Mother's Day, Mail art sent and received and more

 Beautiful Sunday, perfect for a drive to our friend's pottery open house. This is the annual Mother's day trek that N and I make.

 Our friends have a beautiful garden and we love taking photos of their flowers as soon as we arrive.

 The scent of their roses is wonderful.

 They've got tons of these Irises.

 This dove is #159 and I used some of the paper tape, my first try out. Liked it, more to come with tape! This little fellow is flying off in today's mail though he was created yesterday.

 Today's mail art is going to "Make a Spectacle of Yourself" the mail art call I did for Carytown Optical. There's still time to send in your entry.

 This is a piece of mail art that I received on Saturday, from Dean in France. It's part of a cardboard box, with a painting on the reverse. It's amazing to me that this made it all the way to me in the USA from France, as it's sort of a flappy, loose item. Amazing. Meanwhile, my little package sent to the U.K. never made it. It's so interesting to see what gets around.

This is a lovely sight in my neighborhood. The mounted police. I heard them before I saw them. We had a brief chat as they passed by and then I thought, oh I have my camera with me, and by the time I got it out, we get the back end. So it goes. I love the sound, clip clop clip clop, so old timey.

Happy Mail Box

 Someone sent me this wonderful tube of paper tape! I don't know who gifted me with it but I can't wait to do something with it.

 My dear friend Andrea in the U.K. surprised me with this packet of Peppermint tea, which I love and I loved receiving this. Thank you so much.

 Another of my dear friends, Katerina, in Thessaloniki, sent me mail art AND a copy of her son's book. The text is by a woman, but don't read Greek, so don't know how to translate her name. The photos are by Petros Nikoltsou. The book is about Los Angeles. See the Title? Now you can read some Greek.The photos are just perfect for the subject.

A new friend of mine, whom I hope to meet someday, here or in San Francisco, sent me a ravioli box full of goodies. All Asian, of the kind we do not see here in RVA, plus a CD of a local band. An amazing box of goodies.


I am overwhelmed and humbled by the generosity of my friends.

#157 & 158 series of my Mail art 365 project

#157

 I decided to get back to the 3 or 4 element collage. I'd cut out a lot of words recently while catching up on some TV programs (okay, confession, I do watch TV.) I decided to ramdomly combine words with images. The first one is this REAL one. I like the little seaside town, but can't remember where it is. Watermelon fit the color scheme.

#158

 The birds were waiting to be used so I decided to continue the 3 or 4 item, random word theme with them. Interestingly, for me, is that they end up being narratives. What do you think? They tell some kind of story?

#158a

 The photo is an old view of the Brooklyn Bridge.

#158b

#158c

This little pup was riding in a woman's purse in some fashion advert. The background is from the same image as the big baby in the landscape (#101)

Mail art #156s and another peak at the patio

 I realized that today was the 5th and that our neighbors south of our border celebrate this date, so I got out my sampler set of tiny tubes of watercolor and got busy. What fun. I'm really enjoying doing watercolor pieces.  I noticed that I forgot to do the stem on this one, so I had to back into it, but didn't feel like re-scanning. This one is my favorite of the three, the 3 one that I made. I got better at it!

 This is the first of the cards. I didn't quite have the watercolor technique I wanted, like leaving white spaces for sheen.

 This was the second card I did and I was feeling better about what I was doing.

Here's the back garden/patio as of this morning. Oh boy, I'm so excited. The plants in the back area are going to be planted tonight, I think. There are some lights around the tree and in the planted area. This is soooo exciting. We'll inaugurate the patio end of the month with a party! Celebrate!

Mail art #155, a landscape

I awoke to find that it was raining, and so today I had to make a card that reminded me of one of our days on the road, with sun shining, puffy white clouds in the blue sky, and fields, green and yellow, with trees in the distance. Indiana? Ohio? Take your choice.

I want to do more drawing and watercolor mail art, though it won't help me use up the paper in my studio. One of my goals with the 365 project was to get rid of my paper stash.  However, I'll be teaching a workshop in June and will provide materials, so I think maybe lots of my scraps might "disappear."

#154 and some landscapes

 Today's mail art, completed just moments ago, because today somehow got very busy. I can't believe we got home late last night. I feel like I never was away, except for that slightly discombobulated feeling having been in a different time zone.  To relive my journey, I'm posting some of the many landscape photos I took through the window in the car.

 Midwest, big sky, lovely clouds.

 La Porte, Indiana, on our way out of town. This row of trees was so lovely.

 Power lines, awesome sky.

 Back in Virginia, where it was much greener than Indiana and the rolling hills, and tree covered old mountains were comforting.

 We saw this up ahead. Traffic was stopped as this very, very large truck made a turn. We didn't know what the load was, until our nephew remembered seeing the huge windmills that we'd passed. They weren't working yet.







Closer look - it's a portion of the windmill structure. HUGE. It was nice to see that they were being installed, taking advantage of nature to create energy.

Sneak peak at the back yard/garden. We returned home to find that our patio was almost complete, with the landscaping part yet to be done. So happy. Here's the pattern of the bricks.

Mail art on the road, #152 & 153, and some interesting sights.

 Mail made while traveling.   I found this house in a brochure at our hotel, and it's been mentioned that the house looked like the one used on the Roseann Barr show (do I remember that?) I guess it's a typical house of that area.  I made this card on Sunday.
After Brunch on Sunday, we headed home to Virginia.

We stayed over night near Athens, Ohio, and I made this card on Monday, in the car.

 Here I am, on Friday, mailing Thursday and Friday's cards in a town  in Ohio, somewhere. I didn't get any photos of me mailing the others. Saturday's I gave to the hotel clerk. Sunday and Monday's cards were handed to the Postal worker outside the post office in Amherst, Virginia. Whew.

 We met the Big Boy on our way to Indiana. I can't remember what state we were in, but he was quite big and my niece and I had our photo taken with him.

 Our nephew stopped to show us this site in Virginia on our way home. He said it had been a restaurant but now it's not used for anything, though it appears to be taken care of.  We were stopped in a cut through of a median strip on a busy road. Aaagh, scary. What we do for our blog.

This looks like a doll's house, right? It's the view down to a portion of the lobby from our hotel room at the Best Western in La Porte, Indiana. Quite a suprise to see this.