Four O'Clock Tootlings

Antiquities Project

2012-01-16T12:26:00.000-08:00

One reason I treated myself to a new version of Photoshp was that my sister Kate had gotten CS5 in 2010 for Christmas. For her it was a huge step and she was getting frustrated with all she had to learn so we are now working with the same version for the first time in years. And we both have a lot to learn! This project was a start. We each made a background (courtesy of some techniques I found in Digital Art Wonderland) and then each picked some images that fitted our theme of Antiquities. Her project is here: http://katemarkey.blogspot.com/

Thanks for looking!!

Meshy Mirrors

2012-01-12T06:38:00.001-08:00

This is my entry for the Smeared and Smudged January Bloghop - the challenge is MESH IT.

I had gotten myself some nice Christmas presents, Photoshop CS5 and a book called Digital Art Wonderland by Ange Sullins and Silas Toball. So when the bloghop notice was posted, I was already knee deep in this as a learning project. The mesh idea seemed a wonderful way to differentiate their arches. I grabbed a new meshy dishcloth and an old green onion bag. Seriously, who doesn't save all of their old mesh onion bags? They were scanned into PS, given a blending mode and a layer mask (I learned how to transfer one from another layer).

Then I needed to add the undersea stamps to the sea side. They are Seahorse by Rubber Stamp Avenue, Bubbles by Impressive Stamps, and Spiral Shell by Impression Obseession. The border stamp down the middle is from Ann-ticipations, one of my favorites. I found the quote online and it seemed appropriately creepy.

If you happened upon this accidentally, check out all of the other great entries in the S & S January bloghop from the blogroll in the side bar.

The Very Dark Side of Steampunk

2011-12-08T08:21:00.000-08:00

This is my entry for the Dark Side of Steampunk challenge at Smudgy Antics.
As I was turning over in my mind what I considered the dark side of Steampunk, I was coming up with parallels between Victorian times and some aspects of contemporary life: now the child labor laws are being bandied about in US politics, the pollution is from fracking in addition to coal burning, state supported mental institutions were closed en masse in the seventies and eighties. Okay, maybe a little too dark, until I read in the paper they are going to starting a fracking well about 6 miles up the road. So this isn't nearly dark enough!!

Even the whimsical drawing (Digital Things on Etsy) by Alfred Robida from 1883 showing his vision of the future on steam portrays plenty of pollution. Prostitute #1 and crying girl with dog are from 100 Proof Press, charitable child is ALA Art, architectural drawing is from Artful Illusions, the rest of the figures are from Dover clip art books. The quote I found online.

So....is this too dark or not dark enough??

The Empress of Useless Feelings

2011-11-28T06:54:00.000-08:00

While playing a Big Fish game "Puppet Show: Lost Town" I came across this box man and grabbed my camera. Thank goodness I had the presence of mind to do it at that point because once you found his head and put it on, you couldn't get a close up.

I knew I had to make a box person for a good friend for Christmas. Mine turned out to be a box Empress and I made it a receptacle for some dark things I'd been thinking about.

I bought a wooden box to use but after I'd made the head, it was much too small for the original box and I found this paper mache one in a drawer of alterable containers. You know - Altoid tins in two sizes, candy boxes, interesting cardboard boxes someone will wonder why I saved! I've never used so much glue on a single project in my life.

In a nod of the hat to Big Fish Games, I photographed her on a couch and in my animal chair where she becomes a "Hidden Object".

Spinach Asiago Pizza

2011-11-12T15:41:00.000-08:00

One day last week we were going to get a hard frost. There's not much left in the garden that would bother - kale is okay with it - but there were several spinach plants left so I decided to make spinach pizza - one of our favorites. I picked and cleaned the spinach and we only had 16 ounces but it just seemed more weighty than the grocery store stuff we ususally use so decided to go with less. If you don't like spinach, I'm sure this won't convince you but spinach fresh from the garden is like asparagus fresh fom the garden - unbelievable!! It has a hint of apple flavor and it it sweet! In our three years of gardening with this huge garden, this is the first time I've managed to get spinach planted.
Anyway, back to the pizza. I had checked and we had the asiago and some mozzarella to substitute for the monterey jack. At the last minute, we couldn't find any rosemary so had to go out to the garden with a flashlight and pick some. I made the crust from scratch with a recipe from Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. We don't eat vegetarian all the time but this cookbook is loaded with so many yummy recipes.
The pizza stone is almost brand new - Todd got it for us when he was home early in October, but you can see it's already well loved (and used).
The pizza was wonderful!! And we got an extra crust for the freezer!!

A Little Steamy

2011-11-10T05:31:00.000-08:00

This is another one of my BJD, Sophia. She is 43 cm and made by Customhouse, a Korean company. I spent last December making Steampunk outfits for this size doll, some as Christmas presents. So she has been all dressed up with nowhere to go until this hop.

Stamps are the steamy train by Lost Coast, lace by Our Daily Bread, gears by Artfull Illusions and also from one of those clear sets that never put their names on anything you might conceiveably keep unless you're a masochist. The gears and lace were beveled and embossed which doesn't involve powder when you do it digitally. The subway pix are from the internet. The black and white one actually gave me the idea for this layout. Digital brushes are Spiky_Swirls_by_ Melemel. I adore Steampunk stuff and am looking forward to seeing what everyone has done. If you landed here from somewhere other than the hop, check out the blog list for Smeared and Smudged's November Bloghop.

Studio

2011-11-01T16:37:00.000-07:00

This is the studio about two thirds of the way through October. I still had not quite worked myself into a 6" x 6" working space on the table.

The studio is in the attached garage and is the best working space I've ever had because it holds everything but the computer. The light isn't wonderful but we use daylight flourescents in the big fixtures hanging over the tables so it suffices. The only area that's really dark is in the bookcase corner and when I get a fixture over there, it will be fine. The old fashioned stove is getting replaced by a newer woodburner this winter that hopefully will be cleaner and more efficient but I really love this one. Actually, I'm crazy about every nook and cranny of this place - love going out with my doggies and creating!

As far as shots of after the cleanup, they don't really exist. It only gets to that state by special request. I'm not a neatnik and put one major mess away only so I have room to pull out the next!

31 Days of Halloween - Day 31

2011-10-31T06:04:00.000-07:00

While I was playing with the Distress stains and the new star thingie, I came up with six tags that almost matched in twos. They were sitting on the table sort of thumbing their noses at me so I decided to use some things I had in pairs. The top pair are skellies are from Flickr Commons. The middle pair are digis from Tickled Pink. The last set of girlies were drawn by my friend Pam for our weekend of playing but neither of us got to them then. Swirls on all edges by Inkadinkado. To honor a prevalent style here on Smeared and Smudged of using lots of embellishments I gave it a try. Not exactly up to snuff but not bad at all. I have drawers full of cool stuff but never really got the hang of using it. Buttons and ribbon from sewing stuff. Little gear looking things are some kind of cheap washers from Home Depot. They are silver out of the package so I colored a few with gold and copper Sharpie pens. And that's a wrap. It's been a riot and a half!!

31 Days of Halloween - Day 30

2011-10-30T06:24:00.000-07:00

We all know television can be a bad influence on children. Morbidia has had this particular obsession since she saw the Amazing Racers on the Island of Broken Dolls. If truth be told though, in Morbidia's case, the townsfolk breathed a sigh of relief at her latest project.

Witch by Inkadinkado, town by Zettiology, front grave by Inkums, dolls by 100 proof Press, path with brown trees by I Love Rubber Stamps. All the PS brushes used including trees, graves, grass from EErie_Pack_by_wyckedBrush.

This is the weirdest thing I've ever stamped although I've come close before. Hope you get a good laugh from it!

31 Days of Halloween - Day 29

2011-10-29T07:07:00.000-07:00

Stay with me....only this and one more of these to go. Even I am bored posting them, but still loving doing them. And having them nearly ready has given me time to help a little bit (very little bit) outside getting ready for the fall and help a lot in the kitchen.
This is another one of my witches, drawn using BJD pictures as models, steps traced and PS distorted from a treehouse calendar, spooky tree from Third coast, scenery right side from Beeswax (two stamps), haunted house from Stampendous, rocks left side from Stampscapes. Foreground maybe some small foliage stamps but mostly PS brushes.
This has been quite an experience for me - starting to get to know all of the Bloggers, learning so much from every one of you, and even learning a lot from the work I've been doing. There are still so many ideas percolating in my brain about Halloween! Great projects yesterday!! Don't you gals and guy ever slack off??

31 Days of Halloween - Day 28

2011-10-28T06:59:00.000-07:00

This is one of the first ones I did and I see that I broke that rule about treating actual rubber as digital. The fence from I Love Rubber Stamps has been distorted and embossed and the stones at the bottom of the house(?) were warped to fit. The house itself is also I Love Rubber Stamps and beautiful Willa is from Third Coast.
Check out the foreground! After the scene was nearly done and I had no suitable stamp fot it, I used a bunch of filters on a bunch of kale and got that!

31 Days of Halloween - Day 27

2011-10-27T06:43:00.001-07:00

WARNING: The following images contain pictures of DOLLS. You may get creeped out!! I'm taking another day off from the Witches pages because I really want to publish these pictures on Flickr and know they should be here first. I found this coffin at Michaels along with the paper-mache ones everyone has used. This one fit my smallest BJD so this was my choice. Painted purple, stamped and embellished with metal stuff!! A totally unnecessary shot but I love it!!

Uh-oh! Here she comes!

Showing her with two different wigs because that is just one of the fun things about these dolls! You can also change their eyes, their "faceups", and clothes of course. This lavender skinned doll was produced by Dream High Studio and stands an amazing 11 cm tall. She's in a class called tinies and actually is not the smallest doll available. When I was making the polymer clay ornaments, lots of them were about this size but they were figures whereas this sweetie is completely jointed and posable. Other than papercrafting, they are totally my current passion.

Great projects yesterday from everyone!! I did enjoy seeing so many with one theme (especially since I'm nutso about Steampunk stuff) and thought theming certain days might really be fun!

31 Days of Halloween - Day 26

2011-10-26T06:25:00.001-07:00

This Where Witches Dwell might be my favorite. I adore Terra Bidlespacher's sweet little girls and witches and thought right away about having Grandalyn live in a bat cave. She is from Sweet Pea Stamps. The cave and the fire are from Third Coast and the bats are from Inkadinkado.

The second piece is a card for Millicent, of course. I'll be sending it along to Tori to forward to Kapree, but I wanted to put it up here because the background is done with my new Tim Holtz Distress Stains and I think I like them a lot. That spiky star is from Stampers Anonymous and the dress and dresser are from My Sentiments Exactly with some tiny Halloween touches added.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 25

2011-10-25T04:52:00.000-07:00

I'm reading on the blogs a bit of sadness that the 31 Days are nearly over and how many ideas are still floating around in your heads. My theory is that while you are creating the ideas just flow and while you are sitting around trying to think of something to do, forget it. My solution when October comes to a close will be to take notes on some of the better ideas, put them where maybe I can find them again, and then move on!

Boy, you just can't plan anything on Blogger, can you? The Family Tree is kind of a big project, like 7 x 9 and the other one is regular card size. I made these after I discovered the October Challenges on S&S. The Family Tree uses lids -these are canning lids - so I guess that would be the JUNK FUNK challenge and I used the card sketch from the VERY SKETCHY challenge for the Spell On You card . Stamps are Inkadinkado webs and swirls and tree, Zettiology alphabet and dots from Stamps by Judith.

Thanks for all of the really warm and complimentary comments about the witch houses! They really make my day!! I have a few more but thought it was time for a break from them.

