had been a pretty mild
winter so far, so off we went, looking at the offerings at the Christmas
tree stands. Blah! Nothing bigger than a shrub for under $50. Jimmy wanted
a BIG tree! And he would pay for it mostly in physical labor!!!!!
I remembered that the place we go to, to cut Christmas trees fresh, also has live trees. I called, and they said it doesn't matter to them if you cut it down, or dig it up, as long as you fill in the hole. And they're all $10, or $20 for a Blue Spruce. So next thing, we're walking up into the Lytle Tree Farm's muddy field, during a windy kind of rain/sleet. But lookie there! That must be Annie, our first live Christmas tree! Jimmy is skeptical about how hard it will be to get her back to the car, but he does want one big tree, so he starts to dig. He has the saw, just in case he wants to cut her down instead. No, he keeps digging. He has me pull her as far over to one side as I can, and he digs down on the other side, then we switch sides, until she's out.
He fills in the dirt, and drags Annie to the car. Behind him,
I think he looks like a peacock, dragging its tail! Annie costs $10. She,
who was about 7' tall before, is now 10' tall, standing on her root toes!
We stop at a farm supply and pay more for a bucket to put Annie in, than
what she cost! Jimmy and Floyd dig a hole in the yard, and use the dirt
to put Annie into her bucket. She sits on the patio, then in the garage,
as she awaits coming into the warm house. Trees can't stay in very long,
if they hope to survive going back out, in winter. I think we brought her
in around Dec 17. Nobody got a hernia, but she was really heavy!
We had the Shie Christmas Extravaganza on Dec.
19, Gretchen's 29th birthday, at my oldest brother Larry's house. He and
Sherry had a wonderful dinner of pizzas and goodies for us, and then we
had our first Shie White Elephant gift exchange. You had to bring a present
that you already owned, whether it was fun or really cool or dumb. You
couldn't buy it. We drew numbers, and each person picked a wrapped gift.
Later, the next person could take someone else's gift, or choose a new
one. If your gift got snatched, you could pick another wrapped one. We
had never done this before - only one of the nieces had!!! It started slow,
but somehow, a pen and pencil set got stolen several times and things got
to be fun and silliness! Very nice way to do presents. One of our donations
was the gift basket C and T Publishing had sent us by accident one year,
when they tried to send it to Michael James. (They had told us to keep
it.) I thought that was a pretty fine thing to get! Jacob, in the picture
above, was well satisfied with the Santa ball cap he got! In the photo,
he proudly models it, but his dad, my older brother Jimmy is not impressed.
After the gift exchange, we all went out back, to
see Larry and Sherry's new barn, pastures, and farm animals. Their kids
Jennifer and Brian, help out with a horse named Lily, some sheep, including
on named Miss P, and the cattle. Above, Larry has brought Dorothy, the
young Black Angus cow, up for us to see and pet. My niece Aimee and Sherry
watch, and Korinna is being told to stay away from the cow's feet!!! Larry
has been a long distance truck driver for a long time, but is adding a
hobby farm to the family's career!!! Sherry would like to have some goats,
but the land is zoned against pigs and chickens. Our Uncle Harold and Aunt
Mary Jo had a small dairy farm, when we were kids, and this sure brought
memories back of those good old days!!!!
Gretchen and Mike came home for Christmas,
along with their cat Isis, who needed to see her cousins Meeper, Willy,
Rita, Tulip, and Marigold. On Christmas morning, we unwrapped presents.
Here, Mike pulls a little present out of his stocking, for Isis. Look!
A Sack o' Rats!!!! We also opened a bigger such sack, for all the cats
to share. The "rats" are covered in rabbit fur, have little faces
and ears, and long, suede tails. Our cats go nuts, and by now, most of
the rats are lost, under the stove, or have really been eaten, especially
by big old Rita.
Jimmy watches as our housemate Floyd opens his presents, including
a set of "long handles." In case you don't know, that means long
johns or a union suit. He has never had them before. Jimmy loves to wear
long johns, and every Fall, I sew him into them, until, oh, about April.
Jimmy has been avidly reading the book I got him for Christmas, "The
Earth is Enough," by Harry Middleton. It's a true story, about a 12
year old boy, who goes to live with his grandfather and great uncle, and
learns to fly fish in the Ozarks. Jimmy says it's one of the best books
he's read in a long, long time. Not much about fishing in it, really. My
favorite present was a headset telephone! Look Ma, not only no hands, but
no more scrunched up shoulder ! Now I can get my posture unlopsided!
And while all the presents were being unwrapped,
and until we had to take Annie the tree back outside and plant her the
day after Christmas, there was a secret squirrel hiding in Annie's top
branches. Can you see it? This is the coveted Dad's Squirrel, the last
one he ever hunted! My little sister Debi got him to stop hunting, by carrying
this squirrel around in her arms, trying to bring it back to life, when
she was a small girl! So Daddy took the vow, maybe in 1963, and the squirrel
popluation of the world has breathed easy ever since. Dad had his squirrel
stuffed, and it used to sit on the mantle at home. Now it lives on our
livingroom shelves, up high, where the cats can't reach it. Once Mom and
Dad's cat Meow Meow gnawed part of the squirrel's ear off, but he can still
hear pretty well! So, when you come to our house, watch what you say, especially
about squirrels!!!!No digital camera, even on the horizon, so the rest of Christmas' pix and New Year's are still in the camera, but we had a good, quiet time, watching the ball drop at Times Square, from our toasty warm bed! Now we are scurrying around, getting ready for a full Turtle Art Camp here, Jan 5 - 11, with four campers!!!! And Gretchen is going to NYC, to pick up art for her museum, from the Met, where Robin Schwalb, my best pal, works. Wish we were going along, but the campers wouldn't get much art made on the plane!
Hey, you guys! Absolutely NOBODY responded to my request for old Ouija Boards in November. So I assume you either didn't take me seriously, or you really wanna keep those babies! Well, I did mean it! So cough 'em up. Don't you know Ouija Boards are bad for you, and that you should get rid of them, before it's too late????? I will recycle them into harmless, spiritually groovy art. Send 'em over! Hop to it! ;)
On the other hand, could be that God / Godette doesn't want me to have those Ouija Boards, simply because s/he knows good and well that it will railroad me, keeping me from making the next St. Quilta paintings and the next Kitchen Tarot card quilt, if I make Ouija Art. God/dess is so smart!
The drawing above is what I made as a thank you present for Deborah Clayton, former director of ATCO in Athens, OH, who graciously let us use her entire house, during our residency at Passion Works! She had taken another job in Springfield, and left the house completely stocked, while it's for sale. If you're looking to move to Athens, that's the place! It's gorgeous and peaceful!!!!! Buy it now!!! In the drawing, we're in a kayak, amidst many stars, since Deborah is a kayaker, and there was the Leonids meteor shower, while we were staying there. We have yet to meet Deborah and thank her in person for her generosity!
That's all, folks. Happy Chinese Year of the Dragon, February 5th!!!! Next diary around March 7th, which is Mardi Gras!!!!
See you later, Sweet Potater! -- Lucky Magnolia
Return to Page One of this month's diary, if you like!
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Susan Shie and James Acord
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