Keeping Myself Grounded

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Anyone who has known me for more than five minutes knows I love my garden. Getting down and dirty with my plants is my favorite form of meditation. During the cold months I find myself poring through seed catalogs, gardening magazines and Pinterest for all manner of garden inspiration. As it turns out, Pinterest was the inspiration for today's garden project -- a tipsy tower of plant pots. Here is the original image that inspired me on the left. My rendition of it is on the right. Looking at them side by side I notice that mine looks short, stumpy and less elegant by comparison and yet I like it all the same. Next time I'll use taller, more elegant pots but for now I'll content myself with my happy jumble of petunias and violas.

Next on my agenda of garden projects is my raised garden bed. I procured the PVC lumber and had it cut, screwed it together and placed it in my front yard where it will serve as the new home for my vegetable garden. I have bought the landscape cloth, soil and amendments I need to fill the bed and have plants ready and waiting in the wings. I've been longing for a raised bed for so many years. Now I've finally gotten off my duff and done it. More on that project in the near future. Stay tuned.

Ballo ergo sum
- Gitana, the Creative Diva

Creative Detritus

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An artist's work area is not neat. To be so would be antithetical to the creative process. At least this is what I tell myself whenever I look at the sometimes unbelievable mess on and around the craft table in my basement workshop. "It's only temporary", I convince myself, "until this project is completed", but I know this is not true. It's not true because there's ALWAYS another project in the pipeline. More often than not there are several projects in various stages of completion on my table simultaneously along with bits and pieces leftover from completed projects that I just never got around to removing. This photo is evidence of that very thing. On the table you see four cards being laid out on a piece of cardstock. There is a foam wig stand that is in the process of being altered for a display and to the right of that there are four ATC's (artist trading cards) being held aloft by a doohickey (that's a technical term) with alligator clips at the end of it's arms looking for all the world like a very small Transformer. The cards and ATC's were in the process of being framed for submission to the Local 3 Biennial Spring Arts Festival, a show I entered when it last ran two years ago. (Click here to read the results of that show.) Because I had been so busy for the past two years volunteering at the senior citizens center, I really hadn't had time to do much work of my own so I initially had not considered entering the show.  My husband convinced me to enter something just for the hell of it so I decided to frame these two series of pieces. I had to improvise creating new mats over the ones that came with the frames because they were designed for standard size photos, not for this kind of work. I placed pale green handmade paper with flower inclusions behind the underwater scenes and placed the "Night Flight" series on a rust colored handmade paper mat laid over the white mat in the frame. The white mat was stamped with watermarking ink and dusted with gold PearlEx to create a subtle pattern that worked very well overall.

So now that these cards are framed and ready to be submitted I should, in theory, have more free space on my tabletop, right?

Not a chance.

Ballo ergo sum
- Gitana, the Creative Diva