Mail Art, of course, and a tea bag!

 Oh dear, you can't see where the card ends and the back ground begins, oh well. It's a 4" x 6" piece of dotty mail art! My honey likes it so I might keep it for his birthday card, oh right, I should mail it to him!

 This hand and foot bit fit so nicely with this card, I just had to break away from JUST DOTS. In fact, as I look at this more, I'm quite fond of it. I could mail it to myself! Oh no, it'll go to someone.

 This is Mail Art #960! 40 more to go for 1000 since 01 Dec. 2010. When should I stop numbering? What do you think? Your opinion counts.
With this one, I like that the gray and the pale violet are the almost the same value and the boundaries are soft, as opposed to the yellow with the pale violet.

I re-opened my Etsy shop FritziMim, after a long hiatus. I've put a few bags in it, including a vintage Tea Towel bag. A TEA BAG! Get it? You can see my stuff at FritziMim.

Paper dolls and mail art, too.

 This dotty card is going off to London. You, too, can send work to my friend Andy. Send your Mail Art to:
My REAL wall
Plot 45 REAL
The Royal Opera Arcade Gallery
1-2 Royal Opera Arcade
London, SW1Y 4UY
U.K.

 This dotty card, for some reason, called for this bit of text that was sitting on my work table. It works well, I think.

 This dotty card is so subtle. Do you like the way the orange dot and strip are the same value as the peachy color background? I like the way the 2 colors have a subtle boundary, a disappearing boundary, so Albers Interaction of Color, right?

 Oh don't I have fun? I copied the self-portrait that Adriana made and I turned it into a paper doll for her. I made 3 outfits out of art magazine photos.

 Close up of a flower.

 Some water color imagery.

A field of sunflowers.

Here it is standing up. I can't wait to give this to her, maybe tomorrow. I hope she's as tickled with it as I am.

Mail Art plus

 I am really enjoying the hole punched paper. The blue piece fit so nicely over some eyes that I'd cut out giving this dotty mail more of a narrative. The tiny square holes were already punched in the yellow paper. I wish I had a punch like that. Do you know where I can get one?

 This dotty card has a lot of ambiguity, I think. are the dots on top or holes punched. Only the recipient will know.

 The other day, we received a thank you for our neighbor, Adriana. We'd given her a gift certificate to buy books as she moved on from elementary school to middle school. Here's a portion of the note. She's a terrific draw-er. We love the way the eyes are looking to her left, and the sheer sleeves on the shirt.

 S. Churchill, in the U.K. is one of the Mail Artists that I exchange mail with. She's been experimenting with fusing plastic bags for her mail art. The one she sent me arrived in a plastic bag, which I found so funny and ironic. I was thinking I'd send the WE CARE bag to her to incorporate in her mail art, but maybe not. I showed this to the workshop participants yesterday and they thought it as ironic as I did. Maybe I'll keep this as is to show future workshop-ers.

My honey bought me some old stamps, uncancelled. I really like how they show scenes of the workings of the postal system. Those of us who use the postal systems all the time, mail artists, letterwriters, hope that there will always be stamps and mail and postal delivery. Please send a piece of mail using a stamp to someone, please oh please.

Garden fun

 Last year, my honey planted two calla lilies in the back garden. They were dark brown and I didn't like them because they blended into the color of the mulch. This year, surprise surprise, they returned with HUGE leaves and one (so far) lovely orange color bloom. I like this!

 Mr. or Ms. squirrel lurking by the bird feeder pole. I see you!

 Here he or she is again, waiting on the fence. Hoping I don't see him.

 Here he is balancing on the top of the shepherd's crook pole that holds the bird feeder. Clever little acrobat!

 YIKES! I've been noticed! When he saw me, he scurried down the pole and hid under a fern. I don't mind feeding him because the bird seed is inexpensive and he only eats the parts he likes, leaving plenty for the birds.

 I was trying to identify the little birds we get. I used the telephoto on my camera. Here's a shot with one in the feeder & 2 waiting.

Here's a blurry view. One just jumped into the feeder, others waiting. They're sparrows. I've identified 2 kinds so far, plus Cardinals, oh so easy to I.D. and some big grackles. One grackle came yesterday and couldn't figure out how to get inside to the seed. Oh dear, maybe brain damaged, as the others of his kind had no trouble the other day. Could that be possible?

Dotty Mail, tiny baguette, and a recipe

 Oh, dots are so satisfying! The acting of punching holes with my different sizes of hole punch, the placing of the dots, the placing of the punched paper, mmmm, so satisfying.  And if one were of a mind to, one could write a story for each of these. A children's book, anyone?

 I like clouds a lot, as regular readers of my blog know, and I like reflections of clouds in windows and water, too. Here's a photo of clouds reflected in a building in Washington, D.C. We passed it by, in the train, on the way home from our last trip. If you look carefully at the bottom row of windows you can see the reflection of the top of our train.

 This morning, we went out early to meet a friend for coffee at Can Can. The Bonne Maman confiture is a miniature, ditto the baguette (a ficelle.) We enjoy these little reminders of Paris, though none of the employees speaks French. Bummer!

Even though the heat is brutal, I decided to make a cake yesterday. I was going to make a vegan tea cake but my book of recipes opened to the page holding this recipe - Brown Sugar Toffee Cake. Oh, yes! I went out and purchased the Heath bars necessary for the topping. It was a big hit at the dinner party we went to, and you can find the recipe here, if you want to try it yourself.

An even HOTTER day!

 Here are the cards that I made yesterday, while keeping in the cool of my studio. The dotty-ness is so much fun. Some of the dots are punch outs in the paper and some are the cut out dots on top of the paper. Only the recipients will know which is which.

