Goodbye To Summer

A moody northwest summer day with gray skies and chill in the air blows a kiss goodbye to vacation. School begins one week from tomorrow, and as a teacher, I have already been back getting my new classroom together. August was a blur of travel: San Diego, "Fail Camping", and Umatilla, OR to visit my Dad. Today I am trying to get a hold of the many appointments and schedules to keep in mind as I slide into fall. Looking forward to the busy blur of the school year and backward wondering what happened to the not-very lazy days of this summer.

I did create things: This blog, a mostly finished quilt top, a turtle wall-hanging for my husband's birthday, assorted travel memories, peach cakes and several memorable dinners, a travel journal, and the beginnings of a young-adult novel with a distinctive narrator.

The most unique travel experience of the summer was "Fail Camping" (the title my teens gave the endeavor) or "Faux Camping". This is what we did when our one scheduled camping trip was rained out. I voted to drive the extra hour to Leavenworth and sunny days, but my other family members opted for the camp out in our backyard. Rain poured on day one as we set up the tent and rain fly 30 feet or so from our back door. My dog Juno looked on curiously as we dug a fire pit and prepared "camp". We ate lunch inside when the rain began to fall even harder, then we finished our preparations outside and successfully made a fire in the drizzle. We ate hot dogs cooked over the fire and s'mores while we got damper and damper. The wacky spirit that allowed my 14 year-old, 17 year-old, dog and husband to prevail with silly songs and shared story-telling, which my husband always tries to make science fiction, made me proud. Our first night in the rain was rocky. The rain fly was not a success. The side of the tent where I slept was quite wet, the top plopped thick drops on my husband's forehead, my oldest daughter was sick in the night (thankfully the bathroom and shower were easy access). We spent four days in our backyard camp out, napping more and hiking less since we were unwashed and unkempt in our own neighborhood. We played games and laughed.

So as the summer closes, creative time will be more precious, but memories like Fail Camping will have to sustain us through schedules and deadlines. The firepit remains in our backyard. Proof that sometimes you have to bring the fun home.

Crazy Peach Cakes

Where is the line between creative enthusiasm and obsession? I found the line this week. It is called peach cakes. I've crossed this line before. The ingredients for turning a great idea into an obsession are the following:
1 great idea
1 plan to make it reality
1-10 problems to overcome
1-10 reasons to continue beyond normal sanity
a pinch of blind pursuit of the creation

First take the great idea and make a plan, stir well. Then encounter several reasons that this plan may be impractical or unwise to pursue, yet press on where normal people would give up and try something saner. The result will either be complete failure where you kick yourself for wasting your time or something wonderful that may still require some post-creation kicking because the end didn't justify the means.

I am working on a new quilt project now that may just turn out to be this project, but it's too early to tell.

But the peach cakes my daughter and I made this week for my husband's work party 100% qualify. I found a recipe on stumbleupon.com that had what seemed to be a perfect summer cake that I foolishly thought would be easy to make.

With steps that included making your own colored sugar and cutting cinnamon sticks into peach stems, it's difficult now to see why I thought this would be a quick dessert. Other obstacles to this project included the need for special baking pans I didn't have, completion in four hours, and making them look good/real. I resorted to using disposable muffin pans and rounded out the bottoms with an alabaster egg which was round and hard enough to do the job, then I had to cut the cakes smaller because they were too tall to make rounds. After coating the kitchen in frosting and colored sugar granules, Mckenna and I did persevere. The project ran overtime thanks to a break in the project to pick up my other daughter and squeeze in a 15 minute practice drive.

When my husband arrived home to a train-wreck of a kitchen and a platter of half and whole peach cakes, his response: "Why did you go to so much trouble?"

I had no answer.

Mckenna had fled the kitchen by that time realizing that making the cakes look like peaches was stressful, and maybe fun the first time, but not by the 10th or 12th time.

The cakes impressed people at the party. They tasted good too, although that's thanks to the box mix and tub frosting, not my cooking expertise. Do I regret the project? Not really. Will I excite my friends with summertime peach cakes again. Probably not.

I know you may be looking at them thinking.....hmmm....I could make those. That's what I did on the night I found them on the internet. Go ahead and try them if you have four hours to kill. Here's the site: http://www.bigredkitchen.com/2009/07/little-peach-cakes.html. I used pineapple box mix not yellow cake and sour cream frosting not buttercream. I thought a fruit-looking cake should have a fruit taste. But be warned this project is not for the faint of heart, when you finish you'll have a mess, but also a pretty, tasty unique-looking cake. Let me know how it turns out. I'd better go obsess over my latest quilt.

More Than A Spark

That first spark of creativity for a new project burns hot like love. First there is the realization of how intensely you want to pursue it, and once in pursuit, if the chemistry is right, every moment is pure joy. Unfortunately that burning passion to create something from nothing can be so hot that it scorches everything quickly before it reaches a finished piece.

Then it is up to creative endurance to see it to the end. The process weighs on your emotions. Often that devil of an editing brain keeps shouting loudly that I am wasting my time, and the end product will not be good, can not be good. As I work through the quilt top, story or essay, I become so close to it that I can't really see it. Particularly with a colorful, complicated piece, it may take me several weeks to really see it objectively without my editor holding it's nose making a stink face.

I don't want you to get the wrong idea. I'm not an artistic super-hero. I often don't stare down that nasty editor and get to the end. The basket of unfinished blocks and quilt tops on my table AND the bags under it are a visual testament to that. Unseen are the many partial documents on my computer where the spark fizzled or my faith in them did. My sister got ALL the organizational and production genes. I have to fake mine.

I love that buzz I get when I have a great design or story idea and run with it and can't wait to get back to working on it, but it takes perseverance to keep it going. Real-world chores and interruptions also halt the flow, sometimes killing the enthusiasm for the art.

Today, I deftly maneuvered around the many things that forced my attention away from the fun of making things. They threatened to rain on my spark, but I kept going. I worked in some writing time, and even sewed one more row on my Asian fan quilt. The pieces are far from done, but I kept the fire burning.