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There’s so much “free firewood” around just now, each day during the cleanup one can hear chainsaws, and along the roads people are loading up cars, trucks, horse drawn carts, little cycle-driven boxy things on two wheels, even a motor cycle sidecar.

We were lucky. We are among many who have roll down shutters here, and our windows were protected. Only last week I commented how lovely our peppermint tree was looking out the front – now 2/3 of it is twisted off and down on the street. (pictured – we occupy the middle unit of this triplex) To the right of this photo a fir of some kind is bent in half, slumped over the wires on a power pole, but it all continues to work OK. These Uruguayan power people could show our chainsaw-happy Western Power employees a thing or two about power lines and trees, and how they DON’T need to be hacked and massacred into the wild improbable shapes you see round some of our Perth suburbs. And, this week’s storm aside, here we don’t suffer anywhere near the amount of power outages that we do in Perth. Anyway, time now to do another spell with the yard broom….
PS firewood a guy with a chainsaw chopped up the major branches friday… I am assured this does not need a year or two to dry out, it’s great for fireplaces right now.

On tuesday night, a nasty severe storm unexpectedly developed out of a rain bearing depression which was forecast. The system then however slipped out into the R. Plate (which is pretty wide off Uruguay) , intensified, and after dark and without warning, slammed all along the coast, with wind speeds that put it in hurricane 2 and 3 class. It hit us, in eastern Montevideo, around 9 at night, and continued wildly for about 7 hours. At least 8 people died and more were injured, there was a lot of damage to property and in Montevideo civic parks and gardens alone around 2000, two thousand, trees were uprooted. (pictured, a beautiful blue cedar keeled over in the grounds around my husband’s office in a grand old mansion) Buildings were unroofed or lost tiles. Windows were blown in. Phone services, land and mobile,were out for several hours, and over 40,000 homes lost electricity and/or water even mains gas, in some areas for nearly 24 hours. We had water, in the front garden hose only, but without the electricity to pump the water into around the house etc ( we’re in a very low water pressure area) we had to cart water in a bucket until our power came back on early next afternoon, about 15 hours after losing it. We did have gas, though, so were able to make cups of tea, at least. For all that time the house alarm was in beep mode, once every 5 seconds, to let us know it was running on backup battery. I could have done without that feature, at least.

Oh, and the leather stuff?
all the repeat units/blocks are now on the backing, and it is ready to be sandwiched and basted. I discovered that they all needed to be machined around to prevent lifting or worse, fraying. This means really I now need to consider a ‘compatible’quilting technique – free machining; fine hand quilting like seed stitch or birds feet; french knots possibly – they’d look great – nah, I think I’ll procrastinate this afternoon and go downtown with my friend Virginia to look for some leather tools. I need a punch for another idea, and need hand sewing needles at least…and some heavier threads….

No, this is not me getting a bit kinky, it means more that I am discovering ways to incorporate leather into my textile creations, and thinking about its potential.

Forced to make some kind of statement to accompany my quilt “Ora Banda” into the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum collection, I alluded to the great underlying building block of traditional american patchwork, the repeated block or unit. Although I made very few traditional quilts before experimenting in the non-traditional field, something continues to draw me to repetition and block formation. My earliest quilts were the “Ancient Expressions”, I-XIV, which included a lot of repeat patterning drawn from ancient and tribal carvings in and on various materials, rocks and cave walls, and some of the petroglyhic and petrographic renditions of figures of man, animals and essential basic symbols which occur in civilisations world-wide. And of course there are some here, in Uruguay. One of the great artists of this country, Jose Gurvich, sprinkles them with others from his own personal lexicon, throughout his drawings, ceramics and murals. I just love finding something that he has used that is similar to a mark made by a cave dweller in europe, or to one that I know has been marked on a wall in an Outback Australian ravine.