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Excellent yarn for grasses, and landscape, hand dyed, thick and thin, spun in Chile, 242 yards, $14.95C	Noro Yarn $12.95C an ocean waiting to be hooked, night sky waiting to be seen
Hand dyed swatches $12.95 C set of six 12 by 4" graduated colours	We call these our cupcakes, bundles of joy wool all connected in colours to a theme Moroccan Spice, Summer Sky, Deep Ocean, Maritime Landscape, Primitive People
An excellent ash gripper frame with the grippers bent over the side to hold your mat tightly, handmade $199C	Wonderful, colourful chunky yarn. Perfect for that highlight of texture you need in landscapes, flowers, or just for fun. $8 C per skein, assorted colours available.

There is nothing more beautiful than and idea. This is a little area where I'll post a new idea or two ....thoughts to play with, things to do,

In large bowl, combine flour and sugar. Cut in margarine until mixture is crumbly. Add egg and extract. Mix until well-combined. Set aside 1 cup flour mixture for topping. Press remaining flour mixture into lightly greased 13 x9 inch pan. Spread raspberry jam over dough. Mix reserved flour mixture withe chocolate chips and almonds. Spread over raspberry jam and press with back of spoon. Bake for 40 minutes until lightly browned at 350.. Cool in pan and cut . Makes 2 dozen squares. I also made these with strawberry jam- not as rich.

The Latest News from the studio....

be sure to check here for the up to date information on what's happening.....

If you are in the Montreal area this winter...

Rug Hooking Show of hooked rugs by Deanne Fitzpatrick, Doris Eaton, Rachelle Leblanc and Margaret Forsey is at

Musée des maîtres et artisans du Québec 514-747-7367 from February 7 to April 13, 615 St. Croix Ave, Montreal, curated by Denis Longchamps.

The Artful Rug Hooker 2008

A Feast of Inspiration

Thursday and Friday, October 16 and 17, 2008 featuring

Ginny Stimmel, Editor of Rug Hooking Magazine

Beth Powning, New Brunswick Artist and Writer

Valerie Hearder, Award Winning Quilt Artist

Joy Laking, Nova Scotia Painter

Janet Crawford, Owner Fog Forest Art Gallery

Rob Lyons, Author and Graphic Designer

Danielle Oulette and Gabrielle Savoie, Acadien Fibre Artists

Deanne Fitzpatrick, Rug Hooking Artist and Writer

The theme of the 2008 symposium will be a Feast of Inspiration and our guest speakers have been brought together to inspire rug hookers and other fibre artists. The format of the symposium will be based on the 2007 format, with adjustments learned from our first year and with new speakers and new ideas.

Won’t you join us for The Artful Rug Hooker 2008? It will be a Feast of Inspiration.

sym-po-sium – a gathering with a free exchange of ideas

This will be a dynamic two day Rug Hookers Creativity Retreat held in the parish hall, Amherst, Nova Scotia with its goal being to bring together a group of rug hookers and fibre artists interested in developing their creative ability by learning from each other, other artists, and from myself. It will be two days of exchanging ideas, creating and developing hooking projects, feeling wool and other fancy fibres, dreaming dreams and turning them into realities, nurturing original thoughts. It will be a conference of creativity, where art and rug hooking meet. Imagine a room full of people who all still believe in making things by hand and that art is part of daily living. Imagine a series of speakers who have made a life’s work of these very things and have set out to inspire a room full of people. The cost is $250Cnd.A $75 non-refundable deposit is due upon registration with the balance due in October 2008.The 2007 symposium

was booked up eighteen months in advance so if you are interested please call and register your place at the event.

If you are thinking of coming to any of these, please call us as they are filling.

Registration

All workshops are lead by Deanne Fitzpatrick in her studio.

A $50 non refundable deposit is payable upon registration.

Space is limited and the class fills very quickly so register early.

To register call or send cheque to:

Deanne Fitzpatrick

RR5 Amherst, Nova Scotia, Canada, B4H 3Y3

Call to register at

1-800-328-7756

We accept visa and MasterCard.

info@hookingrugs.com

www.hookingrugs.com

Pattern Catalogue (32 pages)

available with 90 new designs for $5($2 shipping) to order call 1-800-328-7756

as well as patterns there is all kinds of bits and pieces about rug hooking, and even a few recipes in the mix

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Deanne Fitzpatrick's Daybook and Journal

This full colour daybook/journal is illustrated with Deanne's hooked rugs, and includes diary excerpts from the past four years.

On the left side of the day book is a hooked rug and a diary excerpt, on the right side is a daybook showing your week at a glance. At the end of each month are journal pages for your own writing and ideas. It is a perennial daybook, allowing you to fill in the days according to the year you use it.

Coil bound, 6 by 8",120 pages with over 60 full colour images

Pre Order your copy call 1-800-328-7756

Deanne Fitzpatrick East Coast Rug Hooking published by Nimbus

a book of stories and designs inspired by life on the coast.

Call to order your copy today

1-800-328-7756

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Artspots

The CBC has created a five minute artists profile video and five 30 second vignettes about my work. Click on Artspots above to view the videos.

In January 2007 nearly 11,000 people visited this site. Can that really be true? Yep it is! I hope you enjoy your time cruising around here and that you find all kinds of stuff useful to you.

The Diary...

These are my rug hooking rambles....my regular bits....a place where I weave together the loose strands of my mind. Read lightly and take it with a grain of salt:

August 7, 2008 Dear Diary, Lately I have been thinking alot about gifts. I enjoy giving gifts. I like surprises, and I like tiny thoughtful things. I like finding funny things, beautiful things, things I hate but know someone else will love. One of the best things I found this year was .25 cents. It was a tiny spotted composition notebook that fits in a purse or a back pocket. I try to keep a stock on hand to give to people so they can write down a good idea if the get one.

