The Big City

I'm in Anchorage, the same city I was in when I started this blog. This time it's from the point of view of not living here but in a small town that has very few amenities other than beauty. I'd still much rather live there, but I feel like a kid in a candy shop here!

REI is 1/4 mile down the road
Play it Again Sports has 2nd hand skis
The Bead Shack already took $50 bucks from me
The Bear Tooth movie theater/brew pub is just down the street
Title Wave Books is over by REI
Internet is fast and wireless
T.V. available
More than one radio station
The Tony Knowles trail system is just down the hill

and that's all with out even getting in the car!

Thrift stores, used book stores, Old Navy, Target, Costco, Fred Meyer, Barnes and Noble all want me to come drop a few dollars.

and the sun is out.

I'll be more than ready for my small town life when I leave, but it's fun to visit.

redo

The fat fish repainted. I haven't finished his fin yet, but see how moving his gills back makes his head bigger? I still don't really like the secondary gills that come back from his mouth, maybe they'll just go away. Better fish.

I just found Pamela Hasting's blog when I was stumbling around looking for more information on Arlinka Blair. Nice find! I love that those wild looking dolls Pamela makes come from such an ordinary looking woman. She's working on a big doll that just fits under her 9' ceiling. yum.

Fat Blue Fish

This is fat fish. He started life as a blue butterfly fish cut out of 1/4 inch plywood and then his head got too small. Looking at him here, I know I have to repaint his head, what an ugly fish!

He's about 1.5 x 2 feet painted with acrylics and hung up in the wall gap I made last winter. Repaint job this weekend, yikes! His dorsal fin needs to have a dark outline and more detail so it shows up better, his head needs surgery and maybe more detail on his tail fin. What a funny looking fish!

moving right along

Values quilt with 2nd panel nearly done on the right. I did the left panel in strips but they were feeling stretchy. The right one is done in 9 patch style in squares instead of strips. Seems like seam allowances need to be more accurate in the 9 patches, but it's not so easy to stretch the triangles out of shape.
Oh yeah, the right panel was on backwards at the top. I didn't notice when I was taking the picture and was pleased that I had actually finished the right panel. Um. no. There's one more series of 3 strips or set of 2 9 patch blocks that need to be added on the far right.

In conclusion:

I pulled up the rest of the plants in the 2 bigger beds leaving some parsley and the onions then covered the whole lot with sea weed gathered off the beach this morning. I gave the strawberries and the cabbages a layer of kelp too. The strawberries are going crazy in the rain, next year should be a good berry crop!

Allow the raspberries to take over more, make them a frame to stand in.

Plant more: Lettuce and carrots (don't let the cat get the sprouts!) and chives (unless those 2 plants go crazy). Maybe put the carrots in buckets like the potatoes.

Plant less: broccoli, kale and turnips.

Plant some: flat parsley instead of curly. One or two zucchini plants. A sunflower in front where it's warm.

Use bone meal and nitrogen.

3 buckets of potatoes was enough, you really don't eat that much.

I'd really like to have a privacy fence/hedge across the front and have been letting the cherry tree babies grow as much as possible. Tossing rose hips in the side yard and letting the weeds/cherry trees grow there. patience.

The other day I turned the compost (sort of) and it was steaming in the rain! Real live compost happening in my heap o' vegetable matter! It was a crazy dry summer but the rain is making stuff happen.

I finally know where the secret-double-secret blue berry patch is! I just didn't drive far enough last time...yeah 26 miles to the bridge then another 1/2 hour plus on the logging roads. It's for friggin' ever to get there, but the berries are phenomenal. Bigger and more dense than Eaglecrest or the Dan Moller trail!

values quilt

No, not family values or morals type values but color type values. Lights and darks. I found a tutorial here and decided it might just help gnat brain to focus. Lots of small steps and quick results.

It's fun to combine the colors, trying not to look at the cloth as my favorite this or that but just as lights and darks. I tried it with a dark center, but didn't like it.

fall

I was going to call this post "autumn" to sound more sophisticated, but fall is more appropriate. We went from a 3 month burn ban due to dry weather to flooding and erosion due to torrential rain. I heard reference to a typhoon today...We fell into autumn.

Ages ago I did an on line dye project with a group from Delphi. We all dyed a rainbow of fabric with a set formula adding a little more of each color to the dye bath for each next color. It wasn't bright primaries. I made a simple quilt top to display the fabric then folded it up and forgot about it. Today when I was looking for fabric for another color based quilt I found it. It's bigger than I thought, with an additional border, it's ready to be sandwiched and stitched into an actual quilt.

I kind of like it but a border will make it so that middle strip of red to purple doesn't run away off the edge. Wow. It was so long ago that both Mom and Dad were alive when I did the dye project and I was living in my favorite if decaying apartment in Juneau. Huh.

harvest

I took the buckets off of one of the potato plants today. Here they are back in June, one bucket deep and looking nice and healthy. The one in the back is the one that's now a pile of Yukon gold potatoes.
Geez, the grass was green in June. It's black and brown now with late season sprouts coming up now that it's finally raining. Black grass is really ugly.
Here they are, my first potatoes. Ever. It sort of freaked me out to have them actually appear in the pile of soil. It's been a tough summer for cool weather crops, too hot for months and suddenly rainy as hell. I was afraid the plants were going to rot with out making potatoes, but here they are. Food. I think I might just do it again next year. Isn't that what planting a garden is about, giving hope, thinking ahead and doing it again, but just a little better?

normal weather for now

It's finally cooled off a lot, back to 50's and light rain...like a good summer day in Haines. Inspiring enough to get back to the bead table where this fine gentleman waits for me. He's a scientific replica of an adult male skull I got ages ago in Ketchikan at the Ray Troll store. I was still working on the tour boats at the time so 130 bucks for a life sized skull didn't seem outrageous. He's been my traveling companion for a bunch of moves in and out of storage and various houses and apartments but I still haven't given him a name.

The new bead project is a smaller fish called a stickleback. A 3 spined stickleback to be precise. When the tide is really high, parts of the golf course where we walk most days floods and these wee fish get washed up in to the grass. There was one in a shrinking puddle one day, I either gave him a heart attack or he survived the sweaty-palmed run from the puddle to the stream. I have this idea that he was a little shook up when he hit the water and totally confused as to how he ended up in that stream instead of the one he came from!

fair hair

I got fair hair at the Southeast Alaska State Fair this weekend! Alaska is soooo big (how big is it?) we have more than one state fair. This is the smaller, more funky version of the agricultural fair in Palmer where they have those big-ass cabbages. I sold some stuff, volunteered a couple of days and got fair hair...in other words the hermit participated! ...and had some good fun. Hermit participation is a very good thing. Fair hair is a pretty good thing and chatting with a really interesting guy until all hours of the morning is REALLY good!

If any of my 5 followers are voters in Alaska, time to jump on the Bob Poe bandwagon (see Mudflats for more info on this potential governor dude). He was here for the fair, he campaigned some, bought coffee at the Market and had the patience to stand in the really long (local brew) beer line yesterday! Bob Poe for governor!