The Avant Garden

the days are getting shorter, the weather cooler, and brown leaves scratch across the driveway. I have moved my energy indoors early this year, so it seems, and the projick known around the Rockpile as "The Time-gobbling Quilt-top" has cost me waaaay too many hours with waaaay too little to show for it. See what I mean:

But I have fallen in love with the thing, so onward I sew, once Elsa (my sewing machine -- she's from Switzerland) gets out of the ER. In the meantime, I dragged my old sewing machine -- which is great for sewing in straight lines -- outta the cobwebs and did this blanket repair for my friend Erin:

The tag says, "Grandma's tripping again."

She wanted this yellowish thing re-sewn, and it looked thusly this morning as I laid it out on the floor:

It will be just a little different when I return it to Erin, but she said I could get creative with it.

On the rockstacking front, I finished the mailbox post for the cabin out in Maggie Valley. Here's how it woulda looked back in the 1950s:

Overall, I was pleased with it. I might go back and make a few improvements that occurred to Rob while we were installing the thing. Still thinking.

Speaking of Rob, his daughter Chris came down from Michigan for a visit and took this pic of the debris that Rob's Upstream Arch  collected during one of our recent high-water events:

 That's enough for now. I have to go upstairs to stir the stew. Hope we see more good stuff in October. It's gonna be a good month.

are greatly exaggerated. I've just been busy with things we just don't talk about in the Avant Garden. But I did find this leftover cellphone pic from Maine:

 Maine has so many rocks that they just sit around doing nothing. Big, beautiful rocks, little stackables ... just sitting around calling out to me.

 Then the AvåntSwede came to visit and I sewed three snugglesacks:

That's friend Åsa, who flew all the way from Sweden to hang out in the Avant Garden. She was so cool that I no longer say, "That's really awesome." I say, "That's really åsome." Anyway, the snuggly on the left is for her 5-year-old son (Ture), the Swede is in the snuggly that will go to her husband (Hugo) and the animal design on the right is for her 8-year-old daughter (Sandra).

I rec'd an e from her today that said, "Good things from Asheville ... Sandra and Ture are watching telly in their snugglesacks right now."

Yesterday I went hiking on the Mountains-to-the-Sea Trail and saw this creature:

It looked so plump and yummy I almost ate it, or at least brought it home to sauté in butter and garlic. 

Most of the rest of my time has been taken up by the rockstack mailbox projick I mentioned about a month ago. Here's how it looks without the threaded rod running through it:

I hope it looks just like that with the threaded rod running through it.

As I mentioned last time, it had to be a stack first and actually balance, with the threaded rod only for permanence, not balance. Does that make sense?

The Swede and I drove out to the bascom.

Trailer Hitch Arch on Pedestal is still doing well:

and look at these cool signs they put to go with it so that folks could call it something:

Once again, as all rockstackers know, that is just a little something to make you feel like someone instead of a guy so lonely he has to make rockstacks to have someone to talk to. All those Stones come home on Hallowe'en Day. It will be a joyous reunion around the rockpile that night.

I think that is a record. I have no excuses ... haven't even been busy, really.

I have mucked around on the sewing machine:

That's a bowl kinda thing I made, using the crafty techniques I picked up from my friend and father-in-law's wife, Joan, and this book that she loaned me.

I've made several more since then, each prettier than the one previous, in my humble opinion.

 Rob and I went exploring last week primarily to see the place these railroad tracks almost meet:

I reckon that was the only way the Southern-Pacific could get trains up the Old Fort grade. It's on the Eastern Continental Divide. 

And there is a lot of kudzu there. Rob marveled at it:

It was the 1930s there, so everything was in black and white.

My old friend Åsa is coming to visit the Avant Garden this coming Friday. She sends this pic of an arch she found on a little island near Bohuslaen in Sweden:

Which I think is way cool. She's really into this rockstacking thing, so I plan on repairing all the fallen things while she is here and hopefully will have some cool pix to show off next week. I also have to go out to the bascom to repair some things that have fallen.

Gravity never sleeps, never leaves me alone.

and the blog portion of the Garden has been neglected. Until tonight.

