Easter Butterflies

Last week Jimmy and I returned to Naples, Florida to spend Easter with my father.

Every day Jim and I trekked through the mangroves to visit the beach...



We were lucky that there was another Osprey pair this year with three fledglings in their nest.  I love to watch the Dad fish.  Last year, I wrote this post where the sea hawk caught a Florida pompano.  This year, he entertained again by catching this gar fish...



It didn't look like a very big meal...

But when you've got three hungry mouths to feed, you eat whatever you can catch...



The weather was calm and mild the entire time we were there which made for perfect beach-going.

There wasn't much of a wrack line this time...



Which was a huge blessing in disguise.

A full wrack line is like having too many choices on a buffet.  You tend to select the larger, more unusual dishes.   If there had been too much competition, I'm afraid we would have missed the treasures that actually were there.

Coquina shells. Donax Variabilis.
 

Small, edible saltwater clams that live below the sand in shallow water along East Coast beaches.

While I stooped to collect these tiny shells, an older German woman whom I had befriended that week approached with her cane.  She walked the beach every morning and we had struck up multiple conversations throughout the week about shells and birds and clams...basically, any and all wildlife that we saw in the mornings.

When she saw me down low, she said, "Oh, hello.  I see you've found something to collect."

"Coquina shells, " I said.  "Only little shells are here these days."

"Oh!" She exclaimed.  "They are so Be-YOU-tiful.  All those pretty colors.  I have a whole dish of them I keep out.  Just beautiful!  You have to be careful to clean them well though or they stink.  A little bit of the clam sticks to the shell and you have to get that out."

I waved to her as she went on her way, leaving this egret behind fishing in the surf.



I went back to collecting the tiny marvels and found they were most easily spotted in shallow water, as the lapping water lifted them up and they floated back down...



I wanted to find a way to share the pleasure of shell hunting, so I took a picture just for you.  Think of it as a virtual shell hunt.

There are eight coquina shells (3 doubles and 5 singles) in the picture below.  Can you find them all? (I'll reveal the answer in the bottom of the post.)

While I continued the delicate job of picking up wee bitsy clam shells, another woman approached and told me that she had grown up on Coquina Beach.  As children, she and her siblings had eaten the little clams as they played; their parents had made coquina broth from boiling the live mollusks in salted water.  I found a recipe here.  Who knew?

Jim and I weren't up to harvesting live clams, so we took our empty, bitty bivalves back home and followed the German woman's advice of washing the shells carefully...

Spending the time to pick out any remaining organic matter.  It was a tedious task as the shells ranged in size from 5mm to 18mm.

But it was exactly this slow, methodical care with each and every shell that caused me to fall in love...over and over again.

Together they were a kaleidoscope of Easter butterflies...



And individually, they were every shade of pastel with stripes and delightful combinations.



Like a box of antique buttons, each one held its own charm...

As I washed, dried and sorted my delicate swarm of shells, my father watched perplexed.  "What," he kept asking, "Are you going to do with all of those?"

"I don't know yet, Dad.  But aren't they amazing?"

"Hmmpff, " was all he said.

What I was going to do with them?  I didn't yet know.

But when Dad, Jim and I went to an Antique Mall the next day, look what I found...



This kitschy, old-fashioned souvenir bouquet of shell flowers.  It was love at first sight.

And look...

There are flowers made from all those tiny coquina shells.

And the hummingbird has a set of coquina wings...



Yesterday, I unpacked and sorted all the paired coquinas by color and placed them in a collection box...

A palette from the sea.

And I took all the single shells and placed them in a dish...just as my German friend had suggested.

And here they sit as I type this post to remind us that Summer is coming and the world is full of wonder and joy.

My new collection has led me down a path of researching shellwork which was all the rage in 18th century England.  I found this stunning example of shellwork from the reign of George III...

And then I remembered that my friend Mrs. Delany had created shellwork in addition to her 1,000 flower collages and amazing embroideries.  So I'm busy following that lead.

Looks like there's more shell embroideries in my future.  Found on the Beach might have to become a series.

Blowing kisses to you all and hoping that some unexpected delight washes up on your beach ;)

P.S.  Here's the solution to the virtual coquina search...



