Saturday Cornucopia

Can't. Stop. Making. Tumbler. Quilt. Send Help. Seriously I do believe I am almost done now, and just need to stop cutting more until I sew together the rows and rows and rows I've got so far. And I found a nice spirally black fabric to use for the ends of each row to make a nice border/frame.

Ahh. So nice to have Mr.Super Husband back home again from an extended trip to China and Japan.

This isn't a picture of us, just a couple of sleeping peccaries at the zoo I recently snapped.
It kind of sums up how we feel when we're back together, everyone say awwww.

This picture reminds me of the one above in texture and lighting but not so much in content.

Oh and here's what our new floors look like. Bamboo flooring from Costco, looks great, feels great. Slowly moving our stuff back in and re-evaluating what we actually want in the nice, new-looking living room. Poor Zelda The Wonder Dog is having trouble slipping on the floor though, I think I need to get her some grippy booties or something.

Sunset Open House

Do you get Sunset magazine? It is one of those indispensable home and garden magazines that is always useful and inspiring. Their headquarters is pretty close to me, and I got to go to their big open house Celebration Weekend event.
The reason I actually went this year was because my brother and sister-in-law and niece came up for a visit. My parents also came along for the fun. No pictures of the extremely cute niece and other family members as I forgot to ask them if they cared or not if I published them on my blog, whoops! Take it from me, my niece is way more interesting and way cuter than this stuff.
Anyways, here is a picture of part of the garden. I always love the gardening section in the magazine and was most excited about seeing the Sunset gardens.

Doesn't that just shimmer and glow, it really comes through in this picture. I'm going to try this in my front yard, because I don't think the deer will eat this sharp tough grass.

There wasn't too much to the gardens, which was kind of disappointing, I expected more in that department.There was a whole section of camping stuff, and I really loved this teardrop trailer.

An inadvertent self portrait! Doesn't it look so cozy in there?

This is kitchen is so well designed, really impressive.Speaking of kitchens, here is the test kitchen. We got to hear all about their setup, how they test the recipes, making sure to use equipment that normal folks have in their own home kitchens, and how the leftovers are quickly consumed by all the people who work at the magazine.

Most of the event was vendors, which wasn't too terribly exciting. I loved this rust metal spiral hanging lamp.

This gizmo was cool, you get four of these metal braces, slide in boards, and presto, a garden box!

One of the vendors was Tillamook cheese, isn't this the cutest? A squashed VW bus all tricked out in cheesy orange. We didn't get any samples because the line was super long.

It was fun to see where this magazine that I've long subscribed to is put together, and I'm glad I got to hang out with my family.

Early Summer Cornucopia

Where have I been lately?

Down by the riverside, in the cool cool shade.

Marveling at what is left behind after a winter's worth of storms.

Taking inadvertent self portraits.

Eating strange concoctions like this trail mix I made up, raw almonds, raisins and raw pumpkin seeds.Watching my son, Zach play timpani and other percussion instruments in the school band 3 times in 3 weeks. He had quite the crowd of young fans at the all-district band concert, elementary school through high school all together.

Or home painting the two story high living room.
No wonder I haven't gotten much artwork done, flitting from one thing to the next is just how this season goes.

Chickens!

Yes, we finally decided to get back into raising chickens. Here are our four new girls a few days after bought them. Not sure how many weeks they were, definitely not baby chicks, pre-teens maybe? This is only our second time having chickens, so I am by no means an expert. I still have to look up what breed they are, hope they're good layers!

Faster than a speeding chicken? They are super fast, and two of them jump straight up when startled. Right now they are in the downstairs bathtub with a heatlamp and the exhaust fan on. This picture is from two weeks ago, so now they are just about big enough to put outside, we're going to try it in a small pen today and see how they do.

So far no names, but when I end up with trippy pictures like this, perhaps be looking for some 1960's counterculture monikers like O'Leary, Lucy, Janis and Jerry.

Random Recycling or Refashioning

What do you do with a perfectly good, but old and kinda yucky looking bulletin board? The silver framing was still in good shape so I decided I didn't want to cover it up, but the cork part was chewed up and written on and needed to be rehabbed somehow. I already have a bulletin board in my work space, but it is completely filled up and I really like the way it looks and don't want to take anything down off of it just yet. So instead of throwing this old bulletin board away I'm decided to recycle and repurpose it just for me.

