haiku

Back on this post, I mentioned that I was going to add to this spread a haiku I'd written. I finally actually did that and here it is.

Haiku is a very short form of poetry, typically written thusly:

5 syllables
7 syllables
5 syllables

My mother used to write a lot of it when she was young. I played around with them for a while in my twenties but got sidetracked by limericks, which suited my smart-ass personality better.

I just went off to see if I could find any of them, but no luck. Probably just as well...

June prompt - my super power

Roc posts a new prompt each month, which I didn't discover until April or so. I really liked her prompts, so I played catch up and was current for May and June. This month's was 'if you had a super power, what would it be?'
I used a previously painted spread of orange and turquoise, which really pop when next to one another. I journaled in black with neon orange and neon turquoise gel pen on their respective opposite color pages. No images on this one, just mostly writing. I'm still new enough to art journaling that I find myself veering wildly from magazine images to drawing to photos to lettering - no coherent style yet, at least not that I can discern LOL.















I discovered that neon orange gel pen on bright turquoise paint is a bitch to photograph well. The color of the left page is more true in the second photo.

icad 6/14 - 6/17

My index cards for the last 4 days. This is still fun. I expect they'll end up in journals or glued to mail art or something. Don't think I'll want to save them as a set for any reason. I don't have much comment about these. I do them on the couch in the evening, when I'm tired and not up for much else than a 3x5 whatever. So I draw or glue or... I guess that's it, actually - I draw or glue.
Sorry for the crummy image quality. I suppose I should turn on either a light or the flash when it's almost 8pm outside and I'm trying to shoot too far from a window.

be careful what you wish for...

Remember how I was moaning back on June 4th - a whole two weeks ago - about it still being so chilly and gray?

Remember???

Well, just look at next Tuesday.

Tonight

N/A | 60°

Clear

Thu

91° | 57°

Sunny

Fri

88° | 54°

Sunny

Sat

86° | 55°

Sunny

Sun

91° | 60°

Sunny

Mon

98° | 64°

Hot

Tue

101° | 67°

Hot

three gardens

We'll start with last year's garden, which is a sorry mess right now. We blocked it all off from the dog with a fence that I had to sort of crawl under over by a post out of sight on the right. Not gonna do that again.

 

Here is this year's edition. Three Sweet 100 tomatoes. That's it. Gonna be a lot of visit's to the farmer's market this year...

 And last but certainly not least, here is a garden I produced yesterday afternoon in the studio. The background was done a few weeks ago and was nothing special, just mottled pink. But while blog surfing, I saw this on Roben-Marie's blog and was inspired.

This is one of the few times I've ever just cut loose and started throwing stuff on the page. I'm usually little Miss gotta-figure-it-all-out-in-advance, but this was totally off the cuff. I felt myself gettin' in the groove and just letting it flow, and that hasn't happened to me since I started all this art journal stuff. It was great.

The background was acrylics, the flowers and stems were done with water soluble oil pastels gone over with a water brush, the spots were stenciled thru sequin scrap, and the black detailing is acrylic paint using a water brush.

I did just a little journaling after I took the pics, talking about how this was a summer of transition and that this may be my only garden - painted flowers on paper.

I'm absurdly pleased with it. :-))

icad

Index Card A Day = icad. Do something on an index card every day during the summer. Start by June 16 and go thru August. I've been watching this on Daisy Yellow's blog  since she started it. At first, I wasn't real interested, but eventually the pressure got to me and I've been doing them for a few days now. Since the taking a picture/scanning, loading, blogging thing takes time, I'll be posting them a week's worth at a time. I started on the 11th, so here's my first three.

I love pink and green together. My guest room is shabby chic pink and green and I love that room. I have an old quilt on the wall and another on the bed, an old white bookcase, an old sewing machine cabinet painted white for a bedside table. It's a great room. So my first card was pink and green papers. The green is a page from an old book that I painted green for another project and had leftover.

6/12 is a list of things I had to do that day. Housecleaning of any sort is very low on my list of things to do, hence dusting got bumped for shopping. It's colored with Copic markers.

6/13 is a spider wed mandala. I used to always put a spider and web on my crazy quilts, and still like to use that design. More Copics. I love those things...

the night I almost burned the house down

Let me set the scene...

It's a peaceful Sunday evening, about 6pm. I'm puttering around the kitchen, putting together some cheese and crackers, some olives, some salsa, and hey, why don't I toast some tortillas for corn chips. Mmm, that sounds good.

DH is reading on the couch, the dog is sleeping in her chair, the bird is preening, the house is quiet.

I run the cut up tortillas thru one cycle of the toaster but decide I want them crispier. I'm about to get my wish.

As I'm standing there next to the counter gazing into the family room, something catches my attention at the corner of my eye. I turn to look and O!M!G! there's flames shooting out around the edges of the toaster oven door.

In a flash of total non thinking-it-thru-ness, I yank open the door, adding oxygen to the fire, which billows out into the room and begins licking at the underside of the cupboards above.

This whole time (2.5 seconds) I've been saying, "Steve, come here. Steve! Steve, there's a fire!!!"

He's a guy who can tune out the world when he's reading a good book and never even looks up.

Finally I blast him with, "STEVE THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE!!!"


He looks up, swears a lot in a real short time, bolts from his chair and screeches into the kitchen. He grabs the tongs from the drawer and drags the flaming tortilla chips out onto the counter.

I'm shouting, "Do you want me to throw some water on it?!?"

He looks at me like I've lost my mind (water on a plugged-in electrical appliance, even one that's on fire, is apparently not a good idea), unplugs the toaster oven, and suddenly every smoke alarm in the house starts going - BEEP BEEP BEEP  The dog starts to howl.

We look at each other. The fire is out, the cupboards are ok, and we both burst into stress induced laughter. Ha ha ha.

I carried the poor toaster oven out to the patio table, where it sat for two weeks before I remembered to take it to work and put it in the dumpster.

The next morning Steve opens our bedroom door and begins trotting down the stairs. Over his shoulder he throws the line, "Smells like toast..."