Today I received a beautiful gift. Grant, my neighbour, and the husband of Brenda who works with me brought me down a new cheticamp frame that is a bit wider than my old one. He used the door of Mansours, my husbands store to make the legs of it. So now my frame is made from the wood that my father in law turned the key to open his store everyday for seventy five years. He did actually work that long. I had ordered the frame but never knew about the wood he was using. When he brought it he insisted it was a gift. A beautiful gift. Thoughtful, useful, beautiful. It was William Morris, who said that everything should be both beautiful and useful.

Tonight I am heading out to the beach. All week I have been happy and busy in the studio with lots of visits and action. It is a happy and exciting place this time of year. People heading in to learn how to hook, meeting people who have been hooking for years. Sometimes people run into friends here. I plan to hook a big rug on my frame nest week. I am getting ready for a show called " Darkening the door, The Art of Visiting." I plan to do a rug of a woman walking across the moors. On the new frame I 'll have to roll it less. I'll be able to see more of it at once. I know that changing the format of the way I work may change my rugs. I am curious to see just what will happen. The weather has cooled slightly so I can hook again. Humidity is one of the enemies of the rug hooker.

July 31, 2008 Dear Diary, One Hundred Days of Solitude, well, not exactly but for the first time since I had my children, I did manage to spend three days by myself at my own place. Knowing they were happy and occupied , doing exactly what they loved to do, I spent three days living by myself and never even turned the radio on once. For supper I did things like cook only mashed potatoes, mixed with cream and garlic scapes. The place was quiet. I hooked some small mats, had a few visits with friends, but mainly read, swam, walked and ate tea and toast. One night I slept for twelve hours straight. Staying home was a gift to myself. It was an interesting feeling to be alone and only having to care for yourself.

The day before they all left, my next door neighbour from childhood came and spent the day with me. I don't remember a time when I did not know him, and I had not seen him for ten years. We played together. I remember us in the gravel above his house and the dinky cars being the size of our hands. Seeing him was like a dream. When I woke up the next morning, I kept thinking, did that really happen. We ate a couple of fried hamburgers, and sat around ion my backroom, talking like we used to, about life, and kind of a common philosophy. His brother who came with him, drew his head back at us and laughed, just the way he used to, not taking us any more seriously than we should be taken. I love them like brothers, because, I nearly lived at their house growing up. When I was in university, and my parents had left Nfld, I stayed at their house every weekend when I went out around the bay. I was always welcome. His parents, and sister had been to visit a few weeks before, and while they were there, my cousin came with his five kids. It was like I had Freshwater, Placentia Bay, 1979, in the house with me, with them all there. An afternoon that had a kind of timeless quality to it because all the people, important from another time, were shown to remain important, years later in a different time and place. I loved where I grew up, and the people I grew up with. There was a basic ness that remains in my mind important. I always find being around people who knew you for ever is comforting. My very first show was called, "From Freshwater", and was about sticking to the roots of who you are what you know. That doesn't mean not changing , or growing, it just means knowing that where ever you are, or what ever you learn, or become, where you came from never changes, but where you came from heavily influences all that you learn , and all that you become.

July 23, 2008, Dear Diary, So now the raspberries are ripe. I mark the passage of summer by the ripeness of berries. With the first flood of sunshine, we are overloaded with strawberries. Once summer has settled in we get the tender raspberries. Blueberries mark August , telling us that though the fruit is sweet, summer will pass and the fields will redden again . When I was small I picked wild raspberries in the hill above my house. We lived on the coast and the woods behind us went for miles. The interior of Nfld is vast, and wild. I would be right on the edge of that, caught between, the community and the interior. A little like the life of an artist, a metaphor for it perhaps. I was always slightly scared up there of the "man in the woods", the one who as far as I know never existed. What there was to be scared of were the wasp nests that would catch you as you crawled through thicket and bramble. when I came out of the spruce on that hill I would look down at the back of my house with its small veranda, and beyond it down over a hill to the water. From that perch I could see the whole community, who was going where, what laundry was hung, and where my friends were. I would have picked a small bucket, perhaps a quart of raspberries. When I think back I can see that they were mixed with leaves, and bits of dirt. My mother gave me freedom in the kitchen, and often with those berries I would bake a tart pie, of which only one piece would ever be eaten. I would eat the first piece, but rarely was it good enough to eat because I would forget key ingredients like sugar, or lard. I made it with out a recipe. I still often cook with out a recipe. I hook with out a recipe, and I try to live my life with out a recipe. Unlike when I was a kid though I know that there are foundations, like lard or sugar. There are basic ingredients for everything that you can't skimp on, or overdo. The freedom my mother gave me in the kitchen to waste the berries on a poorly made pie might have been important to me as an artist. I had the freedom to make mistakes, to experiment. As the youngest of seven, and seven years younger than the last, my mother let me be alot of the time. She was there for me, loving and kind , but I was left to amuse myself. She let me play and dream. As a teenager, she let me set my own hours, and live as I liked , pretty much. The freedom she gave me is something I have to learn to give my own children. I need to step back as they grow up. I cannot protect, and coddle. I let my daughter mess the kitchen, and I try to take it in stride. I teach her to wash the dishes, but understand that they may not work out perfectly. When I get impatient I think of my mother. It seems that I have learned more from her in remembering how she treated me as a young person, than I did learn from her when she was living. I try to remember her patience with me. I was grumpy, she was quiet. I was self centered and she was caring. She was a patient, caring mother but I really did not appreciate her skill at mothering at the time. This is natural.. She prayed alot. She worried alot, and prayer helped her rest. I find I try to model her, though sometimes weakness sets in and I want to tear through the house huffing and puffing and picking things up. It is not always good to do what you feel like doing. Sometimes you need to remember the way you like to feel, and think what it is you need to do so you can feel that way. This is so much better than doing what you feel like. I am not one of those artists that needs angst to keep going. I seem to need peace to keep going. I like a soothed mind so that it has room to grow. I don't see how I could fill my mind with new ideas if it is full of frustration. My son stays up late at night. I want to yell, "Go to bed". I would like to be able to carry him to his room and shut the door but he is so near being a man, that I have a longer lease on my Ford, than I do him. What is the sense in arguing over bedtime with a boy who is now closer to being a man, than being a child. Some would disagree, but my mother would not, and lately it is her voice I am listening to, even though I can no longer call her on the phone.

