ON MY TABLE: A NEW PROJECT, AND A NEW CIRCLE JOURNAL

Well, I'm ready to give Jane's "Transparent Foregrounds" project another go. This time I'll try to do it up right, maybe even follow the instructions. To start with, I got myself some proper tracing paper. Now I'm in the process of gathering up all kinds of bits and bobs to form the textured under-layer. 

So far I've got part of a beautiful soap wrapper, some glistening marbled tissue paper, sheet music, a gift tag, another tag from some clothing or jewelry I bought, and a few bits of scrapbook paper. That red floral piece with two holes was the chopstick holder next to my plate when we dined at Uchi. That's the problem with this multi-media/art journaling stuff. Every time you start to throw something away, you end up thinking "Hmmmm, wonder if I could use this in a project someday? Maybe I'd better save it." Next thing you know, you're smothered in clutter! The other problem is that I'm absolutely loving the way these colors have melded -- so much so that I now hate the thought of covering it all up with tissue paper. So I'm not...covering it all, that is. Instead I think I might do several small tissue sketches, cut them out right along their outlines, then collage them on here and there. We'll see.

Meanwhile, Circle Journal number three has arrived at my house!

This one belongs to Jeanne, and she too has chosen to use an altered book as her journal. I can't tell you how exciting it is to examine each new journal that shows up -- especially now that you can see examples of several different hands at work in each one, while knowing that the same thing is happening to yours as it works its way around the circle. I won't be showing you the actual projects in them, as I don't want to spoil the surprise for their owners. However, rest assured, once mine finally makes its way back home, I will share everything that is in it! I do have permission, though, to show you the books themselves, and how their owners have crafted them.

Jeanne's Inside Cover. CUH-YOOT!

Her Title Page

My favorite part is this that you see above. Instead of a "sign-in page", Jeanne created several pages of these little rural mailboxes sitting on a fence rail, and each artist who adds to her journal gets to decorate one of her own.

How precious is that? Now all I have to do is think up something equally as cute to add to it!

ART GRABBERS II

The second time a piece of art reached out and grabbed me, I was at a party in Indonesia, at my next door neighbors house. After seeing me stuck in my mesmerized state for a good long while, the hostess finally came over to check on me. "What on earth is this?" I asked. "Is it a water color, or what?" "Heavens no", she replied. "It's batik!" No way. I'd seen plenty of batiks before. They were those garish florals you saw in all the tourist shops, and they looked absolutely nothing like this!

At the Fabric Stall

Turns out these were made by an elderly man named Azziz.  He created these masterpieces in a little workshop behind his house, which was in Medan, right there on Sumatra, just a short trip on the company plane from us. I got there just as fast as I could...

Harvest Time

and went back to see him about once a year...

Fruit Sellers

until we were sent home.

EXPERIMENTAL PLAYTIME: AUTUMN ASPENS

I've spent the last couple of days playing with a Jane Lafazio tutorial that I downloaded from Cloth Paper Scissors. It's all about textured backgrounds and transparent foregrounds. Jane made her "bumpy, lumpy, nubby" backgrounds by covering pages with a variety of papers, fabrics, tags, etc. I was in a hurry to get started, however, so I just used a page that was already in my journal, where I had squirted a bunch of paint and spread it around with a credit card.

I added some more acrylic paint, in more colors, to one like this.

The next step was to create a transparent focal point by making some black ink sketches on sheer paper. I didn't have any artist tissue on hand, or at least, none that I could find, so I just grabbed my kitchen parchment paper. The colors reminded me of aspens -- not something that grows around here, but something I remember from my family's yearly trips to Colorado -- so that is what I sketched. I made several different sketches, on small bits of parchment, then played around with how I wanted to arrange them on the page. Once I was satisfied, I started gluing them down with gel medium, and that's where I ran into a bit of trouble.

I couldn't get the tissue to stay smooth!  Jane advised that the trick to having the tissue dry transparent was to get the piece totally saturated with glue. Well, the only one of my four sketches that stayed even semi-smooth was the one with the least amount of glue on it, and guess what? Not only was it not at all transparent, the next day it popped back up off the page! So I slathered it with glue, wrinkles be damned.

I've almost got myself convinced that the wrinkles actually give the trees great wood-like texture.

Still, I can't help wondering how, even though I was layering over a nice smooth under-layer while Jane was layering over all that nubby textured stuff, her pages all ended up looking as smooth as glass in the photos!

THE ART THAT GRABBED ME GAME

I have never claimed to be an art connoisseur.  To tell you the truth, for the first twenty or so years of my adult life, I chose all of my art according to how reasonable the price and how well it went with my decor. In fact, the masterpiece over my fireplace in those days was a Monet print I ordered from Spiegel catalog, which made my artist mother-in-law a wee bit crazy. The trouble with buying art in this way, I later discovered, is that after a while, you just quit seeing it. All that changed when we moved back to Indonesia.

Just a few months after we arrived, there was a school holiday, and we joined several other families on a little trip to a resort in Penang, Malaysia. One day when we were exploring in town, I came across these two paintings in a street stall, and something about them stopped me in my tracks.

They cost way more than I would normally spend, and they weren't really even my colors, but, though I tried to walk away from them several times, something kept pulling me back. Eventually my hubby said "Just buy them, for Pete's sake!"

If you look closely at the people, they are almost child-like in the way they are drawn, and yet something about these images just mesmerizes me. They've had a prime place in every house since -- a place where I can stand right in front of them and lose myself in their imagery. Even now, almost 20 years later, if I do this? I can actually smell the spices from the food vendors and the clove scented cigarettes that most of the men smoked, and hear the chattering voices, honking horns, bicycle bells, and the scratchy music drifting out from the shops. It's the next best thing to time travel!

There have been a few other instances over the years, where art just grabbed me and wouldn't let go. It wasn't until recently that I finally realized they all had something in common. I'll be sharing some of them with you in the coming weeks, and we'll make a game of it, to see who can figure out what that common thread is -- and no, it isn't the thing about time travel!

A TINY BIT OF HOPE

I suck at growing vegetables. And indoor plants. I do great with natives and perennials, not so great with edibles. In fact, I can't tell you how many times I've sworn "This is it! I give up!" This summer I'd had it for certain. Nothing in my veggie beds produced. My full size tomatoes came out looking like cherry tomatoes. My green bean plants looked great at first, produced a few scrawny beans, then got speckled foliage and all crapped out at once. I did get a few potatoes, but my arugula seeds never even germinated, and only one of my cucumbers did, Unfortunately, that one never really took off. By the end of summer it was no bigger than when it started. Granted, it was supposed to be a dwarf, space-saving variety, but sheesh!

At the end of August I went out to rip everything up, and guess what I discovered? My little cucumber plant had a sudden growth spurt!

I even spotted a bit of yellow between the leaves.

The real surprise came when I began lifting those big fat leaves, to check for more blooms, and found this.

My very first, gen-u-ine, home grown cucumber! And that's all it took to have me ready to dive back into veggie-growing head first. Just a tiny bit of hope.

P.S. One thing I noticed was that, unlike those dark, waxy-smooth cucumbers you get at the grocery store, my cucumber was kind of, well, spiny. Prickly even. Is that normal? And how do you know when a cucumber is ready to be picked?

GIRLS JUST WANNA HAVE FUN: POSTCARDS FROM THE PAST

The results of my family album foraging:

 

SIMPLE HAPPY

Is there anything better than enjoying an unexpected Hill Country rainstorm from one's favorite perch on the porch?

Well yes, actually, there is! It's knowing that you now have a full 12,500 gallons of water in your rain tank, and that you supplied your whole house with water throughout an entire Texas summer without ever having to purchase any even once. It was a very good summer, by Texas standards.

Know what? It got me to thinkin'. I'm thinking that we (and when I say we, of course, I actually mean my hubby) really need to add a bit of gutter to our little pump house. I'm pretty sure we still have one or two of those old green plastic rain barrels from Smith & Hawken lying around somewhere. If we had them catching the runoff from that one tiny roof, I could then use that to water my two little veggie beds, which happen to by right smack dab next to the pump house. Even better yet would be if they could somehow be attached to soaker hoses that run down the middle of each bed. Yes, "we" really ought to do that, don't you agree?