We have been playing with our new stuff in the studio - I am (and always have been) slow as molasses in January but my friend Pam is a graphic designer and her skills are evident. I'm trying to get her to post some of her great Halloween stuff on S&S.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 24

2011-10-23T21:13:00.000-07:00

The house and fence today are not stamps either rubber or digital. They are from an old tole painting book by Rebecca Carter and this is the first time I've painted them (digitally as it happens). I have noticed that Penny Black has licensed some of the images from that book but not these two. And I bought the book a long time ago so feel okay to use them. I did use the warp tool on the house. The witch and cat are from Sweet Pea Stamps and were drawn by Elaine Cox.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 23

2011-10-23T07:32:00.000-07:00

This is the scene I made to depict my friend Pam and her "witchy life". All the details are right except the number of cats. I have plans to do my close friends and myself but unfortunately the Days are coming to a close.

Witch is Ching-chou Kuik's from Sweet Pea Stamps, cats from 100 Proof Press, Inkadinkado, Hero Arts, tiny sets, house from Good Stamps Stamp Goods, fence from Artful Illusions, trees and clouds from previously mentioned PS brushes.

Pam and I went to the Adventures In Stamping convention yesterday, both of us convinced that since it was so small we would get away on the cheap but we were wrong - so much good stuff! I felt lucky to have enough money left for lunch. Then we stopped at Hallos, a strange little store in Brunswick where they have a gazillion colors of cardstock that you can buy by the pound.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 22

2011-10-21T18:41:00.000-07:00

This scene was one I just thought up. I drew the witch. The ghost town is in the backyard of an estate for sale and I may have gotten the photo from the realtor's page. It had numerous PS filters applied to make it look like a stamp. The stamps I used were Willow the ghost girl from Tickled Pink and the other ghost is from Third Coast.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 21

2011-10-21T04:38:00.001-07:00

Don't know how I missed that ugly white line (oh well). I'm sorry I let my enthusiasm for Photoshop overtake my good sense yesterday (oh well) but it's virtually the only thing I know how to do on a computer and I love it.
I happened to find Sweet Pea Stamps while gorging myself on all of the internet stamp companies I had never heard of before and bought some of Ching-chou Kuik's lovely ladies and also some Elaine Cox and Terra Bidlespacher witches. I also tried drawing a few of my own witches with limited success. So that all fed my obsession with this project. I actually think they are going to get a bit boring to look at but they are super fun to create. I don't know if Violetta's less than total witchiness is genetic or a matter of choice - I just knew she wasn't a complete and total witch. I have a kitty named Sunny too!
Ching-chou Kuik's witch by Sweet Pea Stamps, rocks, water texture and foreground road by Stampscapes, mid ground road with cliffs by Third Coast, little house by 100 Proof Press. The clouds were done with a PS brush by Obsidian Dawn.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 20

2011-10-20T04:50:00.000-07:00

Okay, I promised yesterday I wouldn't go on and on but...The first thing I did in making these scenes was scour the web. My best results came from "witch house" which turned up some fantastic stuff. I like to see how closely I can mimic a photo or piece of art given a finite number of stamps. The goal is to transcend what I'm looking at and make something completely different which happened here but not always. I set the ground rule that no actual rubber would be treated like digitals, i.e., scaled, flipped, or distorted. However, I did discover the warp tool during this process and warped the hell out of most everything else. That said, I'm not going to say it again.

Witch by Penny Black, demon by 100 Proof Press, fence by Old Island Stamps, rocks by Beeswax, path by Alex Stamping, background trees by 100 Proof Press, Beeswax and Stampscapes. I drew the little house sort of like one in a tole painting book. Foreground trees are two separate sets of PS brushes, Trees by Horhew and Memory_of_Trees_v1_0_5_by_dejahofmars. I found both sets of brushes by seaching for PS brushes spooky trees.

One of my favorite PS tips is that a black and white layer, say line art, can lose the white parts by making the blending mode into multiply. Then you can color on the layer beneath that and still retain sharp black lines.

The posts from day 19 hit so many high points that it was more like a mountain ridge than a mountain peak! Wonderful projects, one and all!!

31 Days of Halloween - Day 19

2011-10-19T06:29:00.000-07:00

I got to take my time yesterday, start cleaning my studio for my friend Pam's visit, watch two episodes of Survivor - all because my next 10 posts are an idea I had before I decided whether I was going to play the Days. I had noticed that I had bought a lot of witch and haunted house stamps last year and this year and wanted to put them together so I had the theme Where Witches Live.
I have 8 of them done and one more in progress and ideas for a lot more. But they took longer than I had time for once the scramble started and I put them on the back burner so I would have time to spend with Pam this week . We've going to a smallish stamp convention in Strongsville on Saturday and then crafting for a few days!
Back to the project. This is only one of several possible covers for my pages: Lifestyles of the Witch and Notorious, Where are They Now (a witch academy alumni publication), extended family photograph album, Horned Devil's Little Black Book. I had in mind that the book would be beat up, dirty, and heavily distressed but the pages are not in that shape now. Enough, I promise I won't go on and on about the pages every day - just to introduce them. Oh, and no humor this time, well, maybe one quirky label.
Face by Carmen's Veranda, hat by PSX, boots by Northwoods, arms by A Stamp in the Hand, spider and web by Inkadinkado.
I had a great day hopping yesterday without the pressure of knowing I had to get a project ready. You may see longer than usual comments from me for day or two at least! Now that could get scary!!

31 Days of Halloween - Day 18

2011-10-18T05:41:00.001-07:00

I guess they missed the last waltz! But it was a ball that will be talked about for a long time by all of my freaky stamps.
Credits: 100 Proof Press, naked devil,Poe head; Stamping Ground: hallway with doors; I Love Rubber Stamps, skeleton on steps, mummy, grim reaper, Come and Get it witch; Zettiology, death, pointing guy, guy in elephant hat; Rubber Baby Buggy Bumpers, vampire body; Stampers Anonymous, very sick snail man; Stamp Out cute, little russian man; Commotion, troll; Artful Illusions, wafting kettle; DJ Inkers, bubbling kettle; PSX, three witches' heads. I drew the confused dwarf and had him and the fool from one of Ford's fairy books made into rubber stamps.
I've very much enjoyed working on the faux scrapbook pages and am very glad the story is done!!

31 Days of Halloween - Day 17

2011-10-17T06:15:00.000-07:00

Fantastic projects yesterday!! I'm still having a great time (the various bugs making everyone sick out there have been stopped by my virus protection) and commenting is one of the best parts. When I almost stopped commenting 'cause the first few days took 8 or 10 hours, my husband asked if I liked getting all of the comments and of course I do.
Every great ball has a photo booth where for a little less than a pound of flesh you can get your picture taken with your date. In this case the photographer was in cahoots with Seetharaman and made notes of what the couples were discussing. Plus our diligent scrapbooker has an ear for gossip!
The photo background is an arch from Stampers Anonymous. Chubby Venus from Rubber Baby Buggy Bumpers, Frankie from I Love Rubber Stamps, Monkey Man from Carmen's Veranda, flutist from Judikins, Susie's date and Simon Smith from Zettiology, Susie, Nosty, and bear from 100 Proof Press, Willa Witch from Third Coast. The bear didn't want to stand up and dance so he required major surgery and isn't dancing as well as usual. Don't know where that background paper is from. The images were colored with FaberCastell watercolor pencils before being scanned and in the process of being scanned got all scratchy looking. I liked that but fixed their skin coloring.
Tomorrow's post will be the end of the Monster's Ball and explain why the ball broke up a little early.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 16

2011-10-16T07:49:00.000-07:00

Seetharaman Skeleton is back with page 3 of the Monster's Ball faux scrapbook. The page features a double fold program and the music playlist from the back of the program. Believe it or not, this took all day yesterday and it was almost done before yesterday. If you're wanting to go digital to speed things up, it's kind of like getting into rubber stamping to save money on greeting cards. Just not going to happen!

The music play list was mostly nicked from a Tender Thoughts greeting card my hubby thought might be useful. It was! However Moondance by Van Morrison and Bad Moon Rising by Creedence Clearwater Revival were in the movie "American Werewolf in London", a great Halloween movie but not for kids, and Eye of the Zombie is an ear-splitting trip by John Fogerty.

Stamps include a free digi from Stampers Best, Happy Halloween House, Martha Stewart's Dracula, chair, lil bird, Third Coast's desk, 100 Proof Press's bookshelf, chandalier, clock, band members, maybe window, Artful Illusion's grand staircase, skeletons, Stamper's Anonymous' program greeter, various and sundry things by Inkadinkado. I know I've missed a lot. Sorry all you wonderful stamp companies! The ballroom scene elements were stamped and scanned and then composited in Photoshop.

I showed two shots of the ballroom, one a photograph taken without enough light for any depth of field and the second using the PS file and warping it to match the shape of the first one. The difference in color is all in the printing.

Reading through everyone's posts yesterday, it seems like a bit of exhaustion is setting in. I know that I didn't think I would get this done in time and I see it's getting close. Hang in there, we'll probably get our collective third breath any time now!!

31 Days of Halloween - Day 15

2011-10-15T07:03:00.000-07:00

This is the spooky ATC I found incomplete from last Halloween. I was not able to find the skeleton I had used which is a total shame as I love his face. I did find a similar body on halloweenclipart.com and I suppose I could still use this face on it. The swirly stamp in the corner is from Inkadinkado. I made the background which includes that spider web from my garden.
I am in a complete fuzz this morning starting with fixing this ATC and then having to do it again because I couldn't find the file and then being completely confused about Terra's sponsor message today (or maybe that was yesterday) which couldn't have been more clear. So if my comments on your posts today don't make any sense......that's why!

31 Days of Halloween - Day 14

2011-10-13T18:11:00.000-07:00

The Monster's Ball is on hold for a day or two as I will be out of town all day tomorrow, although I should be back in time to comment. That meant I had to get two projects ready today and they had to be quick. Both of these cards have vintage images from Lunagirl's Victorian Edwardian Vintage Children's Photos CD. Witch hat (removed from a cute bear) by PSX, witch shoes from Northwoods, broom from one of those mini sets, owl from I Love Rubber Stamps.

Another great day of projects - Day 13. You are all such creative people with so many ideas and skills I've not encountered before. I'm having such a good time!!

31 Days of Halloween - Day 13

2011-10-13T05:51:00.001-07:00

The Monster's Ball, Page 2, Before the Ball. The "photos" for this page were fun. Two of the sets were purchased to go together, the pumpkin heads from Crackerbox Palace and the bathroom couple from Rubber Buggy Baby Bumpers. I got them when RBBB was a separate company and now they are a division of Stamp Francisco. The third couple is mixed - he's from Third Coast and she's from Zettiology. Her question, "What do we have in common?" was the fun part of choosing the mixed couples. Unfortunately, I never write down who makes background stamps so I just don't know. The bottom background was assembled from Stampscape stamps.

My question yesterday reflects my total nerdiness. I love collecting, in my head, unusual names, the longer the better. Seetharaman somebody or the other is one of the developers of Photoshop and I see the name every time I open the program. I thought that perhaps someone else had noticed it and would get a kick out of it.

Well, if you got here following the blog listings, you're all done now. Otherwise you should go check out everyone else's great projects!

31 Days of Halloween - Day 12

2011-10-11T17:32:00.001-07:00

Click to enlarge

When I got the idea for a Monster's Ball scrapbook, I wanted to do one of my favorite things to do when combining digital and hand stamping, which is to print small compositions on gloss photo paper and use them as if they were actual photos - make scrapbooks, whatever. I did want to do most of the work by hand coloring with watercolor pencils. But I hit a snag because the part of the project I was thinking about the most was the story of the Monster's Ball. I realized that story would be told by the photo captions and the photo captions would be less readable printed and rephotographed that just posted digitally.