July 17, 2008, Dear Diary, I was going through my wool stash in my barn today. Sometimes I spare things along, even if I have yards of it. I don't like that about myself. It is a slightly miserly quality that I just have not overcome easily. An artist once told me that she never hoards her ideas for later because the more she uses them up, the more ideas come to her. It is like giving stuff away yet always managing to feel an abundance is around you. Most of us know this to be true. Yet I am scared that I'll have no yellow, or no green. Truth is as long as I have a yard of white I'll be fine, but convincing myself of that is something I need to work on. Don't spare the wool shall be my motto. More will come.

July 16, 2008, Dear Diary, Today, David, who helps me look after my computer and website taught me how to use the program I already have in an easier and more efficient way. I can add things to my website now in only two steps instead of the cumbersome way I had been doing for years. I knew there was an easier way but I was afraid to learn, because learning things on my computer, well learning new things causes me some stress so I avoid it, and plod along the old way. I know amongst people who like to tear up old clothes to hook rugs, I must have a few kin friends who share the same struggle, and choose the not so simple way at times to avoid learning, because learning can be hard. Just this second I uploaded these few words with one click. I used to have to click fifteen times. Basically , today, he just threw the change upon me, and it was so sensible of him to do that, whether he knew it or not. I had dropped off my laptop for him to clean up a few messes I had made. I knew how but it would take me hours. He could do it in a jiffy. As he poked around he could see I was working in a cumbersome way, so not only did he fix my mess, he also fixed the problem that was helping me create the mess. I love initiative in people. I love it when they can see what you need, and offer it to you, encourage you to try it in a new way. We need those people around us. I remember when Gwen came to work at the studio. She told me three or four things I must do. One was getting Interac for customers. I had avoided that too because I was afraid of the machine. It has proven to be very sensible. If you don't keep up with technology it becomes such a burden to catch up later. May I remind myself of that the next time I shudder and lift the sheets up over my head.

Yesterday I went to lunch at the shore to a friend of mine who has recently retired. We had some chicken over a barley and corn salad, on fresh lettuce from the garden. Her cottage on the Northumberland straight is in a converted army barracks from Debert in World War II. It is a warm pine paneled place full of things she has collected in travels over the years. Her husbands watercolours of their grandchildren, fill the space over the homemade sofa that he made years before. It feels like a place that has been well lived in, yet loved and nurtured over the years. We ate beside the windows overlooking the water. Years ago when I worked in counselling she was someone I saw as a mentor. She was always sensible in her approach to issues that arose around the work place. She had alot of common sense, yet she appreciated new or novel ideas. I still see her as a mentor still because she understands the art of living well. She keeps her place lovely, but is not fussy about it. She has beautiful things but does not place too much value on them, and uses them when she can. She surrounds herself with family, and doesn't let it get to her. She is frank but never unkind, and sees the humour in her frankness. She also has a habit of dressing great, and gee, shallow me, I admire that in people. I love a bit a panache, a sense of style, and I see that in her. I remember once we ran into her at the dollar store, and my daughter who was then eight, asked about her age after she left. She was in her late sixties at the time. I told her, and my girl said, "She's in good shape.", and she is. She keeps her day book like a religion. She scheduled lunch with me five weeks ago. She is busy but she is not harried. Years ago when I met her she must have been in her late forties, and she had been a family therapist at that time for quite awhile. The other thing I like about her is that she is still a therapist, probably working in the field for some thirty five to forty years, and she is not soured. She remains kind. She remains a mentor really. Watching people live well is good for us. We learn from them, and hopefully their wisdom sinks into us.

As I read over my little notes here I realize that I need many kinds of people in my life. I need the ones who push you towards change, and I need the ones to look up to, and yes, they can be one and the same. I need smart people around me, people with ideas they want to share. The women who work in the studio with me are like that. Brenda is always passing me bits, and thoughts and ideas. They tell me the truth...I think...I hope...they better. I admire smartness. I learned that from my father. He liked smart people, and was smart enough to know that there are many different kinds of smart. My father finished grade ten only, which in itself was quite a feat in outport NFld in the thirties. I have a picture of me in his arms on the way to the basement of the studio. It comforts me, yet pictures of so long ago almost seem like a mirage. For he does not exist in the physical anymore, he is just in spirit. He exists in my own spirit. He exists in the way I value smartness, and respect smart people. We'll both continue to exist in my kids I see it in my own kids too. They like smart people. We admire education, but we really admire smart. Smart is always educated in some way, either self taught, or through experience, or formal schooling, but really smart people get to be that way because they are curious, and they like to learn. Learning happens in the same way that developing creativity does. It is organic, with one bit of knowledge building on another, like a vine, curling and going in all different directions. My father must have read thousands of books, yet he always remained a bit ashamed that he had never studied formally. He always stepped back to formal education. I could feel it off him when we around educated people. He always told me that I needed to study, that it was a ticket. He was right that it writes you a ticket, but the real ticket, the ticket to ride, is believing that you are smart, regardless of how you learned it, and knowing that others are smart too, in different ways, and you need them to keep learning. There was a lot my father knew but he didn't know everything. It makes me wonder... what is it that I don't know, and will I learn it?

