An Apple a Day

An Apple a Day is a personal challenge to use a theme in mixed media over the next 12 months = featuring the humble apple.

In the first fortnight I have -

•   drawn apples roughly – more a doodle than a quick sketch
•  done a quick sketch on an envelope
• embroidered a tiny apple in chain stitch on a crazy patch piece I am working on
• added apple blossom inspired by blossom photos and motifs sourced from the internet – and then discovered I should have used white tinged with pink rather than pink if I was going for uber realism
•  stamped using ink pads and fun foam – see Stitchers Plus blog for what we all did as a quick exercise.  
•  actually carved a couple of stamps and played with acrylic paint
• stemmed stitched another apple in blue onto that crazy patch piece
•  played with stitch on a stamped fabric apple, and
• spent some time thinking/looking/reading about apples in myth, legend and religion.  

In the course of doing this I have read quite a bit of poetry including Robert Frost's work After Apple picking which I have cut and pasted below so you can read it with ease.

After Apple-Picking

BY ROBERT FROST

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree

Toward heaven still,

And there's a barrel that I didn't fill

Beside it, and there may be two or three

Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.

But I am done with apple-picking now.

Essence of winter sleep is on the night,

The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.

I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight

I got from looking through a pane of glass

I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough

And held against the world of hoary grass.

It melted, and I let it fall and break.

But I was well

Upon my way to sleep before it fell,

And I could tell

What form my dreaming was about to take.

Magnified apples appear and disappear,

Stem end and blossom end,

And every fleck of russet showing clear.

My instep arch not only keeps the ache,

It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.

I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.

And I keep hearing from the cellar bin

The rumbling sound

Of load on load of apples coming in.

For I have had too much

Of apple-picking: I am overtired

Of the great harvest I myself desired.

There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,

Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.

For all

That struck the earth,

No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,

Went surely to the cider-apple heap

As of no worth.