So.. no shiny photos, just another digital project (sigh) although I did do the stamping and coloring by hand. Being a bit of an old school scrapbooker, I like black pages and photo corners and cute captions but I tried to add a bit of glamour by digitally tearing some digital paper and layering it in there. I think I can tell this story in three or four more pages.

I made the stamps come to the ball in couples thinking it would be fun to pick out some of the less obvious couples but am finding I have more weird guy stamps than girl stamps. Go figure! Do you know the namesake of the scrapbooker? Hey , Kristy, you are right. I meant who is the scrapbooker named for, not who is named after him! Sorry!

31 Days of Halloween - Day 11

2011-10-11T06:08:00.000-07:00

After a kind of crazy day of two steps forward, two and a half steps back, I found myself with nothing to post for Day 11. I had been working on stuff but it was almost like there were too many ideas and I couldn't calm down enough to get any one of them ready.

I remembered this ATC that I had worked on last Halloween but never really finished so I found it and thought about what stamp or stamps I could add that would work. The space on the fence seemed right for a pumpkin and this one just fit. I was going to print out the card, cut and paste the pumpkin but it worked better to stamp and scan as I was able to make the colors match the file.

The real bonus was that while I was hunting for the clown image to credit it, I was looking through my Tallulah and Lunagirl image discs and found some doozies. I never found this particular clown so I must have borrowed him from the web. Background is my photo, two textures from Ghostbones. That was a Flickr site with bunches of textures he or she allowed you to download. I didn't feel like being greedy so got these two and the next time I looked the site was gone. A real loss as you can see from the viney texture on the fence and the spooky one above the fence line. I found one more ATC I may use tomorrow that is super spooky but I need to see if I can find where I got the images.

So...is your house as awfully dirty as mine? Have you been living on pizza? Can you still find your Aidirondack stamp pads? Gosh, you must be knee deep in the "Days" too. Ah hahahahaha!!

31 Days of Halloween - Day 10

2011-10-10T07:45:00.000-07:00

We are almost a third of the way done! Just a third of a project to go to hit that milestone. I am amazed, every day I go hopping, how wonderful the projects are, that each and every one of us (yep, including myself in that US) are coming up with!!!

Yesterday I needed something new and instead of stretching myself, I decided to crawl back into an old box. Little guys like this witch are what I took to craft shows for 26 years. I retired in February 2010 after a really stressful show season and have had a lot of fun playing with all my other toys, including rubber stamping, since then. So while I feel like this is almost cheating, at least I've touched my polymer clay again when I made the dead crow and now this little girl dressed as a witch to go Trick or Treating.

Spider (my favorite this year) and Trick or Treat are from Inkadinkado, web from DJ Inkers and bat from a Hero Arts set. They were stamped in StazOn ink on a 30 cent tile from Home Depot.

Darn, darn ,darn. I thought Blogger would let me add another image after my post but no, there it is hogging up the top line. Sorry! This is the spider and title I promised yesterday. And most of the s*** I was referring to yesterday was external, like camera batteries being on their last legs with half an hour to go. Pages scanning whopper-jawed, PS refusing to save my PSD file as a JPG. Stuff like that which is only mind numbing when it happens at the last minute.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 9

2011-10-09T08:20:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the extremely sloppy post this morning. I needed to finish and photograph this tagbook and I think my name this morning must be Queen Sadim (Midas backwards) because everything I touched turned to s***.

The mess at the top of the tagbook will become a spider and it will get a name, but for now let me give as many credits as I can before my time runs out.

Lots of the images are Inkadinkado - cat on ghost page, pumpkin with bats, sketch kitty, fancy moon, birds with fence. Rats are from Artful Illusions, fence, little bird, tombstones from Martha Stewart, ghosts and monster from 100 Proof Press, cover scenery from Stampscapes, haunted house from Crackerbox Palace, witch from Third Coast. If I've missed any you want to know about, let me know.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 8

2011-10-08T06:20:00.000-07:00

Flowers, y'all!! I said I would do it!

Today's offering is a digital collage I've been working on for months, off and on, but it had been shuffled to the back burner. I started another project yesterday that I was loving but couldn't seem to finish. So I hauled this out, added the ghost stamp from Third Coast so it could qualify to be here and put a little story to it (and the flowers, of course).

Except for the girls and the ghost and the little snippet of lace, all of the layers of the collage were photos I have taken. The foggy morning background is our back field, house taken on a walking tour of Paducah, KY, flowers and spider web from a previous garden. I consider the spider web to be the most awesome layer as it took some real fiddling around to isolate it.

Lots of wonderful posts yesterday and hopefully everybody will get rested up over the weekend although for those of you with children and/or jobs, there may be more to do on weekends than other days. Being retired, the days are all pretty much the same - only the work changes. Today we're cutting wood and splitting it for the woodburner in my studio.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 7

2011-10-07T06:53:00.001-07:00

I am having so much fun. There are some vulgar ways to say how much fun I'm having, but let's just say so much fun. But after a few sunny days, I had to get some garden work done and when it was time to get back here, I realized my brain and body were pretty much fried. AND that I've never worked on art stuff for 31 days in a row before.

So today I'm posting one of the projects that I did in anticipation of actually starting. I'm one of those who need lots of time and no pressure so I took the suggestion to start early very seriously and have lots of projects almost ready.

These little monsters are Zettiology, the squiggles are Magenta and I don't know whose alphabet. As I had stamped onto the blue cardstock, coloring options were limited and I decided to try chalk. It's not precise but I liked it.

Thanks for all your support and comments. I feel very welcome here!!

31 Days of Halloween - Day 6

2011-10-06T06:45:00.001-07:00

Methinks Murdoch Mummy is in for a big surprise as Cat'chula likes his mummy newly risen and very dry.

Do your projects come to mind all fully formed or do you work from a germ of an idea? My normal way of working is the latter, but when I received the "Here Kitty Kitty" stamp from Third Coast, this project just popped into my head. It changed a bit as I put it to paper - I had planned on using silverware in it and thought I might indulge myself with a new kitty stamp but when I found this maniacal cat in my stash a whole new twist happened.

Fence top from Artful Impressions, mummy from I Love Rubber Stamps, eyes and webs from those little cheapie sets, part of the tree from ProvoCraft. I had to elongate and add an extra branch to the tree and draw some of the weeds. Oh, the blood sploches were from Martha Stewart and the alphabet is Zetti.

All of the projects from yesterday were marvelous. I had no idea when I started this that I would be pushed to try such new and different things. That's because I barely had time to take a look around the forum before I jumped in headfirst to the "Days". Okay, I admit it, I waded in whining like a baby!

Comment form

2011-10-05T15:12:00.001-07:00

I typed this up a bit ago to help me get through the commenting part of the challenge. Added the blog names because I am frequently lost. Please forgive me if I spelled anyone's name or blog wrong - I'm the person who spelled 3 wrong one of the days.

Feel free to download it and print it out if if would be helpful to you.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 5

2011-10-05T08:10:00.000-07:00

WOW! Didn't think I'd make it on time this morning. I'd gotten so excited about all of the 3D art I'd been seeing and this little book had been sitting around for a while with a really crappy cover that had actually started to peel off. So I ripped the guts out of it (little bit of Smeared and Smudged humor there) and remade the cover with black fabric and sculpted the polymer clay crow and added some jewelry findings. Embellishments are not what I'm comfortable with but it's a start!

The pages are painted, stamped Lutradur with the image also stamped on similar colored paper and the whole sandwich put into slide mounts. Slide mounts were painted with some translucent paint?? and then stamped with border stamps.

Crows are from AlexStamping,Stamp Francisco, 100 Proof Press, Silver Crow, Artful Illusions, Martha Stewart and Inkadinkado. The whole thing measures 3 3/4 by 3 3/4 inches. Oh, and I'm supposed to say the spider web in the corner is from halloweenclipart.com.

Hurry, hurry. hurry and press publish!

31 Days of Halloween - Day 4

2011-10-04T07:08:00.001-07:00

The 3rd day posts were amazing - lots of exciting 3D stuff!! I hope to tackle a 3D project at some point but staying flat today.

I had made the background paper in Photoshop before the "Days" started and then wondered why I had spent so much time on it since anything I mounted on it would cover the pumpkins, and skulls and bats. But the mind-blowing experience of joining the Smeared and Smudged forum and finding all of the smaller stamp companies and digital stamps (all of which I had never imagined) lead to the purchase of quite a lot of witches, some haunted houses and this lovely digi "Ghost Willow" from Tickled Pink.

I painted her just a bit and then reduced her opacity until the paper showed through and she was just a shadow of herself. If I print it and use it for a card, I will reduce the size but I worked it on regular paper size.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 3

2011-10-03T07:06:00.000-07:00

A change of pace for today's post. Someone had mentioned those little sets from Michaels and JoAnns. Mine are all thrown together so I can't identify which sets these are from except that the little skeleton is PSX and the kitty is from Inkums Boo2. The cute Halloween frame is from Northwoods and I'm reasonably sure the alphabet is Zettiology. The tiny bit of coloring is watercolor pencils and, of course, the boxes were stippled.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 2

2011-10-02T07:50:00.000-07:00

I was so glad to see other participants using Zettiology stamps yesterday. They just can't be beat for weirdness. My main image is an old one that I got when Tracy and Teesha used to come to a stamp convention in Cleveland. I sure miss seeing them and all their new stuff every year. Background images are from Stampers Anonymous and the cloud in the corner is from A Stamp in the Hand. Color on the main image was stippled on randomly.

I really enjoyed seeing everyone's projects yesterday. They were all exciting and fresh and so well done. Hopping around trying to keep track of where I had commented was crazy since I don't know everyone very well yet and also because a lot of my day was spent driving around Ohio getting family stuff taken care of. The leaves are starting to change but there was no sunshine lighting them up - just wind and drizzle. But gorgeous fall days are on their way!

31 Days of Halloween - Day 1

2011-10-01T07:20:00.000-07:00

My first project is a pair of Halloween jumping jacks, in this case, Jack and Jill. The arms and legs are stamps from Stampers Anonymous, the girl's head is from A Stamp in the Hand and the hooded skeleton is from a I Love Rubber Stamps sheet. The bodies were just made up from small Halloween stamps.

2011-09-29T15:15:00.000-07:00

After over a year of absolutely no posts (the garden 2011 did fine), I've committed to posting a Halloween project every day in October. Not sure if this is called a challenge or a game, but it's sponsored by Smeared Ink, an online stamp company that specializes in alternative, vintage and Gothic art rubber stamping. Pam introduced me to their companion forum Smeared and Smudged and this project was one of the first things I read about there. Since Halloween themes are one of my favorite things to stamp, I decided (not without a lot of wavering) to participate. Online challenges are quite the thing in the stamping community but this will be my first experience.

There is a list of links to all of the participants on the sidebar for the 31 Days of Halloween so if you've gotten here looking for garden news (HaHa) and you're as crazy about Halloween as I am, check them out.

So this is my introduction to the stamped projects I will be posting starting Saturday, October 1, 2011. Enjoy!!

Garden News Part Two

2010-07-21T20:05:00.000-07:00

First, I want to explain all of the straw bales in the last post. We had been trying to come up with a compost system for the whole last year and nothing was coming together. I saw a system described in Eliot Coleman's "Four Season Harvest" based on straw bales that end up being part of the compost in a few years. We had priced the bales at $5 at the nurseries and ended up being at the right place at the right time to find a farmer who sold them for $2. We hadn't thought far enough ahead of the situation to realize we only needed half of the bales to start with so ended up with half of them in the garage. That's OK for now because the cats love them. Cats? Cats???? We haven't given a cat the time of day for 40 some years but Ken wanted some barn cats and happened to mention it to the goat folks and pretty soon somebody showed up with cats. I liked them immediately because they matched the dogs in color so we kept them. Juniper tried herding them for a week or two but has resigned herself to their wild ways.

