Posts Tagged ‘November’
drear November: Project #2 – a small quilt
When I visited my mother-in-law during her last year, I started a small project with her. As I sat and talked with her, we worked at a lap-sized quilt for her granddaughter, my husband’s niece.
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She could not do much of the work but she chose the fabrics from a selection and showed me how to organize the patches. I sewed them together as we talked.
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When she was younger, she loved to quilt with her neighbour friends and sister-in-law. My husband remembers a big quilting frame set up in the living room and the ladies drinking tea and sewing. When my father-in-law died, I helped my mother-in-law set up a smaller frame in her living room and visited her during my lunch hours to quilt … we made a huge quilt with green and amber autumn leaves. I learned a lot about quilt-making from her.
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The quilt we made for my niece was simple, made of squares of two patterns:
- one is of violets in shades of blue, with green stems and leaves and interwoven silver;
- one is of tiny yellow roses on a background of vines and leaves.
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For the backing, we chose a bright floral print, showing pink and red flowers with green leaves.
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Now, many years later, I have decided to finish what we began. For the binding, I have chosen and ordered a pretty pattern of green leaves from Spoonflower. The greens will match both top and underside of the quilt.
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During November, I will finish sewing and binding the quilt. Instead of setting up a quilting frame, I will do the quilting with the fabric stretched across a large wooden hoop.
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This will be an enjoyable and warming project during the dark evenings of November. When I am finished, I will mail the quilt to our niece, along with the story of how her grandmother helped with the quilt.
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Are you doing a project to ‘warm’ the November evenings?
All my best,
Jane (a.k.a. Alexandra)
welcome, drear November
November is here. Not my favourite month, but a month I try to face with planning and determination.
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Why the word ‘drear’ for November? After the colours of October, November seems a month of blacks, whites and greys. Snow has already fallen here in New Brunswick (we had 10 cm on October 30). The days and evenings are colder. The trees are mostly bare trunks and branches. The days are shorter and lower exposures to sunshine encourage the doldrums.
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But November has some fine characteristics. The oaks and beech trees cling to their leaves, creating slashes of orange and copper on the landscape. The month begins this year with a gibbous moon, waning from the full Hunter Moon of October, so clear nights will be bright, at least for a week. The crisper drier air invites deep breaths as I walk the loop of our driveway. And cooler evenings invite warmer activities like quilting and embroidery.
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We have a few plans which will improve our lives:
- We are planning to add another loop to our driveway trail and are having some dead and encroaching trees removed so we can walk more easily.
- I am working on a special shelf in our house to be an emergency station, in case we have winter power outages and flooding. It will be a place for storing water, candles and other things we might need in an emergency.
- I want to complete a small quilt I began years ago with my mother-in-law. When it is completed, I will send it to my husband’s niece as a memento of her grandmother.
- Reading is always on my list of things to do and this year I have a new way of recording the books I read. Emily Arsenault at Dog Eared Books in Oromocto, New Brunswick has created ‘The Book Lover’s Journal’ with space for listing books read and making comments on the reading experience. ( https://www.dogearedbooks.ca/ )
- As you may know, I am working to complete ‘Pareidolia,’ the fifth book in the Kaye Eliot Mystery Series, to be available by the end of November.
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I am a planner by nature and by training, but I think having a plan at the first of any month helps it to progress more smoothly. Items not completed become the plans for a later month. And accomplishments feel so rewarding.
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In the next posts, I will talk about each of the plans mentioned above and give you an idea of my progress through ‘drear’ November.
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All my best,
Jane (a.k.a. Alexandra)
making November warm #3
One way to keep warm is to expend energy.
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The cold days are perfect for housekeeping projects. I am a collector and my house is overflowing. I am trying to downsize, make my world a little easier to navigate. During November, I want to attend to my kitchen, to return it to the beautiful space it was meant to be.
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A few years ago, we decided to open the wall of a closet to make a throughway between our bedroom and bathroom. To do this, the closet had to be emptied and all of the closet contents ended up in the kitchen!
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Our kitchen is quite large, 14′ by 14′. It has white cupboards with green knobs, faux-granite countertops and a grey faux-stone floor. As I did with other rooms in the house, I decorated the kitchen according to a theme. Strawberries! A thin decorative border of strawberries, leaves and berries, runs around the room about a foot from the ceiling.
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The curtains are white with tiny red dots. I have a ceramic cookie jar shaped like a strawberry and a set of vintage cans with the same motif.
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On the wall is a strawberry cross-stitch started by my grandmother and finished by me.