And here's a few other interesting shells that were also in the shot...

The Wrack Line

The wrack line is the line of dead seaweed, marine animals, shells, egg casings and other detritus left behind on the beach as a result of high tide.

The word "wrack" comes from the Old Dutch wrak which meant ruin; e.g the term "wrack and ruin".  In the 14th century, it came to mean shipwreck and today, it's anything that washes ashore...seaweed, driftwood, or any other debris from the sea...

Including shells...

Jim and I love to spend hours combing through the wracks of shells on the beach...

Studying what the sea has cast forth...

And discovering something new about life in the ocean.  

I imagine it's a magical world under the sea.

And walking the wrack line proves that fact time and time again.

And I'm not the only one interested in wrack lines.  

It's the prime feeding area on the beach for shore birds,  crabs and other beach critters.   The birds deposit seeds and organic material in the form of their waste, which leads to the formation of sea grasses and dunes and the ecological health of the beach...

There's no doubt in my mind that poring over the treasures in the wrack line is a meditative activity and leads to a sense of peace and well-being.   

And so it is placed on my shell block....the second in a Reflections series I'm working on for the Crazy Quilt Journal Project.  

It's been a joy working on these blocks...though completing twelve by December...phew...we'll just have to see about that.  Hope springs eternal.

I actually found a book titled,  Walking the Wrack Line:  On Tidal Shifts and What Remains.  I think I'd like to read that one.

I'm posting as often as I can but not as predictably as during the school year.   Summer life means less time inside to stitch and to be online.  It's one of those seasonal shifts that I enjoy, though I do miss being here.

Happy day to you all and thanks for your interest in my blog and my work.  

I'm getting close to finishing now...just one more major thing to figure out...

I'll tell you about that next time.

Itty Bitty Shells

It's not easy to find itty bitty seashells.

By itty bitty, I mean 1 cm (0.5") or less.

And now that Jim and I are getting older, our eyes have trouble seeing those tiny shells from a standing position and our bodies don't bend down as easily to get a closer look.

But the only way we know to try to find those itty bitty, teeny tiny shells is to get down low in those piles of shells and sift through them until we are rewarded.

Luckily, my husband Jim will spend hour after hour...sifting and bending and squinting so that he can find the tiny shells that I can use in my embroidery.

This piece is a celebration of that labor of love and of the beautiful beach that my Dad has so generously shared with us over the years.

When I took a pic of the itty bitties, I realized that my picture didn't really show how small they truly are. So here they are with some 1" shells in the background...

It's been fun sifting through all the shells again to select the ones which I'd like to have on the block.

I love this little cockle shell with the barnacles attached...
      

And, in the picture below, I really love that purple fragment of giant scallop...and the shade of pink inside the jewel box shell (isn't that a great name for a shell?)...and the twists and turns of the white worm shells remind me of ribbons...
 

I especially like it when we find shells where the exterior of the shell has worn away to reveal the spiral within...



How to attach these itty bitty shells?

I modified Allie Aller's pre-beaded plastic button approach that I used to attach the stones on my January Reflections piece.

Instead of using plastic buttons, I pre-threaded beads and glued them inside the shell openings. I used different sized beads for different sized shells.

This tiny guy has a 15/0 bead inside...



Finally!  This pic shows the tiny scale of the shell the best!

Now I'm ready to get stitching and pull everything together. I'm hoping to have this block finished by Friday...life willing.

Happy Monday everyone!

P.S.  We saw Snow White and the Huntsman over the weekend and we absolutely loved it!  The visuals are wonderful...and the costumes for the evil queen...TDF!  Charlize Theron is great at being evil...

P.P.S.  To Any Blogging Needle Friends Living in France: I am trying to locate a Mai/Juin issue of Magic Patch Patchwork (French version) magazine.  If someone would be willing to send me a copy, I would send you a package of goodies in return?  If you can help, please email me.
Thank you! I found someone to help.

