Of snakes, riding mowers, cats, dogs, compound fractures, sheep, coyotes, lambs, tales and truisms, and of course fiber arts.

I am sorry I missed a week, was feeling poorly last week and left the group on their own so I can't say who in all turned up. 

Yesterday we had a goodly sized group.  Beth rejoined us at last after unexcused absences (haha )!  I am afraid she was thinking of other things when I told everyone to smile for the camera.  

 

Kathleen Lewis joined us for the first time.  We were interested to learn of her shop at the Woolworth Walk downtown.  She's been doing it for about 17 years now. Having professionally started a business centering on sewing, and subsequently working with interior designers, Kathleen has lots of fabulous left over cuttings of all kinds of cloth (sewing, upholstering).  It is her goal to use up all these wonderful tidbits in projects such as hats, hip purses, pillows.  Check out her website for a better idea of her accomplishments!  No pics of her in progress needle felting because it was a leg and very small!

Stacey turned up again after missing a few sessions. She showed us her neat quilt that she is finishing.  It involves special seams and cutting down the middle to create a decorative fraying. I am afraid that that doesn't show up well, but you can see the theme quite well.

Judy is nearly finished her pieced, self designed jacket!  The pictures I took on the screen don't do adequate justice to the real thing of course. This time I have the option of using images that Judy had sent me, so you wont' have to see the phone shots of the Zoom screen with all its crazy interference lines. 

from Judy: "The bargello jacket I am working on, pattern by Figure Flattering Designs. The denim coat I designed is from old blue jeans and men's ties." 

Judy and I tired to think about how to do a virtual studio tour with only still pictures of some of her other projects.  It doesn't really work since we would want to hear her talk us through them and show us where she works.  Since she lives a distance away and it is Covid-time, instead I plan to highlight from time to time the breadth of the projects using the pictures she has provided.

Whoever shows ups, we chat about many things and if not already friends, we are becoming friends, sometimes never having met in person.  Some discussion are rather personal to our group and perhaps better stay amongst ourselves!.  Sometimes we get onto topics far afield of fiber art.  One example is Judy's experience on a riding mower encountering a copperhead.  I will try to repeat it in a bit.  I call her one of our wild women, having moved to the NC mountains in her retirement, a wild mountain woman! 

Katya is our other wild women. Both Judy and Katya appear at first very demure as they sit and work on projects during our sessions.  Katya is a bit more reticent, but has allowed that she has had a free style youthful period sailing across oceans in a small vessel.  Judy is not so reticent.  Interesting how wild women can be either introverts or extraverts!  You wonder how I define wild women.  Well, not very explicitly to be sure.  At first it was that both Judy and Katya both rode motorcycles in their youth. As I sit here and think about it, we are all more wild in our youth.  However, I only rode a motorcycle once around a pond when a friend let me try.  Mostly, I remember my mother telling me about a friend's son who was in a motorcycle accident, didn't die, but...  That has always made me hesitant.  Wild is relative.

Now for a Judy story having to do with postmen, shovels, snakes and riding mowers.  I think she was responding to our conversation on postmen.  I was telling the tale of what a rural postman encounters during his deliveries.  Rex is Sebette's, Beth's, and my regular postman in Leicester.  Matt, my stepson, is now the part time postman for our route!  He and his family recently moved to NC to become our neighbor.  Rural postmen end up in all sorts of situations involving dogs, things in mail boxes such as bees, black widow spiders, bird's nests, and so on.  

Judy was mowing her yard on a riding mower when she encountered a copperhead snake with its head up and ready to strike.  Totally terrifying.  Her first response was to run over the back end of it and escape to some distance.  Just at this moment, her postman was delivering.  Still in an adrenaline state, Judy told the postman about the snake, running over its back end, and the fact that the snake's head was still up and potentially dangerous.  The very nice, manly man postman rose up gallantly returning quickly to his truck to get a shovel, from whence he returned to bash the snake on its head.  As Judy's adrenaline subsided and her brain began to function again, she remembered all of her shovels close at hand, just there, in the barn.  No matter!  The postman felt he saved the day, and thereafter, liked to joke about shovels with her.

Here is an illustration.  It looked better in my head so I didn't bother with the other two panels showing the subsequent action.

And what do you know? We later were treated to another Judy story, and I am sorry, but I don't remember the context!  It was about her biker/ nurse experience at a KOA biker meeting when a drunken/ drugged up biker did something stupid and broke his tibia and fibia in a compound fracture. Do you know the kind?  You often see it:  bone sticking through the skin?  Judy is a nurse.  She did a rough bandage, and the ambulance came and took him away, and she never found out what became of him.  The End.  But, there was a lot of good detail and comment that I wasn't able to include.  I really must get her to record these stories for an oral book!  Her telling is better; her words, tone, and timing make her a natural story teller.