Archive for the ‘Project Spectrum 2009’ Category
Seasons Change (Gonna Happen Every Time)
I decided to put up the new Project Spectrum design a day early. That summer/fire design never did it for me and I actually hated visiting my own Web site as a result. I find this one more to my taste.
The photo in the header is one I took last November on a photo walk through Rockefeller Preserve. I’d just gotten my Nikon, and I still love the photos I took that day, even though I was still learning how to use the camera. I thought it was a perfect fit for this phase of Project Spectrum, because not only does it show autumn, but also water and the blue sky. Here’s another shot from that day:
It’s a relief to me to be moving into the autumn phase of Project Spectrum, much as it’s a relief to me to be moving into autumn itself. This has always been my favorite time of year. Scott has a theory that people love best the season in which they were born, and for the two of us, that certainly holds true.
Many people see autumn as a time of endings, but to me this time of year seems so full of promise and hope. Maybe it’s the connotations with back-to-school time that were imbedded so deeply in me as a child, but I think it’s mostly because I see this blaze of glory, this last great party of Mother Nature in a riot of color and harvest, and it makes me think about the wheel of life and how what looks like death leads to new beginnings. (There’s a reason the Pagan year begins on November 1, after all.) All I know for sure is that autumn makes me feel more creative than any other time of year.
Not to mention, it’s the beginning to knits season.
I think this year I’ll do a big feast for Mabon. It’s my favorite hoiday, and I love autumn’s food, with its apples and nuts and pork and wine and yumminess. And now my stomach is rumbling just thinking about it, so I need to get some lunch and start the week’s bread-baking.
Project Spectrum 2009: South | Summer | Red | Fire
Summer is my least favorite time of year. Give me winter storms and brutal cold over humidity and heat any day. While just about everyone I know has been frutrated by the cool, wet summer we’ve had until recently, I’ve been loving it. Gray rainy days that don’t go above 75 degrees? In late June? Yes, please.
That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy the things summer has to offer. It’s stone fruit season, which makes me happy. Plums and cherries are among my favorite fruits, and I’m making sure I enjoy them while they’re at their best. Cherry picking time is just about over, sadly, and I’m regretting not getting upstate this past weekend. But peaches and apricots will be ready to pick in just a few weeks!
Late summer tomatoes make me swoon, especially when I can bring them in fresh from the garden and still warm from the sun. That won’t be happening this year, but ripe summer tomatoes seem to overflow my kitchen from various neighbors once August hits.
I love the beach but hate the people, so we rarely go. This summer I’m hoping Scott can take a little mid-week time off so we can go down the shore while a lot of people are at work.
This summer, I plan to make an effort to get out and enjoy it more. Normally, I hibernate in the a/c until brisk autumn breezes hit, but I think I shouldn’t disregard an entire season. I think I’ll still shun the outdoors in the afternoons, but summer mornings are perfectly lovely for strolling or sitting outside with a cup of tea.
I don’t anticipate knitting anything red for this phase of Project Spectrum, but I do anticipate photos of summer’s bounty.
Project Spectrum | East
Today marks the turning of Project Spectrum from North to East. East is represented by the element of Air, the season of Spring, the material wood, and the color yellow.
Yellow is a really hard color to work with in a Web site design. It’s either pallid and babyish, or eye-numbingly bright. I hope I’ve been able to balance that a little, but please let me know if that yellow is blinding on your monitor.
I feel like this blog design is way over the top for me and, to be honest, it makes me a little uncomfortable. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because yellow just screams LOOK AT ME and I tend to feel more comfortable fading into the background. Yellow isn’t a color I normally wear, my mother’s efforts notwithstanding, and it isn’t a color I’m particularly fond of, for the most part. (The one exception would be with daffodils, which are my favorite flower. I love them yellow and bright and eschew the white ones in favor of the sunny faces of the yellow ones.) But Project Spectrum is about exploring your relationship with the various colors and elements, and about pushing boundaries to some degree, so I’m stepping outside my normal comfort zone with this bright and over the top blog design.
It’s fitting that today is the beginning of the next phase of Project Spectrum, for today is also Beltaine. (Though you wouldn’t know it looking out my window.) I have a love/hate relationship with Beltaine. To see the world bursting with life and color and promise makes my heart sing, but the associations with fertility make me cringe. It’s holidays like Beltaine that make me feel like a failure as a Pagan. It sounds silly to say something like that, but so much of Paganism is about fertility. I try to not take that so literally and make up for my lack of fecundity in body by nurturing my creative fertility, but it’s not always easy.
I haven’t decided yet what my focus, other than the blog design, will be for this phase of Project Spectrum. I’m considering finally starting on Flicca, because I have a mountain of yellow yarn waiting to be knitted into that sweater. There will certainly be photos, and tree bark is one of my favorite things to photograph, so I’m looking forward to that. We’ll see where this goes.
New Theme
It was my intention to do a new theme for each phase of Project Spectrum. So here I am, only a month late into North!
