stuff

I made this for me.


I love how this turned out. This is another collage using drywall joint compound, crayons, and bee's wax. This is up for trade if anyone is interested in it - I would love to trade...


This was an experiment - playing with what I've done before and some new ideas. I really like it. It is finished of with bee's wax. The spinner is from Bingo. ;) This one is a freeby if you want it and speak up. Oh, it is a tin can lid for pie filling so that should give you an idea as to size.


Just playing. This is up for grabs - anyone can have it for free.


I got this adorable child at the thrift store.

mixed media

I thought 'mixed media' would be a clever title for this photo.


Two canvas's featuring melted crayons a delightfully fun technique that I was turned on to by Lisa.

The bee canvas includes one of my all time favorite quotes:

"Nothing is more like a soul than a bee. It goes from flower to flower as a soul goes from star to star, and brings back honey as a soul brings back light." (III.1.iii) Victor Hugo

This clipboard uses drywall compound, crayons, and bee's wax (I tried bee's wax the for the first time this weekend and I love it). I also love drywall compound - fabulous texture!! The hymn is 'Now Thank We All Our God.'


This clipboard was created with Wendy on my mind.


I thought that this was a terribly cool clipboard when I found it. The recipe is a photocopy of one that was written by my paternal grandmother for 'Snicker Cake.'


A 'random stuff' box. I bought this box at a thrift store when my MIL was here - she thought I was nuts at lunch as I suddenly took a butter knife and started hacking at the box and then took pin-style floral frogs and banged them against it. I love how it turned out!!



Okay - I find 'Everyone His Own Weather Prophet' to be highly amusing.


Okay perhaps I am the world's biggest dip but the phrases 'Time and its variations' and 'Time-breaking points.' Just send my imagination in wonderful places.




I think all of these will be posted to my shop tomorrow with perhaps the exception of the box.

Photo Hunter: soft

I want to apologize for the darkness in some of the images I go through stages where I like them dark. I would have lightened them but for being busy working on my gallery shots.

Also there is a rhyme to the order...I simply don't have many images of C that aren't on film and it is much easier to pull digital images. So I posted a couple of C first (um, yeah that is me) and the rest are K.

I would love to post some of my niece G but I suppose I have to stop somewhere.

gallery

My sister works at a library that does art shows. She got me a show and when I said I wasn't sure I could pay to have enough works framed she said that she and her husband would help. I guess she believes in me.

I am hoping to assemble ten 8x10's (a terrible aspect ratio - ugh - so clumsy) and 5 5X7's. She showed them my floral/nature stuff so that is what this show is about. I am sticking to black and white and narrow DOF since that is what I am about. I am trying to steer clear of my more abstract wanderings and focus on the kind of macro shots with magic bokeh that I think is my strength.

I also decided to throw in five bug shots cause I love buggy things.

If you are so inclined you can see the gallery here. Please give me feedback on what you would want to see. :)

my parent's visited this weekend

to open Christmas gifts - yes a bit belated.


me with K a photo taken by my husband when we went to a local tourist attraction when my MIL was here - for reference/comparison with my Mom's pics below. :)


my Mom




I made this over the weekend. And I love it, which is saying something as I hate - school pictures. If I had my druthers, we wouldn't have them done. Why, may you ask do I hate them? Because they are meaningless images of what a person looks like but say nothing about who the person is. Once upon a time before cameras - painters would paint likenesses -- I understand why people did it. To know and remember what a person looked like when an image was nearly impossible to create and keep and expensive too - a good likeness was valuable. Even in the early era of photography when few people owned cameras and most images were taken by 'professionals' and the act of photography was time-consuming and strenuous makes the idea of a likeness valuable. But now nearly everyone has a camera - the records of one's life are immense. Why wast time on what one looks like? We know well what the people in our lives look like and there will be plenty of incidental images to remind us. Lets get down to who they are - but that is harder.

Sorry for the minor rant.



It seems the thing to do lately, come to M's house and learn a new craft. My Mom made these from some napkins she picked up for this purpose when she was here in December.


So I made this one for my niece H - I think my Mom will keep it at her house and light it when H comes over. H is a bona fide horse nut.



I decided to experiment on an old jar. I think I might try this again - the result is a bit uneven but lovely.