July 10, 2008, Dear Diary, Just a few days ago, Unesco declared the Joggin's Fossil Cliffs a world heritage site. It will be interesting to see what keeping such grand company (other Unesco world heritage sites include the Grand Canyon, and The Great Wall of China) will mean for this area where I live. I am fifteen minutes from Joggins, and probably soon all the world will be coming to see the cliffs. It will be interesting to watch. For eighty years, Don Reid, a local man has collected fossils from the area and has made amazing discoveries, bringing geologists from all kinds of prestigious universities here. Mr. Reid, whom I have had the pleasure of meeting many times is a gentle, and generous man. Recently the government announced, built and opened a nine million dollar interpretation centre. After spending a life time collecting, and amassing an extensive and valuable collection, Don Reid decided that he wanted to donate his collection to the community to be housed at the centre. No doubt he could have sold it, but for Mr. Reid it is not and has never been about the money. He just gave it all away. It has always been about the history, the geology, the art of collecting, and the beauty of fossils in stone. When he first started collecting he told me that he was attracted by their beauty. One evening in the pleasure of his company at the centre, he took me through the collection, talking about each piece displayed. It made the centre such a personal experience.

The berries are good this year. I have picked and eaten bowl after bowl of strawberries, grown in my own back yard. The beauty of picking strawberries is that the bowl fills up so fast. We had to call in the neighbours to pick and fill their own fridges as there were more than we could ever eat. The feeling of eating out of your own back yard is totally gratifying. All of a sudden when July comes your relationship with food is much more intimate. It belongs to you, you grew it, You know what is on it, the land it grew upon, it is your own in the way that strawberries from the grocery store have never been.

June 27, Dear Diary, I got the workshop schedule up. We are ready for 2009 so if you are thinking of making the journey there is a an opportunity to grab the train, take the plane, and visit Amherst Nova Scotia. It is a beautiful town full of lovely people. Today, as I walked up the street I ran into my sister and she took me to the cafe (Bella's) where we had a chicken salad sandwich, and planned a dinner for the upcoming fibre arts festival in October. It will also be the show of a local felting artist, Lisa Martin. The community has rallied around the Artful Rug Hooker Symposium and planned a fibre arts festival for Amherst in the fall of 2008. Sometimes lovely things can come out of a sandwich when you are part of a community. The cafe has room for forty people so she'll host a dinner and an art exhibit at the same time. It all took ten minutes to arrange, just connecting people and bringing them together. A happy smile, and wanting people to have fun.

I wanted to tell you about a gift I received in the mail today. It was the most interesting gift. It was a packet of inspiration, and it was inspiring. A beautiful rug hooker from England mailed me a packet of cards, and copies of articles, and photocopies of interesting pictures that she found beautiful and thought I would like. It is like she made a magazine for me to have tea with. It introduced me to many artists I was not aware of. It is such a good idea to save all the bits of beauty we come across. The bits of fabric, the clip from a magazine, but then how nice is it to share that and pass them on to someone else. Now when I find a great postcard, you know I will have to buy two. It was lovely to receive but the real gift is what it might lead too in my mind. Oooh I love that path...down the windy road of my imagination, ferns brushing my legs and blue creeping jenny under bare feet. Sleeping under the stars of ideas, midnight in the garden of wonder. My heart feels so light when I think of a new idea.

I am actually having a t shirt made that says..."There is nothing more beautiful than an idea." and I think it might be true.

June 20, Dear Diary, My mother had me on her forty third birthday. I have just turned forty three myself and can't imagine what a surprise I might have been to her. She took to me easily of course being the seventh daughter of seven girls. I grew up alone in the house with her and my father, like an only child in some ways but with this huge network around you that arrived for weekends. In a way it was the best of two worlds. I was born in a cottage hospital on the gut in Placentia. In the bed next to mom was Kathleen Maher, who was young and having her first child. If she had a girl she was calling it Deanne. If a boy she was calling him Dwayne. Dwayne was born eight hours before me, and my mother thought that she would use Deanne. She had already thought of six girls names on her own. So that is the story of my name. It would make a good rug, as would most stories.

My high school friend is coming tonight with her husband and kids. I am hooking a rug right now that somehow reminds me of her father. It is the head I think. Often it is just a tiny element that leads to recognition. That is all it takes one good reminder.

June 18, Dear Diary, Lately I have been thinking alot about fear. I have always been a somewhat fearful person in some areas of my life, while in others I am more fearless. I am fearless with the hook but very cautious in other ways. Over the years I have come to accept my trepidation as part of who I am. Part of me says be fearless in everything, another part of me wants to coddle the part of myself that is slightly scared, and say that's okay. One friend of mine told me that the only thing we are really afraid of is dying. Face that fear, she believed and you can do anything. The truth rings clear. My fears are often in the form mild anxiety , or worry, leading me always to imagine the worst outcome. A friend of mine told me she always prepared for the best possible outcome. She liked to plan ahead to ensure that things would work out. Like most of us she discovered that you can't ensure such things. She also told me that she took a workshop in Calgary on embracing fear in which she did all kinds of fascinating activities that scared her to death. She says that she remains afraid of change but that the workshop helped. One of my biggest fears is of losing the beauty that is around me, the freedom to create, the happiness, and peacefulness that shelter me. Essentially I struggle with the notion of deserving what I have. It runs deep, and though I think about it as I hook, I have very few answers. I feel so lucky. I cannot believe that I get to make a life out of making rugs. How could I ever have guessed. My house is generally a peaceful place. I make my rugs, and carry on a beautiful little gallery in the downtown. My fears are my own to conquer and deal with. The one thing I have going for me is I am not afraid of being afraid of some things. My friend who took the course said it our brains way of protecting us. Sometimes it just goes into an overprotective mode. For the most part I know myself. I must be thinking about more than blue when I am hooking blue.

