peaches, peppers, tomatoes - oh my!

Did a drive-by photo shoot this morning before I ran out the door to garage sale a bit before heading to work. We're having a great time with our garden, walking around it morning and evening, pointing out new developments such as the 5 inches the zucchini grew in the 10 hours we were at work. Zucchini is crazy. So is fennel, we've discovered. Our fennel plant that started out about 6 inches tall is now about four and a half feet. Unreal. I didn't know it could even get that big. Our basil is insane too. I'll post tomorrow about the basil and my first pesto making effort. Meantime, here's this morning's pics.

First up, these are San (somethings) can't remember.  San Marzanos maybe.
They aren't Romas but some other paste tomato that grows long and skinny.
Very cute and quite prolific.
We have high hopes of making spaghetti sauce if enuf of them ripen at once.

Green Early Girls.
I usually don't have much luck with full size tomatoes but these are doing great,
prolly cause it's the first year using the dirt. Tons of green ones on the plant. 

And almost ripe Early Girls.
I'm going to eat tomatoes on everything from eggs to sandwiches to buttered toast.
We made bruschetta the other night and it was amazing. We used to order it at
California Pizza Kitchen as an appetizer and loved it. The batch we made was
every bit as tasty. Ate it on toasted French bread with a slice of mozzarella on top
straight out of the broiler. O.M.G. It was good.
I love fresh backyard tomatoes and altho these may indeed cost the proverbial
$300 each, I don't care. We've gotten a ton of enjoyment from the garden this year

Either banana peppers or Anaheims, not sure.
We have 12 or 14 different types of peppers growing and I just can't
keep them all straight. Always have to look at the little tag.
We've been putting them in scrambled eggs, stuffing them with a variety of things,
sticking them on our lunch sandwiches, just trying lots of things
cause we have so many.

And last but certainly not least - ripening peaches.
Aren't they lovely? I'm so thrilled to have fruit trees after living in CA for 30
and never having any. There are 9 or 10 peaches on the tree
and they all look about like this - hard as a baseball
but starting to look like a real peach.

Lenna's prayer flag swap

Lenna has got a prayer flag swap going and I think there are a few spots left. Altho I'm not a religious person, once I read up on prayer flags, I liked the concept well enough to join. Pretty much the only requirements were a final size of 5" wide x 8" tall with a sleeve at the top for hanging.

I started out with a couple old damask napkins from my stash, no telling when I bought them but for sure they're from a thrift store. I cut them into the proper sizes, then did some stamping on a few of them with an old Tibetan wood block I got from a weird little junk store when I first moved to CA. It didn't print real well, so I lost my oomph for the project and they sat on my work table for a couple weeks.

Then I decided to dye the fabric with various spray inks and distress stains. That was a lot of fun and I got happy with them again. Did some more stamping with a dot-textured roller from my husband's Garage of Gadgets and made some big arcs with the cardboard inner roll from a large roll of packing tape.

Found a scrap of upholstery fabric sample from years ago when my friend Moneka gave me literally boxes of sample books that an upholstery store had put in a dumpster near her house. I've gotten a lot of mileage from those samples. Stamped "confidence" on it in turquoise ink, then cut it into strips. I went thru my drawers of lace and pulled out bits and pieces of trims I'd dyed over the years.

When Julie was here last weekend we went to the Lace Museum in Sunnyvale where they had a 'fill a bag with scraps for free' thing going. Among the things I got was a large piece of quite damaged pale yellow cut-work that was perfect, so I cut a piece for each flag. Stitched everything onto the flag with various aqua and blue plain old floss, then added some beads to hold the lace on. Folded the top over to make a sleeve with a running stitch.

The three shown here are for the swap. My two mail art buds are also in the swap so we're each making two more to swap among ourselves. We'll end up with 5 flags which is a nice number to hang in the back yard or craft room. The ones I made for them are a bit different - don't want to give it away before we swap them in Sept.

A simple enjoyable project made completely from things I had on hand. Doesn't get much better than that. Soon they'll be dispersing confidence vibes into the air. Lenna's swaps get people from all over the world, so no telling where they'll end up.

freebie 1900 magazine pages

I bought two Home Needlework Magazines as part of a 3-for-$5 deal at the local antique mall. Here are some pages from the back of the January 1900 issue. The crazy low prices just amaze me when you think about what a similar item costs today.

Use however you like, just please don't sell the images as themselves.

freebie 1912 postcard

Here's a postcard sent to my mom's mother in 1912. She apparently had signed up to sell things for a company to earn prizes, but hadn't kept up her end of the bargain, and they're reminding her to get with the program lol. Despite the lack of any real street address, it made it to her house cause it was in with all my mom's old papers. Fascinating.

