The Little Dresser

Okay. I used to have a roll top desk. It was a lovely thing - probably the nicest piece of furniture in the house. But it was also a very large thing and I have to think back more than a decade to remember the last time I actually sat down at it and used it like, well, a desk. Mostly it held the bills and accumulated whatever miscellaneous pieces of paper that wandered in the door. So I've sold the thing to somebody who has coveted it for years and will actually use as a desk.. So to find a home for the various bits and pieces that were living in the desk, I bought myself a small dresser and refinished it.

The first step was actually the hardest. My usual thrift stores came up completely dry, then the second and third tier stores let me down. I even looked at some new ones. They wanted $70 and $110 for laminated chip-board junk I could twist with my bare hands. But the last store I stopped at, with an attitude more of "dotting the I's and crossing the T's" than any real hope, had just what I wanted - a small, simple wooden dresser. It had taken some hit points over the years, but it was sturdy and the price was right - $30.

I was sanding the first drawer when I realized I needed to get a picture!

I cleaned it up, and sanded it down.

I liked the handles, but one was missing, so all of them had to go.

I put 2 coats of MinWax Mission Oak PolyShades on it and added simple porcelain handles. It came out darker than I had really wanted, but it fits neatly in the home office. So I am a happy girl.

Pretty good for a first try in refinishing!

Heaven only knows what trouble this success is going to inspire me to get into!

More Finishes, Major and Minor

First, the Major. The Oak Tree Sample is done! It's not a large a piece, about 8"" x 4", but I am quite pleased with it. Seeing as I can't even remember when I started it, I also count it as a major check-off on the Getting Things Done list and that makes me feel good, quite important on a week that is proving to be full of thorns.

I made only one real change on it, swapping a little cross-stitch motif between my initials and name with a satin-stitched star that I thought picked up on the shape of the eight-pointed star motif above it.
  

I may hem-stitch the thing, partly because I've never done any hemstitching and it would be good for me to learn, partly because I prepared this piece of fabric back in the days when I was using iron-on hem tape and I think  it would be good to that stuff off the fabric and away from the sampler entirely.

The "minor finish" involves an over-due Christmas present. A while back they were handing out a free print at the local library of a painting by Diane Pierce, a Florida artist I admire hugely. I snagged a couple, thinking one would be perfect for my best birding buddy. When Micheal's had a half-price sale on picture frames, and I had a good coupon I could couple with it, I got a basic black frame. The thing would look like Buddy Holly's glasses on Diane's osprey's, so I got a couple of cans of Rustoleum's Hammered Gold spray paint and Bob's Yer Uncle, as they say.

The Frame, ready for its transformation.

A dry and a wet Fly-Lady Rag - my best pals!

I think the final result is quite splendiferous!

Two check-offs on my Things to Get Done List in as many weeks. Yoohoo!

First Finish of The Year! Or, The End of a Beginning.

You know how the natives in the Arctic are supposed to have something like 200 words for snow? I don't know if that's true, but I know for a fact that there are something like 150 different kinds of sand in Florida. Seriously. For real. We even have an Official State Sand - Myakka Fine, in case you're wondering. When you've got as much of the stuff as we do, you get to be something a connoisseur of silica before it's melted into glass. I'm not sure what the sand in my yard would officially be called. I've heard it called sugar sand, I've heard it called ball-bearing sand. But I know for a fact that it is the very dickens to find anything that can actually grow in the darn stuff. So when I find something that doesn't go belly up within a matter of weeks of being put into it, I get all excited. And so we enter into the saga of the Beach Sunflower. Or East Coast vs. West Coast.

Beach sunflowers are a Florida native. They do exactly what their name implies - grow on the dunes - and are well adapted to whatever Florida cares to throw at them. I got some a couple of years ago for the back, and was quite happy with them. They handled the heat, the sun, the sand, got bushy and strong and bloomed profusely. But the husband is from the MidWest and does not share my love for things that sprawl loosely and freely and trimmed them down with the idea they would grow back more neatly. Flowers are not shrubs, so I had bare ground again.

East Coast Beach Sunflower before Tom took the shears to it.

So I got myself some West Coast Beach Sunflower. Here Tom and I found a plant we could agree on. They bloom in all but the coldest weather and can handle the sun and heat and require little to no care, which makes me happy, and they stay low and form a tidy mass, which makes Tom happy. I had a chance to go to Pinellas County couple of weeks ago, so I got to by to my favorite nursery and get more West Coast Beach Sunflowers. Half of them went in the back to fill in the spaces left by the Great Sunflower Whack Job, and half in the front. I had to be careful to make sure I removed any remnant of the East Coast sunflowers since the two are closely related and when they cross, the taller, bushier East Coast variety is dominant.

Last year's  planting of  West Coast Beach Sunflower - Much tidier!

