The First Snow & What To Do About It

Well, here it is in Suburban Seattle, West Side of the Cascade Mountains, elevation 500 feet, and it is snowing, a whole week before Thanksgiving.  It is snowing vigorously in the mountain passes (above 3,000 feet), traction tires and chains required.  We have a good snowpack predicted this year because of La Nina.  The current event down here in the burbs is clammy and cold and coming down in big, fluffy, wet blobs.  Not sticking, as we say around here.  Not much good for enjoying the phenom, I'd say, so I am indoors in my workroom doing some R&D.

After a recent run of recycled silk sachets I have a pile of small scraps with lots of enticing tatters.  My motto is "no scrap too small," so I am trying out these small patchwork dolls, calling them Pagan Babies -- a friend once told me that the best speller in her parochial school got to name a pagan baby, so that's my takeoff point here.  When she told me that story, I was rolling around on the floor with the dust bunnies -- sometimes ethnocentricity is so ridiculous that all you can do is laugh, and fire up your imagination.

 I love the flavor of small flashes of delectable color, texture and straggling whisps of fine silk, layered and stitched by hand and relayered and restitched, until the original patterns are not quite there, and I am also trying my hand at unapologetic imperfection and immediacy.

These pagan babies are from somewhere long ago and far south of here, perhaps a high desert.  Were they buried to keep company with a sacrifice?  Found in the remains of a palace reduced to rubble?  Dropped by a pilgrim long gone?  Just another magical, mystery trip for a snowy, colorless day . . . remote sands, dry winds, ancient travel routes, not quite lost to time.   Today I don't know if  I will ever get to visit Urumchi, or the High Andes, but my imagination has plenty of frequent flyer miles.  It's a nice way to travel on a snowy day, and you don't have to worry about the snoopy body scanner, either.