Photo Hunter: antique

This is an old quilt hand-pieced, hand-sewed, hand-quilted by my great-grandmother P. I don’t have many memories of her although I do remember that she was very “old-country.” I associate monkey face pansies (johnny jump-ups), hollyhocks, and willow trees, and massive mulberry trees with where her and my great-grandfather lived. I remember the old barn where we kept sheep, the little short picket fence, grandpa's pancake size cookies, and his shaving kit. I remember a small house made of pebbles, peach pit key chains, and a wall of family photos. I remember that grandma always wore dresses, her hair was always in a bun, and she never smiled. I remember that great-grandpa was a tremendous teaser. The house was teeny tiny, sparsely furnished except in the over-crowded living room which was crowded mostly because it was so small and always spic and span.

I remember these quilts always in use as we grew. In fact, they were in use until my children were born and I coerced them from out of my Mom’s hands. (Bad, bad, bad daughter). It and the another quilt, now reside in a glass trunk.

The pic of the baby is my youngest in her baptismal gown that my Mom made. It was of beige linen and had pink flowers and green vining embroidered all over it. I floored my parents when I picked the fabric. I have a problem with pink. My oldest child had the traditional long, white, lacy gown.


This is the nativity that my husband remembers from childhood. He has fond memories of it and none of the numerous nativities in my collection quite measured up. My MIL didn't like it. She says it is ugly and something she picked up at Pic and Save when the kids were small. It is old as it is older than my husband so it qualifies as an antique. It is brittle. It is lovely. I used images I took of it as our Christmas card one year (more abstract and in color - not these).



This set of binoculars was my husband's grandfather's. My husband asked for them after his grandfather passed away. He has fond memories of using them when going to Padres games with his father and grandfather. We've used them to watch lunar eclipses and to view meteor showers.




I photographed this shortly after we started visiting Glen. He was a tailor on the USS Alabama. His shop was directly under the big guns and therefore he has a great deal of hearing loss. This is his sewing machine.

love letters from God: brooms and dust

“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.” Martin Luther King, Jr.


Today I come to you to speak of brooms. For the first years of our marriage we lived in apartments with wall-to-wall carpet so I didn't use a broom. Even after we bought our first house, I didn't use one often, we weren't often home. Then we had one of those broom vacuums which for some reason I thought was wonderful.

It wasn't until I had babies that I learned to appreciate brooms. They are quiet and as I used them when the babies were sleeping, I discovered them to be soothing too because I would get caught up in the gentle rhythm of the activity of sweeping. Somehow the silences, the musical rhythm, and the pleasure of knowing I was cleaning and that it was worthwhile pleased me.

I've noticed that in the first three Little House Books (I notice it in these because we listen to them ad nauseum around here) Laura often talks of her mother sweeping the floors. In fact, it seems whenever a significant household even occurs it is punctuated my Ma sweeping the floor.

In Little House on the Prairie, the first thing Ma does when the new house is ready to be moved into is she sweeps.

“We’re moving into the house today, and all the chips must be out.”

So they ate quickly, and hurried to carry all the chips out of the house. They ran back and forth as fast as they could, gathering their skirts full of chips and dumping them in a pile near the fire. but there were still chips on the ground inside the house when Ma began to sweep it with her willow-bough broom.

Ma limped, though her sprained ankle was beginning to get well. But she soon swept the earthen floor, and then Mary and Laura began to help her carrying things into the house.

In On the Banks of Plum Creek, an ox sticks his leg through the Ingalls' roof. They thought it was okay - but the next morning the entire roof collapses.

Then they carried out the rock and the earth and the bunches of hay that had fallen. Ma swept and swept again with the willow-twig boom.

That night they slept in their house, under a starry sky. Such a thing had never happened before.

Later in the story, they move into their new house.

They hurried to do the work. And in the lean-to they found a boughten broom! There seemed no end to the wonders in this house.

This broom had a long, straight, perfectly round, smooth handle. The broom part was made of thousands of thin, stiff, greeny-yellow bristles. Ma said they were broom straws. They were cut absolutely straight across the bottom , and they curved at the top into flat, firm shoulders. Stitches of red string held them tight. This broom was nothing like the round, willow-bough brooms that Pa made. It seemed too fine to sweep with. And it glided over the smooth floor like magic.

To read more love letters check out Wendy's special blog.

Garth Williams illustration for On the Banks of Plum Creek by Laura Ingalls Wilder.