I know, it doesn't look like this now. But things change so quickly around here! And fall really IS coming; Alice and I, the polar bears in our family, have been enjoying cooler weather and snuggling into sweatshirts in the morning, paired with basking in the sun around lunch time.

I have a second fall piece in the works, possibly a third. Whatever is finished before September 20th I'll take up to Grow Gallery. The it's time to focus on finishing up work for the Crane Estate art show and sale.

Busy is good.

We had a week of sunsets like this while we visited my brother and his wife and their son. (In my opinion th ebest nephew in the world. Please don't tell me otherwise!) We rented a house on the hill, so we could see over Manana and into the west – the views were expansive, but the sunsets were particularly lovely.

Once we got home, it was time to get the big one organized across the river to college. It was easier this year, and will probably easiest next year, when we've had all that practice. She's carrying two orange codas and a bag of cookies to thank her dad for carrying her.

 And the day after that, school started for the other one. Alice is looking rather more awake here than is usual for this time of day. The excitement of the first day of school clearly got her moving more quickly than usual.

 I'm designing sets for the fall production at school. We are doing Skin of Our Teeth, the Thornton Wilder play that isn't Our Town. I spent a happy morning making 1/8 scale models of spiral stairs, turning triangles that I keep thinking of as trilithons, and people sized blobs. Since everyone works better with something concrete in front of them, I glued this together so the directors and I can talk about possibilities and exactly HOW big those spiral stairs are…

And that's what I've been up to lately. I'll talk more about the Holyoke show soon.

Sometimes in the middle of something I am not confident of, I have to stop and do something I know I understand completely, to reassure myself of my hard won skills.

Alternatively, sometimes in the middle of working on one thing, the urgency to do a different thing becomes overwhelming and I have to drop the first thing and do the new thing now, and then go back to the old thing.

The above piece was a breather in the middle of the elaborate saltmarsh and beach piece I'm working on. I finished most of the salt marsh yesterday. I was delighted to find I had exactly the color of perle cotton I wanted, and I used that in the bobbin, and ran a green and brown variegated thread through the needle; the end result looks amazing. But then I desperately needed some pink and yellow and blue-green in my life, so I finished this piece early this morning and now I shall go back and think about the next part of the salt marsh puzzle.

Meet Iris – finished but nekkid! I think she might need some clothes, but Alice says dragon girls are fine Just the Way they ARE. Thank you.

The pattern was wonderful fun. She is knit entorely in the round, and each piece begins by picking up stitches from existing pieces. I thought it was going to be crazy-making, but instead I had a wonderful time, and was SO relieved at the end when I didn't have to sew anything together. I did get kind of carried away with her lower legs and ankles – I added some shaping the designer didn't have, but I have a major thing for a shapely calf, and it came out well enough.

The last thing that surprised me is how solid the knit fabric is. I was using tiny needles for largish yarn, so it makes intellectual sense, but to be able to stuff her fairly firmly and not have the stuffing show through the knitted fabric was lovely. I have lots of experience stuffing muslin bodies and faces, and they take a phenomenal amount sutffing; just when you think they might be finished, you are only half-way done, and the same amount again of stuffing goes into them and smoothes out the lumpiness. Iris is not stuffed to that standard, but she did absorb more stuffing than I anticipated, and is much sturdier because of it.

So. That was fun. Back to the landscapes!

Of course, much of what I like best about the original idea I had was the focus on details of how water carved channels through the marsh and offshore. And that is the part that is the most difficult to convey. Which is just how life goes, yes? Yes.

My mother lives where she can look out over the salt marshes. When I go and visit her, I go to the beach, because it is the best beach, and because I have a pass for it.

I have a pass so that I can go and be inspired by various Trustees of Reservations properties, so that I can make artwork for the Crane Estate Art Show and Sale that usually happens on an early weekend in November. (You should totally go – there are so many beautiful things, and admission is free when it isn't the opening.)

While that pass is getting a workout this year, this particular piece is drawing more from Google Earth than from the photographs and sketches I make when I'm there.

This is the first layer, the deepest channels.

The same piece of river as the last two, this time at sunset. Al is correct that the long sloping bank makes for a dead spot in the picture, but I knew that when I looked at the photograph I was working from. I've done what I can to add texture and interest to the area, but really they are all experiments.

can't write, knitting

knitting this person; isn't she great? 

In a series of nine images, you can see the order I generally use to make a piece. This one has an average number of layers. The stitching in the second image shows how I sketch things in to make sure the top layers will fall correctly on the underneath layers.

In the second row, you can see the details sketched in with stitching, including the reflections in the river and the foliage on trees.

The third row shows the final details added to round out the picture.

There is a phrase that delighted me when I learned it: contra-jour. If you have some French or other romance language, you recognize that as, basically, "against the day" and it means, in art at any rate, to sit looking towards the sun, and draw or paint (or photograph) what you see. If you think for a minute, you'll realize landscape painters and photographers generally do not do it that way. They position themselves at right angles to the illumination so the objects they are working on depicting have shadows that imply mass and form. Sometimes they look down-sun, and see everything illuminated in an interesting, flat way. Contra-jour means the sunlight is making you squint, and all the shadows are pointing directly at you, and things are oddly dark with very bright halos. There are moments when that is what you want, which is why there's a word for it.

This is sort of contra-jour, except my light is the setting moon, shining across the stretch of river north of Hadley. So I called it Contra Luna.