View from my Porch

Each morning when I get up, I look across my yard and see the cotton field.  It looks like snow, especially on these early fall mornings when there is fog.  Actually, I walked down to the road to take this picture because there are trees and plantings between my porch and the road, but its quite beautiful.  The farmer, who I have known since childhood, alternates this field each year between cotton and soybeans.  He'll probably be harvesting it in a few days and there will be huge bales of cotton sitting there.

And speaking of fields, I thought I'd share a picture of Dan standing in a pineapple field in Hawaii eating pineapple.

When we first talked about going to Hawaii, Dan said all he wanted to do was stand in the middle of a pineapple field and eat a pineapple.  I told him that I didn't think you could just do that and I was right.  First of all, there is only one working pineapple farm left in Hawaii.  Its on Maui.  All the other farms have closed due to high labor cost.  All our pineapples are now grown in Costa Rica or the Phillippines.  Fortunately, there was a tour available to tour this farm so of course, we had to take it.  The guide was great and let Dan and others eat all the pineapple they wanted.

Here are a few other pictures of our trip.

Farmer's Market in Hilo.  

Some Things I've Been Doing

I spent most of the summer experimenting with fabric painting techniques.  When I was in graduate school, I worked with Procion Dyes and painted my quilts with them.  Later, I became worried about the adverse health effects for long term exposure (I'll admit I was not always as careful as I should have been.)  I used acrylics for a long time, but did not like the texture that they left on the fabric, so this summer I tried a variety of inks. The six quilts or paintings above are the best of the results.

I pieced the backgrounds,using mostly 1"to 1.5" strips and then "drew" the shells with my sewing machine.  I then painted the shells using the inks.  Finally, I stretched them on 16" canvas stretchers.

This is now hanging in my bedroom over my bed.  I painted the wall that pumpkin color when we moved in the house, but had not found just the right thing to hang there.

We've just returned from a trip to Hawaii and I'll post some pictures of our trip later.  Right now I'm recovering from a terrible cold that I caught near the end of the trip and trying to get all the laundry finished so that I can get back in the studio next week.