My new potato family and email signature ...

Is this a sweet potato family or what?  I bought a big box of sweet potatoes at Costco and I don't want to eat them, especially not now. They started sprouting so I put them in some random drinking glasses and a theme emerged. I'm wondering why the dad is yelling. I think it might be because of what his youngest daughter did to her face. Is that a handbag the mom is hiding behind her back?

How do you like my new signature?  I met with my upline Miche rep and am so excited. As an art teacher I remember feeling like ET until I went to an art teacher's conference. I had a similar feeling, it's just that the Miche folks are obsessed with PURSES!  It brought to mind a time with Natalie was 5 or 6 and I was on a purse shopping binge (before my beloved Miche) and she said "Here, Mommy, here's another purse for your purse collection."

Pour me a mint julep, it's Kentucky derby time!

I'm loving fascinators as a medium for expression! Hat making party the horizon...

Someday my prince will come...

A rainy night on my front porch. I am sure there are a dozen good tag lines for this picture I snapped of a tree frog who happened into a little mirrored metal cabinet. He was undaunted by the flash.

Earth Day, Arbor Day, Peace Trees, Happy Trees...

 I love the yellow tababuia behind our tree. It was in it's prime on Earth Day/ Arbor Day.  For those of you who aren't familiar with the tababuia, the yellow blossoms don't last long and when they fall, they rain down, making bright yellow petal puddles on the ground beneath. Our realtor's daughter named them 'happy trees' so that's what we call them too.

We had quite a show of helping hands from the Multi-faith Education Project and ArtReach Orlando. The bottom tree blessed Winter Park City Hall with it's presence until it joined the other three trees at the Winter Park Chamber of Commerce. Go visit them there!

The trees will bring some festive color to Winter Park's Kentucky Derby event next weekend. I've been commissioned to make another fascinator for one of the hosts. Now I have the fascinator bug and ordered a book, fabrics, and lots of feathers.

I have been making plastic bottle forms since 2004 and I thought I had seen every idea. I should have known better since every group I work with brings new ideas. On Earth Day, a volunteer brought Sharpies so that participants could write messages of peace on  the blossoms and I love the Chinese dragon that one gentleman created, more interested in the engineering than the final product. It is pictured next to a blossom a woman made that I think looks just like a bleeding heart bloom. My former student, Hugh, discovered a striped painting technique I am using for the derby project.

I am so grateful to The City of Winter Park, ArtReach Orlando, and the Muti-faith Education Project for doing so much prep work and making this installation such a success.

 

Virtual bead store, Italian appliances, and peek-a-boo flowers...

Wouldn't it be fun to have a virtual bead store? I was imagining customers making appointments on skype and then accompanying me to the studio to choose colors, charms, and chain. With that fantasy in mind I found myself sorting my newest color combinations. I've been playing with transparent pale aqua with crushed glass embellishments. The crush glass is called 'frit' deriving from 'to fry' in Italian (like frittata.)  The crushed glass is made by heating the glass, squishing it thin, then shocking it in water so that it crumbles to bits. I wish I spoke Italian beyond glass terms and menu items. I accidentally set our Roomba to Italian and now I don't know if it needs to be emptied or charged.

Sunflower playing peek-a-boo...

State of the garden address...

John has started chemo which is no picnic so it has been hard to do anything creative. Mostly I feel paralyzed.  I sat in a wrought iron chair and wrote the other morning, so I will share that picture with you even though it is made of words and not paint or glass. Here is a photo to accompany it.

From my journal:

I am on my front porch, a stoop really, the covered landing at my front door that measures a cozy 5 by 5 feet. I am in my pajamas, turquoise flannel pants dotted with hugging penguin couples and a black sleeveless cotton undershirt since it is really too warm for flannel.   Beneath me is a potted poinsettia, the red so vibrant it fairly warms my behind. Its color creates a happy contrast to the wrought iron garden chair that I spray painted turquoise. The chair and I match.

I brought my breakfast out here in hopes of seeing the morning birds squabble over the bird feeder when they aren’t chewing me out for invading their space. Before they arrived, it was quiet and I looked at my shabby garden which hasn’t been mowed down by freezing temperatures yet. My poor leggy basil plant is covered in some kind of fungus spots that make it look like a bus just hit a pothole and spewed it with mud.  It looks a little pissed off as well as unhealthy, even itchy. There are sunflowers randomly pocked in-between the mums that are going dormant. I hope they get to bloom before we get a freeze.