I like to wake up to each day with the freedom to choose what to do that day. It is an uncommon luxury. Other than my workshops I don't plan much. On Monday I don't want to know what I am doing on Friday. When people ask me about the summer, the only thing I know is that I'll be busy on Sundays with family and I have one lunch date. I like that. My friends are sometimes like..."What is wrong with you?" I think they think I don't want to do things with them. It isn't that . It is just that I want the freedom to decide what I want to do closer to the date. Lately when I wake in the morning I walk to the window, raise my hands in "namus day", and thank god for the day, for the land around me, and the river below it. What is there to be afraid of ? All my own fears are with in me. Settle my own mind, which I am good at, and the fears, simple and complex ease up. When I was a little girl I worried about all kinds of things, and that little girls still lives inside of me.I used to worry if the stove was turned off, the doors were locked, and other foolish things. I am the same person I was at ten or eleven but I have grown layers around the person. Each layer is made up of experience, and knowledge, and faults, and mistakes. As adults we must mother ourselves, rub our own heads, assuage our own fears and douse out our worries. Worry is so useless yet there are few people I have met that don't struggle with it in some little way. I find that walking can be comforting as a hug from my mother used to be when I was a child. My hook eases my mind because when I am at it I am literally lost in whatever colours I am using, and my mind is free to wander around. Worry comes, and goes, but never has it made a problem better.

June 12, Dear Diary, We are planning a fibre arts festival for Amherst around the time of next fall symposium. The community noticed all the excitement last year and has come together to create some additional activities around the event which is absolutely lovely. I read today in the paper that Valerie Hearder, who will be one of this tears symposium speakers, lost some of her quilts when two suitcases where stolen from her car while she was visiting friends. She has offered a reward for finding them. If you have a chance be sure to visit her website and become familiar with the beautiful haunting images she creates in her quilts. It would be a beautiful thing if somehow we could mange to help her get these quilts back. Having your art work stolen would be heart breaking.

Tonight I took the time to plant a long row of sunflowers at the edge of our vegetable garden. The first packet I planted last week has emerged and now I see the [possibilities of how they will look from the road as I drive home to my house in September. How their tall statuesque figures will create shadows in the snow this winter as I snowshoe around here on stormy days. I love the leftover glory that remains in the way they stand so strong and tall even after all their youthfulness has gone. Reminds me of my father in law some how. My son stood above me as I did it. I had to go in the house and grab my jean jacket to take the chill of. These will be in their glory in the heat but now the cool evenings will let the water create their roots good and strong so their form can endure the winter. They are like the rest of us. Only our form stands in the winter. In the summer we are full of glory.

Mary, who works at the studio with us, painted some of the walls in the basement a great sunny yellow today. She is the soap maker, and is the creator of our “Coastal Woman Soap” . I out her mint saps all around the studio as I love the fresh mint smell. Downstairs looks likes it is full of possibilities. The theme of it is playground for artists. The colour scheme is “fresh and strong”. The feeling is use what you have and make the very best of it. Once I heard a woman talking about her mother, and she said her mother used to say, ”It’s not what you have it is how you keep it.” I loved that idea. It is an idea of appreciation. My friend Cathy Thurston , years ago was doing the dishes in my kitchen, and I can still see her holding up an old plate and telling me about the Buddhist idea of mindfulness, and how even drying a dish can be a prayer. That was nearly fifteen years ago. I bet she does not even remember it but I can still see her in all her exquisiteness holding that old plate like it was golden edged china. She was standing in front of our old cupboards that were painted forest green. It was the moment I decided to read more about mindfulness, but it was probably five years later that I actually got to it. Small conversations over dishes is now one of the reasons I don’t have a dishwasher but it did not start out that way. Our reasons for being the way we are develop and redevelop themselves. Who knows what bits and pieces of our caring for each other enrich us in what ways. Over the years we have transformed this old farmhouse but I remember nearly every swatch of fabric I have had to make curtains, every colour I have painted the rooms, and I can still picture it the way it was at different times in my life here. The other night when I picked the lilacs I was brought back to the first summer we were in the house ad I had painted the front room light blue and made curtains of navy blue and lilac, with lilacs all over them. That summer every day I brought in a fresh bouquet. I think it is time right now for me to get up from this computer and pick myself a fresh bouquet. Stay close to the things that nurture the soul, listen to the sound of the peepers in the ponds at night, and know that empty vessels can’t really be filled with stuff.

June 11, 2008 Dear Diary, I am turning the basement of my studio into a playground for all the rug hooking artists who come here each year for workshops. I have fearlessly hung my own paintings...abstracts and poppies mainly so that people can see that fooling around and wasting time is worth it. We had the floors shined. They are old old old, and not really pretty but there is no fear about dropping stuff on them. Next spring I plan on doing two rug hooking and creativity workshops with groups of twelve to fourteen so I had to revamp that space as a place where people could go to draw out designs and play with all kinds of activities. It is fun to recreate space. Brenda who works with me says we need a red leather chair and I think she might be right. I took a course in May on using Creative Arts for Transformational learning at the Tatamagouche Centre and it got me thinking about what I can do to enrich the experience of creativity in rug hooking when people come from so far away to visit the studio. It led to a transformation of space, and a surge of ideas. I haven't listed the workshops yet because I want to make sure of how I am going to do it. If you want to know what is coming be sure to email me and ask to be put on the newsletter list.