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The wooden top to my dish-washing machine is painted with strawberries and my dishes are mostly (you guessed it) strawberry themed.
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Sounds nice, right? Not so much. There are so many things crammed into the kitchen, you would be hard-pressed to name the theme!
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So part of my ‘keeping warm’ in November is to empty my kitchen of non-kitchen things.
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My process is:
Make a plan for the next day: identify the item to be removed;
Dust and clean the item;
Decide if it is to be kept, discarded or given to a second-hand charity;
Move it to the appropriate place.
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So far, I have tackled a large Coleman cooler, my suitcase collection and a tote filled with swimming pool supplies. It is hard for me to let go of things. The Coleman cooler was easy to give away: we have another, newer cooler. The suitcases were harder; they included a set my husband gave me when I traveled so much in the 1980s. In the end, I decided to let them go; I have a smaller, newer suitcase. The pool supplies were harder. We don’t have a pool, but they include a beautiful inflatable palm tree. Every woman needs a beautiful inflatable palm tree. The tote remains in the corner of the kitchen.
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Next I need to remove several items under the kitchen table. They include: the above-mentioned strawberry canister set; a tote of items collected for use at our camp; a set of plastic fruit that once belonged to my Mom. Any guesses which of these may be kept, discarded or given away????
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Cleaning the kitchen will work in two ways to warm November:
1. the activity will be warming as I expend energy
2. making the decisions about keeping, discarding or giving away will take so much thought,
I will forget all about being cold.
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All my best!
Stay warm!
Jane
impressions of the day – early morning
Every morning, after waking, I spend a little time in my guest room. I get myself ready for the day – doing a few stretches, looking from the window, greeting Zoë (our cat), planning my day.
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Usually this happens just before sun-up and I am able to watch the sun rise behind the woods in our back yard. I am always amazed at the shift in the location of sun rise, season to season. These November days, it is to the south of where it rose in early summer.
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This morning the sunrise was brilliant, a fire of orange behind the trees. The flaming colours burst through small gaps in the darker trees – inspiration to get out my watercolours!
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November 3, 2015 ‘morning fire’ Jane Tims
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Copyright Jane Tims 2015
Winterberry Holly (Ilex verticillata (L.) Gray)
In contrast to October, November is a colorless month. The exception – November’s red berries.
They punctuate the roads and ditches – Highbush-cranberry, Staghorn Sumach, American Mountain-ash, Hawthhorn and Rose. Eventually the birds claim every one for food, but through most of early winter, the berries remain to cheer us.
Highbush Cranberry in November
Last November, my husband and I took a walk in the thicket of saplings above the lake. As we came around the edge of a clump of alder, we were surprised to see a sturdy bush of Winterberry Holly. It glowed with orange-red berries, set off by sprays of bronze-coloured leaves, not yet fallen. We are used to seeing Winterberry along the lake, but in the grey and white thicket, the little bush was a gift. We went there again this past Saturday, and there it was, glowing in the morning sun.
our bush of Winterberry Holly
Winterberry Holly (Ilex verticillata (L.) Gray) is also known as Canadian Holly, Swamp Holly, Inkberry, Black Alder and Feverbush. The shrub is usually found in wet areas, including wetlands, damp thickets, moist woods and along waterways. The leaves turn a brassy purple-brown before they fall. The fruit is a small, hard orange-red berry, remaining on the bush until January.
In my poem, the words ‘lexicon’ and ‘exile’ are included as imperfect anagrams for Ilex (ilex).
Canadian Holly
(Ilex verticillata (L.) Gray)
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drab November
and lexicon
expires
umber leaves
grey verticals
dull stubble
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winterberries
astound the wetland
red ink on page
and words explode
from exile
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fever flush and holly
above December snow
icicles vermillion
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© Jane Tims 2011
entering november
After the color explosion of October, I feel a little exhausted. Sensory overload. Trees and roadside plants have gone to sleep or seed for the winter. Most of the Canada Geese have left on their southward migration, and I am sure our Groundhogs have eaten themselves into a winter stupor. Not many of us left to settle in to our niche for the coming months.
My November ‘niche’ activities will include:
- daily filling of the bird feeder
- refurbishing our outside fire pit
- acquiring rock for our new project… a rock-embellished woods road (more about this later)
- sorting some of the books in my library
- return to making soups and stews for our meals
Mostly, I want to appreciate November. I am not very fond of the coming month, but I have resolved to find good in it.
November first frost
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air brittle
a broken sliver of moon
caught among disrobed larches
silence ruptured
by craven’s cry
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© Jane Tims 1995
nichepoetryandprose 