Life's a Stitch

I’m dating myself here. That song, Sailing, by Christopher Cross brings back warm happy memories of the early months of C’s and my relationship.

Truthfully, the only thing about sailboats that takes me away is painting them. It’s a thing here in British Columbia – boat portraits. Pets, houses, wedding flowers and boats, I’ve had the privilege of painting them all.  As for the boats, I avoid boarding them, for a variety of reasons including severe sea sickness. 

I studied with a well known BC artist who once combined two of his photos: a sailboat and a mountain looming over the horizon. His painting was produced into a large scale run of prints that were sold far and wide. One day he received a call from an irate man who recognized his vessel in the painting. He exclaimed “You moved my sailboat! It’s never been moored near Mt. So and So. My teacher calmly replied, “I assure you I do not possess the ability to move sailboats, only mountains.”  Certainly a testament to his dry sense of humour. He gave us two important tips when painting a sailboat:

1. Never place them in the right side of your painting. People at a show will perceive it as sailing off the edge of the paper and will move on to consider the painting beside yours.
2. It is too difficult to paint a boat with its sails up. I ignore that one.

Here are two of my recent sailboat paintings. 

For those of you who have recently requested notecards and prints, I’ll be in touch shortly as I need to get an order placed and don’t want to miss anyone.

I’ve done it. Twice. Fallen prey to the advertising efforts of two family search companies. 

Who can blame me? I know almost nothing about my father’s side of the family as my only surviving relatives are my sister and an older cousin. My goal was to build a family tree in order to discover if our family name lives on, as all surviving children in our generation are girls whose children were given the surname of their spouses.

The verdict? The exercise was worth the effort, given Black Friday prices. If I had it to do over again, which would I choose?

My maternal uncle traced his maternal ancestry over many generations, so I was familiar of my roots on that side. He even began a search of my father’s lineage and guided me as to how to continue. Bottom line, I was aware of where my a good portion of my family originated prior to their immigration to North America. 

23&me’s genetic reports seemed quite accurate placing 50% of my background in Poland, about 37% in the Iberian Peninsula and Southern Europe and 13% traced to my Caribbean Native American and African roots. I was connected to 1061 specific genetic relatives, many first and second cousins, thanks to a prolific great grandfather who had four wives and 20+ children.

Why bother to try another version? Because the last names of my relatives read like a Puerto Rican telephone book, nary a Polish family member to be found. There was one I suspected to have a connection, but I never received a reply. I was hoping that the other side may have more of a presence in another database.

A year later, having read that it is a better source for building family trees, off I went down the path of AncestryDNA. Although they advertise “2x more geographical detail,” I didn’t find that to be the case for me. The results appeared far less accurate, assigning  70% of my lineage to Poland and the Slavic areas and only 13% to the Iberian peninsula and Southern Europe, and about the same amount of Caribbean Native American and African origins. It connected me to over 1000 4th cousins or closer. I found a third cousin who lives near us who looks astonishingly similar to my mother in her younger years. 

AncestryDNA allows me to form a family tree and search their database of records such as US census data and immigration papers. Although that’s been helpful on my dad’s side, it requires a paid subscription or a trip to a public library to use their free version. I’ve since found the same information available for no charge, on familysearch.org. 

So, bottom line? I probably could have saved $59 by sticking with 23&Me and using Familysearch.org for their free family tree services.

Warning: 

1. Online family trees are only as accurate as the person who entered the data, sort of like a family Wikipedia. I found loads of errors in other’s trees.
2. This genealogy stuff is fun, time consuming, addictive and comes with surprises. I discovered my dad’s mother, was listed as the stepdaughter of the father we knew of, meaning there is another family line to research.

There you have it, not quite in a nutshell. My recommendation: 23&me.

On the topic of family here are a couple of family photos from this year’s holiday season trip down south:

Hiking the Painted Canyon trail in Mecca CA, a slot canyon requiring the climbing of a series of ladders in close quarters:

Cooking:

C, M and high school friend, Laura cooking KC’s birthday dinner, pierogies three ways. Each one picked their own flavour: butternut squash and feta, Philly cheese steak and turkey dinner pierogies (turkey, stuffing, cranberries and mashed potatoes). I made a sticky date pudding birthday cake.

B making his never fail grilled eggplant involtini:

We convinced him to do it twice:

Elephants

Watercolour on Arches 300# paper

Unframed size: 16×20

Painted with techniques learned in class with Lian Quan Zhen

This is the painting I was working on in my last post, while sitting by the pool in California. I hadn’t thought about getting it home, but luckily it fit in my suitcase sandwiched between two sheets of dollar store foam board.