I have not been feeling too philosophical these days, preferring concrete things like chairs and geraniums. I also had four workshops this spring filling the place with beautiful people and wonderful ideas and my writing has been left to my brown leather book. I have put some entries in there as I sit dreaming about the potential of my garden. I am getting better at that you know. Over the years I have learned a little more, and slowly have taught myself to make things grow.

May 27, 2008 Dear Diary, Last week I went away for a whole week and took a course. I had not done that in years. It was on using creative arts for transformational learning. It gave me new ideas for my workshops, but mostly it was exciting to be a student again. Learning freely under the total guidance of someone else. It was interesting to spend a week with a group of people I did not know, from al different backgrounds. Going away for me though is always about coming home. So many people tell me that as much as they love to travel, they love to come home. I am like them. Once I got home I happily returned to checking my nasturtiums that I have planted in the greenhouse and weeding out the gardens. May and June are months of promise for gardeners. I have become better at it over the years, paying close attention to what the good gardeners in my life do. Last year I managed to create a nice little garden out my back door. My rhododendrons made it over the winter but will they bloom? I am content to wait and see, and hope. Garden make you adapt. One of the things that made me a gardener, albeit a weak one, was the program, Recreating Eden, that is produced out west and shows on Vision TV. It kept featuring the most interesting people who created unusual or interesting gardens. It was shot beautifully and was rich in meaning. It was about responding to the land around you. Gardens tell you what goes where. Last year, Margaret Mackenzie, and landscape architect came to my house for a cup of tea. She told me what the land around this house was calling out for. She knew how to listen to it. I had been trying to tell it what it wanted instead of just listening to it with my eyes. You want to give the land some shape but you have to look at the bone structure that is already there. I like what the garden brings out in me. At the shore when I needed mulch, there was no where to go to get it. I decided to gather seaweed of the beach and try that. It felt so great to be using what was naturally available. What was there for the taking. I like that it tells me to quiet down and be patient. The garden sounds a lot like my husband actually. The garden makes me rest in it. It tells me to get my book and sit still and watch it. It tells me that it needs me daily, not for everything, but for a little love and nurturing. In that way it sounds like my children. One friend once told me that when her children were little she did not have enough leftover nurturing in her to water a geranium. I understood that, neither did I. Perhaps that is why women often turn to the garden in their forties and fifties. We have fashioned ourselves into caregivers as we raised a family and as our children mature, our nurturing needs to find a new home. It is true here in this house on seven acres on the edge of town. The children are just blossoming and the garden is just getting planted.

May 9, 2008 Dear Diary, I made a rug with a blue field in it, only to find out when the rug was finished it was a river not a field. I love the possibility of learning from yourself whilst it is unknown only to you. I dream sometimes about rugs. The other night as I was falling off to sleep I saw a flat top house on cliff. It was huge, and the water was rushing towards the cliff. Last week I tried to make a painting, and there were waves in the painting. It remains incredibly bad, but the dream of the rug has a possibility in it. Making the bad painting may lead me to a good rug. Besides it is good to do something badly. It is humbling, and we all need that, though as a mother I am humbled daily. Perhaps being humbled in a more creative form, "creative humbling", is an exercise in itself. We need to do things we are not proficient at, to learn that it does not come easy. Truth is this happens with things you are good at. I am humbled sometimes by a bad rug that does not live up to my expectations. I have thrown them in the garbage at times over the years after looking at them closely and trying to rework them. Other times a rug that I love and find beautiful is ignored in the studio by visitors. Thankfully this does not bother me. If I believe it is good, that is enough for me. Where ever I got that sense of myself, I am grateful for it. Perhaps it is from my father. I link it to him even though I know he cared greatly what others thought. I do to in some ways, but not so much about the rugs. I am overjoyed when some one loves them, but I just feel respectful if someone does n't. Not everyone sees things the same way. Art is personal, and rugs are art.

I have just read Edna Staebler's diary. She was a writer from Ontario who wrote really wonderful cook books and also articles, and books. She was a wonderful diarist, and had all kinds of thoughts and ideas about writing. Someone emailed me with the suggestion and I thank them for it. It was lovely.

April 18, 2008 Dear Diary, I finished a small series of poppy rugs. They are rich red poppies. At the time I was hooking them I decided to go out and buy nasturtium seeds for the green house. I plant them early. While buying the seeds I found poppy seeds so I bought those too to put in the earth in the green house. I thought the seeds belonged with me as I was hooking the poppies. I play small simple serendipity games with myself. It makes my life a bit more magical in my mind. The magic does not always last. But if those seeds sprout a plant I will believe in the generosity of the cosmos. I spent time this week preparing for the texture in the landscape. Gathering thoughts and ideas and wool at the same time. The last few days I spent getting the little cottage ready for the season. George Davis ,my faithful friend comes to turn the water on. Yesterday he showed up out of the blue and put the water on early for me. I was standing at the sink with my back to the water and I knew just where I was because the seagulls were screeching. I was able to clean the place after the winter. I learned from a neighbour how to set a mouse trap, and I set them. Thankfully I did not catch any. I am not self sufficient when it comes to mice. I run like I am late for a bus if someone holds a mouse by the tail and wags it at me. I am a fool about it, even if they are dead. Once my neighbor, who lives a hundred yards away ran up to my yard because he had heard me scream. I saw a mouse in the garden while I was pulling weeds. He could not believe my scream was connected to seeing a mouse. The two things did not add up.

I am just a one hundred and seventy pound weakling I guess because I remain, a forty two year old woman, afraid of mice. The solution, I got myself a cat.

