orange i lucky?

Just a cool little dish that I found at a thrift store, too cute not to show off. I've never really seen a dish like it before. Is it for sugar? That must be why it's so sweet.

While we're on the subject of orangeness and sweetness. The large orange pot to the right of the dish is currently home to some fledgling avocado plants (if you read my farm-blog over the summer you will recall that I started an avocado once before but a dastardly chipmunk came by and ate it)! I'm pleased as punch to have these wee sprouts growing beside my work station - where I can keep a close eye on them and fend off any chipmunks attacks.

got framed

Whew! Got busy, got out of the habit of blogging - but here I am again!

Tonight's arty project was long overdue - about 7 years overdue in fact.

I've had this small print made by my friend and amazing artist Warren Heise (here's his website) since we were at Sheridan together. I needed to frame it finally because I still think it looks as cool as the day I got it.

Over the years it's lived in various large books, staying nice and flat, waiting for this day. Every now and then I would rediscover it and think, "I should really frame this..."

Well, no more! That little sucker lives on the wall now!

I got the frame from Value Village and the mat is an off-cut from the art store. So altogether this project only cost about $6 (not that the print doesn't deserve to be professionally framed - but I can't afford that extravagance yet! ... also, I have a mat-cutter so making semi-decent-home-framing is possible).

Before:

After:

In situ:

A close-up:

craft-catch-up

So, this is another "catch-up" post to show some little crafty-projects from the last few weeks.

Having a wedding to attend and wanting to spice up my plain black dress, I made a feathery headpiece. I got the supplies at a fly-fishing shop much to the amusement of my fishing-enthusiast-husband.

(Also, I'm showing off the classy way to drink Bourbon - from a teacup, the way Swearingen does in Deadwood. I love this teacup and saucer because it's got the Great Lakes, a cool ship, and the queen all thrown together.)

I scoured through my old button collection to find something for the above "fascinator". I have no explanation as too why there is a small bullet mingling amongst my buttons. Very strange.

This is the area of my house dedicated to bear posters and wall-hangings (you don't know you need an area like this until you have one) :

I'd been struggling to paint the plaque that the shiny bear was attached to, trying to do something ghetto-folksy-fabulous... but I couldn't make it strike the right chord. In the end I ripped the bear off his moorings and made a speech bubble instead.

Below is something I made relating to my dear ol' Dad. He became an amputee when he was 30 years old... on Valentine's Day.

The loss of my Dad's arm is kind of a deep-seeded theme in my family because so many of our stories stem from that (it's even the reason why I started getting all my tattoos on my left arm - it's my "story arm").

This picture is partly about accepting people for being the normal, flawed humans they are.

I have simultaneously revered and villainized my father throughout my life. I used to feel really neglected by him, but I know that a lot of the things I like about myself now are because of how I was raised (by wolves). Anyway, it was time to just let my Dad be on the same level as me and stop looking up to or down on him; time to stop blaming him for some things and start giving him credit for some other things.

Literally it was time to obliterate the "hero" and "zero" labels and accept that my dad is a normal, average human... but also to accept that he is "just" my father. Our lives are our own and we don't owe each other any explanations for the choices we make or the things we do. I'm still working on extracting that parental voicebox lodged somewhere in the back of my brain telling me what to do... or not do.

Anyway, back to Feb. 14th.

I was apparently meant to be born on Valentine's Day but came out a few days late. I'm happy to say that missing the mark on my due date did not plague me throughout life. I've been very blessed in the true-love department.

I don't even know if it's really true that I was supposed to be born on the 14th but I have childhood memories of hearing that and this fact, combined with the lore (and gore) of my Dad's accident, has always given me a heightened and distinctly non-Hallmark appreciation for V-day. I really get the idea of "love-hurts-but-it-hurts-good"... like being struck by cupid's arrow. That's gotta hurt right? I mean, Cupid is cute but we tend to forget he is piercing flesh with projectiles in order to infect us with love.