 This one is so playful to me. I'm calling these color play.

 These are strips with holes in them. They remind me of the Albers Interaction of Color experiments.

 I made this one this morning, when I saw the scraps lying on a dark brown piece of paper. I just liked the way they looked though it's a much darker, wintery (oh that red/green combi) card to me. It's #950. I'm getting cloooser to my 1000.





I made this card just now to send to my Mom, whose been transferred to a nursing home after a few days in hospital.  We don't know if she'll be able to return home. We just wait. I think she'll enjoy receiving mail &  these animals had been sitting on my table for a bit so it seems a perfect use for them.

Here's  a cool image - cool, in the sense of not hot temperatures, like we have here. It's already up to 93/34, on it's way to 98/36 this afternoon. I need to keep an image of fluffy clouds and cool water in my mind, as I debate going outdoors.

A very HOT day!

 We were told to expect heat! There were heat advisories! It was indeed very HOT! 92F/34C ! Tomorrow is going to be HOTTER!
Okay, that said, here's a photo I snapped of my sleeping honey, in our backyard, making it appear to be pleasantly sunny, in the late afternoon.

 The birds were actually using the bird bath! We had tons of little birds at the feeder. I got my old bird book out and think that they were sparrows of some kind. Plus, we had the usual cardinals, and a bigger black bird, maybe a grackle. We're enjoying this flurry of birds a lot.





The garden is getting lush. I watered it heavily this morning, hoping that my new dogwood in the corner will live. I still have some other plants that I want to add but for now, I like the way it's looking.

 Because it was so hot, I spent afternoon time in my studio making dotty mail art. I used pieces of colored paper that I'd already punched holes in, for another project. I put other colors behind the holes.

 In this one, I also put color behind the punched holes. This was really a fun little experience.

For this one, I used paper with holes punched out already, then I punched out some circles of orange and added them, but I think the effect is interesting. Doesn't it look like the orange circles are holes cut in the darker gray showing the orange paper from beneath. Not! This is such fun. I'm going to do more of these. By the way, this is #946 on my way to 1000 pieces.

Father's Day (in the U.S. of A)

Thinking about my Dad, today, on Fathers' Day. What a guy! I miss him. Here he is, in front of the apartment building we lived in on Franklin Boulevard, in Chicago. The building is no longer there. I've checked on Google Earth! That's my Dad's car that he has his foot on. He loved driving and wanted us all to learn to drive. (by the way, I didn't learn until I was 25 years old.) When he was old, he asked me if my kids knew how to drive. He said it was important to know how to do that. 






This is card #943. My honey got me a hand cranked paper shredder for shredding receipts. I shredded some paper and thought, oh yes, perfect for mail art. I enjoyed shredding but attaching the bits to the backing was a bit tricky. In the end, I like how this turned out.

 Here are some New York City clouds.

 Here are some clouds over Washington, D.C. There's the Washington monument to the right. We were on the train, heading home.

Here are some wispy clouds over a river,  maybe the Potomac, as we headed south towards home, after our trip to New York City.

It's a quiet day at home for me. My honey and son are off on a father-son excursion. I'm reading, and waiting, for a phone call from my sister. My Mom went into hospital this morning. I wait to hear news.

A muffin & some Mail Art at Skull Appreciation Day

I really wanted to use the fresh blueberries that my honey had gotten in his berry farm share on Tuesday. I found a recipe in a Cook's Illustrated magazine that I had all of the ingredients for, amazing! The muffins turned out wonderfully delicious. I've posted the recipe here.









June 4th was the 2nd annual Skull Appreciation Day event, held at the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia (thus our trip there.) I had posted a mail art call which got distributed far and wide, as the saying goes, and the response was terrific. here are just a very few of them.

The box containing all of them was delivered to me to scan and post on the Skull Mail Art blog, which I'll do over the next few weeks. They are all so good. People do amazing Mail Art.

In New York City

Happy this was available!

We took the train from Philadelphia to New York City on Monday afternoon (last week.) and by Wednesday, I needed to see the Doc at the Duane Reade. Happy me, got diagnosis and meds and on the road to recovery. But this trip to the city was at a way slower pace than usual. 







One of the exhibits we saw was at MAD. Artists who don't usually work in glass, showing glass pieces. Very cool! I wish I'd written down the name of this artist, because I really liked this piece, but I didn't. If you know who did it, let me know. It's a broken red glass chandelier with crows on it.

 This glass piece was done by Mike Joo, a sculptor, whom we met many years ago at the Cite International des Arts. This is a beautiful piece.

 We went to MoMA on Thursday, a day we forgot the umbrella and needed one, so I ended up buying the one I'd wanted for a long time. It has clouds on the inside and you know how I love clouds. Here are some clouds as seen from MoMA. Here is the link to see the umbrella I got.

 We stopped in at MoMA cafe where I had a cup of lovely peppermint tea. For some reason, I wanted that kind of tea while I was ill, and everywhere we stopped in the city had it. Lucky me.

 Clouds viewed from the High Line. We walked slowly down the path, the sky cleared. It was so nice to have the views from this elevated park.

 Clearer skies, lovely clouds, more from the High Line.












This is some vegetarian sweet and sour soup from the really good Szechuan restaurant on 9th Ave. & 24th Street. If you are in the city, stop in at this place. Reeeeally delicious food.

T

This is Buddha Delight. I had this at a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown on Canal Street east of Broadway. The tofu is made there and is excellent. It's so busy and the food is so fresh and delicious. Even though I wasn't feeling 100% well, I enjoyed eating this kind of food. Yummy!