Mail Art and so much more

#71

#71a

 Friday, I worked on some watercolors again. I'm feeling a bit less wimpy about them, but still, so pastel-y.  I like this one a lot more because I was able to get that purple ridge line, and then get that sort of reflection thing on water.

#72

#73

#74

This one is a big bolder, color wise, but still not quite there. I did a bit of pencil work and added dots. When I feel like the results aren't strong enough, I add dots. In this case, the dots are all the same color but change based on the background. Oh my, an Albers experience!





Saturday, I decided to tear up some postcards before we went off to the big Folk Festival. I found a good quote about landscape painting and put that up with the image on my Facebook page.









Then in Sunday, I decided to do the same - tear of old postcards. This one dealt with water, and I found a nice water quote to go with it. Oh there are those ubiquitous dots! In this case, I used them as connectors.








Today, more torn vintage postcards. In this one, the cards are like paintings and I wanted to make some visual connection between the lake and the road. I'm not sure how successful that was, but I like the way this looks.

 On Saturday and Sunday it was so hot at the Folk Festival. HOT! We couldn't stand being in the sun for long. Only listened to Roseanne Cash for 15 or 20 minutes before heading for shade. That hot! But Monday morning, while walking over to the dentist's office, I saw that over night, the leaves where turning autumn colors and falling to the ground! Wow! Overnight!

 I spotted this gorgeous tree a couple streets over this afternoon. Gorgeous, right? Autumn is arriving!

 And of course, autumn means apples in abundance. I got a half of a bushel and started to make apple sauce. I think apple butter is next.

Here's last weeks abundance from the farmers' market. It was the last week of my CSA, but this week I got some beautiful string beans and some beets there.

Mail Art, clouds, rain, New Year

#43

 Here I've altered a painting by one of my favorite painters, Richard Diebenkorn. I don't know that he's appreciated my dots, but look, they're "flavourful!"


And here's another painter that I like - Kandinsky, who is featured in Mona's thoughts. An altered Mona!

#44

#45

I got an  inquiry from Chris in Brisbane, Australia, about my circles. Did I use a punch and I do! She was going to try to get one. In the meantime, I decided to send some punched out circles to her.  I altered a Max Ernst painting with circles, tucked it in to a sheer envelope with some circles and taped it shut. THEN I remember that I hadn't scanned it. So here it is scanned in envelope and I LIKE the way it looks. The reverse is the address, of course. I hope it gets all the way to Australia okay.


This card was made for Laurance's grandmére in Nancy, France. She said that gram liked to fish as a young woman so fish would be nice. But I thought a rose and an old movie star would be a nice addition. I hope grandmére likes this card.

#45a

 Oh the sky was lovely the other day. Check out those clouds. We were driving to Portsmouth, and I got this as we were headed to the interstate.

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 Today is a stormy day. I pulled into the parking lot at the supermarket, looked out the window and saw the flag though the rain. It looked so spooky.



Then I stepped out of the car and the wind was so strong that the flag was totally unfurled!

 We had family over on Sunday afternoon for a big dinner to celebrate the Jewish New Year. The food prepared by our niece was scrumptious & our nephew's apple pie YUM. I made my Neat balls and tried a new barbeque sauce recipe from the cookbook Veganomicon. So yummy. 
Here is my little plate of cut up apples and honey.

This is the flower arrangement that my honey made in a small glass. He went out to the back garden and cut some greens and a hydrangea blossom. It sure looks professional, doesn't it?

Mail Art, of course & more

#32

 Back to dots for me. I decided to do a random piece again. I had one larger piece of cardboard and worked on top of that, knowing approximately what size I'd eventually cut out.

I grabbed pieces of paper out of my envelope of colored paper. And as they came out is how I placed them down.

#32a

I had cut a bunch of circles out of a catalog before I recycled it. I tossed a few down on each area of colored paper.  I moved a few of the dots around but for the most part, they are glued down where they landed.

 Here's the board before I cut out the 2 postcard sized pieces. I really like the way these turned out. I'm going to do this again.

 We had lots of apples from last weeks fruit share so I decided to make a cobbler. It was really good.

 While I was preparing the apples, Other Mim stopped by to visit and bring me a large bag of postcards from her Mom's shop. Wow! My Mail Art workshop students will have lots to choose from. Thanks, Sylvia.

Mim took home the peelings and cores for her compost pile. I stuffed them into a long bag and they looked very nice that way. I was glad they didn't go to waste - organic!

This insect was on my front steps. It was dead. I don't know what it is. Do you?

Vegan Apple cake and a squirrel

I made a really delish vegan apple cake from a recipe that my daughter created. The recipe is here. Because we make our own applesauce, there are a lot of apple cores to be dispersed, rather than tossed in the garbage bin. I put them in our big tree in the back garden. In the notch of the tree and in a little place where some shoots had been cut off leaving prongs of sorts.  Yesterday, my husband came up to my studio and said "quick, there's a squirrel sitting there eating the apple core." It was still there when I got to the kitchen window and I scored this photo of it. So cute how it held the core and ate all around it.

This morning, while returning from a walk over to have my doctor check out myh achy knee, I came upon a squirrel lying in the alley behind my house. I thought, Oh, no, it's the little apple chomping fellow. When I entered my back garden, another squirrel was sitting on the edge of my garage! Probably the apple core chomper, right?

PS my knee is fine, just a bout of tendonitis. Whew!

Apple Sauce time

I decided that I needed to make something better for health, so I put away my lovely new baking pan for awhile, and started peeling apples. I had a few to start with, and added some others, an assortment of Granny Smith, Fuji, Gala, and Empire. I add nothing. It's just apples, all apples, and so good tasting.



The snow has melted from the front area of the house, the back yard is starting to clear out, too. Still too much white stuff out there but another day or two of higher temperatures (44F-6c predicted today) and I should be able to see the ground out there. I look forward to spring.

My yard

With the coming of cooler weather, I've been enjoying sitting in my yard again. It's so peaceful. Though the view from my bench isn't much of a vista, that I get when I sit at the table and look east at a more open space with lots of trees, it is a quiet and restful yard. I put apple core into a place on my tree trunk where a small branch had been trimmed off. Squirrels come to get their treat. We haven't had many squirrels this summer because there've been a lot of hawks, but the ones that do come by really amuse me.

6 Questions to ask!

I wish I could give attribution to this apple image. It came in one of those e-mails that one is supposed to forward, maybe it was called "cutting edge." I really like apples. Mom always said to eat an apple a day! (Mom is 94 now.) And the butterfly is such a lovely symbol that I thought I'd use this to link you to the 6 questions that you should ask yourself before you buy any product that is "PINK." You know, where if you send in 4 lids from a yogurt, a donation will be made to breast cancer research. The list of questions are very illuminating. Read them here.
Oh yes, October is Breast Cancer Awareness month: we're aware already! How about some Breast Cancer prevention!! Thanks for listening, please read the questions and pass this information along to others.