I have a vivid imagining of my mother receiving, instead of flowers that one Valentine's Day, the news that her husband had crashed. She thought he was dead at first when she saw the base commander and chaplain walking up to the door. I can imagine the physical pain of thinking that your Love is dead. And then I can imagine her on another Valentine's day a few years later, sitting in discomfort, waiting to get this huge, overdue, over-nine-pound baby out of herself but already loving the little thing that was literally about to rip and tear its way out of her.

Ahhhhh Valentine's Day.

Anyway, it's how's that for a Friday afternoon ramble?

(You can click on these to see them bigger y'know?)

This collage was done over top of an iconic "hero picture" of my Dad (before he lost his arm obviously). I've never desecrated it before.

(Geez, I sure do look a lot like him!!)

Moving on, my sister-in-law got married so I made this card. The fabrics and buttons all come from significant places.

And this is just some bread I made. I make bread all the time but I had to take a picture of these loaves because they came out so. fucking. perfectly!

around-the-house-round-up

I learned a good word the other day, "Wunderkammer". It literally means cabinet of curiosities (from the natural world). In the medieval times rich dudes would keep these cabinets (or rooms) full of, well, "cool stuff" basically. They were meant to show how worldly and knowledgeable the person was. There are also "Kunstkammers" and "Rustkammers" (kunst = art, rust = historical).

(by the way, there should be umlauts in some of these words but I'm far too lazy to bother with them...)

I think I've made my whole apartment into a Wunder/Kunst/Rustkammer... only not enough people come over so I'm showing it off on the internet instead. And now I know why I do it... to show off how wonderful and worldly I think I am. haha!

So I've started to think of myself as a curator around here. Though I tend towards "collectorism", I try hard to not to hoard things. I like things to be neat and tidy... and by "neat" I actually mean I want people to come in and look at stuff and say, "oh! that's really neat!" Some people would consider this place "cluttered" but I know it could be A LOT worse if I was undisciplined. Things have to either "beautiful" (to my eyes) or functional or both.

Anyway, I really like old stuff and I enjoy "scavenging" and thrifting. Other people's trash truly is my treasure. There's almost nothing "first-hand" in here anymore (some books, electronics, and undergarments excepted).

Here's a round-up of recent innovations and acquisitions around the house:

The visible man isn't new, just freshly out-of-storage. I wittled a classy new base for him out of wood to replace his old, plastic base. He's "all heart" because I took out all the uglier organs.

Finally found a place to hang "Slap at Park Fence". I'm experimenting with mixing very stiff/traditional-looking things (like this fancily-framed print) with more kitschy items. So here I added a vintage fox postcard and Gumby and Pokey. I think they work well with the comical nature of the print.

The print hangs in the front hallway across from the Queen and some other junk. I attached a milk crate to the wall for winter mittens and scarves.

My farmer-brother-in-law recently had to tear down a really old barn on his farm. It was sad to see it go but time marches on I guess. I went over and cut up one of the old hand-hewn

beams to make some cool cat-scratching-posts.

Scored this old locker-looking cabinet very cheap from Value Village. (Maybe old IKEA? Not sure. Could be old office-ware.) Blinged it out with diamond-esque knobs.

Put wheels (scavenged from something in a dumpster back in the Halifax days) on my old drafting-table stool. Wheeliness is awesome! So mobile!

Ok, this last one is a bit strange. These old plastic dogs came in a bag-o-stuff from a thrift store (there was one item I wanted in the bag, these dogs were leftovers hanging around the house) and before bringing them back to the thrift store I felt inspired to chop them up. I made them into Ukulele-accessory-holders; "Tuner-head" and "Pick-head".

Lucks Lives... yes.

Despite the dearth of posts, I do intend to keep this blog going... I've been busy with summer lately is all...

But who cares? No one's life depends on this blog. I don't even know why I mentioned it...

Here are some random bits of my life, with pictures!

1) I recently discovered the enjoyment of reading poetry - when it's very accessible and not very obscure.

Hot on the heels of that discovery, I learned about this lady, Mary Oliver, who writes about animals and nature. When I went to the library to find her writing, the only book there was "The Truro Bear and Other Adventures". I recently lived in a small, east-coast town called Truro so I was all like, "Signs and Wonders! This is the poet for ME! Woo hoo!!"