Then Sunflowers in the back will be growing in front of and around my Peggy Martin Roses, aka "Hurricane Katrina Roses." I set these out two and three years ago with hopes of having them climb the 3 center pillars of the pergola and get into the rafters a bit. They've started to do that, and well, you just have to love it when a plan comes together. Some of the canes have already hit the top 15' long mark and are draping prettily in the rafters. They have 2 really big blooms a year, but they bloom off and on in all but the coldest weather.I babied them a bit their first year; now I fertilize them about twice a year, water them occasionally during the worst of the dry season, and that's about it - you really do have to be tough to live in my world. But this is what they in return for that modicum of care. You just have to love these guys.

My Peggy Martin Roses

The story behind these roses is amazing. They came from the garden of a gardener name of Peggy Martin who lived in Plaquemines Parrish near New Orleans. Nobody really knows where they came from originally, but she was always glad to give cuttings to anyone who admired it. When Hurricane Katrina roared through, the Martin family was devastated; the flood waters swept away her parents, her home, her husband's commercial fishing boat. Her garden was under 20' of sea water for more than 2 weeks. When she was finally able to return, this rose was growing back. Inspired by its story, people who had these Peggy Martin Roses used cuttings from their bushes to help growers like the Antique Rose Emporium in Texas to sell these roses and donate part of the proceeds to a fund to help restore gardens destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. That is how I got my first two, and I was so impressed with how well they did that I got a third. You have to be tough to survive on my patch of ball-bearing sand, and these guys have the right stuff!

So delicate looking, but so tough.

The front yard has been a whole other battle. There had been a yew hedge in front of the house, but it had gotten tattered and scraggly, so we'd had it taken out and replaced it with plumbago last spring - another plant which has done well for us. We also planted a Cracker Rose, an antique species rose. I've another in the yard, great plant in completely the wrong spot. It did not read the part of the book where it's supposed to top out between 4 and 6 feet; I think it wants to be 8 feet or so. I have to keep cutting it in half so we can see out the dining room window. I'm afraid that one will have to go. But you have to love a plant that does so well in such hostile territory, so I've sited another Cracker Rose where it can get as big was it wants to be. Once the Beach Sunflowers spread out in front of the plumbago and new Cracker Rose gets some size on it, this space should look a lot nicer.

These babies have a lot of growing up to do!

So bit by bit we're getting the yard a bit more up to snuff - though we have no intention of ever having one of those perfectly manicured St. Augustine grass ChemLawn things some of the neighbors have. Our yard will never look like the greens of Augusta. But as long as it doesn't bear too close a resemblance to the first turn at Churchhill Downs, we're doing okay!

We Have Lift-Off!

Took three tries to get the threading right.

Wove a bit, realized two threads of the weft weren't enough, so I had to re-wind the bobbin and make it three. Spent an evening and the better part of a morning winding the lace-weight yarn onto cones and tubes so I can wind it onto bobbins more easily - which meant I was doing a lot of very tedious untangling. (Thank you NetFlix and National Geographic Channel for just the sort of mildly interesting but not too involved TV I can do this kind of work to. The "Navajo Cops" are my pals!)

Wove some more, realized the sett was completely wrong, so had to take all the threads out of the reed and take it from 36 threads to the inch to 24, which basically meant throwing away about 3" worth of the warp I wound.

But to get the pattern I wanted just like I wanted it....

Pattern: Valley Forge Dogwood

Priceless!

There is a warp on my loom!

 I can't say how long I've been trying to make this happen, suffice it to say this warp and I have been through a lot together. But at long last it is on the loom, everything it tied on, and actual weaving is about to commence. Wonders never cease.

Shuttles loaded and ready

I'm planning to weave a scarf in Valley Forge Dogwood, an overshot pattern that's one of my favorites.  I took a picture of a test swatch that I did, but for some reason blogspot kept turning it on edge every time I tried to post it. I'll try again later when I've a bit more patience with electronic neurosis. It's a lovely pattern and confidence is high it will look great.

On other fronts, the Oak Tree Sampler has passed the half way point. Most of this week was spent on the boarder. The blue outer border and inner rust borders are Montenagran and Double Cross Stitch, which take 12 and 10 stitches respectively to cover 6 threads, so they are not speedy. But they are a lot easier to do in front of the television that free-standing motifs!

Kelvin-Helmholtz Waves

And in the realm of "Just Cool Stuff," I was driving home from doing some volunteer work at a local nature preserve when I was rewarded with a glimpse of these clouds. They're called Kelvin-Helmholtz Waves, and develop when a level of cirrus clouds occur between air currents of differing speeds or directions. I've seen them a couple of times before, but what made this especially cool was that I saw three layers of them! The top two were very clear, the bottom layer was hazy, but still definitely Kelvin-Helmholtz. So why am I having to use an image off the internet and don't have my own shot of this amazing moment? Well, when you're on an overpass on a 4-lane divided highway, it's not a good idea to stop for pictures no matter how amazing the phenomenon you're looking at.

