A new year!

#1

 Happy New Year!

The holiday season has come and gone and my wrists no longer ache from production knitting, and a new year has begun.

I decided to grab some pieces out of the tin of colored paper. My grand and I have been making circles so I have a lot of paper with holes punched out of them. Layering them makes for a lively piece of Mail Art, I think. 

#2

 Working with this old colored paper is fun but frustrating in that I have to keep it really clean as it marks easily and if glue gets on it, it doesn't clean up nicely. Oh, am I a bit too precise here. It's ONLY Mail Art! And I noticed, when we saw the Matisse Cut Out show that he wasn't precise or neat. And his work is so amazing!

 Our trip to New York City was really good. We saw that Matisse Cut Out show at MoMA, and M took us to the Noguchi Museum in L.I.C. after we went to PS1 in Queens. Really liked both of those museums. My first time for the Noguchi.

The weather was okay, not very cold, though rainy the first couple of days. But who cares when shoes are bright!

This is a view out a bathroom window in PS1. I was on a quest for boring photos for the Boring group that I'm part of. It turned out to be not so boring to me.  Since I've been looking for things to photograph that are boring, I've had a very interesting time. Go figure.

And FYI, summary of my Mail Art 2014 - I made and sent 256 numbered cards. I send a few un-numbered but can't remember how many so maybe I'll round up to 260. I'm pleased with that considering I'm NOT doing a 365 project.

Now, on to my resolution - getting rid of stuff daily, even it only one item. I was proud of myself, I threw away my old date stamp that didn't go beyond 2014 when I got my new one that started with 2015. I did think momentarily of the possibility of the old one being a sought after vintage item in the future. But tossed it anyway. YAY, me! Good start to 2015.

Did you make a resolution? or two?

Mail Art and the Storm Part2

 View from my kitchen window this afternoon. We left the screen in so it caught the drops and gives a nice filtered look. The rain isn't torrential but the wind has picked up. Hello Sandy!

#86

I thought this would be nice for yesterday's storm watch.

#87

This minimal Mail Art works nicely for me. I really do like working with 3 elements to see how I can make an impactful composition. I think this one works nicely. The man is from the background of a still for the movie " A Bout de Souffle" (Breathless) by Godard. I remember seeing that when I was young and being so impressed with it. 


This is what my side porch looks like usually. My honey has hung a striped cloth to divide the area closest to the back door, with it's chair and a little table, from the back of the porch.

Here's what happened today with the wind blowing. The wind lifts the curtain every time there's a gust. Now you can see what's behind the curtain. The yard furniture was brought it so it didn't get tossed around, and there are our recycle bins, plus assorted other stuff.   No porch sitting today!

 Ingredients for making cookies, yesterday.

 Here they are, crunchy oatmeal cookies.
Today, I made pumpking muffins. Must keep busy baking. Come on over and have tea with me!

On the road again & #149

 I created this piece of Mail Art in the car on the way west, heading to Indiana. We're on a road trip with our niece and nephew! What fun. Tonight, we're staying over in Ohio. More than half way to our destination.

This is on the road in Virginia, however, not today. I took it the other weekend when we were headed down to Lynchburg to pick up my honey's art work from a gallery. It was lovely on the way down, but on the way back, a storm. Not as bad as this weeks storms, to be sure.  Tomorrow, we start out again, early, Indiana bound.

A chilly, gray day & Mail Art (#49)

 We awoke to a gray day. Freezing rain was predicted but looking out I saw no rain, then realized that the rain from the evening before had frozen on the tree branches. It made them look so pale and the light reflected off of them making them sparkle.

 In my yard, after returning from the post office this morning, I was able to capture the moment before the temperature rose above freezing. These little drops hung on a few minutes longer and then were gone.
Magical!

 This is the way the lobby looked while I waited on a very short line at the main post office. It was empty! I was sure that the day after a holiday, two days without mail delivery, it'd be packed. I was happy it wasn't, you can be sure.

 Here's what the main post office looks like from the parking lot. It's so official looking (to state the obvious.) What do you think, 1950s era architecture?  I do like the continuous verticals created by the windows and the spaces between, even if the entire thing not very attractive. 

Today's mail art for MailArt365 came about because I wanted to use the big veggies and the little girl, who was waiting patiently in one of my tins. I almost put too many pieces on this and stopped myself just in time. Whew. What do you think? Not too busy, right?

A drizzly day! Finally.