Anyway, it hasn't disappointed. I took it out into Nature with me yesterday whilst the Husband fished. The weather was warm, the fish were biting, the bugs weren't, and the words were full of hope and joy. I recommend doing some variation of this activity yourself... soon.

2) I had my very own Double-Rainbow experience on my drawing table today!! (Full on. Intense.)

3) The rainbow-maker:

4) Some things on the ever-morphing-art-shelf right now:

The saw-painting is almost-but-not-quite-done...

The saw is significant but I can't fully explain why yet... I often lack words for explaining my personal-iconography.

The doily is of no personal significance but I thought it looked cute.

Wasaga Beach is the beach of my childhood memories and my sister found this baseball-badge in her cottage there. It is from my birth year.

The acorn is a small memento from a recent anniversary trip.

hobo arts / hobo star

The painting below/right in the photo-triptych has been languishing around the house almost-done for awhile now. I couldn't figure out quite how to "finish" it. Today I applied some more paint to it, promptly washed it all off again, and declared it "done".

The painting was inspired by this weird thing I picked up at a local antique store that was labeled as "hobo art". Hobo Art is a real, collectible type of art/craft which I don't happen to collect... but this was just such a strange little item... I totally fell in love with it.

It's made of string wrapped meticulously around a star shape with a photo of what I presume to be a hobo in the middle. It is a little bit like a Christmas ornament or something.

The painting is kind of a mash up of the star shape and the colours of a quilted pillow I made back in 2001. It has no meaning (yet?) except that I thought it would look cool and it kindof resonates with this one.

As always, you can click for biggerness.

Here is another weird thing I found recently and just had to squirrel away in my nest of curiosities. It is a miniaturized package of herbicide encased in plastic. I have a general fondness for anything floating in plastic and have a bit of a collection - back in the art school days I even encased mementos in resin and plaster myself!

Little, plastic tombs...

Anyway, I thought this was funny because the other things I have are all kind of "dignified" items and this was just... odd. Plus, the herbicide controls for "quacksgrass and nutgrass" and heaven knows we always need to be on guard for quacks and nuts!!

anniversary round-up

Yesterday marked 7 years of being married to a dude who is just awesome. No itches here! "7 year itch"... bah! If anything, it just gets better.

I haven't been very creative in the 2 dimensional realm of late but I wanted to waste time doing a blog post - I'm procrastinating from learning about the new HST tax rules - so here are some pictures of my kingdom during the last few days...

Holding feet:

I recently saw heart-shaped waffles in my friend's pictures of Norway and I instantly wished some Scandinavian would import heart-shaped-waffle-makers to Canada. Apparently someone already did! I went to the thrift store on my anniversary-day and what did I find?!?! See below! What luck!

So I made savory, cornmeal waffles for dinner and topped them with a creamy red-wine/mushroom sauce for syrup... and chicken instead of bacon. I like how the heart-shaped indicator light glows when the waffle iron is plugged in.

Below is a picture I already posted on my "farm-blog" but I really like it. That's the husband in behind the tomato.


In another twist-of-good-fortune, there was wet sidewalk pavement right outside our building when I got home from the grocery/thrift-store trip. I took advantage but it was already pretty dry so I could only manage "R + A" and not our full initials with a cheesy heart.

Sadly, when I went to look at it at the end of the day the workers had come back and scuffed it out (plus a few others). Kill joys!

I have to mention the other cool thrifty items I got.

A Stephen Leacock tea cup. He was a famous Canadian humourist, which is why I picked it up. I found out when I goggled him at home that his was also a bit of an conservative jerk that didn't believe women should vote. Oh well. Still a cool-looking tea cup and now I will just take pleasure in getting my spit on his face when I drink tea from him...

A $5 portfolio! It's in really good shape. Looks like it was never used. Most of my artwork is small and I don't have to carry it around very often but this will still be handy for storing stuff in!

And how did Husband and I spend the rest of the evening? After eating our heart-shaped dinner we broke into a new TV show, "Community". It is REALLY funny! I don't know how I missed it until now! I love this Abbed character:


Oh, I think I've kicked the friendship-bracelet-bug. Back to making other stuff: