My heirloom garden seed catalogues have arrived and I am already planing the gardens for next year's events. The vegetable garden will be featuring heirloom corn and pole beans along with a host of other oddities. I rotate my crops as a defense against pest and disease and the gourds will be planted in the field located in Coal Creek bottoms and a clearing in the woods that is here on our farm in 2010. If you were at the 2009 Summer Moon Gathering, the heirloom pole beans will be where the extensive gourd trellis works were then.
I am currently researching the North East Woodland Indian's rock art, paintings and petroglyphs, and cross referencing them with the scrimshaw on powder horns of early Colonial America. I am searching for motifs that were used over a period of certain times in order to better understand and more accurately reproduce these images with certainty on my reenacting wares. There is also a local place where carvings abound on a sand stone ridge and I am going back to the site with my new knowledge and see what more I can discover. After reviewing some photos I have taking there, what I thought were abstract designs located on the ridge, I realize now are stylized renderings of animals. I am finding that these early artist had a keen sense of the curvatures and shape of their surfaces. They utilized and incorporated a variety of creative techniques such as negative shapes, natural occurring curves, textures etc. of the surface to compete an image.