I knew I wanted to paint these elephants in a larger format, but watercolour paper is tricky. If you cut a standard size sheet into halves or quarters, your painting won’t fit a standard size mat and frame. This one was planned as part of a series, the first one being my mama and baby zebras, so I needed a standard size in order to match the previous frames. The math in that decision meant cutting a $17 sheet of paper to 16×20 with only enough paper left for two small 8×10 paintings.

I’ll definitely get a better photo to do prints and notecards of this one before selling it.

This painting was started a couple of weeks ago. Last week my son found out he’ll soon be filming an African photo safari. He showed the company’s owner my elephants in progress. “Wow, she said, your mom paints the future!” Hmmm, I’ll have to have a look at what else I’ve done recently. I know there were two sailboats…

After our recent family sadness,  Christmas in the desert gave us time for much needed R&R. We made no advance plans allowing each day to unfold. Our first sunrise promised sunshine and warmth.

Down time for me, meant plenty of opportunities for artwork. I was able to take in a class with my favourite local award winning artist, Diane Morgan, whose subject for the afternoon was a close up of hydrangea blossoms.

The others elected to spend time at the pool  in the heat of the healing sunlight.  It struck me one afternoon, while painting alone at home, I was missing important family time. So I packed it all up and joined them. 

One of daughter M’s Christmas gifts was a set of German coloured pencils, as I was hoping for some creative time together, however M arrived prepared with her own larger art lesson. She led us in an afternoon of acrylic pouring. It’s messy, quick and satisfying. 

I found an online tutorial on using coloured pencils on black paper, which is producing a far more subtle version of the previously mentioned hydrangea. C kids me that it’s a version of the black velvet paintings of the 70’s. I doubt the tutorial instructor was even born then.

I’m going to finish it for a different kind of drawing, then try it in vibrant pastel pencils.

A tiny pink knit hat has a place of honour on our tree in memory of baby Sage.  Parents M and KC, our daughter and SIL, lost their little girl at 21 weeks gestation at the beginning of the month. There are so many words to describe this time in our lives,  but I’ll leave it at the title of this post: Loss.

For those who were aware, and were in touch, thank you for your kind words and actions. 

Not your typical cake story, this one has solid history and there is an effort afoot to preserve its legacy. It has all the elements of a page turner: tragedy, hope, love, survival  and an eye to the future. 

This story starts with Alex Buckman, the president of Vancouver Child Survivors of the Holocaust. In a nutshell, after his parents were killed in concentration camps, he was raised by his aunt, who in a woman’s camp secretly wrote down her recipes from memory. This is not about a happy ending, as no Holocaust story is, but about hope and achieving a sense of purpose. 

One brief paragraph can’t tell this very moving, but complicated tale, so take a few minutes to read about it here. Better still, take 30 minutes to listen to CBC’s  radio documentary, an outcome of which is to inspire people to bake the cake yearly, on Remembrance Day.

The recipe:

The cake: 

This past spring, when I had professional prints made of the dog portrait I painted for my sister, there was a free pile outside the photo shop. “Thrifting” is another enjoyable non-lethal hunting behaviour for us right up there with mushrooming and geocaching. C views  everything through his “what can I do with this?” filter, as was the case with this Brilliant brand broken tripod from the junk pile in front of the photography store. 

Paired with a piece of hickory wood, C turned it, excuse the woodworking pun, into a side table to put between our new Norwegian chairs. Zoom in to see the Brilliant brand metal plate just under the tabletop.

Rescue mission #2. When we moved into our last house in 1998, we discovered an indoor planter filled with zebra plants and overgrown ladyfinger cacti. The previous owner had lived there since 1959, so the plants were potentially approaching their 40th birthdays. We carefully repotted them and they eventually made the move with us to White Rock.

I did my best to keep them alive during the renovation, but the winter months without heat took their toll. A few of the zebras escaped unscathed and last week I noticed a tiny patch of fresh green on the cactus! These are now almost 60 years old and I was determined to save them. C did a nice job repotting them in a garage sale planter and dollar store pots and he’s carefully spritzing them back to life.

Aside from fall’s foliage, it’s been an exceptionally colourful month here. I think I crave colour in preparation for the long Pacific Northwest season of foggy greeny greys.

C finished another piece of garden art.

Initially I thought it was responsible for this magnificent afternoon rainbow cast upon our rock wall. 

In fact, that spectrum of light is a fall phenomenon, like the changing colour of the leaves. As the afternoon sunlight angle changes, in October it hits the bevels of our bathroom mirror and produces this example of nature’s artwork.

Not the prettiest pav on my blog, it is the brightest I’ve posted. Never mind the crumbly sides, it was delicious.

Look at these edible mushroom we found last week, appropriately called Laccaria amethysteo-occidentalis, or the amethyst deceiver, as it changes colour quickly.

Our autumn sunsets are spectacular.

And the poppy seeds that hitched a ride in planters from our old house, have bloomed right in time for Remembrance Day.