Orange Sweater Design

Spring is Sprung!

First things first.  We need a pink picture to start things off:

Now, having done that I'll say that I realize my posting has been a bit sporadic and may continue to be.  Such is a busy life of a working mama.  But I still I have tons of great stuff to share, so check back now and again (as I know many of you do) and see if I've had a chance to post something fresh!

Spring is springing in the most beautiful way this year.  It seems that having been completely deprived of much sun last spring and summer, the weather is making up for it this year.  The weather man is predicting 80 degrees this weekend!  Oh delicious warmth ~

We've been up to some really great gardening - things are bursting in the green house and I finally got the onions and potatoes in the ground. 

And the compost turned, beds weeded, front garden tidied.

We've even had visits by three, count them three, honey bee swarms!  All of whom were lovingly deposited into sweet little square hives and set into the garden.  We're looking forward to good honey this year, dear bees~!

We've also been deep into some really wonderful spring cleaning, so drop by later this week and I'll post some good new furniture pictures.  Here's a sneak peak~

See you soon...

Flower power

Whilst unburying ourselves from the snow, dragging lots of branches and trying to get a garden started, I helped out once again with the elementary school auction.  Phew!  I feel like it ate me for a couple of weeks and spat me back out.  This said, it was very successful and we are all very grateful for the money that we raised to keep things going at our school.

Part of the preparation, of course, was in making items to be sold at the auction.  I donated a set of notebooks and a couple of t-shirts. 

I was going to take more time with them but then realized that it was time to bust out the new fabric.  And save myself a bunch of effort along the way.

What a success!  I'm delighted with the way they turned out and between these three items we raised about $85.  Not bad.

I also finally received the tea-towels that I designed and ordered from Zazzle.com.  So exciting!

I originally designed these to enter in a tea-towel competition, but then I missed the deadline so I decided just to try it out on Zazzle.  Zazzle is cool - you can put a design on just about anything.  For a price, admittedly.  I did these in three colors (the third was orange) but decided to just get two done in case they were a failure.

They were decidedly not a failure!  I'm really pleased with the results, have learned a few things I could improve upon, and now they're living in my kitchen drawer. I'm excited to try out more designs on fabric or whatever seems right at the moment.  For now, my kitchen has new spots of orange!

Intuitive :: A new way of seeing

Hello my faithful blog readers ~ It has been a long month and so my little blog has been a bit neglected.  During this time, however, I've been doing lots of interesting things so I have some good pictures and designs to share! 

Let's start out with my sister Eileen's on-line photography class.  Yup!  She's amazing and she'd doing it.  It's called {eye} wonder workshops :: intuitive photography for everyday people and while registration is closed for this spring session, you can register for the fall class now if you want to get in on the action!

This is the first time she's ever taught it, but she's looking to make it a regular feature of her on-line creative life.  Which I think is just fabulous because I'm having a ball with the assignments.  The second assignment was to make something with crayons and document the process or whatever you did.

I discovered the kitty crayons my kids got for Easter last year - and oh my, it  was just too much fun!  I ended up making some crayon and water color easter egg cards.  But the crayons really stole the show.

Her whole point is to make the medium more accessible to everyone, no matter what. So she's teaching people to see in a new way, be creative, let things be weird and think outside the box.

And it's perfect for me, given my relatively low tech approach to photography.

And so I've been prodded along through some good class projects to take more pictures - and boy, it's really fun!

In addition I've started the third module of the Art and Business of Surface Pattern Design.  This particular session is about Monetising Your Designs.  Woot!  Maybe someday I'll live my dream of being a real surface pattern designer - in the meantime I'm just adding some cool tools to my kit.  More about that in the next few blogs.

For now I'll hope to post a few times this week to make up for a bit of a .... gap.

Like a Lion

Something crazy came our way last Wednesday and wow, it certainly left an impact.

We got six to eight inches of snow in Eugene Oregon in a three hour period on March 21st. Heavy. Wet. Snow.

In case this seems perfectly normal to you given where you live, let me explain two things.  First, it rarely snows more than a couple of inches at a time here and sometimes we'll go whole winters with no accumulation to speak of.

Yes, it rains a lot, but rarely snows.  Generally its just a bit too warm in the river valley where we live.

Secondly, having lived here for a greater portion of my life, I've never seen it snow this much in March.  Ever.  So that alone was pretty surprising.

It was amazing and beautiful.  And humbling.

Unfortunately, the impacts were intense for our fair City.  Several thousand of us lost power for extended periods of time.  But more devastating was that thousands of trees fell or were irreparably broken by the weight of the snow. 

This big fir fell through our back gate, but did remarkably little damage to much else. 

And we lost a few others on the property which left a big mess, but really nobody was hurt and nothing was severly damaged.

Throughout the City there are huge trees that fell everywhere, and all the flowering cherries and plums just split apart as their blossoms caught the weight of the snow.

It's so tragic to see the end of life for so many majesties at once.  This said, it's also the nature of things. 

After we mourn a bit and get everything cleaned up, we'll all have more fire wood and we'll plant new trees.

And there's nothing like a big storm to bring us all together and remind ourselves how much we care for and appreciate each other.  I do feel blessed, indeed.

Fresh starts

Well, the greenhouse beckoned with soil and seeds and little pots this weekend, and so the seeds were sown!

Tomatoes, broccoli, basil, sunflowers and lettuce got an early start and now my task is to remember to give them a little drink each day as they think about rooting down and starting up.

I have to admit, I have a real love for my greenhouse.  It was the first thing we reconstructed when we moved back to the old house.  It was falling down and we hadn't started spending our remodel money yet.  So, in my youthful wisdom, I said - "We must do this!"  And I'm so glad we did.

Now it's a warm place when the sun shines but the air is cold.

And I love the cheerful orange door.

Once summer gets a little closer I'll be planting beans and squash and things that take a little less time to germinate and grow.

Until then, it's back outside digging compost and dirt for potatoes and onions...

As an aside, how about the drawings on the Territorial Seed packets?  I think they're so well thought out and the color coding is wonderfully intuitive - yellow for sunflowers, orange for pumpkins, red for tomatoes and peppers, green for the green things.  Nothing like simplicity to bring home a strong idea, don't you agree?

Happy gardening!

Finding the pattern

In doing all the work that I have with my surface pattern design course, my eye has been keenly re-adjusted to look for beauty and pattern in the world.  And oh, have I found it!  And oh how it inspires!

For starters, there's nothing like frozen fog blowing off the river on a chilly morning to highlight something you might have otherwise missed. 

A lovely edge.

An abandoned web...

The last vestiges of summer seeds.

Then I'll go out to the park and there it is again ~ in the form of bundled purple berries.

Or the simple layered repeat of the Rhododendrons.

and the reminders of a season gone by.

Then there are the more intentional patterns out in our world.  The architecture of a landscape.

The repetition of a line.

The circles on a gate.

Here's just a little of what all this has inspired ~

    

All of these little drawings will be someday be transformed into new surface patterns with color and repetition.  Stop back now and again and I'll share more inspirational photos and drawings plus the new patterns I'll develop from them!

Springy...like!

Well, it's been a couple of quiet weeks here on the newbie blog so let's see if I can pick up the pace again a little.  The weather this weekend was so blissful - sunny - and even warm on Saturday.

All the lovely plants and flowers that give us the ray of hope that spring is around the corner just seemed to pop to life!

Even the dogwood is showing signs of beautiful things to come...

And the sun was so lovely and warm that our bees were in full swing, gathering all the pollen and nectar their little bodies would hold.

I even planted a few lettuces, pansies and some new raspberry sticks.  As the days are getting longer there will be lots more light for them to thrive by.

Next weekend I'll be back digging in the dirt planting potatoes, onions and peas.  Hooray for the garden and all the magic it holds.   I can't wait to fill it up full of seeds and baby plants!

Coming in to Focus

'Tis that time of year when my husband and I venture into the garden again to prune the orchard.

We have 40 fruit trees, many of which are fairly mature as my father planted them when I was young. It takes about four person days to prune them all. They are apples, pears and plums and provide us with a heavenly abundance of fruit every year.

We've gotten about a third of the way into it over the last couple of weekends. As I've been pruning away I've mused a good deal about what it means to prune and how it's relevant to so much else in our lives these days.

The first word that came to mind as I clipped and trimmed along was "focus."  It takes a lot of focus to prune, although it's also kind of a zen activity.  When I was wedged up into the crook of a tree and leaning as far as I could to reach the next shoot I had to remind myself - "focus so you don't fall out of the tree."

And then there's the focus you're hoping to bring to the tree by pruning back all it's wild and eager growth.  The idea is that it will take all that energy and focus back it in to the fruit wood and buds, producing strong and good fruit.

These musings then led me of the importance of being focused on what's important in life in the small moments.  There are so many distractions - iPhones, computers, social networking, tweeting, texting - all of which have their inherent value, but I find these tools to be invasive if I'm not intentional about how and when I use them.

And so we guide our children.  We don't have a television and actively limit media time.  But I don't always set such a good example.  And it's hard for them when it's all so new and ever extremely present and abundant.

So, thank you, sweet trees, for reminding me to be focused on whatever activity I'm engaged in for the moment and to see it through to completion.  Whether it be playing with the children, folding the laundry, paying the bills or writing a blog post I've been gently nudged to be present and focused in the moment so I can give it my wholehearted attention without distraction.

It's a good thing for this mama who's often multi-tasking and juggling a few life balls at a time...

Stamp time...

Yesterday I had the pleasure of hanging out with my friend Shade with the sole purpose of doing something arty.  The project of the day was to carve our own stamps.  For several hours...wow, what a lovely quiet time on a rainy afternoon!This was the first stamp I made - I picked one of the flowers from some of the pattern work I had done earlier.  You might recognize it.  I'm noodling around with the idea of making this my business logo, but I'll see where it takes me.

Then I worked on a second one that was a little more abstract and I feel like it has all kinds of potential for print and pattern!  Different colors, maybe running off the page, or starting in the middle.  The juices are flowing...

Below are a couple of prints from the stamps Shade carved - I just love how she left the rough texture around the edge of these.  It really makes them look like old-school wood carved prints, don't you think?

And I always appreciate it when you can see an artist's process in the finished work.

Thanks to Shade for getting me over to her house, serving me lovely teas, showing off her amazing new studio space and being an overall inspiration!

A brief post...

Hello all -

My energy has been kind of sapped this week, and so the time I usually blog has been substituted with sleep!  A good thing overall.  I'm still plugging away and trying to keep up with the Surface Design E-course I'm taking, so some of my time has been absorbed with that as well.

Today I'll just post a small piece that I worked on for the class.  I used Illustrator this time and colored up some of my older tree design work.  The challenge was to come up with a wrapping paper for spring using Pantone's color of the Year:  Tangerine Tango.

I'd say it's more fall-ish.  But I had fun nonetheless!  Maybe I'll do another version with an orange background instead of a yellow one - and maybe add a little background texture.  They seem like they're kind of floating...which is kind of how I feel this week anyway...so there you go.