P.P.P.S.  To anyone reading through the 69 Best Travel books...Cousin Bette by Balzac is quite good PLUS Cousin Bette owned her own professional embroidery business (though this doesn't figure too prominently in the story).  And, thanks to "anonymous"...Jean Rhys' The Wide Sargasso Sea is next for me.  What's next for you?

One Little Urchin

While shell seeking in Naples, Florida, Jim and I haven't found too many sea urchins.  

Just this one...

This guy had washed up on shore after a big thunderstorm, having lost all of his spines in the pummeling surf.

Normally, the purple sea urchin looks something like this...

Its skeleton covered in very sharp spines that cause a painful wound to the human who steps on one!

Once the sea urchin dies, all of its spines drop off and you are left with a beautiful, pale dotted skeleton underneath.   

In researching this little purple sea urchin, I learned that the urchins belong to the Phylum Echinodermata, which also includes sea stars and sand dollars.  Echinoderms have five-fold symmetry which isn't readily apparent in the sea urchin while it's alive and its skeleton is covered in spines.  

But once the spines fall away, you can see the symmetry very easily.   I was happy to discover this because it helped me to define an embroidery approach for creating my own little textile urchin.

I found the illustrations in this post at Bibliodyssey...a great site full of all kinds of wonderful photographs/illustrations. And Bonus!  Everything posted on the site is under a Creative Commons license which is great.  Thanks to Megan of Elmsley Rose for pointing it out to me. 

I used the divisions of the five-segments illustrated in the picture below to create an embroidery pattern of sorts...

I struggled a bit trying to decide how best to sculpt this little urchin.  Finally I decided to embroider a circle onto water-soluble fabric...

The water-soluble fabric does two things.  First it stabilizes the embroidery stitches by helping secure them more firmly to the fabric circle.  And secondly, the glue in the stabilizer gives the fabric circle some body which, I hoped, would help the globular, raised cloth of the urchin hold its shape...

While the stabilized, embroidered circle was still damp,  I stitched around the outside of the circle to draw it together in typical "yo-yo" fashion...

I then stuffed the inside with half of a felt bead to give that yo-yo some three-dimensionality.  I  cut out a center circle in the top and, using a stylus while the fabric was still damp, I scuplted the yo-yo into a round biscuit.

Then I let it sit to dry, the stabilizer helping the little urchin to hold its shape.

As I applique the little urchin to the block, I'm hoping that some of the folds from the yo-yo gathering will smooth out.  

I'm not quite ready to decide where to place it on the block or if I should need to make more...

So for now I'll just let him hang out with the guy I found on the beach.

See you next time.

Red Sea Whip

Reflections.

That's what I decided would be the subject that would tie all my crazy quilt journal blocks together, trying to incorporate mirrors into each one.

This shell block I'm working on now is all about the shell seeking that Jim and I do when we visit my father in Naples, Florida every year.

I'm attempting to convey the feelings of beauty and lightness that captivate us as we walk along at the water's edge and I hope to honor the treasures that we've collected there.

The subject of today's work is the Red Sea Whip.

Until this morning I thought it was a red sea fan.  That was until I did a little more research and discovered that it's most likely a long sea whip.  A sea whip is actually a soft coral from the gorgonian family, an animal not a plant, and has small tentacles that extend from polyps along the branches to capture plankton.

I've been lucky to find three red/purple sea whips in Naples.  The one in the first picture was sent to Marty Trahan because she loves them so.  Hi Marty!

That leaves me with two.  This big one I keep in my china closet...

And the smaller one below, I used as the pattern for the red sea whip I stitched onto my block today.  I photocopied the fan on my printer at 80% so it would fit on the block.  Traced it on tissue and transferred the design...

I went a bit overboard with that one variegated seam treatment over which I wanted to stitch the whip.  

It was kind of busy and I was afraid it would fight with the sea whip rather than recede behind it...so I added some of that metal mesh ribbon as a seaweed backdrop to calm the area a bit.  

I love crazy quilting for this reason...If you don't like something, you change it until you do...  

And here's what the entire block looks like at the end of today.

The next elements I have to figure out are a little more complex...interpreting a nine-armed sea star and a sea urchin that Jim found one day...

I haven't figured those out yet.  I better get out a doodle cloth.

See you next time shell friends.