The garlic that we replanted last fall, after learning that garlic pretty much likes to be planted in the fall, was ready to dig last week so Ken dug it up for us and Kei Chi and I braided it three days later. So authentic!! Now we just have to get used to using fresh garlic instead of those handy jars of pre-chopped stuff. The asparagus spouts are getting bigger and bigger and are starting to look like asparagus for gerbils instead of asparagus for crickets. Next year for people we hope. The cucumbers are planted along a chicken wire support and just starting to bloom as I got them in so late. Next year, I'll try something similar for the peas which were going gangbusters until a really hard rain just washed most of them up out of the dirt. The tomatillos we planted for fun and for salsa and they are just pretty, like little lanterns hanging on the plants. Inside the bonnets they are about the size of small cherry tomatoes so I guess they grow until they fill them up. I may put some more photos up on Picasa where I don't have to explain and you don't have to "listen."

Garden News

2010-07-19T15:06:00.001-07:00

I've been very negligent about garden posts because the weather, rain, rain, more rain and mud, had me pretty depressed for some time. Ken kept telling me to accept what I couldn't do anything about but it took me quite a while to get into that state of mind. We had gotten a really early start and perhaps bit off more than we could chew: an enclosure around the septic tanks, a second herb bed, sodding around both of those beds plus the front yard, setting up our tiny greenhouse, making a compost pile, building an asparagus bed and building a second raised bed for carrots and celeriac. May was gorgeous and we were getting lots done and then it was time to get all those lovely hardened off plants plus all the seeds into the ground and it wouldn't stop raining. By about the middle of June we had had 5 inches of rain and counting. The green bean seeds and the lima bean seeds rotted in the ground and when I reseeded them it started to rain again. I got the viney stuff in very late in June and had to reseed most of it plus the okra. Today, the middle of July, things finally feel like they are coming together. We have green beans and limas and most of the squash up, and although the rows aren't full we will get all that we need. I'll put more current photos in the next post.

Birthday Present for Kate

2010-05-11T07:52:00.000-07:00

Birthdays are such fun!! I made this fabric book with the theme of Insomnia for my sister's birthday. Parts of the collages were made in Photoshop and printed onto fabric. Other parts were printed first and sewed onto the substate later. This is the first time I've printed onto fabric although I've had the materials to do it for a while. It was so wonderful that I vowed again not to always be afraid to try something new.

The idea for the pieced spiral on the front cover was "borrowed" from a photo I had saved for years from a quilt magazine. The photo was so small I couldn't tell how the spiral developed so I scanned it into Photoshop at a 600 dpi resolution and then zoomed in on it to see how it worked. It goes together very slowly and I kept getting confused and thinking I had messed it up. I'm definitely going to make more of those. Got a whole quilt planned for them.

Paducah AQS Quilt Show - The Second Year (For Me)

2010-05-10T07:12:00.001-07:00

My friend, Jean, invited me along on her annual excursion to the Paducah quilt show again this year. I think I remember Jean saying that the first year she went had the most exquisite quilts and that other years haven't lived up to it. If so, I think it must just be the wonder of it all the first time you see it. Because I wasn't as blown away by the quilts as last year.

Again my favorite quilts were the smaller wall hanging size. They seem more innovative, less repetitive than the bed size ones. The first one is "To Market" by Mary Diamond. I included it here because I know how much Kate is going to like it. The second, my favorite, is "Incommunicado" by Esterita Austin. Not only is it beautifully done but the theme made me laugh out loud. How often have you found yourself with absolutely nothing to say at the most inappropriate times? I have no information on the third quilt but love the colors and the motion of the quilting lines.
Most of my fabrics I got at the enormous Hancocks of Paducah; a bit of it from show vendors. I had just finished Kate's birthday book (next post) and had used a lot of black and white and was still in the mood for that. The other pile is mostly stuff I will use for landscape quilts. Whether I'm quilting or stamping, that seems to be one of my favorite themes.
Jean and I also set ourselves a challenge to make a Paducah quilt ala Judith Montano's cottage quilts. So we took one morning and traipsed around Paducah's "lower town" taking pictures of houses, yard sculptures and whatever else caught our interest. Lower town is an inner city area of lovely houses that the city bought up as they were starting to go to seed. They resold them, mostly to artists, on the condition that they renovate them and run studios or galleries out of them. This wasn't supposed to be a tourist ad for Paducah but I have to add that there are also some delightful restaurants in the quaint little downtown area.

Starting Seed #2

2010-05-09T08:44:00.001-07:00

Our seed starting went exceptionally well. I lost most of the celeriac I started because I forgot to water it one weekend we were leaving. However, these four trays of asparagus, tomatoes, peppers, basil, dill and artichokes have been under the lights in the basement or in sunny windows in the breezeway for weeks now. Early this week they expanded to six trays as we repotted and split the tomatoes that had been started in tiny plastic pots. We had to hang another plant light and find another table for them. We still need to split and repot multiple tomatillos of out their tiny starting cells, but then in a week or two it will be time to start hardening them off. We've been told that is a crucial time to do it right, but Ken has done it many times before with "store bought" tomato plants so I'm confident he'll do a great job.

For most of these plants, we have almost twice as many as we plan to use. That may take care of hardening off mistakes. Otherwise, we are going to see if the new Ashland community garden program can use the extras for some of their participants.

Starting Seeds in the Basement #1

2010-03-24T12:21:00.000-07:00

On March 8, we put one asparagus seed in each of 16 peat pots. The seeds were a year old with a 70% germination rate for 2009. Since we had made no effort to take care of the seeds properly, I lobbied to use 2 seeds per pot but Ken thought we would possibly get more out of our 32 seeds this way. They started emerging March 19 but for one reason or another we weren't ready with the lights. Those were hung and ready to go late Monday, the 22nd, so we left it for the next morning. The early emergers are probably leggier than they should be at this stage so I blow hard on them when I'm checking on them to strengthen them up as Steve Solomon suggests. (Actually he suggests a fan but they are so tiny.)

As of this morning we have 11 of the 16 up which is 69% germination. I know lots of things can still happen to them, but it is so exciting that we are going to have asparagus started from seed. In a year or two, anyway.

Late Birthday Weekend

2010-03-23T15:17:00.000-07:00

Because of all of the snow and otherwise unreliable weather, Pam and I had not had a chance to celebrate our birthdays which fall about a month apart. So this past weekend, after both birthdays were over, we got to spend some time together. I got a plethora of goodies including some doll scaled fabric pieces and Maggie Taylor's "Landscape of Dreams" (gasp, swoon). Last year we had decided to get some ball jointed dolls to craft for - sewing, jewelry making, furniture making, whatever. The first thing you do with the dolls is make up their faces with paints, pastels and watercolor pencils, called doing a faceup. I had enjoyed doing mine and Pam needed to tackle the job during the weekend. She was quite apprehensive and when she was finished doing a beautiful faceup on her doll, revealed that it had made her really nervous. Want to guess who wears makeup all the time and who knows nothing about the process? Funny, huh? For her birthday, I had sewed two outfits - the sporty striped tights and turtleneck with the brown skirt to match an outfit for my doll, the smaller one, and also a Victorian blouse, skirt, underskirt and jacket in black. She loves the steampunk scene and that was what I was aiming for. It will give her a chance to do all of the fancy jewelry and trims that make it steampunk.

One of the things that is coming to light in this experience is how differently we approach things. I know I've talked before about how her background in graphic arts makes some aspects of our paper arts (color, design, balance) second nature to her while I struggle with them. The way we go about dressing the dolls is even further apart. I love taking patterns, which I have a ton of, that fit other dolls and making them fit these dolls and sewing by hand or machine to make the clothes. Pam, as it turns out, does not like sewing - although she seems willing to give it a try. Her approach to doll dressing is to take an old luggage tag or a pair of gloves and turn it into a belt or legwarmers and a tank top with a clip, clip here and a stitch, stitch there. We made the sweater and legwarmers in the middle picture out of a pair of socks. As we have found many times before, our totally different approaches seem to complement each other.

Ken treated us to going to see "Alice" in 3D. We both loved the costumes and hope to use some of the ideas for springboards for doll clothes but the whimsical wordplay of the original Alice was in short supply in this version of a favorite story.

Food For Thought

2010-02-24T07:01:00.000-08:00

In the spirit of getting back to why I started this blog, to share the art and craft of what I and my friends are working on, I wanted to post the pages of a gorgeous fabric and paper book my sister Kate made for my bithday. I was surprised to get a handmade gift at all this year since she had been working on a quilted wall hanging for her sister-in-law. We share an interest in good food and she had quotes she wanted to use and some new techniques to try. The second page is a paint to paint transfer of a magazine image and is quite lovely but my favorite is her collage to accompany the food for thought quote from Walt Kelly. I hope this wonderful gift inspires me to get back to paper/fabric experiments.

Winter on the Funny Farm

2010-02-19T08:52:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure how these pictures inform what a winter this has been. We didn't get as much snow as Washington DC or even Pittsburgh. I can't seem to get photos of snow laden trees as the wind clears them too quickly. But you can see that the wind shaped our icicles so that they go south at the bottom and swirled snow up onto the covered deck where the firewood is stored. Some of the snow had to be shoveled because the plow was being serviced at the tractor dealer across the street when the first snow hit. It took Ken a few shots to learn how to use the plow but he has gotten much quicker with it. The day I tromped out to get the pictures of the field and treeline, the snow was at least 15 inches deep in places although there were places I got surprised by it being only 6 or 7 inches deep.

The plastic cup of ice has been sitting in the garage since Valentine's Day when we went to Mansfield to see Avatar. I guess when the ice in the cup changes its shape we'll know it's been above 32 degrees.

Not With a Bang...

2010-02-07T08:59:00.000-08:00

I've been away from here for a while. On October 1, I sat myself down to produce the ornaments that would get me through the sales season of 2009. Thankfully, I had made some prototypes sometime earlier in the year because leaving only a month to do my production work was crazy. But even then was a little soon for the garden work; we ended up taking huge bags of produce to the local Salvation Army. I continued to make the ornaments through November and most of December, but it was obvious I hadn't done enough. So because it was my last year of production and I had run out of all of the new ornaments, I offered to make anything that was ordered by January 15. That turned out to be 98 ornaments and I finished them this morning, February 7 at 11:03. Which I recorded on this little clock that I've used for the last 20 or so years to measure out my life in little clay hands, and feet and noses. Well, maybe, it's the second clock I've had.

As I worked, I found that I had lost my patience for sitting such long hours and realized that it wasn't a second too soon to be moving on. There was actually quite a bit of whimpering and whining as the jobs seemed to multiply like the fishes and the loaves. And there is still a tentative order for a gingerbread house lingering in the back of my mind. But this morning I feel free to choose how to spend the next 24 hours. And then it's time to start working on my income taxes!!!

An Artful Potato

2009-11-23T19:54:00.000-08:00

I suspect it is a recessive gene that allows one to see all sorts of things in almost innocent fruits and vegetables. I always knew I could see lots of things in clouds and vinyl bathroom floors but my sister seemed to have a "special" gift (see her Sexing Lemons post on her Escape from the Library blog). But, alas, I knew I was cursed too when this little fingerling potato left me with no thought in mind but Henry Moore Potato. And then ...five potato, six potato, seven potato, Moore. Honest.

Fall Photos

2009-11-23T19:37:00.000-08:00

All of the pretty colors are gone now but one afternoon Ken took the camera out and got these shots of the cleaned out garden space, some geese he startled on the pond, a grandpa frog in the pond and the paths in the woods. It was great for me because that was when I was barely getting outside because of trying to get the ornaments done. Hopefully next year we'll get out to collect the hickory nuts and walnuts and chestnuts.

The Dreamscape Book

2009-11-02T08:04:00.000-08:00

This accordian book is one of my favorites. The little scenes are overlaid with pieces of sheer vellum that can be lifted to see the scenes better. It was really different to try to distill the essences of these places I dream about into stamped scenes.

Two more of my "little books" are posted April 2009 and October 2007.

Rubber Stamp Madness / Little Books

2009-11-01T17:55:00.000-08:00

While we were still in Kirkland, I submitted most of the scenic stamping I've done over quite a few years for a special publication Rubber Stamp Madness magazine is doing on scenic stamping. The whole thing seemed to get put on a back burner and with our move I didn't give it another thought until last spring when I thought I'd like to get my submissions back and realized I hadn't sent in a change of address. Shortly after I contacted them, they asked if they could use some of the submissions for a feature in their Holidays issue(pictured here). The writer for the article was the delightful Barbara Blanks whose blog is now in my links. The issue came out last week and the article said that some of my little books were to be seen here on my blog. Since the focus lately has been the move and gardening, I thought I would post a couple of those little books. This one is in the form of a star book but shaped like a nautilus shell. It has snippets of the poem "The Chambered Nautilus" by Oliver Wendell Holmes. I'll put up another one tomorrow as The Amazing Race is calling me to the boob tube.

Todd and Kei Chi's Visit

2009-11-01T17:01:00.000-08:00

This was over a month ago and I'm really late in getting it posted but we had some very special guests the last weeks of September. Our son Todd and his wife Kei Chi were here from Seattle. We stayed very busy most of the time they were here with trips to Malabar Farm State Park, Lehman's in Kidron and the Stratford Ecological Center in Delaware. We picked a lot of black beans and lima beans to shell. Since Ken and I thought digging potatoes was so much fun, we left a few fingerling potato plants for them to dig. We ate a lot of garden produce so there was some serious cooking done too. And, of course, anyone who is here on a Friday gets to go to the produce auction. Todd and Kei Chi walked over to the auction and back to the house but we didn't make them carry our goodies: eggs, green beans, tiny hot peppers, hickory nuts and a hickory nut pie.

They took a short trip to Columbus to visit friends and relatives and a thrift store on Cleveland Avenue that we all love. Todd works at Microsoft so I had thought he would appreciate getting away from the computers for a while but I was wrong. The last day they were here, Todd's friend from Columbus, Dell, came up for a short visit. Dell is always busy with his food service business so we felt lucky to have him spend some time with us.

My Absolute Last Garden Post (Ho ho)

2009-10-05T20:06:00.000-07:00

Well, it seems that most everyone who looks at this blog is looking for news of the veggies. I had no idea. I put some of the middle of the season garden pictures here: http://picasaweb.google.com/kenandsharonsahl/Gardening101# because I had just run out of things to say. These are the results of two of the best picking days we had (there's 110 pounds of tomatoes in that one shot) and a shot of the freezer and a composited pic of most of what we canned. We also just bought an Excaliber food dryer and are having a good time playing with that. We haven't given up on the solar dryer we had started building - just short on time.

We did learn some valuable garden lessons: two seed packages of beets produce way too many beets, garlic is supposed to be planted in the fall, if peppers aren't ripe and red by now, forget it. Also, either the complete organic fertilizer mix described in Steve Solomon's "Gardening When It Counts" is amazing stuff or Ken and I have had a pretty good run of beginner's luck.

I have now sworn not to get back into the garden because I am FINALLY working on some ornaments. We'll see how long that lasts because my tiny okra dried so well I want to try drying some larger pods. Maybe I can talk Ken into fetching some and cutting them up.

My Output during Kate's visit

2009-09-27T06:27:00.000-07:00

These are a few of the things that I did while Kate was visiting. Looking back, it was more about learning some techniques than getting anything useful. I had wanted to do some altered cabinet cards but the ones I printed (one made up from a photo of our grandmother and one downloaded from a site about guitars, I think), I printed the wrong size for cabinet cards and we didn't realize that until much later. The small fabric pages were for an old Word Perfect binder I have where I want to combine fabric and paper projects. My initial thoughts on how to get the small pieces into the binder are not working and I did not like the results of using adhesive sheets to stick the farm scene together - much too flat. So that project will continue to be a challenge.

I hope Kate will post her grandmother "cabinet card" also. I loved it.

Studio II

2009-07-28T20:24:00.001-07:00

Well, I put these in backwards. The last photo is Ken putting some temporary lights in for us to work with. Then Kate working on a project and lastly (actually firstly) a few shots of the studio all ready to go. The bears, books, beads shot is there because Kate arranged them the way she wanted them, which I thought was a stitch. The book she made for my birthday is too tall for the shelves and is sitting in the window. The windows will get blinds so won't always be so bright in photos.

There was a bit of time spent looking for stuff but not really as much as I had thought. We did oodles of crafting which I'll show on the next post and hopefully, she will show hers on her blog too since time just ran out on getting photos of everything.

The Studio

2009-07-28T18:08:00.000-07:00

The studio is in a semi-attached garage across the breezeway from the house. We had jumped right off the deep end shortly after we got here and had a Naturestone floor installed. Crazy me thought that was all there was to it. But a really cold winter and getting most of my working supplies into the basement made me a bit more willing to wait for insulation and other amenities. Ken and Barry and I blew the insulation into the walls and although I thought I would just be in the way, the machine was so loud it required someone to signal between the hopper and the end of the hose.

Ed and Dee Ann, friends of ours from Lancaster, came to help with the wiring. The guys managed to do most of the nitty-gritty stuff in two visits. The diffusing lights and the fans still need to be installed but we wanted the finishing work done before that.

Ken and I nailed supports for the pieces that were to go between the joists, stuffed pink insulation into the cavities and cut and installed the short pieces of 2 x 8s to fit between the joists. We were really pleased with the results of that last finishing touch. We also insulated below the beaver board with foam insulation and put up a baseboard but I couldn't find any pictures of that because at that point I got overly anxious to get moved in. Ken had told my sister Kate that we would try to have the studio ready for her visit in July. I knew it would involve more than just moving everything out there. We had to organize it and then try to remember where stuff got put away. Assigning letters to each bookcase or storage unit helped me know what went where after the organizing was done. Most of the work was done when our friends had time to provide the help we needed or when it rained and we couldn't get into the garden.

And Even More Garden Pix

2009-06-29T19:03:00.000-07:00

These beans are black beans but we also have peas (I know it's too late), limas, green beans and edamame. The pictures were fairly indistinguishable. The little red stemmed ones are beets, already thinned. We built a support for the cucumbers and cornichons. Pretty cool, huh?

And that's the herb garden with the stones around it and yes, there are 6 more tomato plants in it as well as a number of tomato plants in pots on the rim. Wish us luck figuring out what to do with all of them. I should weigh them as we bring them in just for fun.

More Garden Pix

2009-06-29T18:35:00.000-07:00

I know, I know, I'm getting sick of pictures of dirt too. But after getting all of the planting done on June 16 which we had started on June 7, it was so exciting to see how quickly stuff started to come up. The seed potatoes had seemed a complete loss since we had stuck them in the basement for a couple of months without opening them to see the instructions that said to plant on arrival or refrigerate. When we got around to opening the box, it was a scene worthy of a science fiction movie. The sprouts were up to nine inches long and completely intertwined with the mesh of the bag. That was about a week before planting was a possibility and I worried over them every day. After we stuck them in really deep holes to keep from breaking the sprouts, I told Ken I would feel blessed to get five plants. Today we have two 20 foot rows almost full of plants.

The cabbages were starts from our friend Doug and the rest of that row is okra. The tiny plants in the unfocused picture are pepper plants. I'm waiting for the second set of leaves so I can thin the three or four down to one. The 24 caged tomatoes are about 400% more than we've ever had before, but apparently not enough for Ken. Check out the picture of the herb garden in the next post. And I'm pretty sure the dirt picture will be the last one of just dirt. I just wanted to show the raised beds I dug by throwing dirt from the paths up there. Ken smoothed and raked them and got them ready to plant.

The Future Berries

2009-06-03T08:12:00.000-07:00

My sister, Kate, called about a month ago and told me she wanted to give us a "new house gift" of some blueberry bushes since it takes a couple of years before you can start harvesting them. She said she had found a great place in Madison called The Blueberry Patch and they had a deal of six bushes and asked if I knew the place. I told her we had been to Madison (nine hours away in Wisconsin) but weren't very familar with it. When the plants came, two of them were snapped off pretty low to the ground and Ken noticed they had been shipped from Mansfield (half an hour down the road). I'm pretty sure Kate heard me say that we weren't all that familar with Mansfield. So we called and arranged to change the broken bushes plus we added two more when we went over. They sat around for a while before we tackled planting them: the instructions called for a 2 foot diameter hole 18 inches deep refilled with half soil and half peat moss, 6 feet between plants and 8 feet between rows. We've got lots of room to plant - it was just a matter of deciding where. Black raspberrries, which I had been pining over since I saw some plants at the auction, seemed a breeze by comparison so we got 13 little plants and put them in too. However, we used the last of the sunny days to get that done and are now waiting to get back into the garden. More on that soon.

The Garden Revisted

2009-05-20T10:48:00.000-07:00

Gardening can be such hard labor!

The Garden Visited

2009-05-20T10:08:00.001-07:00

For weeks now our focus has been to get the garden ready to plant. Moving in the fall and dealing with spring weather gave us quite a late start considering how much work needed to be done. We moved 38 tons of dirt and sand into the garden with wheelbarrows and rakes. The first photo is the last of the dirt which is about 8% of what we put in. The next photo is bags of compost (about 2 1/2 tons of that) waiting to be spread. After we spread the poop, we rototilled the whole area both ways . Ken loves to take pictures of me using the heavy equipment. Needless to say, we have been doing nothing but preparing the garden other than keeping up with the mowing and occasionally sleeping. And dreaming about the garden.

Morel Hunting

2009-05-10T17:38:00.000-07:00

We had seen some Morel mushrooms at the auction last Friday and the neighbors had said there were some in the woods, but neither of us had ever gone hunting for them. I decided to try to find some and Ken said he would go along. We found a website that told us likely places to find them but instead of mushrooms we found lots and lots of trillium, wild phlox, wild columbine, some amazing little red things that looked like tiny fairy horns pointing straight up, and whole fields of those crazy big leaves that were hiding a beautiful yellow flower under them.

I knew that if we found even one mushroom, Ken would be the one to spot it, and sure enough, about an hour and a half into our walk, he found one under some other greenery that nearly covered the ground. We got excited enough to try for another half an hour but found only the one. We took it next door to make sure it was a Morel, which they confirmed. They said they hunt them but don't eat them considering the flavor to resemble the odor of rotting trees. We cooked it and liked it a lot.

Paducah Quilt Show

2009-05-05T09:34:00.000-07:00

My friend Jean invited me along on one of her annual pilgrimages to the Paducah Quilt Show in Paducah, Kentucky. The quilts were stunning; the vendors seemed to go on forever; and I have never seen so many quilters in one place in my life.

The three I've shown here are: #1246, Flights of Fascination by Anna VanDemark, #1423, Water, Earth II by Pat Pauly, and #1416, My Mind Drifts Along with the Stream by Eunjoo Kim.

We preferred the wallhanging sized quilts to the bed sized quilts mostly in that they were more free formed. My program says there were 1626 competition quilts at the show!