Television Brain

I've been working on "The Oak Tree Sampler." Now that the alphabet is sorted out, I moved on to the central "oak tree" motif. It got way too complicated - and a right royal PICNIC it was too. (In computer help desk parlance, that stands for Problem In Chair Not In Computer.) I was happily working away, but when I stepped back to look at the work, I realized something was wrong. Namely, I'd worked the trunk in the wrong color. All that rust is supposed to be green. Sometimes my seam ripper is my best friend.

I guess I miss fall so much I decided to make it an autumn oak!

So, back to work. But I moved indoors, which meant I was in front of the television. Now I don't watch television as much as I listen to it because I'm usually stitching or knitting when I'm in front of the idiot box. Unfortunately, I tried this while watching a British mystery, Death in Paradise, a piece set on a British protectorate in the Caribbean.. And between the British accents, the island accents, and the fact you're trying to keep track of the clues - the next day when I sat down to stitch, I realized the BBC and cross stitch motifs on linen are not a happy mix.

Heard about your brain on drugs? Well, this is your stitching under the influence of TV.

Then I had a huge debate about the color. It's green. It's okay. But it was bugging me. I even pulled out my thread collection and considered changing it. As I compared the green to the other colors in the piece I could see exactly what the designer was doing, which lead me to seriously question what I was doing. It finally dawned on me what my problem was. The leaves are oak-like. My art training is as a botanical illustrator, and DMC 3363 is not a very oak leaf-like color. I decided to get over myself and stick with the original color. Especially as I had consulted with my sister and she had wisely pointed out that you can only rip out your stitches so many times before your linen starts falling to pieces out of sheer frustration with you.

There is not a thing wrong with that green!

Things seem to be going much more smoothly now.

Sometimes I need close supervision.

Book of the Month: Gorgon

Much I did not know when I picked up this book. Like there was an extinction 250 million years that made the one that wiped out the dinosaurs look like not such a big deal. That the epoch before the dinosaurs had had incredible biodiversity. Or that the mammals had been poised once before to become major league players on the field of life, but were nearly wiped out. Peter D. Ward's Gorgon is not one of those in-depth science books with lots of graphs and charts and the sort of in-depth analysis that my darling-dear adores, and it really wasn't even that much about it's title character, but it does give one insight into how messy science has to be at times to work, and how scientific  ideas evolve.

Peter D. Ward was one of the scientists who helped develop the theory that it was an asteroid that did in the dinosaurs. After the decade-long flurry of discovery and debate that lead to the acceptance of an asteroid causing the K/T extinction, Ward and scientists like him found themselves at loose ends. He wound up working South Africa, in a hostile high desert area called the Karoo, looking at rock laid in an era certainly not in his expertise, the Permian. The Permian Era was considered a bit of a drag. There were some interesting critters, but the general consensus was that not much had been going on, and it petered out. The Permian was sort of the gray area that came before the glory days when the dinosaurs reigned.

Ward uses his own struggles personally and professionally dealing with the miserable conditions of the Karoo and the steep curve of learning about the Permian after being an expert on the Cretaceous to shed light on how the scientific community struggled to come to grips with the story the Permian rocks around the world were telling. That the period when Pangaea was a super-continent had been one with a tremendous variety of life, that included a variety of proto-mammals and a group they christened the "mammal-like reptiles" because they bore traits of both groups. (The top land predator was the title creature of this book, the Gorgon, was one of these. Originally about the size of a dog, by the end of the Permian, the largest Gorgons could be 10 feet long and boasted 4" long fangs.) That all the ideas anybody had about what happened to these creatures as the Permian came to a close and Pangaea broke up were completely wrong. There was nothing gradual about any of it, there were no graceful exits. The extinctions were fast and brutal and hit on land and sea at pretty much the same time.

That is where the book gets scary and extremely relevant because what killed off 90% off all life on Earth was climate change. The Earth warmed - and apparently warmed in a hurry. Here's the kicker. It seems that when the Earth warms, decay accelerates and oceans acidify, both of which pull oxygen out of the atmosphere. The Permian atmosphere went from a bit higher in oxygen than it is now to about 10% - which is what you have at around 14,000' elevation. Nearly everything suffocated on land and sea. The proto-mammals and lizards did not have very efficient lungs, so they nearly all died out. Bird ancestors on the other hand, survived better because their breathing systems are extremely efficient; they even have air sacs in their bones to help them draw as much oxygen as possible out of the atmosphere. Once scientists knew about the bird/dinosaur connection, they looked at dinosaur bones and saw the same bone structures. So dinosaur and bird ancestors survived the Permian extinction because they could survive in low oxygen better. It took the dinosaurs being wiped out in an oxygen-rich situation for mammals to get a second chance to become an important life form again.

The real significance of the realization that an asteroid played a major role in wiping out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago is not that a chunk of interstellar rock killed off a large portion of life on Earth. It lies in the realization that great extinction events can happen quickly, that the idea great changes happen slowly, in "geologic time" is false, that major biologic changes can happen with devastating speed. In many ways, Gorgon is about what happens once we have crossed that intellectual Rubicon.