JO REIMER: Catching up

I ran into friends at the local farmers market yesterday who were a bit worried because I haven't posted since our road trip and they wondered if we made it home okay... maybe you wondered, too. We're fine and had a very good time but declared at the end that there's truly no place like home. My cat snubbed me for a day; the weeds dared me to pull them by their well-developed roots, and the answering machine was full of messages to return. I turned right around a took a shorter road trip with friends the next week.

Bridge and pier, LaConnor, WA

Every summer for many years some artistic friends and I have gathered for a 4 day "camp". Only once time was it even close to being camping; mostly we borrow a house or rent rooms in an inn. The last few times we've rented space at the LaConnor Inn in Washington state, a beautiful little town on the banks of a canal in Puget Sound, way north of Seattle. We used to take turns teaching each other in rather formal workshops about whatever we had going at the time and we still do in a way, though now its mostly show and tell and we work on our individual projects while we sit and talk. We eat lunch and dinner out... one of the joys of being in LaConnor where each restaurant vies for our attention.

Thousands of perennials respond to the humidity and the sun and make a gorgeous display for us every May so I honor them by taking lots of pictures.

I took my Singer Featherweight with me and sewed lots of paper that I'll use in many ways later. It was fun to sit and sew straight lines. The way I make my papers is to cut lots and lots of strips of interesting paper (wallpaper, scrapbook paper, maps, ledger and music sheets, and my own painted papers, as well as scraps leftover from other projects) and then sew them like stripes to junk mail. I've been using strips of these stripes in daily collages and in my journals,