We recently added a new cat to our household as a companion to our favorite tabby.  This full grown little girl is tiny, under six pounds.  She is seen here on a dozy afternoon with a freshly harvested GIANT garden zucchini.  (Photo taken by my spouse). The two cats seem to be getting along well, playing together with increasing frequency, and recently spotted sleeping on opposite sides of a king sized bed.  No doubt they sleep with one eye open.

My husband has a collection of names he collects for our cats.  Some of them have tracked my artistic journey and love of all things fiber.  Contenders include “Thrum” and “Heddle” from my days as a weaver.  But this little girl was christened with a reference to a more current obsession, “Bernina”.  Meet Bernina, here shown exploring my studio.

One of those glorious indian summer days that always seem to be ordered up by the chamber of commerce for California in January.   I snuck off to the beach and caught this golden sunset over the Monterey Bay.  

Life in the real world is impeding my progress in the virtual one.  We are in the midst of moving, and boxes line the hallways, and are stacked high in the utility room.  Yesterday I packed up my “studio library”, which includes hundreds of art and textile related books.  I have several interesting ones on fabric design and textile printing.  One that caught my eye is “Design Your Own Repeat Patterns: a quick and easy approach” by V. Ann Waterman.  I must have bought it years ago for a class, as the price is marked $3.95.  Much easier to do on the computer these days, but good to know how to build a repeat pattern with paper and pencil as well.  Makes me itch to get creating.  But I resisted the tempting butterfly stickers, leaves and flowers of the pattern workbook, as I must resist most things textile related until we are settled into our new home.  For now I’m happy to have a bit more space in the studio and the dreams of more art time when moving is done.

I know I’d feel more hopeful.

If you would like to sign a petition supporting this idea, go here.  I only takes 30 seconds.

Let’s hear it for the arts.  Yes we can!

So this year, with a more flexible schedule, and a bit more time for myself, I indulged in a reading marathon.  This stack is what’s known as the “Trophy pile”.  One of several piles of books that litter the master bedroom shamefully.  This pile began bedside in early January and grew there was no more room under the small oil painting.  It makes a pretty vignette.  

Many fine books were read, as well as some enjoyable piffles.

I will packing up the piles to make their way down to the newly constructed library at the new house. Meanwhile I made a list of most of the books I read this year, and posted them in the left sidebar.  I’ve discovered some great books spotted on my favorite blogs.  Maybe you will find one here you can enjoy.

• EggNog with a knob of bourbon. (check)
• Persimmon cookies.  (check)
• Fabulous bottle of wine (Burrell School Pinot). (check)
• Yummy Mexican Posole served up by good friends. (check)
• Good Friends. (!!!! check)

This year also featured the irresistible and seemingly ubiquitous Noro striped scarf I knit as a gift.  

We had a grand time doing just as we pleased.

We’ve renamed the occasion to reflect our non-traditional approach, and now raise our glasses with smiles on our faces, and our most sincere wishes for health and happiness. 

 Happy Humbug everyone.

Some people think my only delight is fabric and textile related endeavours.  But it’s not true.

I like shiny things too.

Mac-Santa was very good to me this year.  Happy holidays everyone.

The most pedestrian plant emerges with a snowy white crown.

A birdhouse becomes a fairy castle or a monk’s high mountain sanctuary.

And a pile of stones aspires to be a work of modern art.

PS.  I fixed the photo links.  Sadly it meant reverting to an older version of Wordpress.  I’ll wait for 2.7 to right itself with a dot release.

Despite my long-held belief that NO software program works really well prior to version 4.0, I rather brazenly went ahead and upgraded to WordPress version 2.7 only a few days following its release. For some reason I expected the upgrade to be a snap, but between me not seeing the instructions where you are told to disable all plug-ins in advance of this upgrade, inadvertently blowing away my old server files without a complete back-up, and making lots of changes to my child theme. Well. I’ve managed to hose the visual editor, the media library, and broken all my photo links. Prowling around the web, I see that I am not alone in some cases, and there may be bugs, plug-in conflicts, etc. not just pilot error. My current theory is that because I did not disable WP-SuperCache prior to install, I have got something stuck in database pergatory.

Anyhow, I’m going to let a bit of time pass before I try to sort out the photo/plug-in/visual editor issues and hope that some solution emerges on the WordPress forums.

Eventually this will be a visual blog. Really!

I also want to give a nod to Ian Stewart and his “Thematic” theme framework. Such a beautiful job of separating form from content. Almost thrilling to use after slogging through the creation of HTML sites in Dreamweaver. I easily built my old child theme called “Derivamatic” for this blog. I wanted a clean, minimal design that still reflects my color sensibility.

The state of web typography is still rather woeful. It makes me sad to not be able to use all the wonderful typefaces in my library. Access to type libraries seems to be the technology/legal gatekeeper. I know the folks at the W3C CSS committee are trying to work on this topic. I also found a fledgling effort called typeface.js but I haven’t had the bandwidth to play with it yet. I believe the folks at WordPress have a shot at solving the web typography problem, should they choose to work on the font licensing/embedding issue. Clearly they could perpetuate a core set of typefaces fairly easily via their platform. And that would be very nice. Remember the Postscript “core 35″?

Anyway, it’s been fun to play with this, and now that I have my own blog, I suppose I will have a good excuse for learning more.