Kaua'i Chapter

 At the Koa store we found some hats for sale from the Hardwood Hat Company. Too expensive for a joke, but worth several goofy pictures!!

We left rainy Oahu not quite sure how things would be on Kaua'i. We'd heard that they had had a lot of rain and roads were washed out, & land slides, etc. All true. We couldn't reach out hotel on the north beach beyond the town of Honalei the first night. We later learned that the north coast had gotten 36 inches of rain in 24 hours! Well no wonder there were problems!

What was amazing was that we did get through the next afternoon. The work of the highway crews was impressive, really impressive. Trees had come down, electrical lines were down, mud puddles were all over the place, & there had been several slides.

Our first stop, on the way to the Waimea Valley, was to a famous cloth shop that has been in business for 40 years. I found some fabric that sends me. It matches all the puddles!

We went to the Waimea Valley to see Kaui's version of the Grand Canyon while the road workers did their magic. The roads we took were full of the big rain reminders.

Out off shore you could see where all the red dirt had gone!

So this is just a bit of this famous valley. 

 I love the layers! It signifies different substances in the eruptions.

                                                              That's it for now.
                                                                       Aloha!

*R*A*I*N*

Each of our 3 nights in Hoh-noh-lulu (please note correct proh-nounciation!) were filled with thunderstorms. Rain by day intermittent.  We had plans with some slippage, rain-related, & not-knowing-quite when/where-to-go problems.  But that's life, some plans don't pan out.
This is the palace of Hawaiian Ali'i (royalty). Very ornate and pretty.

Sidewalk hearts & a great unreadable wall mural.

   

Doorway in Chinatown  One of the many white pigeons in Honolulu. Where did they come from?

                                                                    Super surf colors.

Yesterday we left for Kaua'i, not really fully grasping the extent of rainfall here. That would be 36 inches! Wetness everywhere, along with the roosters, chicks, & hens & flooded taro patches.

                                         I love those pineapple patterns!  JUNGLE with monstera vines.

                                                            That's it for today.

SO Sew Daphne

In the process of getting the condo ready for viewing George & I retired 5 IKEA rag rugs made in India. They are hard to keep clean & we were starting to trip on them.
In my fitness class in Kihei we all made a long list of all the things that make us fall.
Scatter rugs is one of them. I decided really it was time to let them go. And the ones in Vancouver too. They were falling apart anyway from washing and too much dryer time.
They were loosing body with each washing making them even more "trippy"

The morning we were packing for Oahu George opined that it was time to chuck them out.
Ah yes, but I had another plan. It was a plan that I had been harboring for a long time.
Since I was mostly packed I started carrying it out.

Cotton string warp, but what about the weave?  Was it polyester, crappy fabric or what?


Dismemberment began!   HOW'S that for visuals?  The excitement of discovery!

I'm in heaven! Mostly the weaving cloth is pima cotton grade strips. There is also some very frayed bright colored rayon. Unusable.  I am making plans!

Mostly there are stripes and plaids-- men's shirting. This will be sooooo fun to work with.
I brought some of the strips with me so when it's raining in Kauai I can have a new project to keep me happy. I have to open up all these strips to reveal the fun of what's there!

I asked George if he was excited by this. Guess what? He wasn't. I wasn't surprised

I know this is so Daphne!
I have dismembered other things in my life before: Peruvian cloth dolls to really see the ancient cloths used, scrap sari-cloth pillows, and so on.

                                                    That's it for now.
                                            Aloha from chic Honolulu!

Preparation for selling Maui Condo

George's condo will go on the market this weekend. He signs the papers today. This is the 3rd property we have gotten ready for sale & strangely I can say I like the process though it's hard work. Confirmed though is how well we work together and we experience the pleasure of like-mindedness about what we do: what goes/what stays, how things should best be arranged, what we'll leave here.

When the realtor arrived yesterday to take photos for the sale he was really impressed. A nice confirmation. Of course at the level of photo-shoot-ready the apartment is total unlivable. Trash container in kitchen is out of sight, as are tooth brushes, dishpans & sponges, newspapers, pen & pencil holders, etc.

It's been a long process deciding to sell. The problem with having a 2nd home is that since it costs money to maintain it you feel have to go there. We could have put it back into the rental pool, & if it doesn't sell that'll be our fall-back position.

Other places in the world beckon. So here is what we are giving up!!

The apartment number I made which the new owners will get.

Morning sea latte walking beauty.... 

The apartment has been greatly simplified to sell.

Tomorrow we are off to Oahu for two nights & then to Maui where I have never been. I'm looking forward to feeling the differences between the islands I know a bit.