April 12, 2007 Dear Diary, Lately I have noticed that when I read a novel I read it as if I were trying to write. Sometimes when I would read a beautiful sentence I would almost feel resentful that I did not write like that. Instead of sinking in and enjoying a book I kept wondering if maybe I could write a novel too. There is a famous quote about an author who says ”When I retire I think I’ll do a little brain surgery.” To the doctor who says he plans to write when he retires. I like to write. I write about rug hooking, and I write this diary. I was starting to feel as if neither were that important, that I should be focusing on writing something big, something important. I looked at words lustfully, wishing I had strung them together. Sometimes this winter it dawned on me how foolish I was. How I was not looking at the gifts I had and appreciating them, Making the very most of them. If you look away from the gifts you have, and wish for other gifts, it is a distraction. I do not mean that you should not play and explore but I mean that you should hold your gifts in great esteem. You must not think you are better than others but gratefulness for what you have been given is necessary to develop your gifts. I want to grow in what I do, and appreciate others for what they do. When I read a novel, wishing I could write like that my focus was off the beauty and the art of what was before me. I was distracted not only from my own work but from art and beauty itself. It was a bit like visiting a friend and wanting their kitchen. Pointless, and a slightly nasty underside to your visit. You come home, not really loving what you have, when you know you do, you chose it. It is always difficult to confront our under belly, the side of ourselves that wants more, does not appreciate the enormity of what you already have. I like Charles Shultz quote above because it is such plain acceptance, such good sense. I can do that well so I am going to do it…a lot of it. I think these thoughts have brought me back to the value of small. I want to create a nice body of small rugs over the next little while. Rugs, because that is what I know how to do. Words to live by is what I’ll write because that is what comes to my head. No shame in that.

April 11, 2008, Dear Diary, I set up a tiny tea shop in one corner of my studio for the blooming teas. The little gift Brenda brought me from Calgary was so interesting I decided to sell them in the studio. You take this unsuspecting looking pod and pour boiling water over it in a glass pot and a flower blooms in your tea. You then have a beautiful pot of green tea to drink. What an unusual thing.I sold three rugs this week for the new fossil centre in Joggins. They have also bought two for their permanent display. The new centre is opening in April and it will be a centre to interpret the famous fossill cliffs not far from here.

The deer are still nipping about my yard. I have just finished two square poppy rugs and three more of my women in dresses. I am going to have a great selection of interesting smaller rugs this summer. I also finished four tiny square poppies. My hands are nimble right now but the outside keeps calling me and I find it hard to sit still.

April 7, 2008, Dear Diary, I have seven sisters and five of them are in Portugal. It is odd to have a large family and have all of them take off to another continent. Often I might not speak to them for two weeks, or visit for that long, but that is different then not being able to. There is a comfort in them being a drive away. They are having a good time, and feasting on salt cod and red wine night after night. Who can begrudge them but I miss them and wish they would hurry up and be back in Canada.

Today the deer were in the yard again. It was our first fine spring day and three deer were playing on the hill. I went out to pile the wood for next winter, and the deer were just twenty feet away eating the bits of spring peeking up through the tan grass from last year. They stayed while I piled as if I was a deer myself. I was amazed. For the first time I was not worried to turn my back on a wild creature, nor were they worried about me. I think I am getting quieter. Last year a butterfly landed on my knee one day. The chickadees feed from my hand at the Glen, a local nature preserve. So today I had the pleasure of being at one with the deer for a little while. It made me feel blessed and special.

Tonight I ache from work that my body is not used to. I took a walk as usual, but today I headed along the Bay of Fundy shore line ,on the marsh dikes in West Amherst. So there you’ll see that the water is jewel tone blue, with purple, and brown, and rose all around. If I painted it, If I hooked it you would say she is not realist, but you’d be wrong. The big chunks of ice had tumbled against the shore line, and in their tumbling had become slicked in chocolate brown mud. They looked like some kind of big ice cream concoction. Across the shore is Maccan, and Minudie. Both are fairly small, and hardly populated. Minudie is famous for King Seaman, a Unitarian, who had a huge shipping business that he ran from that tiny hamlet on the Bay of Fundy. He became a rich merchant. Years ago I went and saw his big grand house and further up the road found his grave marker lost in a sea of nettles. He came and went like everyone else. He rose, became rich and is now buried among the men who worked for him. Hard to figure why people try so hard sometimes. It must be about the challenge, the desire to create change, the drive to make things work. For so many it must be about more than money, and getting rich. Every fool knows that he comes, then he goes.

Back to Minudie, it remains a beautiful and dramatic place where, surprisingly very few people live. So the long walk, and the wood pile have combined, and turned my muscles to tight ropes beneath my skin. I fell asleep sitting in the chair reading The Gathering by Anne Enright. It was excellent by the way. I have a penchant for Irish writers, and the stories of their families. Newfoundland in the nineteen seventies was as much like Ireland as Ireland I think, at least the Catholic parts were. Anyway she won the Man Booker with it, so it is unlikely to put you to sleep unless you have pushed your body good and hard.

April 4, 2008, Dear Diary, When I was a girl, probably ten or so my mother's friend at the bottom of our hill had cancer. Her name was Ann, like my mothers name. They had been friends since they were girls on working on the base in the mess hall cooking for all the American Navy men that were stationed in Newfoundland at the time. Both, unlike so many who had married Americans and moved away, married men from Newfoundland and settled in Freshwater. They raised large families, and both had a late life baby. Her son Jimmy was about two years older than me. The last year of Ann's life my mother spent the days with her, and I went to her house everyday for lunch. She was in a hospital bed in the dining room, and my mother cared for her. Their friendship was long and strong. I would come there everyday for lunch, usually Campbell's soup, and sit on the day bed in the kitchen for a little rest. The day bed was covered with a big floral quilt with a grey background. Those days going there that school year stay with me as I enter into middle age. In those days my mother and Ann were in their early fifties, or late forties. I used to wonder what they talked about all day, what they did when I wasn't there. It was interesting to me to think of my mother wandering around a different house than our own. It seemed such a foreign routine. I learned from my mother what friendship is. It took years for it all to sink in but it came. You don't gossip about your friends I learned. You tell them the truth, with kind intentions. You hold back the truth when necessary. You let them know you like them. You try to be good company. You make them a cup of tea.