The Avant Family (four of the five, anyway) went to Mt. Desert Island, Maine, which is also the place good rockstackers go when they die. Our "beach" consisted of wonderful stacking stones as far as the eye could see. This was my first arch:

and this is it at high tide:

I hurt my finger (left, bird) a bit on that one, and with the bascom exhibition coming up, I got a little cautious. I needed an extra push to go on, and found it in "Never mind the Bollocks, here's the Sex Pistols" again. The result was this stack atop one of the larger stones in our back yard:

Who'd a thunk that 32 years later, the Sex Pistols would still be relevant to me? Weird ... but there's something about that album. It makes pain irrelevant and rocks lighter.

I named this one "Anasazi" for some reason:

and then the Sun set and it looked like this:

 When I read this sign:

I read, "DO NOT BE THE AVANT GARDENER" 

so I was merely an Avant (and eventually exhausted) Hiker for about 4 hours of hell, involving a 1300-foot elevation loss and 1300-foot climb back to the top of Mt. Cadillac.

And finally, one of my favorite places on all of Mt. Desert Island was Seal Cove Pond, where this happens almost every day:

Back in good ol' Western North Carolina, I came home and went to work-work on Monday and then started the installation out at the bascom on Tuesday.

I loaded what turned out to be about 4,000 pounds of stone in the rented truck: 

and drove the 78 miles to the bascom (Rob drove out separately) to do this pair of Rock Ness Monsters:

and then today we added these three Arches on Pedestals:         

I didn't know about it and didn't plan for it, but they asked me to do something right in front of the main building on the very beautiful campus, and this resulted:

We had a buncha rocks left over and were too tired to take 'em home, so Rob arranged them in a "we-meant-to-do-that" kinda way. He's good at that.

My favorite thing of all was the arch-on-pedestal near the bascom entry point:

The trailer hitch thing is something I have never done before, but this AOP is trying to lean the other way and fall, so I built in a counter-weight to help.

No one else has one quite like it -- only the bascom.

I have a bit more tidying up to do out there, but am finished with the heavy lifting. I'm going out one more time, either tomorrow or this weekend. Yesterday evening I was more exhausted than the day I climbed New Zealand's Mt. Pirongia.

Longest blog entry ever? Maybe ...

Mainly because I have not taken a photograph of anything cool in a while because I have not done anything cool in a while. Mostly I have been preparing to move a pile of Stones (I think about 3,000 pounds worth, but I don't know why I think that -- I guess because I have seen a ton-and-a-half of Stone all piled up and I know what it looks like?) out to The bascom do the installation there.

I'm very excited about this, but a bit nervous, too. I usually stack alone out in the Woods or my own back yard and I dance and sing and curse and grunt and spit and talk nonsense to myself (I do this when Rob is around, but not as strangely). Stones add 500g to their weight every time you pick them up.

Here's an old pic I like:

That is a series of dependent balances -- three rocks that can only balance that way with the weight of the Stones above .... if you remove the top Stone, they all fall except for the pedestal. I saved that pic as "CoolestEver." It still just might be in the Top 5.

Now, what was I saying? So yeah, I am a bit nervous about being on public display, or at least that much more so. I worry most about someone else getting hurt, but then I worry about me getting hurt while doing this or wearing out my cranky back. As you can see, I have obsessed over this like no other project I can remember.

Stones add 500g to their weight every time you pick them up.

Another pic from old-timey days:

That one is Battle Branch as it flows into Bent Creek. I save the photo as "MeditationsOnThominator" because I built it just after helping my friend Thom pack up to move to Florida.

So anyway, I have done a lot of work already on this, having moved a big pile of Stone to the front yard, all lined up and ready to head west to Highlands.

Stones add 500g to their weight every time you pick them up.

Another moldie oldie:

No comment on that stack.

So anyway, before I do all that, though, the Avant Family is headed up North for a bit. Enjoy your Summer, and when I return, we'll chat again. And as I always remind my readers when it is time to go away for a while: Don't come over. Our dog, the aptly-named "MeanAss SumBitch," will be here.

Stones add 500g to their weight every time you pick them up.