more of that small northern town thing...

Doo doo doo lookin' out my back door...

Spring is coming, you can tell because the days are getting longer by leaps and bounds. It's easier to get up early now and sun comes through windows it hasn't touched for months. It's still very white out there so I thought the flower in the header would be a nice addition until some real ones appear.

Interesting dilemma here in the Chilkat valley, in this great big temperate rainforest that we call home. We're running out of dry firewood. The woodcutters were selling the beetle kill trees as dry seasoned firewood and we've run out on the U.S. side of the border. Now they're driving into Canada to harvest the trees killed by the spruce bark beetles up there and bringing that wood back to sell. The price of wood is skyrocketing and there are two major projects in the works to use wood as the primary source of heat for large buildings. What will the small time wood users like me and my neighbors do? Will the price of wood be higher than the price of heating fuel? When I build a fire in my woodstove I wonder if I should switch my thinking to 'conserve wood' instead of 'conserve oil'. Do I have enough wood to buy green wood for the lower price and season it for a year myself? mumble mumble...buy a cord of really expensive Canadian wood and 3 cords of cheaper green wood...and plenty of fuel oil. Thank goodness I have Toyo stoves!

laughing...I just clicked on the picture to biggiefy it: the stove is burning in the yellow zone, according to the gauge on the chimney, so there's no creosote building up. That's what having seasoned dry wood is all about, no build up and no chimney fires.

BJP for February, keeping up with the cuffs

I don't "do" Valentine's day stuff often...single with out Mom to send me the annual heart card makes the day a little not-so-much, ya know. This time around I felt the urge to make something with a heart on it and although I like that typical winged heart image, it's a little over done. I changed that image up a little and came up with this:


That's a bus token from Juneau (the old home town) in the middle. I like the "Good For One Fare" words...take them as you will, I've got a couple of different ideas of what they mean here.

Since the wings extend above and below the line of the cuff, I needed to line it with something that doesn't fray or do some seriously fancy needle turning on fabric. I chose the "doesn't fray" option and went with some nice soft chamois leather ( found in the auto parts store under 'buffing up the shine')

I like this one a lot. I like the bug wings, the breaking of the frame and the sort of super-hero look feel it has when it's worn. The bus token gives it a sort of steam punk touch too.

Weather or Not

Sitting in front of the woodstove thinking about this blog and how I've sort of let it turn in to just where I show my bjp stuff. Thinking about life in a small northern town staring at the flames licking around the wood I realized it gets sort of mundane mid winter. There is a lot going on but it's hard to share my daily 'geez it's beautiful here' with out repeating myself over and over.

The big thought I had was this: (for me at least) Summer weather makes a person while winter weather breaks them. Sort of drastic but here's the rest of it...I can handle a crappy summer as long as the winter isn't totally dark and rainy. A rainy summer is tough, but dark and rainy in the winter is wrist slitting bad. Weather in a small northern town is what we have in common, it's our conversation at the store, it's our answer to "hey, how's it going", it dictates our clothing, the car we drive and the distance we walk each day. We may or may not know what's going on in Washington D.C., but we certainly know which way the wind is blowing...from the southeast brings warm rain from the north (that's Canada!) brings cold sunshine. If there is a high pressure zone over the Yukon, we know it.

Paddling back over to the "big thought" lots of people leave town for the winter, but this winter makes me want to stay here. It doesn't rain as much as Juneau, but there's enough water to go around.

catching up with myself

I got my January Bead Journal cuff done today. People that know me even just a little shouldn't be surprised at the subject, you probably expected a fish sooner than this. I kinda like this one, but the face of the fish is too square and the finishing totally challenged my hand sewing "skills". The inner fabric reminds me of fish eggs even though the dots are the wrong color.

I did a fish because they really matter to Alaska's economy and to me personally (I just really like fish). There are some villages up in northwest Alaska that are having serious hunger and heating problems right now because their fishing season was cut short by regulations and overfishing by big trawlers. They need their salmon season to pay for heating fuel and to provide food for their families.