Worm Moon

I just returned home after attending The Michigan Herb Conference. It's was a wonderful 2 day conference with a lot of great speakers, plants and herbs for sale, great food and fellowship. I'll tell you more about it next week, but right now I want to show you my new book I got at the conference. It's a wonderful book onthe changing of the seasons, gardening, the earth, the moon and stars, animals, birds, and bugs in the north eastern states. I heard the author speak last summer and have been waiting for her book to come out. It has a lot of wonderful ideas, stories and projects to do with children. We (my grandchildren and I) began last night with going out to look at this months full moon called by Native Americans in our area as Worm moon or Crow moon or Sugar moon.

I did my little moon as the "Worm moon", with the warming days the earth worms are now coming to the top of the soil/lawn to gather bits of food and in the process they are aerating and fertilizing our lawns. This is such a fun little quilt to make, I sit in bed and applique and quilt each block, and on clear nights the moon shines in. (This is pinned to a much larger wall hanging for the picture).

Speaking of crows I made this piece a few years ago with sun-printing dyes. I took a white piece of fabric and painted the dyes on it and placed it out in the sun under our apple tree. It was very windy and the apple blossoms were blowing off the tree and landing on my fabric, wherever they landed the sun did not reach the fabric and the color did not activate. So the little white prints are petal prints. How fun is that? The whole time I worked on the piece 3 crows sat in the trees cackling, one ended up on my quilt. I cut him out, quilted and beaded him before sewing it on the background. I beaded the background of the quilt and added a little stream of ribbon flying around.
Crow moon has a lot of legends to it, one being if you see crows in February it will be an early spring. Full crow moon links the sound of calling crows to the end of winter. By Spring they are settling down to nest.
Sugar moon told the people when it's time to tap the sugar maple trees to get the sap and make maple syrup.

I stayed at the Kellogg Center on Michigan State's campus during the conference. I passed by this wonderful piece of Kuba cloth every day. This was hand-woven, natural dyed and hand stitched in Africa. The men traditionally do the weaving while the women do the hand stitching.

I hope this comes in clearly enough for you to read.

The hand appliqued symbols. Wish this was hanging in my house!