That's it for now.

Maui Quilts 2012

Yesterday I finished off two quilts that I made after my eye problem.
I ran into all kinds of trouble with my machine quilting.

In 1951 when my mother decided to buy her 3 girls a portable Singer (which I still have) she stayed in the kitchen while the man went over the basics with us in an upstairs room.

The big rule I remember was don't fool around with the tension. The lesson I took from that was that girls couldn't be mechanical enough to be taught how to control/manage that zone.
That was the man's world zone. How sad is that? So for many years I kept hands off unless I was totally desperate and dared enter that no-no dial. Just think of how many precious hours of experience I missed that way. So sad. So sad that I was taken in by it.

So when I had trouble with tension I kinda unhappily and somewhat helplessly toughed it through. Afterwards made up my own test assemblage that I would sew a line of stitching with the presser foot I use for machine quilting. Upper tension over lower tension & spool thread over bobbin thread. Keep records! What a concept!

So I quilted up the pattern piece that I painted in Susan Shie's class. Doubling the image for fun. It's about spirals & different ways of getting logarithmic spirals. It's also about constructing the golden rectangle. It's about patterns in my life!

Then the 3 most recent quilt finishes. 

In some ways I don't have the same sense of exploration as I had last year, but I am not hard on myself about that. Art development has ebbs & flows. And EBBS are just as important as FLOWS. The quilting was difficult because I did many changes of direction, but I am really unhappy with the overall effect. Maybe when I get it home I will redo it. [I didn't!]

 This was before I quilted this piece. I love the liveliness of the colors. In a way I was echoing colors from an earlier quilt done 2 years ago.

That's it for today.

Roads to & from Hana

In the old days before European contact there were 30-40 thousand people living around Hana. Hana has a good harbor, quite a bit of flatland to grow poi & humans flourished there.

Nowadays Hana has a reputation for being a combination of hippy's and wealthy folk, as a very poshy hotel set up there. It has a wonderful out-posty general store,  and getting there affords you many opportunities to buy homemade banana bread & coconuts. Houses tend to be built less to code, putting it mildly, but some are build in the traditional oh-so-Hawaian simple style complete with corrugated roof and much green paint.

George & I drove to Hana yesterday. I drove the dry side first and he the wet side.

The dry side started with Grandma's Cafe. I love these rural mailbox collections. There was one outside of Grandma's This is the classic green paint. This area was settled by Chinese.

 

So next door to it was Fong's the dry goods store. We learned that there was a Dr. Sun Yat Sen garden down the way so we stopped there. We were greeted there by poinsettias to die for.

I LOVE this schemata on the base of Sun's statue. There was a lot more too along this vein. Here's another. Some of it is quite revealing.

Classic!! I want to google this whole scheme to pass it on to some of my political friends. Sun went to two schools in Hawai'i & had a brother who lived here.

Onward into the part of Maui I think of as being the moors. Our first great view was of the most recent lava flow on Maui-- maybe in the 1600's, but maybe longer ago than that. I'm not sure.

Not many people live out this way. So services, but plenty of peace. The air was completely machine-free. I love the building in the collapsed cinder cone.

The erosion is wonderful to see. This is the lower slopes of Haleakala, the eastern Maui volcano.

George got pretty windblown!







I loved the ribbon road effects.

 Not to mention cloud-shadows on water.  Oh yum!!

This fetching #14 cow was one of many in this stretch of land. Grass-fed Maui beef is good.

Further along we stopped at an old graveyard. There are several kinds of graves here. We've visited twice. It's a very peaceful place, right at the cliff-edge of the ocean. Charles Lindberg is buried here. George says a perfect place for burial, if you like that sort of thing.

This is a concrete slab with lettering etched in and lava rocks too. The simplicity of it is really nice. People leave loose rocks at the graves too, so there is a feeling of attendance & care here.

Some of the graves were simply covered with rounded rocks.

After lunch we started home on the northwest side.  The road was high & below in a truly Hawaian community poi is being grown in these ponds. I so want to go down there & look, but I so don't want to gawk at other people's lives! In this arial shot TWO churches stand-- I want to know what the story is there. I'd love to see that graveyard too. There were several communities like this to wonder about.

The 'tulip'trees were in bloom.  Lots of orange amongst the green.

We wanted to walk in a bamboo forest. We looked for one, but didn't find one with a trail. There are several kinds of bamboo brought here. This is what I call the spindly bamboo. Some of the stands we saw of bamboo were impassably thick. This shot was done with Sabina's method of 'drive-by-shooting': blurry.

It was a great day for vegetation, microclimates, geology, & beauty.

                                                                That's all for now.