Weaving

Tonight I taught my group about weaving after reading a tutorial about using cardboard to make portable looms on gingerbreadsnowflakes.com.  I didn't quite do it correctly but it came out well enough!  This is my square, it has some stripes, nothing too fancy.

Garden Friend

Found this guy sitting on top of the air conditioning unit outside and was worried he would get sucked in and die! Since the a/c was off at the moment, I took some pictures of him close up, then relocated him to the garden.  (I put him in with the weeds and ivy that is overgrowth from someone else's garden, so he can eat that first)

Isn't he cute?  I have some other, grosser pictures where you can see how slimy he is, but I just love the one above, he is cheesing for the camera.

Playing with buttons

Working on a mixed media project, doing some demos for clients, and this is what happened today.  Buttons, beads, embroidery, and some cool b&w fabric.

Recycled Planters

Did some work on the patio today.

I have spent more money on the garden than I had anticipated, but I think I've stretched it further than last year.  I made planters out of tin cans, twine, and beads I pulled off of an old necklace and hung cheap flowers in them.  So I guess hanging these flowers really only cost me what the flowers themselves cost me, and it was $2.99 for a pack (of four plants), so ... what you see in this image cost about 75c.  Not bad.  I have five of these hanging around, and then the leftover three marigold plants were put in an aluminum bucket I got at a flea market.

Mostly I am trying to do the actual plants for as cheap as possible because of my tendency to kill things.  I bought some plant food today so I fed my plants, which I will try to do every Friday.  But almost everything in the garden has been started from seeds or are super cheap (like the flowers).  Because all of the sprouts I started in April died while we were out of town, I am starting from scratch outside - but the spinach is already sprouting, so I have hopes the rest will follow suit soon.  This is why I'm doing it cheaply... okay, so all of my sprouts died (except the peppers), I'll just start over, no big deal!  I don't mind the "wasted" effort, because the process is the fun part for me, not necessarily the product

Yesterday I put up the solar powered lights and last night it was so pretty...

I can't wait until we're finally finished and I can take pictures!

Professional Nerdiness (I love charts)

Because all of my hours are volunteering, sometimes I feel kind of low.  I keep a very detailed chart of my progress but tonight I made a graphic to show myself getting closer to my goal as a way to stay motivated.  I also calculated the percentage of the hours I've completed towards my two licenses - I am almost finished with 30% of the hours I need for my state license, and have finished more than 50% of the hours I need for my national registration!

Luckily, I married an engineer.  Everyone ASSUMES he is the nerdy one.  But I am an ARTEEST.  Obviously that makes me cool automatically, right?  Coolness came when I bought my first canvas?  Or pastels?  Right?

This chart is so awesome, and it just keeps getting more awesome.  You can get so much information quickly and easily (well, YOU can't, because you can't see the headers).

The graph just makes the info look pretty, like at a fundraiser, I can see the totals rising.  I hated the color schemes so I put awesome retro wood paneling on it.

NOW YOU KNOW HOW COOL I AM.

Coming soon... art?  Maybe?  Sorry for the intermission of art making, I am going a little nuts.

Bee

I don't know what happened to this bee.  It was dead but in perfect shape.  I couldn't help getting some really close pictures because, well, how often can you get this close to a bee?

Our 2011 Patio Plans

Well, I was home today taking a bit of a vacation after coming back from Passover with family, and I decided to work on the plans for our patio that I mentioned.  The winter was really hard, especially with our heat going in and out every few days, and our apartment isn't very big.  We took this place because of its sweet patio space, so we are going to make it amazing for this summer.

So this is my vision!  I decided to make a collage because it helps me get a feel for the colors I want, and it also explains it to JewishGuy who luckily trusts my tastes enough to say "I can't picture it, but I'm sure it will look good."  So there you have it, the foundations of a good marriage, right? :)

Read the full description after the jump!

Boozy Birthday Present

JewishGuy's birthday was Friday so for his birthday I made him a painting of his favorite Scotch.  Well, it used to be his favorite, I hear rumblings there may be another contender.  But he always has a bottle of this in the Scotch cabinet so he at least likes it enough to have a painting of it on his wall at the office.

I almost didn't do the lettering because that is my absolute weakness (painting lettering ... just ask my former job as a custom plate painter at a pottery painting studio).  You can see I'm not very good at it.  But without the letters it looked so blah and generic.

Anyway, I like the way it came out, and I'm writing this before I give it to him because I scheduled this post for the future so he won't see it before he gets his present so I haven't seen his response yet.  I think he will like it!

Plans and Plants

From here you can see (clockwise from left) the basil, spinach, tomatoes, chives, and then in the front right one little bell pepper starting to peek up!  The bell pepper seeds came from a pepper I got at the grocery store that I wasn't sure would sprout, but here we are!  And because the planters are clear, I can see that there are at least four other sprouts coming up.  Yay peppers!

I know there's not a lot of art making going on around here, but actually there's quite a bit of art making going on!   I just can't share it!  My groups at work are making many long-term projects so I don't have little directives to share, and I haven't been able to make my own versions of these projects so I can't even show the ones I'm working on.

However, the planting is part of a larger therapeutic process for me.  We are planning a big decorating project for the patio.  It's very exciting!  It is also helping me through these cold, wet days that are just dragging on.

I even made a sketch, although I don't think the lamps will be the same.  We'll have a vertical garden on the fence that gets the most sun, which is where these sprouts will go assuming they survive us being out of town for Passover (I'm going to ask the pet sitter to water them every day but I am nervous).  We're also planning to have solar lights placed around the fence and even make a solar light chandelier type thing so we can do seudah shlishit out there - the solar lights will turn on automatically when it gets dark so we don't have to do anything.  They aren't very bright but most of the meal would happen before it gets too dark anyway.  Also we are hoping to somehow cover the gigantic air conditioning units just to make it not seem so ugly and maybe buffer some of the noise.  When the units are both on it's pretty loud out there.  AND we're going to try to figure out something to do with the space right next to our apartment, under our upstairs neighbors' overhang, because it's kind of just empty space right now.

All that and more ... to be unveiled in June.  A big project!  A spring project to keep us focused on the summer and warm weather!  Keeping spirits high during the last days of winter and the first days of spring...

Grow Station

I bought a gro-bulb and a lamp just to keep the baby plants warm, nourished, and happy.  I read that if they don't get enough sun they get stretched out which can kill them, and baby plants need more sunlight than their adult versions, but even the adult versions probably wouldn't like the conditions inside our apartment.  So of course I rushed out and bought a bulb.

I'm going about these plants much differently than I did two summers ago when I planted the cholent mix to see what would grow.  (I never harvested, by the way, because I moved the plants downstairs to be in the sun and promptly forgot about them.)  But those plants were a self-exploration in nurturing as I was working through feelings about nurturing where I was working with children.  This is more of a hobby and a way to feel productive, so I really want to make this work this time.  Come on, little planties!