Moss and Frogmouths

Yesterday, Kate and I spent the afternoon in Cannon Beach, writing at a café that kept its doors and windows open. In January. The café owner was blaring popular jazz standards, and a pair of young girls were loudly discussing the complexities of their love lives and the virtues of virginity at the table next to us. I am a little afraid to look at what I wrote.

After a couple of hours, we went for a walk to the beach:

If you are planning on spending 3 weeks alone in the woods with someone, I suggest you follow my lead and choose a specimen as funny, kind, and good-looking as my friend Kate. If nothing else, go for someone hot so that you can capture photos in which seagulls are staring longingly at the person in question.

Later, on our walk,  I found a delightful mushroom bog:

I should probably be practicing by budding embroidery skills on a site specific project, like recreating the lovely colors in these mushrooms, or trying to emulate this moss found just steps from the residency:

Instead, I’ve been working on the re-imagined Tawny Frogmouths.

Kate encapsulated the residency with the  photo above. It has my laptop, a beer, crafting supplies, and two cookbooks. Are we lucky, or what? The Frogmouths  seem to think so. Here is a closer shot of them in an unfinished state:

Not tawny, you say? This is simply an exercise in artistic license. After the Frogmouths were finished, I found out that albino versions of them do exist, as seen at the bottom of this post. The bodies of my Frogmouths are sewn with a light blue linen thread, which might make them the arctic version. Real Tawny Frogmouths freeze when startled, and have the magnificent ability to transform themselves into branches. These guys are more about being seen – just look at the one on the right, he’s giving you the eye.

I’ll take pictures of the finished embroidery today in the morning light.

The next steps for this project are to back the linen with paper, assemble the cover, fold the signatures, and bind the book. I’m going with my favorite buttonhole binding, and haven’t yet decided what color thread to use for the binding. Any suggestions?