Oh Dear, the year is ending. Good bye 2017!

Needs a caption, right?

The year ends, I did a lot of stuff.
I made mail art continuously though not every day. I did may be 150 + but I made other stuff. Mainly, a lot of knit mitts, because I was buying a lot of cool yarn and knitting was keeping me from getting crazy about politics.

He let everything go to his head!

Map of our favorite beach area

We went to the Outer Banks (OBX) for a holiday at Thanksgiving. We didn't plan on it because of financial constraints then said, oh dang, let's do it, so we did. Three days, the five of us. It was very nice. We walked on the beach, went to the giant dunes (Jockeys Ridge) and cooked and baked.

Bizoo

A sign on the OBX

The Atlantic at the OBX

The GrandGirl and her toy bat

Bizoo misses us when we leave though he's got a come-by care-giver.  He's also having some physical problem that has caused him to not urinate in his box, he uses the bathroom sink. Grrrr. Oh if only I had the patience to teach him to use the toilet, and flush it, too. ha ha



The Grand Girl continues to delight us, even though she's gotten a bit sassy at times.  Normal stuff, which is funny, and, thankfully, easily changed.
She's my cleaner-upper, baking assistant, art studio companion, and all around joy producing little person. She never fails to make us laugh, think, wonder, and feel grateful for her presence in our lives.


Happy New year, Bonne Année, Feliz año nuevo. May the year ahead be better than the last.  See you in 2018.

Mail art at home and away

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 I made this one specifically for a member of my "circles" group on IUOMA. It was sent to her before I left for our beach vacation.









Since water, the beach, the ocean, was on my mind, I grabbed a vintage postcard and added this boatman that had been waiting on my table for just the right moment and card to alter.
A friend suggested that he'd be fun added to other cards so I scanned him and will clone him. Watch for more of him in the future.




First card at the beach! Yay, time on OBX (the outer banks of North Carolina, USA)

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It's always fun to make a traveling mail art kit and spend some time away from home.

I had a few people join me in making mail art. Specifically for a 3 year old, the daughter of a friend of our daughter. She's in hospital with some severe problems.
If you'd like to send her mail - she likes octopi, dolphins, and other under water things.

The Mighty Violet
Maria Fareri Children's Hospital
100 Woods Rd        Room 2140
Valhalla, NY 10595 USA

So many days have gone by....

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 Why have I been gone so long?
So many things have been going on and all good!

For one thing, we went off to the beach for an entire week, renting a beach house with family and friends. It was delightful. We could see, and hear, the Atlantic ocean from the house, a short walk along a wooden path took us up over the dune onto the beach. The beach was very lovely, with hardly anyone on it as it's early in the season.
The weather was perfect.

Our grand-girl had a great time in her gigantic sand box.
 We can't wait to do this again.

A couple of the cards above were made at the beach with scraps of paper cut from the beach brochure.

 We saw the sunrise on the ocean and the sunset on the sound. How perfect.

The water was too cold to do more than walk along the edges.

 We saw lots of dolphins leaping and lots of pelicans flying, often they were in a line low over the dune. Both the dolphins and pelicans were closer than I'd ever seen before. How perfect.

One day, there were several bicycles parked on the board walk to the beach, behind our house.

I took this photo and used it on my new bicycle blog, for entries to my Mail Art call. See it HERE and do send me something.

This has been something keeping me busy. Also, while at the beach, I set up a blog to archive the artists coloring book that my honey produced. You can see it HERE.

Really? A month?

I can't believe that nearly a month has past since my last post! Incredible! I don't think this has happened in all the years I've been doing this.
Well, what's up! We went on a beach holiday on the 14th of September for a week. That was lovely.

 I left origami birds for the Fold the Flock project in Corolla.

photo credit: N.Scalin

We stayed in a lovely beach "cottage" that our DIL found through the internet. I wanted to stay there forever!

 The beach was beautiful and quite sparsely populated this time of year.