The birds have arrived, so it’s much more entertaining. A little Carolina wren, all ruddy brown has just tried to light on a two foot tall cosmos plant that could not bear its weight, so the little bird ended up taking a catapult ride down and then springing off when the feathery top of the flower’s stem  brushed the dirt.  The cosmos are completely out of season but I took a chance on them, or the weather, or both.

Creating a garden is a sculptural endeavor for me with an anxious moving about of containers to create varied heights with a sense of balance measured in my gut. I move lanterns, shepherd’s hooks, plants and pots around until they approach some kind of intuitive order. There is no plan. I step away, my back to the garden, then do a quick turn-around-glance, and measure my stomach anxiety. I know it is ‘right’ when I no longer have a stomach ache, when I can live with the layout.

For height, I poured soil into a screen dome-shaped cover I stole from our fire pit. (No worries about unchecked sparks; the fire pit iron bowl is planted with succulents on the back porch.)  I perched the repurposed screen onto an old column resulting in a birdbath shaped planter that teeters, but has settled into a comfortable while tentative balance facilitated by a bulge of soil to the back. A rusty garden angel stands in the middle of the dirt bowl, her brittle skirt buried deep enough to keep her from tipping over. Her wings, the right one lacy from decay, embrace the space. Having dug in her heels, she opens her fractured limbs in praise of morning.

I planted sunflower seeds in my tippy contraption but, in less than time it takes to say ‘scat’, I returned to find hulls opened like Easter eggs in a tidy circle around the angel. Perhaps the pinks and purples on the horizon distracted her from shooing away the squirrel that helped himself to my efforts. Thankfully the squirrel was a sloppy eater or the angel shoed him away before he polished off his snack; four or five cast offs have managed to fight the odds and sprout on the ground below. They are now over a foot tall, one of them almost two feet and leaning a bit precariously under my birdbath/ planter configuration.  I am pleased and amazed that you can identify seedlings from their earliest push into existence, “Every seed after its kind” yields for me a comforting and joy-filled continuity from one season to the next.

 After the squirrel incident, I transplanted some three inch tall cosmos seedlings I had started in a clay pot. They circle the angel, standing upright like members of a choir. They, along with the rest of the garden, tilt slightly to the rising sun, tentative, anticipating, singing.

Everything leans forward a bit. That is what I notice most in my front garden, in my dish of succulents on the back porch,and in the orchids that climb down from the edge of a giant pot then touch the ground like little leaguers stealing second, rebounding into a sharp midair ‘u’. That is where they flower, in midair. Imagine that. With no visible means of support the succulent and the orchid flower spikes reach upward like my whole garden reaches.  Leaning toward the sun, toward who they are, then reaching up and flowering handfuls of confetti that defy gravity.  The trees mirror this activity too, arms up, always reaching.  Reaching in praise, or maybe reaching like little children wanting to be picked up.

Straight A's, lentils, and fairy godmothers, or is it fairies godmother?

Basil babies waiting to put down roots...

True to form, I have wandered off with my camera battery, so until I put the pile of stuff on my dresser away, I guess I won't be posting pictures. I got some sour dough bread going this morning, and scanned through recipes for dinner. I kept coming up short one or two ingredients, then I heard from Natalie that she had made straight A's!  I headed to the grocery store to pick up some flowers and a big red velvet cupcake. The flowers are fluorescent as are the leaves surrounding the blooms: spray paint. (What? Flowers don't come bright pink?) They are actually turning the water in the vase a lovely pink. I had the cupcake put in a smart little plastic take-out container, bagged seperately, but then decided to take all the groceries into the house at once. The cupcake tipped over, not unlike the fairy in my garden. I recollected an elderly relative who went to pick up pizza and tucked it under his arm vertically so that it sought its own level  and became a calzone. Natalie still isn't home and doesn't know about the cupcake so....

