In no particular order: the birds and the bees, a well-crafted cosmopolitan, a fine tomato, a night out dancing, Ella Fitzgerald, silence in old growth rainforest, a home-made meal, the timeless sound of waves crashing on the shore …

These are some of my favorite things.

After a good snowfall, my urban garden Laboratory is breathtaking and beautiful today.  The snow obliterates the dull brown and grey and makes original sculptures outside. This blue spruce was marked down to a dolla-ahhhh at Canadian Tire a decade ago. How could I resist? Now that is a dollar well-spent.

For a brief moment, the snow clung onto the needles of the umbrella pine before melting away.  Love the pom pom marshmallow form the snow makes on the branches.

Just minutes before the sun setting, we rounded the bend in the road. It had been raining on this fall day and the sky still looked unsettled but there it was:  The Marsh bathed in an other-worldly kind of golden light.

So I set out to capture this moment.

I got started with a blank swath of linen and sketched out the space with a running stitch.

The elegant tree line off in the distance would anchor The Marsh. And then I started to build layer upon layer of “gold” to create the space for the grasses to live in The Marsh. 

The grasses were built up over several weeks with the whipped chain stitch. And then, the canvas started to come alive with texture and breathe and vibrate.

I’ve been happily lost and found knee-deep in The Marsh over the past year while working on this tapestry. LOST when I did not know how or where to turn…and FOUND when I believed I had solved a complicated riddle.

The soundscape at Riverdale Park West today is the continuous drone of traffic from the Don Valley. Off in the distance, a dog-walker is wrangling five dogs in the off-leash area. And on the margins of the green space  is a patch of leaves, layer upon layer of organic material.

The best things in life are handmade:  starting with embroidery, a home-cooked meal, an up-do…

Only the female winterberry holly has red berries.

Great eye-candy for us, food for the birds…Win-Win.

Nature and technology converge and offer a new approach to architecture.

Read more about growing buildings out of trees.