s u b l i m e

my first etsy treasury, entitled "sublime", can be seen
here on etsy.there are just so many lovely shops on etsy it was hard to narrow the selection.

assignments

i love a design challenge! i was asked to make a spinnaker pouch that's tied down to the deck of a dinghy from which the sail is unfurled. so i crunched up the sail, measured the ideal size and started sewing away. i made channels on the bottom to thread lines for tie-downs and corner loops for more tie-downs. when the inspector general came into my sewing nest i was told to add more tie-down loops on the top corners of the pouch. sewing was a challenge after inserting custom cut fiberglass battens into the casings at the top of the bag. it has been tested as sea-worthy by the sailor man and given the thumbs up by his crew.

i'm thriving with my next assignment: 5. i just love a widely interpretable topic like that. one of the first things that came to mind was haiku. now that the haiku has been composed it's off to embroidering....
the goal for this and other new pieces is to be exhibited in november.

hybridized painting

circular knitting needles and an ebony knitting needle crossed with an owl doodle.... that's today's hybrid painting. the owl, oil pastel + oil paints on linen, is the size of an atc (artist trading card). the atc phenomenon is something that i thought i might try and after i had cut the painting to the specified size i placed it on top of another painting temporarily and low and behold there seemed to be a marriage in the works.

i had originally planned to sew the owl painting onto cardstock to make an official atc, but as you can see that's not how she ended up. i'll put her in my etsy shop as soon as i can figure out the postage. i bought a postage scale recently yet every time i use it the machine measures a different weight. gggghhhrrrr!

just messing around

on a drizzly day what else should be done but to mess around in photoshop for a bit? well, i can think of plenty of things that NEED to be done, but that's another story. here's a sketch from museo correr in venezia (seen earlier in this blogorama) layered with our garden leaves + biglietti from my solo trip to europe long ago. just pencil + paper for sketching on that trip. no color. just pure illustrative simplicity. on days like today it is wonderful to be transported back to those cool marble steps, where i sat + sketched, in that unairconditioned museum looking up at that vast fresco. ahh memories are a wonderful thing. i hope to keep them around for a long time.

palette creator

just discovered this cool web tool where you input any photo and the site generates a palette of colors from the photo (with web code numbers). the photo shown here i took at the ferry dock.

details

leek

yummy

i think zucchini buds look like a man eating plant.
echinacea mango meadowbrite....love that color.
i wait all year for these beauties. and oh the fragrance! they get soooo tall! if the painters even brushed these babies i would pummel them. such destruction has been wrought upon the garden by the house painters that i am really stressed out right now. all my shrubs had matured to glorious natural symmetrical orbs. yet now, with the mass of broken branches, they look so beat up. i know for my next garden to place the precious beauties far far away from the house.

Good Thing I'm Not PMSing Right Now!

....or else i would be screaming at five men today. our house is in the midst of being painted and i knew this would happen. i cut shrubs down and cleared everything back away from the house and yet there is not a superhighway (as desired by those who paint homes) leading to the shingles on the walls. my delicate plants are smashed to smithereens. some were expensive hostas others are groundcovers that have taken a decade to fill in and create a lovely carpet of fragile foliage (ducks feet + trout lilies). my japanese anemones squashed. hardy fuschias flattened. a mountain laurel in full bloom (that was one of the slowest plants to mature to blooming age) broken right down to the roots...the whole plant destroyed. if i were pmsing right now my blood would be boiling. i guess i need to look at it as an opportunity to do some new planting. so long you lovely plants. you were so beautiful while it lasted.

Seed Packet

after saving lots of seed from my garden i thought it would be fun to try to sell some. but after looking into all the regulations governing seed sales i decided to forget it (way too complicated!). this would have been the packaging for one of the marigolds i wanted to offer (with one of my gilded oil paintings of the featured plant).

Rare Sighting

i saw a cedar waxwing today. they are so rare around here. i don't think i've seen one for years. what a beauty! solidly built and hued like a weimeriener with a red dash on the wings and a stripe of egyptian black mascara over the eye. cool sophistication. glad to see they haven't gone extinct here.
it was my lucky day to see it. happy 7/7/07!

Rust

i should be doing so many other things right now...wrapping presents, making a birthday cake, weeding, doing the laundry, etc. etc., but sometimes i just want to write. it seems to happen every year on this day. i think to myself, "where did all the time go?", it is just so hard to believe it's july already! i keep thinking that july is a few weeks off and here it is already. time just escapes. i think when i put my blinders on and dive into projects i loose all track of time. i'll think of an idea in the middle of the night and can't wait for daybreak to start working on it. with dawn so early in this wonderful northern summer i get many hours of creating accomplished in one day this time of year. i make lists of things i want to make. will i ever get to them all? i need a bunch of lifetimes.

the photo above is the ceiling on the ferry between new orleans and algiers that crosses the mighty muddy mississippi. it pretty much summarizes me right now, a couple of weeks before the calendar marks another birthday: rusty, yet functional, patinaed through time, but always wanting to do more. me and that boat have a lot in common. when everyone else on board that boat was taking photos over the rail towards the city, i was interested in the vessel itself. the stories it could tell in that amazing city. i was taking a photo above me and other tourists were wondering what was so interesting in that peeling paint and rust. they'd look at my photo spot and turn away toward the view again. i didn't lure anyone else to take the same photo. as i've said before, i love the sublime in life.