One of her favorite casseroles awaits her and she doesn't have to know about the cupcake:

My friend Brenda's Rice Lentil Casserole

3/4 cups lentils (I really like the red ones best)

1/2 C brown rice

3 C chicken broth

1 onion chopped (which I did not have, thus the trip to the store)

1/2 tsp basil

1/4 tsp each garlic powder, thyme, oregano

3/4 C grated cheddar cheese

Place all but cheese in a casserole. Bake for 2 1/2 hours covered at 300 degrees. Top with cheddar.

Once I had the casserole in the oven, I had time to freak out and realized that the Festival of Trees is only 3 weeks away.I caught myself and reworded my train of thought: " I have a whole THREE WHOLE WEEKS to finish the ornaments for the tree!" Even if my garden fairy has her head in the dirt, I have friends who, like good fairies, keep dropping off bags full of bottles. Imagine my bliss when I opened a huge black trash bag to uncover dozens of 1 and 2 liter bottles. Yes Virginia, there is a fairy godmother. I spent the afternoon cutting bottles to "Cold Case" tv shows. It's better than when I was home sick from work for an extended period and resorted to Biography: The Life of Andre the Giant.

Frida Kahlo, monster bags, and fallen angels...

Not to make light of people who are bed-ridden but I have often said that I would make a great invalid. I love working, eating, reading, and thinking off of my feet and propped up with pillows. If I could do all that from the bathtub I probably would, but so far I found a waterproof journal, Bible, and pen, but no i-Tub. 

It looks like I'll be playing Frida Kahlo for Halloween, or shortly thereafter.  Went to the orthopedic doctor today and was harrumphing about how there are so many reserved doctors spots while I was forced to limp a city block to get to the front door, when I realized that I didn't know where the front door was or the good parking spots for that matter.  Not only that, I had gone to the wrong office. I was already late because I stayed up too late reading this really interesting article on the end of post-modernism that I am still thinking about. Once I finally arrived I limped in dramatically (for sympathy since I was late) to get the verdict: Arthroscopic surgery.

Since I am street painting at the Sarasota Chalk Festival, I asked the nurse if she thought I could crawl around on the ground a week or so after surgery.  She was warming up to the idea of butt scooting on a little wheely cart when I told her I would also be needing to climb up and down a ladder for the Festival of Trees installation. That's when she drew the line, so I guess I will post-pone the knee repair until after November 10th when the tree is finished.

My poor garden is evidencing my neglect.  One of my wooly lambs ear plants looks like either a science experiment or a Halloween decoration. My garden fairy and pineapple have the same opinion:

Zuzu, as only she can manage to do, swept in just as I was snapping the picture. I have righted the garden fairy more than once, and like Baal in the Bible, she keeps throwing herself down, as though in despair, I think, not obeisance. On the bright side, my neglected basil went to seed so I have a whole bunch of basil babies waiting to fill the empty spots my fairy finds so disheartening. I suppose I could just prop her up with a rock, but find her head banging the soil really amusing.

Another thing that cracks me up: These new Publix monster bags for Halloween. I couldn't resist, especially now that I shop at b.o.y.b. Aldi. I stocked up on buy one get one caramels for the apples I make every Christmas. I figure if we run out of candy I can give them out at Halloween, even though they are only slightly more exciting than the pennies and lunch snacks I usually resort to. Maybe I should just buy more candy.  After I get some paperwork done I am hoping to 'get on my torch' as I like to say, though for some reason I picture a witch riding a tiki torch. Wonder if I can rig it so I can work from my bed?

Fallow time... a place of inspiration.

Years ago I read that people need fallow time to rejuvenate just like soil needs it. I rotate between writing, gardening, glass work, and design with some vegging in-between.  Ironically, lately my 'fallow' time has been planting time. Dale Chihuly was inspired by his mother's flower garden and I (who like to call myself 'the other Dale') love digging in the dirt. Just the smell of the first handful of soil when I get started could inspire a design series, with its layers of  scents reminiscent of tobacco, mushroom, and  moss, almost like a wine. If you would like to tour my garden, I invite you to my facebook garden tour!

Plastic Bottle Chandelier

This is the chandelier we made for our school auction.   It now brightens a gloomy corner of my porch. I connected two wire hanging-basket planters for the structure. Now I just need to figure out how to light it, not on fire... illumine it.