Although I do make the occasional wall quilt, my sewing is pretty limited. I did find some batiks at the show and at an amazing fabric store, Hancocks of Paducah, and managed to fill a void in my stash - yellow and orange batiks with red and pink overtones.

A Birthday Gift for Pam

2009-04-13T06:44:00.000-07:00

We had a late birthday celebration for Pam. I was inspired by the handmade gifts I got for my birthday to make this little altered board book for her. It was one of the 10 I had started after her last visit and the only one I had really gotten caught up with. It's fun to make a friend the focus of a project and to think of their personality as the start of each layout. Most of the quotes I found in Angela Cartwright's " In This House".

Creative Space

2009-02-26T13:05:00.000-08:00

This is what it looks like in the basement when someone is here working with me. My space is the one with the bookcase beside it. Usually that is full of all of my clay and clay tools, but they are easily moved to accommodate the paints and ink pads. Pam always brings two or more projects, with all of the paper, inkpads, stamps and tools so she needs plenty of room to unpack. We set up two tables for her and then clean off Ken's booth/bench behind her for overflow. I've only recently gotten the paper unpacked which makes everything much easier since I had shifted 8 heavy boxes up and down stairs several times. Plus since I print all of our business stuff, each time I shifted the boxes I had to find the right paper for those jobs. Much nicer now! I love the picture of Pam; she looks so surprised.

The day she left I pulled out ten board books that either I was working on or had gotten ready to work on to see how different I could make each set of pages. I used the same base color and much the same techniques on each of them, but switched out the colors on subsequent layers and whitewahed some of them with gesso.

Playing to The Max

2009-02-26T10:36:00.000-08:00

Several weeks ago I had come across a website called Eyethinking, http://www.eyethinking.com/index.php?album=pascal-habousha&page=4 , while I was looking for ideas for fairytale like characters. There was a Hansel and Gretel scene there, I think. Anyway I got caught up in the name, Eyethinking, because it comes close to describing how I work on paper projects. So after Jean left and before Pam got here, I rubber stamped the set of ATCs from some backgrounds I had made from the blue collage I did. (Photoshop variations created the different colors.) The brighter ones were printed on matte photo paper and the others on glossy photo paper. I had fun with the word play.

The painted background, the circus book pages and the drawing exercise were what I played with while Pam was here. I'm starting to really like the depth that even cheap acrylic paints add to a background.

An Unexpected Visitor

2009-02-12T13:16:00.000-08:00

Jean and I have been trying to arrange a visit for a while. One was canceled two weeks ago because of the ice and snow, so I was surprised and elated to hear that she was coming on Monday to spend a few days. It's nearly impossible to characterize the friendship that Jean and I have except to say that it endures. We managed, while tending to our small children, to make baskets, to sew clothes and dolls and quilts, to host neighboorhood cookie-baking sessions and book clubs and potluck dinners, to converse on most matters large and small. Our similarities and our differences informed and strengthened our bond. At some point our lives diverged but our friendship endured.

We have so much to learn about this gardening/hobby farming venture we are getting ready to try and Jean and Doug have already gone through the "growing" pains, so much of the conversation over the few days she was here focused on those concerns. She had given me a bread recipe which I put together while she was on her way here, so she showed me the tricks to baking it. It came from "Artisan Bread in Five Minutes A Day" by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois. She brought a newly butchered and dressed heritage turkey they had raised, and we cooked it in a vinegar and pepper marinade. Delicious! We talked housing chickens, fencing chickens, feeding chickens and watering chickens. We planned a visit with them to learn how to slaughter chickens. And she informed us that the first rule of planning to raise goats is to assume that the goats are smarter than you are.

And of course we talked politics: a new president, the treacheries of the media and the financial concerns we are all facing. We remembered our common stories; we caught up on some of the memorable events we had missed in each other's lives.

Although we both still consider art and crafting, "making stuff", a major part of our lives, our interests have changed. She is a master knitter and I have to read directions to cast on each and every time I do it. She designs and makes quilts with an ease I can only envy. Thus much of our converstion was sharing our current passions. She showed me a book on making silk fabrics and papers from silk cocoons. Eureka! She talked about wool felting, an idea I had decided I didn't have room, resources, or energy to pursue, but I will definitely try it when I go to visit her. We both still have a thing for dolls but come at it from wildly different directions. I shared my interests in bookmaking and bookforms and a common interest was a fabric based book. We have both done some journaling; mine is casual, while hers is on the verge of becoming a personal and public history of the Cherokee people who chose not to participate in the mass movement of the Cherokees known as the "Trail of Tears." She wanted to try rubber stamping to create a valentine for Doug and as we were pulling out stamps to consider, I thought of my Sherril Kahn sets. She took one look at them and had at least "a dozen" projects she wanted to use them for. I gave her a few pointers and went in search of my brayers. About an hour later, I had found the well hidden brayers and she had created the posted card.

A marlevous time was had by all.

Valentine Theme

2009-02-05T14:07:00.000-08:00

I had wanted to work around a valentine/romance theme with the red background I had collaged last week and a close up picture of tango dancers from an '08 calendar. I ran into several problems: the dancers were too big for the page and didn't match the tones of the background, the background itself was too big for some of the other couple images I had on file, and the couple images I wanted to use were a strange assortment of sizes. So I fell back to scanning the images and doing the whole thing digitally. As much as I enjoy getting my hands dirty with paint and glue, I get really excited about being able to alter the size, transluncency, and color nuances of the images I'm working with. In other words, I'm a total Photoshop control freak.

I got a real bonus when I opened the "Stitch" set of brushes by boyingopaw that I had downloaded from here: http://www.brusheezy.com/brushes and saw that the stitiches follow your cursor as if you were really embroidering. Now if I could only sew and cut out and wear paper clothes!

The other bonus was the amazing Virginia Woolf quote I found online: "I want the concentration & the romance, & the words all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose."

Snow

2009-02-01T11:42:00.001-08:00

The first three pictures were taken weeks ago and show how much snow was on the ground before the blast of 12 or more inches on January 28. I love moody shots and the first very grey one shows the auction barn from way back near the pond. The woodpile isn't one we created; it's just sitting in the woods. And there is a shot from near the back of the pond towards the house that I liked a lot.

The same hill is in both of the other pictures and it is all shoveled snow. After we had shoveled three times during the day Wednesday, I couldn't even throw the snow that high. I had cleared most of the upper driveway into the ridge across from the big hill and Ken had done the long drive out to the street. At 5:30 I quit, seriously asked him to leave the garage apron until the next day, and fumed while he finished the job, which took until 7:30 (after dark). If there is a pill for being ridiculous (aka stupid), they need to pass it out before snowstorms.

Art Weekend Content

2009-01-22T18:20:00.000-08:00

So Pam and I had spent two days creating and while I got a few backgrounds done, she did many pages in an altered book journal and quite a few journaling inspiration cards. You can see her results here: http://dieverdog.blogspot.com/ . Pam is a graphic artist with lots of skills in her bag. I usually take her ease and speed at creating in stride, i.e., I just expect her output to be about three times mine, but I was starting to feel some pressure to at least make something that had some content. So I did the Hard Heart page and a few soulless cards and felt a lot better. My heart is fine, by the way. (Unless Top Chef really does harden it.) All of the pieces have a major collage component and the more I do it, the more I enjoy it. Ken and I have even gone dumpster diving at the local recycling center to get some glossy magazines. The amazing resource of the King County libraries ongoing magazine sale is not available here, so send all of your old magazines my way. I cut out what I want and recycle the rest. I'm only partially kidding!

Art Weekend

2009-01-22T18:04:00.000-08:00

My second project was also from Jane Davies' book. She suggested making some collages that are only intended as backgrounds for other work. I just used some heavy cardstock as a substate and started gluing torn scraps of paper from magazines, calendars, and scrapbook paper. Much of the red one came from a Christmas flyer. This was really fun and I can foresee using both the original and the scanned version to build onto.

Backgrounds and Paperdolls

2009-01-22T16:35:00.001-08:00

My friend, Pam, came to visit for four days with the idea that we would play with our paints, stamps, inkpads, and collage materials the whole time. My first project was to do some paint playgrounds, an idea I found in Janes Davies' Collage Journeys. I used 22" x 17" paper and just smeared it with paint with a foam brush. Obviously, I didn't know when to stop, but one of the things I love about this book is that she tells you many ways to go back and forth between digital techniques and messy hands techniques. So I think I can use these backgrounds effectively in digital collages. The paper dolls are BJD bodies from Minoru World. I wanted one of these but they didn't go on sale, so I made her some clothes from vellum. I sort of ran out of patience before I finished the last card.

Farm Pix

2009-01-05T15:26:00.000-08:00

I haven't gotten out to get pictures of all of the snow, so here are some earlier ones.

I had tried and tried to get the ducks that were using the pond from late October through the beginning of December and they wouldn't let me get close. But when Pam was here, 12/10, we were walking through the woods and came up on them from behind and they just sat there for a photo shoot.

The tractor pictures were from even earlier, sometime in October. Ken wondered why I was so intent, but anyone who knows me knows my greatest fear is being behind the wheel of anything. Combined with the boredom of going about 1/2 mile an hour, it made for a strange expression. We were dumping leaves from the yard out in the woods.

First Frost

2008-10-19T12:18:00.000-07:00

This morning when I took the dogs out to go to the bathroom, there was a light frost on everything and we could see our footprints in the grass as we walked. I hurried them back inside for breakfast, grabbed my camera and went back for a few shots. The pond looked clearer than usual so that made a good shot, the frosted grass of course, and then these things that are all over the ground under a big tree by the pond. Barry says they are chestnuts and I have no reason to doubt him. They are quite spiny and I steer clear of them when the dogs are along.

The first shot is some acorn squash we got at our very first produce auction. We had forgotten it and had slept a little late so it was already started when we got there. It was much smaller than the one we went to with Jean, so not intimidating at all. As I made my way to the action, a bid had just been completed on about 25 dozen eggs @ $.65 per dozen and I was surprised the auctioneer let the bidder take what he wanted which was only a couple of boxes. He let the losing bidder take what he wanted (about 4 dozen) and was hunting for someone else to take the rest, so I asked if I could have some without a number and got 4 dozen and instructions to go get a number real quick. We also got a bag of 5 pounds of new potatoes the same way, and I finally actually bid on the squash and got them for 60 cents each. They are small and very tasty. The Jerusalem artichoke was given to me by a man who got a whole box of them. I asked him what he was going to do with them since I've never fixed them. He thought he was getting sweet potatoes so was surprised to find out they were Jerusalem artichokes. We'll go again next week. Another customer we talked to said the auction goes all year, but later in the fall and winter is mostly hay, firewood and pastries. She also told us about another produce auction on Thursdays so we're going to check that out too.

A Sight Seldom Seen

2008-10-19T12:09:00.001-07:00

Barry titled this when he walked by while Carol and I were putting the CD rack together. I don't know if it was a brand new experience but she was a fast learner.

The Move

2008-10-19T07:54:00.000-07:00

Thankfully the feeling that the move was one long nightmare is fading. Just getting the truck up the hill and then backing it into the driveway scared the s*** out of me and after it was loaded, Ken did it again with the trailer. As we were pulling out with both fully loaded, our neighbor, Larry. who had dropped over to say bye, came running after the truck, waving a piece of something in his hand. He said it was a bolt from the trailer suspension that was completely broken off. Thank you, Larry, from the bottom of our hearts! So we made our way carefully to the UHaul in Bothel (about 7 miles away) where they told us there was nothing to be done but reload the load into a new trailer and that there was one available in Seattle. We pleaded, begged, threatened, whined and cried but had no choice but to drive the monster truck/trailer to Seattle. We had been promised some help with the job, but the two guys who got the assignment were intent on assigning blame for the broken bolt to us, saying the trailer was too heavy and that we were going to have to leave some things behind. And then it started to rain. After they slammed a few things around, we asked them to stop "helping". Another man came from another dealership to smooth things over but other than helping us get the first trailer unloaded, there wasn't much he could do to help. I took the photos above as things came out hoping they would help reload, but the battery ran out just as we finished unloading. Have I mentioned yet that we spent three days getting the trailer loaded? Six rainy hours later, with only one major breakdown on my part, we were ready to roll, with only a few things left behind. I want to say another BIG thank you to our daughter-in-law, Kei Chi, who drove over to Seattle and dog sat with Juniper and Sambo. We wouldn't have been able to do it without her gracious help.

