Art @ The Hermitage

I normally don't like to post pictures of an unfinished work, but I just wanted to let folks know I'm still out here and I'm still quilting. Due to playing nurse for several seriously ill felines over the past year, I've been almost totally out of circulation, and have barely...

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This is what my awesome husband gave me for my birthday last week. It was a totally unexpected, out of the blue, dropped from the sky, gift from The Goddess surprise. Decades ago, my very first car was a 1957 Thunderbird, and I've wanted another one ever since it went...

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So far, this year has been the worst New Year of my life. Out of the 49 days since 2010 began, exactly five of them have been what I would call "okay". The rest have sucked. Trying to stumble around with my lopsided eyes for the last 44 days has...

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Elvis is a different cat since the passing of his best friend, Dmitri, a couple of weeks ago. The two of them were practically inseparable - always hanging together, awake or asleep, with Dmitri being the dominant cat. Dmitri spent hours grooming the other cats - washing their heads, chewing...

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Spiders fascinate me. At the same time they revolt me. Sometimes they scare me, and, other times, they just plain give me the heebie-jeebies. I am completely ambivalent about them. I try my best never to kill them because most of them are "good" bugs, as in they eat...

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Our beautiful, special little boy left us on January 13....

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Over four weeks since cataract surgery and my "new" eye is driving me bonkers. The major problem is I don't have glasses that work for my new vision. The old eye is fine with distance and fuzzy with close-ups, while the new eye is great with close-ups and fuzzy with...

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A: Like this...Q: And what does it look like when you take the lid off??WOW!Here's 4 cubic inches of HOT...And here's 4 cubic inches of Black & Silver, after having been put through Francie's Anal-izing process - each piece unraveled, straightened, finger-wound, filed in it's own compartment, and RTU! ...

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It's been cold and foggy every day, we've hardly seen the sun for a week, the drip system is broken, the weeds and the leaves from the deciduous trees are six inches deep everywhere... and still the roses keep going. My mother fussed over her roses like they were infants;...

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Here's the Chanukkah addition to the Greenhouse in the Loo. Don't know her name... and don't care, as usual... I just know she's one classy lady, and she whispered "Buy me", when I walked by her in the supermarket nursery. One of these days I'll get around to looking her...

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Here's the amazing Sheriff Nancy and 265 pillowcases made by the members of her Pillowcase Posse, a sub-group within the larger Vallejo Piecemakers Quilt Guild. Some of the pillowcases will be donated to the kids at Foster A Dream, and others to an organization that sends a touch of home...

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Today his Her feast day... Party on!!I love Guadalupe. I don't believe in her miracles or anything she stands for, but she's so beautiful! She's always surrounded by roses (my favorite flowers) and gold and glitz and all of that stuff I love to play with. I have her images...

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I've always wondered about this..In Heaven:The Chefs are French,The Lovers are Italian,The Auto Mechanics are German,The Police are English,and the place is run by the Swiss.In Hell:The Chefs are English,The Lovers are Swiss,The Auto Mechanics are French,The Police are German,and the place is run by the Italians....

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Now here's someone with a truly deranged sense of humor... he felt he'd totally outdone himself with his holiday decorations this year. Unfortunately, he had to take them down after just a couple of days, for three reasons:First, the cops advised him that the decorations would cause traffic accidents, as...

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I lead-ballooned my lofty ideals about not shopping yesterday... I don't know how it happened... why my exalted intentions just boogied on out of my mind... but they did... probably had something to do with my love of African fabrics... you know how it is... something so beautiful just popped...

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That's today - Black Friday - the day after Thanksgiving - the day when the Christmas shopping feeding frenzy begins.How about we do something different this year?How about a Wildcat General Strike? How about millions of people around the world bringing the capitalist consumption machine to a grinding, if only...

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Of course you would! You should know me by now...Vogue Patterns had another 70% off sale I couldn't resist. This will probably be it for a while, because I can't find anything else in the online catalogue I want. And, I believe I heard someone say, "When are you ever...

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When I was a child, my mysterious and, to my child's mind, fascinating, Grandmother Catharine, had enormous collections of stuff that just about sent me over the edge with excitement... boxes and boxes of buttons, pieces of lace, beads, postcards, dried flowers, ribbons, small rocks she had painstakingly ground to...

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We often have sunsets that look like this - an ominous, solid mantle of clouds with just a sliver of bright sky streaking through the middle. It always freaks me out, because it reminds me of the scene in "Independence Day", where the humongous alien space ship appears and fills...

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Last week I made a remarkable find in my studio... as part of the great re-organization campaign, I discovered a huge container of wool fabrics I've collected over the years with the intention of making coats and other cold weather stuff. Alas, moths have also made their own discoveries, but,...

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But, what are friends for?? you ask... Exactly my point!Years ago, in the dark ages before the internet and e-mail, my friend Rosalie published a newsletter called, "Art You Wear". It was geared toward, if you hadn't already guessed, the then small, but growing, wearable art community. I enjoyed the...

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In spite of the constantly changing weather in recent weeks, including that bucket-brigade style deluge earlier this week, my roses seem happier than ever, and are starting to bloom all over again. Many of them are full of new buds, and I need to get out and groom them to...

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Emma Allebes, one of my favorite people, crossed over last week. Emma was a woman of extraordinary talent and creativity in the fabric art world. She made some of the most wonderful quilts and wearable art I've ever seen - colorful, imaginative, flamboyant, sometimes silly, always excellently crafted, and, most...

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We have a mouse living in our kitchen and one would think, with twenty three cats and 2 humans, the mouse wouldn't last long... but it's been three days and Ms/Mr. Mouse is still running the show. The cats have practically destroyed the kitchen - knocking stuff off the counters,...

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I really like black-eyed peas, and always look forward to New Year's Day when I prepare a giant pot of Hoppin' John, with lots of onions, garlic, peppers, tomatoes and a fistful of bacon ends - enough to have for a half dozen dinners during the first couple of weeks...

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