Today, we have gray skies and light rain. Finally! We're in a drought and may have water restrictions, or not, so the drizzle is welcome. However, it meant that we didn't have pool time this morning. Here's photo of the pool from earlier this week. Isn't that water so pretty? It's salty and very clear.

I changed up my nail polish two days in a row. The colors looked good with the pool water so I thought I'd take photos and share them. I'm totally silly about nail polish. Cheap fun!

A storm, a dove, and a sunset.

A storm was approaching last night, but we made it home before it hit. Winds over 60mph/96kph were predicted. Luckily, it wasn't that bad at our place.


We have a dove nesting on our sill, behind the little magnolia tree sprouting next to our air conditioner.  The air conditioner makes noise and blows a lot of air when it's on but the dove just sits still, with it's black eye looking out at us when we stop to check on her. I took the photo of her looking left, my son took the photo of her looking to the right a few days before.

Tonight the sunset was gorgeous. I loved the view of the clouds, the sun rays, and the parking lot lamp coming on.

Horribly rainy days

This is a view of the walk way during a brief lull in the stormy day. We, fortunately, can keep ourselves busy. Mom is reading a lot, and in this photo she's wearing a scarf she made yesterday. Behind her is one of the pillows she made since I've been here and below is a pillow cover she's working on for her son-in-law Jerry.
Mom loves stuffed toy animals. The lady bug is one that I brought her this trip and the monkey is one she's had awhile. It used to make a noise, an awful noise, but Mom got a kick out of it. My sister decided to do some monkey surgery and opened up the toy to see how it worked. Well, it had tiny batteries in it and my sister just by chance had the necessary three tiny batteries. She popped them in, sewed the monkey back up, and now: it makes this awful noise! Mom is delighted with it. Fun on a rainy day. It's raining now and will continue to rain. Southern California in the winter time is not so sunny!

Mercredi (Wednesday)

The rainy night scenes are actually from Tuesday night after we went to the opening of the Patrick Mimran show. I waited outside of Franprix while Chuck was getting some wine. It was lovely with the reflections. Yesterday, we went shopping for groceries. Here's what we got. Notice that we got 3 packets of cookies and chocolate bars. Chuck loves those LU and Bon Maman cookies. Also, notice that I used my KootSacs for the produce. The clerk thought that was bon. I got a Comte cheese and a thick slice of Boucheron. The latter is SO creamy and not terribly expensive. I had intended to make an omelet for us after hearing a concert.

The concert was performed by Kiyoko Lerner, in honor of her husband, Nathan Lerner. He's the man whose exhibit we'd seen at MAHJ the other day. We were pretty happy that we'd gotten the information in time to get tickets for the concert. Maya, who is in my French class, and is a pianist, came with us. We really liked the concert very much. The program included Mozart, Beethoven, Messiaen, and Dvorak. We hoped to speak with Mrs. Lerner afterwards and happily, we did. We were all invited to the post concert reception. There was champagne, wine, hors d'oeuvres, desserts. We were very surprised and pleased, of course. We got to speak with Mrs. Lerner (who invited us to see her Bob Nickle print - he was our Prof at U of I, Navy Pier-when we were in Chicago next) and Maya got to speak with her, and her sister, who'd just arrived from Tokyo. There were also many other Chicagoans there and we exchanged e-mails. We finally headed home about 11 p.m. feeling very uplifted by the entire experience. And I didn't have to make dinner!

Roving Spectacle InLight Nite

The students from the YAV workshop gathered at 1708Gallery for the First Friday InLight event. It was storming outside. We had the rains from hurricane Hannah in our town, but the teens were up for a walk in the rain. They WERE the Spectacle, along with a couple art cheerleaders and a group of hardy small children from the Visual Arts Center, lead by Sarah Hand. Fearless folks who lined the street got a treat from these wonderful teens with their art poles. A really fine night and the wet streets helped with the reflections. Great work everyone! See My Vox Blog for more photos.

NYC memories of the weekend.

Lots of candles at El Diablo Royale in the West Village and excellent Mexican food. We had a good cup of coffee and a honey sweetened muffin at a shop by Washington Square on Saturday morning. We popped into a nice little place on west 10th, a glass of bubbly, a view of the rainy street, cozy us enjoying being together.

Rainy day look at the Elflog

We've finally had some rain, what a relief; the shelf had stones and a Picasso "birds" magnet on it, looking cheerful in the mistyness of the morning yesterday. The leaves have started to fall off the trees but there is still a lot of green going on.