In my stash I found a good olivey mottled olive green with an interesting black print, this reminds me of those pretty iron fences you see in European gardens. I chose this fabric because I thought the color of it would look good with my orange wall where the bulletin board will be going when it is all done. I carefully ironed a hem on all four sides, continually checking that it was going to fit to cover the cork as close to exactly as I could manage. I actually ironed on the bulletin board, which worked out with no singeing of cork. I also tried to keep the linear design of the fabric straight, on the off chance that it being slightly askew would actually end up bothering me.I was going to glue down the fabric to the bulletin board surface around the edge, but I decided to forgo the glue and go straight to thumbtacks. Impatient much? Um, yes! I wanted to attach some black satin ribbon in angles across the surface so I used the ladybug thumbtacks I'd been saving "for something". Instead of measuring or figuring out ahead of time a sensible pattern, I just kind of went for it until I ran out of black ribbon. I found that I had to keep pulling and smoothing the fabric as I went to keep it taut and flat enough, but it worked out pretty well in the end.And here it is all done. Pretty random, but I like it. Reminds me of those spiderwebs that the spiders given various hallucinogenic drugs make.

And no, I haven't put anything up on it yet, so I don't actually know that it works to hold anything at all besides black ribbon...

Questioning The Comfort of Psychedelic Frogs

Here is Week 20 of the year long six word memoir quiltlet project I'm doing. It is a bright one, can you tell where the scraps came from that I used?

The words say:

Are Psychedelic Frogs Really So Comforting?

I guess I was questioning whether or not the comfort quilt that I made to donate out of my kid print stash was really actually comforting or perhaps disturbing (too bright, too much, too something).

All those colorful numbers on the selvedge, I just couldn't toss 'em.

Big, Small and Fun

More Maker Faire pictures, if you can stand it. I just found so many inspiring things to photograph, like this knitted argyle giraffe. It was in the Lion Yarn booth, the leaves were felted I think, and the grass is yarn. Such a great and very unexpected combination.

You have to watch out for the cupcake cars scooting around through the crowd, they actually get going pretty fast, I was glad to catch this shot with just the car. Don't you love the fake fur chocolate brown frosting around the edge, and the driver's thrilled and goofy expression?There were some great metal work fire sculptures. This one was huge and shiny and sort of menacing and I really wished we could have seen it at night. It was weird you could walk right up to and under it, which was a little bit scary.The rotating ball o'fire, note the fire extinguisher close at hand.

There was a great display of early cars, one of which was a replica of the first Ford. This was my favorite picture, a close up of the oil-filled glass bulbs. So delicate and fragile and essential and unprotected.

Apparently there is to be a Maker Faire in Detroit this summer which the Ford rep was very excited to tell us about.

Don't you wish your car wheels looked this cool? Check out the gears right behind too.

There's the only picture of me from the Maker Faire, upside down and headless.

Another enormous sculpture, this one was rotating (thus the warning cones) and hard to capture all the pieces without some blurring.
I just am inspired and intrigued by all these people just making these enormous things, for all kinds of reasons. It is great to be reminded that there is a whole lot of untapped creative energy out there.

The Future Is Now

I apologize for leaving you hanging for a week without any posts, there has been a major upheaval at home as we moved absolutely everything upstairs so that the downstairs could finally get some flooring installed. My goodness we had even more stuff than I thought we did, will we take this opportunity to finally purge all the excess?? Hopefully! We also painted the big walls of the downstairs, figuring that we'd rather not mess up the brand new floors with paint splotches.

So, after that week's worth of effort I'm back to continuing on with some Maker Faire pictures. First up is: R2D2 on the loose, delighting the crowds (as well as the owner/controller of course). These little robots have so much personality.
Caged R2D2's. When will they be set free??
There is an actual club of R2D2 builders, who knew? I like how this picture makes it seem that the R2D2s are protecting the people from the paparazzi.
Zach playing the Xylo-Van. I love the clouds reflected in the van's windows.
Rocket ship to the stars. I didn't try going in it, the line was too long and the ladder pretty high, but it sure has a great shape doesn't it? It was fun to catch sight of it out of the corner of your eye, made me feel like I was in a scifi movie set in the future.