And speaking of the two dogs, you can see from the photo how squeezed we were. I was in there with them! Sambo found a warm spot on the floor and didn't complain about my resting my feet on him. Juniper was more curious and spent most of the trip an my lap. If I scooted all the way to the door (about 3 inches off the seat), we could sit side by side to give my legs a rest.

Some of the ride was extremely bumpy, but some was fairly smooth. It was slow going, taking a full five days to get to Ashland. The other major headache was near Chicago. We had made the trip three weeks earlier to scout out the roads and get the Prius back. I had routed us completely around the whole Chicago area, and when we got to the point of diverging from the AAA plan, it was raining cats and dogs and we got a phone call and missed our turn. So we drove through the Chicago construction, in the rain, with me in tears, convinved we were going to die. We didn't and it probably made the trip 3-5 hours shorter. And way more memorable.

Ohio Bound

2008-09-07T18:54:00.001-07:00

Our house in Washington was as sold as it could be before the closing finalizes it and at that point we will be handing over the keys to the new owners. We had done some looking on the internet at properties in Ohio, but hadn't wanted to get too attached to anything that might get sold before we were ready. We had looked in Oregon just to see what we could see and now we were ready to go find a house to buy. We were pulling a trailer to get the first load to Ohio even though we had nowhere to put the contents except a storage locker courtesy of U-Haul. They know we'll have to rent another truck to get it out of there.

The scenery is just east of Bozeman, Montana and it made me want to stop and look for our little farm there, but we ignored the impulse and kept on rolling. We saw this house in Ashland the second day we were looking and it seemed just about perfect in it's attibutes except that it wasn't near the folks we wanted to be near in Pike county. So we spent four days in southern Ohio trying to find something that would measure up to it. We found one lovely house that we made a bid on, knowing that it was much bigger than we wanted or needed, and that deal fell through when we realized that some expensive work needed to be done to finish the house.

So we went back up to northern Ohio to look at this house again and when we were having trouble making up our minds, Ken made a strong argument for erring on the side of caution by buying a house that seemed to fit our needs. And his sister Carol reminded us that even though we wouldn't be extremely close to our friends in southern Ohio, we would be a lot closer that we were in Washington state.

The 7 acres are about 1/3 wooded (behind the pond) and are in a long narrow plot. I've shown the north and south boundries (the browner mow lines) and the pond is visible in each of the shots. The garage is attached to the house by a breezeway and I have plans to make it my studio. We got airline tickets the same day we signed the papers for the house so we are back in Washington now, packing like crazy and hoping (probably fruitlessly) that we will be able to fit the rest of what we want to keep into a rental van.

Dreaming of Buses

2008-08-09T20:05:00.000-07:00

I don't remember dreaming about buses before except when I am leaving my dream downtown. Let me explain. I have dreamscapes that are fairly constant.

So having three bus dreams in a few days is unusual. In this one the driver has left his seat and as the bus starts to roll downhill, I have to get in the driver's seat and steer it. It comes close to hitting trees and toppling off the road but I manage to get it to the bottom of the hill. Once there, I can't get it started up the next hill, and using typical dream logic, I back the bus back up to the starting point and try again. The second time goes much smoother as I don't have any near misses with trees or ditches.

I Photoshopped a photo of the Smokey Mountains by squeezing them vertically to get steeper hills, and then raw sketched and colored each hill. Then I dropped in sections of curvy highway and gave each one a similar treatment. I think the dashboard was a Porsche but it had the wrong proportions so it had to be stretched and have a longer hood to look like a yellow bus before I did the raw sketching and coloring. The dream really was as vivid as what I came up with but I don't know how to convey the out of control movement of the bus. I don't give much credence to dream symbolism but this was interesting enough to include.

I Can't Get This Off my Mind

2008-08-07T10:32:00.000-07:00

Sunday, early August, southern Oregon. We had gotten a little off track following the GPS system which had already admitted it didn't know where we were. So we got on the phone with the realtor to find our way to the property and she mentioned to me that the house was selling because of a divorce, that the man was resistant to selling and that we should not be surprised by anything he said. As we pulled into the drive and up to the house, there were some horses on one side and cows and chickens on the other. A boy about 10-12 years old and a fairly old man came out of the house and started talking to the realtor, challenging who she was and what she was doing there. After she reassured them that she had talked to Bobby the old man said, "Well, you can't be too careful about who's coming onto the property."

She started pointing out the fencing on the pens we had just passed and the boy mentioned to his grandpa (he called him that) that we would need to be careful of the wolf. We thought he was talking about the dog chained to the truck where they were standing but it turned out that that dog was only half wolf, the other half being Rottweiler. It seemed to be a very laid back, fat old dog that appreciated a little attention and a pat on the head, but it could have been more aggressive if they hadn't been there. Then the old man started telling us about how many dogs he had breed from the female wolf that was somewhere in the pasture below, with or near the horses. I was beginning to wonder if he thought we had come to buy a dog when the realtor got him back on track by asking where the property lines for the 3 1/2 acres were. He pointed out the ones we had seen along the road as well as where they used to keep the pigs when they had pigs.

He pointed to a gate behind the house that he said opened onto a neighbor's land and as we walked back I saw a couple of dachshunds in a dog run. I started toward them but thought better of it when they started yapping at me. The old man said to just go on back to see them so we all walked back. Just as I spied one really, really long dog with it's back held at a horrible angle, he said that two or three of the white ones were blind. He explained that they used to breed them to sell and there were always one or two in a litter that the kids wanted to keep and that's why they had twelve. I adore dachshunds and have had to put two down because of bad backs but all I could think was that all of these needed to be spayed, some of them put down immediately, and all of their offspring be hunted down and spayed. So as we walked into the house, I was already feeling a bit of shock.

The old man and the boy walked into the house with us and sat down on the couch to watch TV. They pointed out Bobby who was washing dishes at the sink and there was another old man sitting in a chair. I can't remember if he spoke but he seemed to be pointing toward a bedroom. I don't know if he was asking for something or trying to tell us about something. He had a doughy look as if he didn't ever get out of the chair and in the bedroom were the things I remember from my mom's house when she was bedridden. Bobby didn't stop washing dishes but told us his wife had left him and wanted him to sell the place. He said he had hoped he could keep it but that didn't seem to matter. Every surface of every piece of furniture was covered with stuff. I don't know what the stuff was - it was too much to comprehend. How would these men ever begin to pack it up and get it out of there? How would they get themselves out of there and where would they go? There are not enough boxes in the world to pack up their lives and go. We poked our heads into each sad room and got out quickly. As we left, I noticed on a wall by the door pictures of a nice looking youg man. They looked like several graduation pictures.

Grandpa and the boy followed us out and told us that the calf in with the cow was a Charolais but the cow was a Brahman. A neighbor's very young bull had been visiting? boarding? and he had never imagined that that little bull could have breed her. He said he hadn't even wanted to breed her again because she was so old.

We walked out to the barn which was really more of a manger or maybe a half barn since it was missing one side. Ken pointed out a pig lying in a depression beside some tools. We wondered if it was alive and it answered by wiggling it's snout. It was in no way contained; it could have taken a mind to folow us home but it just laid there. Then Ken started wondering if they even knew the pig was there since they had referred to a time when they kept pigs. The pig didn't tell us the answer to that one and we decided not to go back to the house and find out. We drove down the drive and around to the other road beside the old pig pens and chicken coops. There, in a small field, were enough chairs and tables and stuff and more stuff to fill another two houses the size of the one we had seen. Maybe their realtor, like ours, had told them to clear the house out a bit.

I've tried not to inject my feelings into this, not altogether successfully, but I really can't get this out of my head!!

File This Under: Too Dumb To Be

2008-08-07T10:15:00.000-07:00

The boot on my left foot is for a fracture that was discovered after I hurt it while I was walking the dogs. At that point it was about two weeks old and I have no idea how or when it happened. But the bruised toes on the other foot are another matter. After Ken and I had walked around a few acres in southern Oregon we were covered with seeds, lots of the little furry ones that stick like velcro and lots of the ones that work that tiny little fish hooks to spread themselves around. I was starting to feel them prick my skin. So while he was getting gas, I decided to take off my shoe and boot and pick them off. All was going well until Ken got back in the car and said he was ready to go and I shut the car door on those two little toes. It really didn't hurt at the time so I thought maybe they had just gotten pinched but they turned black and blue quickly. Ken thinks I'm trying to get out of all of the work.

What's So Great About Goats?

2008-06-25T11:09:00.000-07:00

Last Wednesday Ken and I went to Everett (30 minutes up the freeway) to a farmer to farmer presentation sponsored by Washington State University on dairying and selling raw goat milk to local co-ops. The presenters (John and Marsha St. John of the St. John Creamery) had upwards of 150 Oberhasli goats of which 17 were billy goats, about 40 does with kids and the rest does without kids. They milked 60 – 70 goats morning and evening with one early and one late employee. They did all the marketing and all of the milk deliveries themselves. The goats were mid-sized but with fairly high milk production. They were a beautiful chocolate color and they pointed out which ones had had their copper for the season already and it made quite a difference in the depth of the color. Most of the talk was near the kids so we got to watch them play. The presentation itself seemed about right for us knowing nothing but I think there was quite a bit that went over our heads because there were other goat people there asking questions about everything from size and restrictions of the milking facility to county to county farm management. Marsha said she had so many billy goats because the boys of this breed have the sweeter dispositions. We didn’t actually get anywhere near the boys so we had to take her word for it. I think another reason for so many boys is that up to this point they have mostly been breeding and selling the kids and have only recently started selling the milk. She is still selling kids for $25 or with papers for $100. That seems pretty reasonable to me; they leave the kids with the does for eight weeks, I think they said. We resisted bringing two home for Sambo and Juniper to learn to take care of but they were sooo cute.

After the farm part of the presentation we were supposed to go to the Everett co-op and listen to a short presentation by their buyers but we got lost on the way and missed the presentation. It was a very well stocked co-op, though, and we were pleased to get some sorghum molasses which we haven’t been able to find anywhere since we’ve been here. We also got a $16 gallon of the raw milk produced at the creamery to see if we would like goat’s milk. It tastes pretty good although I haven’t really drunk milk straight for quite a few years so I am a little more interested in learning to make cheese. We seem to be adjusting to using it on our cereal but it cleaned us all out pretty thoroughly. We met some other people at the presentation who raise goats (Nubians) mainly to make a little cheese and asked if we could visit their farm also, so that will be a fun thing to look forward to.

Cob Owner Builder Workshop

2008-06-10T20:13:00.000-07:00

I decided to post the pictures here: http://picasaweb.google.com/kenandsharonsahl so that my thoughts about the workshop wouldn't be quite so public but the pictures would be available. I learned a little about building cob houses but found the learning procedure very trying most of the time. I think that in attempting to make people feel comfortable designing their own little homes, they didn't want to give answers to our questions that could be construed as "THE answer." But the answer given most often was, "It depends," and unless the factors that an answer depends on are clearly spelled out, along with the range of possibilities, that's not an answer at all.

The weather was atrocious and contributed to my getting quite sick along with a number of other people. I had Ken come to get me at the end of the second week and it took several days at home to get back to normal.

The jury is still out about whether I would attempt to build cob anything, but I do think I would try something more managable than a house the first time out.

Off the Tradmill More

2008-05-08T10:35:00.001-07:00

This will finish up my postings about the Off the Treadmill workshop. The first photo is the courtyard which is on the other end of the garden wall from the Myrtle and overlooks the garden (second photo). The third photo is looking out the large window in the Myrtle onto the garden. Linda is working on a discussion chart, Sarah, Ianto's apprentice gardener, is next; Todd and Kei Chi are seated also. In the photo of the outdoor kitchen, Ken is chatting with Ryan, the cook for this workwhop. Sarah and Ryan are married and are staying at the Boggs Homestead as part of a work/study/apprentice program. They were on loan to the NASNB for the workshop. Ryan is a photographer and did a great job as a first time cook. The last photo is Linda's kitchen inside of Laughing House.

As I said in the first post, I've given this workshop quite a bit of thought. There must be zillions of folks out there who have been exploring the ideas of self-sufficiency, permaculture, off the grid, etc, but up till now I haven’t examined my life with respect to those concepts and I would say that Ken and I stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb at the talk sessions. Ianto Evans, the man who was running them, is a Welsh man who has lived in the states for a long time. He states right up front that his reason for living here is to undermine the consumerism that is driven by (mostly) the US. His way of doing that relates to his field of study, architecture, but is very removed from formal concepts. He believes that people should not be living in houses that 1) make them sell their souls to banks; 2) are made of semi or outright poisonous materials; 3)require heating, ie, houses don’t feel the cold; 4) have gobs of unused right angle corner space; and 5) don’t embody the magic to make the inhabitants feel joy. He probably had a few more reasons to justify his belief in cob building but those are the first that I think of. We talked about family, food, housing, community, and money. I felt very attuned to lots of things he was saying, like making and doing so much for yourself. His gardening skills were amazing but that was covered rather sketchily. The houses were little oases of magic, even the ones that were in process, which was probably over 50% since the site is a school for cob building and people need to be able to experience all phases of the work.

On May 17, Todd, Kei Chi and I are headed back to learn the bare bones skills to build one of these cob cottages.

Off the Treadmill Other Structures

2008-05-08T10:14:00.000-07:00

The first two photos are the washing station, which has the shower behind it, and the passive solar water heating system. Be sure to click on the water heating system. It is brilliant: just black hoses full of water being heated by the sun helped out by the glass in front of them.

The next two are the garden wall which runs from the courtyard (next post) to the Myrtle library. The closeup is the gate to the garden. As I understand it, all of the mass of the garden wall stores and holds heat to warm the garden soil.

The last photo, which should have been the first, is the troll bridge that we crossed over to get from where we parked the car up to the first of the cob buildings.

I neglected to take a picture of what I considered to be the most amazing auxillary structures: the outdoor composting toilets. Kei Chi said using the toilets was kind of like when we take the doggies to the potty box. They were sort of open outhouses facing out into the woods and surprisingly had no odor.

Off The Treadmill Buildings

2008-05-08T09:12:00.000-07:00

We had come prepared to camp: two tents, sleeping bags and whatever other paraphernalia we could fit in the little car. As it turned out it was an extremely wet weekend, raining all of the way down and most of the rest of the weekend.

Linda and Ianto, who live and teach at the North American School of Natural Building offered to let us stay in some of the cob buildings. Being a teaching facility, many of the structures are in progress.

The first photo is the Meadow House where our gang stayed. As you can see it has no doors, but the windows are in place. Our sleeping bags were partly on a couch and partly on straw bales - very comfy especially compared to the very wet ground where our tents would have gone up.

The second photo is the Dawn cottage (facing east, of course) and Mary stayed there. On the other side facing west is the Dusk cottage, where Sally and Andy, stayed. It took me a while to understand that there were two cottages rather than one with two doors.

There are two shots of Laughing House (Ianto and Linda"s house) as well as a shot of Linda's kitchen in another post. Most of Laughing house is done but the downstairs sitting room is in progress: Linda had just finished building the couch/bench and was experimenting with a new cob mixture that contained styrofoam pellets.

The last photo is the back of the library (the Myrtle) and the very large window is the one visible in the participant post. Most of our sessions were held with all of us seated on the heated bench in the Myrtle. There were always ten to twelve of us in a small (square foot wise) space that seemed quite roomy.

Off the Treadmill Participants

2008-05-08T08:52:00.000-07:00

I've been musing and musing about this, but since Todd, Kei Chi and I are going back to Oregon in about a week and a half, I decided it was time to get these photos up and let y"all see what I'd been up to.

The first photo is our gang Ken, Todd and Kei Chi. Next is The Ravin' which I originally thought was The Raven but it was explained that his "nickname" is derived from his style of online blogging. After that are Sally and Andy who travelled to the workshop from New Jersey. They also visited Washington and California on their journey. Next is Mary. She lives very near to us as it turns out and is also returning to Oregon in May for the cob building workshop. And last but not least is Bozidar posing with Todd. Bozidar is from Croatia and was returning there to open a retreat with his family as soon as this Off the Treadmill workshop was over.

We got to know all of these people fairly well as a lot of our time was spent exploring the reasons we were there and what we hoped to achieve from the experience.

Collage from Photoshop Class

2008-03-13T17:47:00.000-07:00

This Photoshop collage was done a couple of years ago as the final project for a Photoshop class I took at Columbus State Community College. We were required to put an image of ourselves into the work and short of that anything was OK. I used images from magazines, calendars, a tarot deck, a travel book, and an insect field guide. Mostly I think we were demonstrating that we knew how to make a decent selection with various tools. It had upwards of 50 layers and I still remember how much fun it was.

Photoshop Collage

2008-03-13T17:29:00.000-07:00

What with painting, packing stuff up to go to storage and being in a general state of confusion about how to move forward with selling this house, I haven't taken time to haul out art supplies to work in my art journals. One night last week I took one of the backgrounds I had made in February, blurred the heck out of it, added grunge with some of my favorite brushes from Vered and Annika von Holt, and then stuck a few photos from my old scanned photo albums in, plus a bird and a bee. It was a fun little quickie!

Two Versions of a Soul Collage

2008-03-13T12:50:00.000-07:00

When I do these soul collages I am not trying to be very serious. So Kate suggested the hole in the head words which referenced both alcohol and the background figure and I was working through ideas of fermented brews being as ancient and as cross cultural as the images I had. Also it was fun to try to turn the hand holding the bottle to stone. So I got two for little more than the price of one.

Ken's Clown Book

2008-03-10T19:41:00.000-07:00

I knew there was one more thing I had worked on in February but couldn't remember what. This is worked into an altered board book, Clifford, the Big Red Dog, which must have 850 pages I've been at it so long. I saw the Ben Hecht quote on a Facebook group, Art Journaling, and knew I had to use it for a clown spread in Ken's Clown Book. The project is probably six or seven years old with no finish time in view but occasionally I like to pull it out and play with it. It's one of the few things I've ever scanned that I couldn't correct all the color that the scanner added to the stamped work.

Land In Ohio

2008-03-06T19:39:00.000-08:00

Well, now that I've opened that can of worms about the possibility of moving back to Ohio, I want to share some books I've been reading. One of them is "Truck" by Michael Perry. Kate recommended it to Ken to read when she was here but after we got it out of the library I got to it first when he started reading the other Michael Perry book, "Population 485." "Truck" is his story about small town life in Wisconsin, about a 1951 (1952?) International Harvester truck, and about love. Kate said she loved his voice and I think I understand what she means: style, vision, center of gravity, etc. but what I loved about the book was his total reverence for every aspect of his life. This is the first nonfiction reading I've done for a while and it was wonderful. My son has also been asking me to read Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma," so I have started that as well. It is extremely well written and considering that it is basically about the politics of food, specifically corn, I'm amazed at how hard it is to put down.
I'm not going to become a farmer at the age of 65, but these readings make me consider how little trouble the chickens and goats were for the 8 to 14 year olds on "Kid Nation," and how much satisfaction they gave. Ken and I (mostly him) have gardened for quite a few years now; we love our tomatoes and herbs and it isn't such a stretch to imagine expanding a little and starting to preserve food in ways that I have seen my mother do in those few years we lived on a farm.
So Ohio is a least up for consideration, given that land values there are more in range of our retirement income. We shall see what we shall see!

Photoshop Mandala

2008-03-06T19:25:00.000-08:00

I've been speaking with an old friend from Ohio who went to check out a small farm in Chillicothe for us and one of her abiding interests is mandalas. She was telling me about a software program that makes mandalas and I told her I thought I could probably do them in Photoshop. For this first try I used a photo of a crystalline mess that was on some glass after a dying experiment. The small pieces of dyed velvet were great but Kate and I were just as excited by these photos of crystals. This mandala is eight sectioned because eight seemed so easy but I think twelve sections would maybe be more interesting. My friend, Jean, is printing them out to quilt with.

Dreaming journals

2008-02-29T10:08:00.000-08:00

This journal page was one I had a hard time getting started on because I had painted the background a pretty bilious shade of pink, overpainted ugly brown, and was not inspired by either. The hands, the dresser, and the borders got me started and I filled the drawers with the stuff that's always in the dresser drawers of the houses I'm exploring in my dreams.

But last night I had a dream I've never dreamed before. I found an old art journal of mine that was filled with wondrous pages. They weren't painstakingly overworked , they amazed me and I wish I could remember even one of them. And now the circle is complete: dream -> journal -> dream.

Making Background Papers

2008-02-10T15:33:00.000-08:00

When Kate and I get too tired from staying up too late to think clearly, we spend some time exploring new techniques to create backgrounds. These are all done with acrylic inks using techniques we read about in Alisa Golden's Painted Paper. I had had the FW inks for a long time and hadn't used them so I was extremely pleased to use them for these backgrounds.

Sleeping With the Fishes

2008-02-10T15:23:00.000-08:00

Having a bit of cabin fever, Kate and I left the cabin to go to the library in Bellevue to get some more magazines to tear up for collage cards and art journals. We hadn't been to that library before and really liked it. We spent many hours tearing up the magazines and organizing our treasures. Even Kei Chi tore out some pictures. We played a little (I finished up this journal page I had been working on a while) and got out for a walk.

Two Journal Pages in One Day

2008-02-07T18:40:00.000-08:00

My sister, Kate, is visiting for a few days and of course we are playing. This morning we set up a blog for her called Escape From the Library. There is a link in My Favs. Then we started art journaling. It was her first so she didn't get it finished but I did an amazing two in one day. The backgrounds are painted with acrylics and rubbed with soft pastels as usual but I did much more stamping on these pages than I have done before.

2008-01-28T19:24:00.000-08:00

I saw some black and white photographic work of Dominic Rouse, in which he somehow created disturbing surreal images working directly with negatives. His images had a very dark, possibly gothic, look. I decided to try for a similarly dark look in Photoshop. Without photos of old house, church, and castle interiors, I used a shot of our stairway and added old doors and windows (some clip art and some of my own). The first time through I worked in black and white, but found that too intimidating so I started over in color. Overall, I would call this more creepy than disturbing but I couldn't leave it alone. The tatooes were made with brushes from Obsidian Dawn, the spiders from In Obscuro, and the other grunge was done with brushes from Vered. Until I added the grunge, I almost couldn't look at this; that made it even more difficult to work on!

If I continue to work with this size image and create a faux tarot (there are so many ways to play with the word tarot) deck, this one will definitely represent wasting time on a major scale.