Our grand-girl loved the ocean and the sand. One gigantic sand box to play in, right!

Lagging behind - a confession.

 I'm going to confess once more that I'm lagging behind in responding to people who've sent me wonderful Mail Art.

I'm too embarrassed to even post a photo of the two piles on my work table. Eventually, I'll catch up - won't I?

Meanwhile, I continue to MAKE Mail Art. My process is once again, taking bits of scraps out of one of my tins and seeing how I can compose them. 3 pieces of paper. Yes. Satisfying.

 Our garden is looking good. The plants are growing back now that we've had lots of rain and sun. Our formerly shady back area has been exposed to sun by our tree being cut back a lot.

The cement duck, one of a pair, looks quite content in the foliage.

Here's the motto again - don't forget this as you move ahead in your own practice.

And don't forget, this is the motto for The Alternative Speakers Bureau.

If you're a reader in the Richmond, VA area, here's an opportunity (click on this) to participate in a creativity experience. It'll help you get unstuck.

Flashback Tuesday - the Atlantic Ocean, N.C. USA

Old Mail found

I was cleaning out an old tin biscuit box where we kept odds and ends and found these letters that I'd saved. Two were still with their envelopes and were from a man in North Carolina. Two were written by my husband's father and were probably tucked into a package or a greeting card as there were no envelopes. Both men were quite old at the time of writing these.

Here is the Mr. Owens story: we traveled to the Outer Banks of North Carolina for vacations in the summer, when our children were young. As we neared the banks, we would pass a house located close to the road, that had wooden objects lined along the front. They were wind mills, whirly-gigs, and other items, all hand carved. They were truly folk art. One day, we decided that we'd stop and learn more about these items. We met the artist, Mr. Owen. He took us to his little workshop next to his house, and chatted with the children. On the way back home, we stopped and Mr. Owen allowed us to buy one of his objects. He was very cautious because he said that he'd had dealers from New York City come and buy his work then sell it for a lot. But he trusted that we wouldn't do that. I think the first item might have been a duck, later on other visits, we bought an airplane and a gull. Sometimes, we just stopped to chat. We'd take photos of him and the kids, he'd mark their heights on his door frame and marvel at how tall they'd grown. The letters are about a year apart, each one after summer visits with him. The 1986 letter refers to his having been ill. The next year, we stopped and spoke with his family. He was in hospital at the time, but his family was happy that we stopped and said they'd pass along to him that we'd been by. I wrote later on but received no reply. I assumed that he'd "passed" as they say down here. We all have fond memories of Mr. Owen.
I cherish these little notes from my father-in-law to our children. He didn't write often. We usually spoke to them on the phone, and we drove to visit them once or twice a year, usually in the summer and then again at the children's winter school break. Everyone thought we were totally crazy driving north to Chicago in winter. We were, but it was an adventure, and the kids loved seeing the snow. At that time, we didn't get it often or for very long. (Oh how different this winter has been!) I think I'll attach Mr. Owen's letters to the bottoms of two of his pieces of art work. Look for photos of his work on the blog in a bit.

How things change.

Not at all, things hadn't changed! This past weekend, we had snow again. It started on Friday morning, at 9h30 to be exact, as I was leaving for my Spanish Meet-up group. I vowed not to take another photo of the stuff. Ugh! It snowed all night and into Saturday. White stuff on everything AGAIN! So I baked, again. I had two small sweet potatoes on hand so I made the sweet potato pound cake, only halved it. (recipe here in an older post.)I baked it in a loaf pan. It turned out really good. I froze 2/3 of it for another time. With all this baking, we could have clogged arteries if we ate it all. I did take a few photos on Saturday, of a corner of my screened in back porch and of the shells on the porch ledge, reminding me that the beach awaits us on some nice day in the future.

A day with friends...part dos

The black bean soup was yummy, as were the views of the playa from the hotel terrace. We sat for a long time, visiting , chatting (si, en español,) and watching the palomas and a tiny lizard.