I know my mother loved Ann , like a sister. I think of how my own friends have developed. I have six sisters so unlike people from smaller families I have never looked to girlfriends in search of a sister. I have six lovely ones, all of whom I like, let alone love. My friends however are something different, they are another kind of a beauty all of its own self. Today, in the mail , I got a card from a friend that I see all the time. I thought what could she be possibly sending me a card for. It was just a note that came in the mail that told me nice things about myself, about us as friends. It made me cry . She was so thoughtful to think of me, to send me a card in the mail, to bother to get my mailing address. We often don't know the mailing address of our bet friends locally because we see them. I had been out for a beer with her last week, and this week we had gone for a long walk. She sees me all the time, but she wanted me to know she appreciates me. How nice was that?

Brenda who works with me went away for two weeks and came back to town with two gifts for me. A tiny box of handmade Belgian chocolates that she told me not to share with my kids. They'd be just as happy with an Aero bar anyway so I took her advice. She also bought me blossom tea, which is a small tea ball that as you steep it turns into a flower. I ordered them for my studio after drinking the tea and watching the little art unfold itself. It was a gift that she knew I would be captivated by. The thing was she was somewhere and thought of me, and followed through. I have always been big on" the thought counts." As I have aged I have decided that thoughts are nice but actions count more, and I have tried to follow through on ideas I have about kindness. I remind myself that a thought is just a thought but a note in the mail to a good friend telling them you love them is something that you can hold in your hand. It takes the thought from inside of you and carries it into the world.

March 27, 2008 Dear Diary, I started working on a little series of small mats of women in dresses . They are all around 5 by 12 inches each. It is amazing to me still that such a small rug can have a personality of the character in it. It is creation, to create an idea of someone out of bits of wool and cloth. I imagine things about these little characters after they are made as if they were real. The woman in the apron with the green dots is prim. The dirndl skirt woman must be from Europe. Perhaps diary you think I am mad but I am not. What would be the sense of making such little tiny works of art if they were not imbued with a bit of life. For a while I was in the habit of thinking that only the big rugs really matter but this winter has been a revelation about the small ones again. Small matters, I keep saying, though I had been ignoring the small mat as really mattering. Now I am back at it, and happy to have found it again. It is like finding a little piece of art that you had hidden in a box under the bed that needed to be framed but had forgotten about. These little women in dresses are now ten in number. I think they will multiply, and go forth. Perhaps I need to make a few men as well if that's the case. We'll see.

March 20, 2008, Dear Diary I remember when I was studying counselling the most important quality seemed to be genuineness when you are working with people. As time has gone on this has become a very important quality not in counselling but in being. I am always talking about simple living, even though I have a furniture weakness, and I buy wool like I hook a five foot by five foot carpet a day. This year I have had a little guilt, felt slightly disingenuine, because I built an addition on to my cottage. When so many in the world barely survive I picked out hardwood for a little place on the shore. My friend says she has focused on being grateful rather than feeling guilt about what she has. Regardless, at times it is a bit hard to reconcile how some of us become so fortunate, while others struggle. Perhaps materialism is just one aspect of this. The same is true for mental health, health in general. There is no understanding life and the way things play out but gratefulness, thankfulness, along with consideration for the rest of the world is part of being genuine. Our cottage is my link with the shore these days. It is a half hour from my house. When my children were little I spent all the summer there in a one room cottage that had two little dividers for bedrooms. There was one tap of cold water that ran out directly under the house. We used my in laws bathroom next door. It was a little place but we lived there for two months. It has grown a little over the years. It still remains a cottage but we have own own facilities now, thank goodness. This year my daughters bedroom grew from a closet to a space that has room for friends. I could now invite someone to stay the night. We have a space on the water. I hook rugs on the deck. It came through my father in law, who bought it over fifty years ago. We made it our own. Years ago, anyone in Amherst who wanted a cottage could buy one for $500. It was so accessible to everyone. They have remained in families for generations. Mine is all pine, and the smell of wood hits you as soon as you enter. Pine is not so much in style anymore but it belongs there and I won't be changing it for fashion. It will remain as it is now for a long time. Here in March under the siege of freezing rain, I look forward to the warm sun on my back as I walk three miles on the tidal flats. I dream of cooking food that I raid from my mother in laws garden. "Whatever is there is yours dear." she tells me, even though it is my sister in law that plants it. I pick lettuce, beans, pull carrots sparingly, there are never enough, while there is always too many onions. We gather there as a family. My children get to play where their father played before them. On summer nights they cross the lawn to visit their aunts and uncles and grandmother, walking up three steps to the shingled green and yellow cottage that their grandfather bought so long ago. They go in have a snack before bed, and sometimes return for breakfast the next day. We take things like vinegar, and flour from each others cottage when the other is not around because at the shore the pantry is never quite stocked. Though it has gotten more comfortable over the years, it is still a place of "make do". I miss Theo, my husbands father, out there. He supervised everything about the place for years. When the roses came out, he was there to pick them, and pass you a bouquet. Every year I take in one of his white peonies, a single peony and put it by a window in a thin glass jar. It is a June reminder of why I get to be there in the first place, and I did this even while he was alive. He never came out before the heat of late June. The peonies often arrived before he did. So I am grateful. I know I am also lucky and fortunate. Life is not easy to understand, but acceptance is an important part of life. Accepting love, and grace, and good fortune gratefully, and being thankful is part of living. So is being good to others and sharing. Just anoth