Use it however you like, just please don't sell the image as itself.

freebie album pages

I scored an autograph album from 1928 the other day while out thrifting and antiquing with my friend Julie. The 4 days she visits each July are packed with art making (this year was jewelry), thrifting, yakking, checking out each other's blog rolls, catching up on mutual friends, etc. Wonderful break for me from the crazy days of summer at work.

Anyway we were in the local antique mall looking around my favorite vendor booth when the vendor herself showed up. When she found out I was looking for old papers, she grabbed up a couple things and handed them to me with the announcement "I'll mark these down since they've been here a while."  Um... ok. This little album went from $10 to $6 but I would happily have paid $12 LOL. Hope she's not reading this. Anyway, it's in great shape, is just the color green I love and has all sorts of good stuff inside. I cleaned up the cover a bit in photoshop but all the other pages are just as they look in real life with vibrant colors and clean edges. Amazing since it's 84 years old. I'll post some of the autographed pages over the weekend.

All the scans are 300dpi so download away and have fun with them. You're welcome to sell items made using the images, just please don't sell the images themselves.

freebie wildflower scan & APCs for a swap

My friend Moneka gave me a neat little book - Wild Flowers of America - published in March 1932. I love the soft little paintings of each flower. It's falling apart with ancient scotch tape here and there, so I carefully took it all apart this morning, erasing pencil scribbles left by some bored child. I've scanned 9 of the images plus the front cover, inside cover and front and back of the intro page. Use them however you like, including works to sell. Just please don't sell them as images.


I made gel medium transfers out of a few. This is one of my favorite things to do with almost any image. It gives a softer image and allows the background to show thru. I do mine with a single fairly thin coat of gloss gel medium, and have to be very careful rubbing the paper off cause they tear easily.


Here's the finished APCs for a swap on ATCsForAll.com. First layer was a thick coat of gesso with torn pieces of green tissue paper mushed into it. They warped terribly and I thought I'd have to abandon them but a few days under Our Heritage of World Literature (the heaviest book I own and whose only use is sitting on top of things that need smashing), and they flattened out enough to use.


Stamped a text stamp in black, then put down the flower transfers. Stamped a dragonfly onto a regular old white paper napkin, then tore the edges and applied them with gel medium. Added a word from an old book, inked the edges and they're done! Yay. And just a few days ago I had no ideas for these things and was thinking of dropping the swap.


I really like the layered look that gel medium transfers give, with the stamped text showing thru. Try them, if you haven't yet.

at the speed of

I recently bought the book Art at the Speed of Life by Pam Carriker. It's been out for a while and there have been online groups who worked thru the book chapter by chapter. It was on my wish list of books but I hadn't been inspired to actually buy it until I had an about-to-expire 20% coupon for Barnes & Noble, of which there is a huge one in our local mall.


The main point of the book is that you can fit art into your regular life. Each chapter has a guest artist project, then Pam gives a speed-of-life version that gives a similar result in much less time. Every chapter also has essays and articles by Pam and various other artists on a variety of topics. I'm enjoying it and would recommend it simply for the projects and techniques. All the time saving tips are a bonus.


There are a lot of good ideas in the book and since I don't need much of a reason to make yet another journal of some sort, I made one of her 7 day journals. Actually it's nothing like hers, I guess, since I used a cover and didn't make it form one sheet of paper. I made 3 signatures from 140lb cold press watercolor paper, nice and thick so I can do all sorts of wet stuff to it. Made a spine of doubled upholstery fabric and covers from a corrugated cardboard from a box at work, glued the spine on and stitched the sigs thru the spine. Wa-la as they say in France.


Made a glaze from 1 part acrylic paint, one part gel medium and 2 parts water and glazed several spreads with a few different colors. I'm hoping the glaze doesn't have the stick-to-itself properties that a page painted in full strength acrylics does. We'll see.




For my first journal entry I chose a yellow spread, glued down some old book pages, added some raw sienna and gesso. I wanted to try the hand sanitizer transfer method so I chose a transparency of my mom at about 3 or 4 years old on a pony with her dad standing by. I tried various amounts of sanitizer gel but had no success getting the image to transfer. So I stuck it down with gel medium and moved on. I needed something on the left so found a pic of my great grandfather, father of my mom's dad, and made a gel transparency, one of my favorite techniques. 


Stamped some gesso circles using the tube from a roll of adding machine paper. After looking at it a while, I got out some turquoise paint and put some around the edges and in the centers of the white circles. Then I sat down with a black marker and doodled the circles, the edges, and some of the sequin waste stenciling I had added earlier. Gave it all a coat of gloss medium and varnish and called it done. Three generations here. I'm happy with it and plan to fill the journal with projects and techniques from Pam's book.