The Finished Half of the Studio

Here is a photo of the finished half of my studio. You can see that the Horn sewing table fits almost perfectly into the extended area, right next to my design wall. Yesterday I finished putting away and tidying up in the studio and was able to turn my attention to finishing the first of the 9 quilts I began at the retreat in Cumbria last month. The quilt is called Taos Blue and is not a reproduction of anything in existence; rather, it is my recalled impression of the sights and colours of New Mexico, especially the brilliant Taos blue, from our trip there in December 1999.

Between Christmas and New Year's 1999/2000, we were taken on this whirlwind tour of parts of New Mexico (we only had 4 days) by our friends Bob and Judith Trager with whom we had been staying in Boulder, Colorado. We stopped the first night in Las Vegas. Don't confuse Las Vegas, Nevada, where the nightlife never ends, with this sleepy little town of Las Vegas, New Mexico, where the nightlife never begins! (They roll up the sidewalks there at 5 pm!) We stayed in an old hotel that looked like a prop from a Western film. Our second two nights were spent in Santa Fe, a place where the living is wonderful if you are wealthy and not all that great if you're not. Santa Fe was lovely at that time of year, however, especially at night with the luminarias (candles burning in paper bags filled with sand--or the plastic-and-electric bulb versions thereof) lining the ledges and rooftops of all the adobe buildings. (See photo taken from a postcard.) On our final day we drove through Taos, with a brief stop for lunch and a browse through the shops. Taos seemed to us to be the "Disney version" of Santa Fe, smaller and more stylised. There is wonderful art to be seen in both places but none of it is inexpensive. One of the shops we browsed was a fabric shop where I got some beautiful cloth from Guatemala. The piece that forms the background of today's quilt was mainly Taos blue, a blue so strong that it is almost mesmerising.

The quilt shows a number of features common in that part of the world: in the foreground is a coyote fence. Made from weathered scrap wood, you see these everywhere. One presumes they are so-named to keep coyotes out of settled areas but to look at them, you wouldn't think they'd offer much resistance to a determined coyote.

Lining the fence is the ubiquitous dried tumbleweed, here created with thread snips "baked" into a substance called Tyvek and secured under white netting. (By "baked" I mean the Tyvek and thread snips were sandwiched between pieces of baking parchment and then ironed with a very hot iron to melt the Tyvek so that it turned into a clear plastic film holding the threads.)

The adobe church could be any adobe building except for the bell tower. I haven't decided yet whether I will add any other features to the building. I will have to look at it for a while to know. (It is definitely not the highly stylised and famous Taos church which has been photographed and painted by the likes of Georgia O'Keefe and Ansel Adams.) The contours of adobe buildings are always soft-cornered, some moreso than others, but they give a feeling of gentleness to the architecture. They also convey a sense of solidity, as though they are planted in the earth. The colours of adobe range from a sort of pale putty colour to the deep brown-orange as you see here. The orange provides a thrilling contrast to the true blue of the sky.

The landscape in the top half of the quilt reflects the sparseness of the ground cover, the flattened mesas in the distance, and the cottonwood trees which, in winter, appear as whitish-gray fluffs of dried foliage. I purposefully left space between the building and the landscape to give the sense of emptiness which is part of the look of the land. Michael Ondaatje, in Anil's Ghost, put it this way: "In the southwestern deserts you needed to look twice at emptiness." One learns this intuitively after traveling even one day through this countryside.

The next quilt also will follow on with the Southwestern theme. The Tragers are avid collectors of Native American painted pots. We went with them to visit various pueblos (settlements) to meet some of the artists who make and decorate these pots. I still have to "make" a pot or two before that quilt is finished.

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We are having another lovely day today, sunshine, a light breeze, and temperature going up to the mid-70s. Don is on the golf course so I'm going back into the studio now. Things are getting dry out in the garden and so we are not unhappy to see that rain is forecast for the next 3 days. The roofers are back this morning, hoping to make as much progress as possible, but they believe the job won't be finished until early next week. We haven't seen the painters again since Thursday. We can see the end in sight but it keeps telescoping into the next week and the next week....