Mail Art Monday! and more.

 Beautiful lettuces were available at the farmers' market on Saturday. I loaded up on them. I put them into "green" bags so they'll stay fresh for our holiday fest.
This is the market I went to at St. Stephen's church. It's quite convenient and will become an indoor market in winter. Yay. Fresh, local, seasonal veggies, and eggs.

I have to share my Japanese Maple tree with you. It's so brilliant, I mean like for real ELECTRIC brilliant. Isn't it beautiful?














I'm getting back into my pens, cleaning them up - I've mentioned this earlier, and now I've indulged myself with 2 new pens. Quite inexpensive ones but they write nicely. The larger one is a Lamy Nexx and the smaller one is a Pilot Petit with green ink in it for the moment. I do like using fountain pens but they do require maintenance!

#325

 Using reproduction Victorian scraps on vintage postcards is quite fun. It's kind of like Tiny Town someone suggested. Perhaps these kids are on their way there. What do you think?

#326

I like the incongruity of the kittens playing with a bowl of gold fish amongst the cacti, and the girl and her kitten having a picnic on the lawn.

#327

#328

 Here I'm using a new postcard of an old painting paired with a REAL vintage Victorian scrap. An odd series of kittens dressed up, and in this instance, holding a toy bear. My honey got the in a flea market in Paris, I think.

#329

Here the kitten is wearing clogs and a fez. So odd, so odd. He's strolling across a vintage landscape postcard.
I have more of these, so you'll be seeing them again.

#97 and 97a plus a bit more

This card is going to a Mail Art call: My Everyday Object, in Milan, Italy. The works will be displayed at Polifemo.

I've loved fountain pens since I was a child. My father wrote with some beautiful pens and I'd watch him writing with his lovely penmanship, which he'd perfected to prove teachers wrong about people who were left-handed. My penmanship is not good, but I love writing and have a lot of fountain pens including one like one of my father's. It has a nib like the one shown here.

This card was made today, day 97, and is marked as the "a" card for the day. It's going to Carla, who's asked us to send her Rabbit related cards for the year of the Rabbit. This cute bunny goes to her.

We're getting the details down for our up-coming trip. I've gotten bunches of little things done, gathering phone numbers, making a calendar to fit in my journal, making a pile of things to take along, finding out about weather (Freezing in London today!) and making sure that our friends are expecting us.

In a week's time, we'll be on the plane headed east. My anxiety has calmed down a lot. I'm practicing with my old school Touch iPod (no camera, no phone) and am getting used to the strangeness (for me) of the key pad. I do like that mistyping gets corrected though the darn thing just doesn't want me to me myself. It keeps changing "Mim" to "Min." That cracks me up. 
What's your favorite every day object?

Drawing series, a change for 93 series.

 Last night, I did some prep work for moving along by cutting up more matt board. I had some of this lovely color and set it on my table for today's play.

 I got up early and went right into my studio. I did a bit of cleaning up, I sharpened some colored pencils, I looked at some old photos I'd taken of Day Lillies, and then I just felt an urge to draw, so I did.   .

These are Marsh Marigolds.

 These are Virginia Bluebells.

This is a Harlequin Lupine.

I used a Sakura 01 Microperm pen (black,) Muji colored pencils and a touch of Fantasia Watercolour Pencil in some places, to do these drawings.

Dewi reminded me that drawing is as addictive as glue stick. He's right. I couldn't stop at one, today.

An assortment of things

My REAL WALL

Wire sketches

Letter openers

Studio view

where I've been spending lots of time

I decided to show you my REAL WALL, which is a term that my IUOMA friend, Andytgeezer, uses to show his postcards. You won't believe how his blog looks like a certain social network site. Check it out here.Such a clever guy! Anyway, my wall is such a jumble these days. Andy's recent Mail Art in on the wall, among other items.

I spend a lot of time at my sewing machine these days in preparation for the Bizarre Market holiday shop. I love the view out my window, nothing but sky and a giant holly tree, and sometimes birds. On the window ledge, I have lots of my small wire sketches.  I collect the wire bindings from old calendars, paper sample books, and others items before the paper part gets tossed into the recycling bin. I make "action sketches" out of the wire.

I've been wanting a letter opener for a long time. I saw one on-line that I wanted but it's no longer available, a very modern metal one by Montblanc (of pen fame.) I went onto eBay and found these two, one a plastic replica of an ivory item and the other a vintage plastic opener. They were each less than a USD. I'm quite happy with both of them. They work!! No more ripping open mail with my fingers, I can nicely neatly slice it open.   I write and receive lots of real mail, and felt badly about wrecking the envelopes. Okay, I know, I could use a knife, but a special opener is cool.

Now back to my studio!

Pens and Pencils

Some of us are really fond of pens, especially fountain pens. I, also, like pencils. I have several mechanical pencils, some vintage, some new. Go here to read about a special pencil that has a lot of fans. Here's a link to see some of  my pens and pencils. What got me started on this topic, well, the article about the pencil on BoingBoing and reading A year of Letters blog this morning. Check it out here.

Pens and Pencils

Here are two photos of the Parker 51. What a beautiful design with the point included in the barrel of the pen. It writes wonderfully well. In the pen group photo, the bottom two pens are by Sheaffer. The dark green transparent barrel one (doesn't show up so well but it's next to the red pen) is the one I remember as the first pen I ever had that used cartridges for ink. We loved not having to lug around bottles of ink. The Red one is a recent design. The upper group includes a Stypen from Paris (green and yellow) which writes very smoothly. Stypen became part of the BIC company but is still it's own brand. The other 2, like the green one in the previous post, which I mistook for a student pen from Paris, are Rotring pens. I now remember I bought all three when they were on sale (Maybe at Kate's in NYC) and I couldn't decide which color I liked best. They, too, write very smoothly.

Besides fountain pens, I like automatic pencils, which keep a point better than a "regular" pencil. I like sharp pencils!



The two pencils to the left are classic Scripto. One is marked Classic Mexico. I remember these from high school. The double pointed pencil has the word Autopoint on the body and clip. Red lead on one end, black on the other; maybe meant for a teacher's marking pencil. The pencil in the middle is a Parker with a gold arrow clip. It feels great in the hand and belonged to my father. The silver metal (aluminum) faceted side pencil is from Muji. I like that I can put it down and it doesn't roll. Next to it is a nice, slim pencil with no identification and I have no memory of where it came from.



The last two items are a boxed set, pencil and ball point pen (which I don't usually like to write with except on certain slick papers) were probably a gift from someone to my husband. The back of the container says GOODWILL with the word Japan under it. The pencil has a nice heavy feeling to it.

So there you have it, my pen and pencil collection, except for one other Waterman pen that has a broken nib and will eventually go to the pen doctor.

So go find a pen, any kind of pen, and some paper and write a letter. Get a nice stamp. Send it off to someone and make their day nicer!