I recently found two murals by the same artist on Roscoe between Broadway and Halstead.
And then one day I came across an artist painting a huge new mural on Melrose right off Broadway.
It took a week or so but it’s completed now.
It’s kind of cool the way the shadows of the fire escape and the street lamps and signs become a part of the underwater fantasy.
I started my Fall decorating this year by making some felt sunflowers.
I used all my felting skills – I cut the flowers from commercial felt and hot glued them together, wet felted the stems, and needle felted the part of the stem that attaches to the flower (which I attached with hot glue).
Last year I made a peg doll of Wirt from the “Over the Garden Wall” series, and I’ve been looking for a little teapot so I could make his stepbrother Gregory. I finally found one, and I also found some pegdoll gnomes that I thought would work well for his body. I just had to cut off a bit of the hat of one of them. Watching the shows may be a new Fall tradition – we watched it with our youngest grandchild in between making Fall sugar cookies when she came over one day.
For the most part, we decorated the way we have for the past few years, but we added a few things. We found this Mazatl at Target. According to the tag, he’s part of the Dia de Muertos Collection designed with Luis Pinto. A little googling led to the discovery that mazatl “means deer and is the day in the Aztec calendar associated with the God Tialoc. Tialoc is the God of rain and thunderstorms and is associated with fertility, floods, drought, and wrath. Mazatl is a good day for hunting, a bad day to be hunted.” https://symbolikan.com
The website https://azteccalendar.com lists some celebrities who were born on the day Mazatl and they were not born on the same day or even the same month on our calendar and I found no reference to the Day of the Dead so I’m not sure there is an actual connection to the Day of the Dead but I like him with this doll my Birmingham niece made.
We purchased a mushroom at World Market that I almost bought last year but I thought it might be too big. It didn’t seem so big anymore now that we have the mushroom we got last Christmas. The mushrooms have been here all year, but I added the leaf fairies I made many years ago for Fall.
Last year, when I wasn’t buying the mushroom, I did buy another of the World Market little houses. The part at the bottom that holds the batteries looks a lot better now after I painted it black.
I created a little scene on top of the small mission book case and gave them one of those large lawn skeletons everyone on Instagram has. I also hung the skeleton I had printed out a few years ago above the scene.
I participated in the Stitchtober challenge again this year. Last year, I had the idea that tarot cards might work with the prompts, and I was really hoping they would after I found the Expanded Celtic Cross spread that uses 13 cards. When I saw the prompts, I knew they would work, so I searched for simplified designs and sketched out the cards. I thought that would be more difficult than it was, but what actually turned out to be difficult was the stitching. I had been surprised when I first started embroidering again that I wasn’t having the problem with tension I had had in the past but after several pieces I must have gotten complacent because it took me a little while to realize my cards were shrinking and the fabric was puckering. I kept going, though, and decided it looked like the tarot spread was on a wrinkled tablecloth. So I crafted a little crystal ball (out of an ornament and my Alexander Girard washi tape) and a candleholder (out of beads and a birthday cake candle) to sit on the table (actually a plant stand).
Since I was immersed in tarot cards, I found one to use for my treats. I wrote “To New Beginnings” on the back so people wouldn’t get upset that I was giving them the death card.
I thought I was done with Fall crafting but then I got the idea to needle felt some mushrooms for the branches.
I’m so glad we don’t rush Christmas and get to enjoy our Fall decorating for another month!
We went to the Howard Street Chalk Festival again this year. This festival features four of the type of 3D Chalk art that only work if you look at it through a phone camera. Here’s one that looks like it could be a trompe l’oile piece.
But here’s what it looks like from the side without the camera.
This one was really fun.
The mermaid was a bit less successful.
The pinata looked like it was jumping. The shadows under its feet are chalk. The other shadows are actual people shadows.
There were some 2D pieces by guest artists, too, as well as ones done by people who had purchased squares, but I didn’t take any pictures of them.
A few weeks later. we went to another chalk festival the I Madonnari Street Painting Festival at the Sutherland Elementary School. It is modeled after a festival of the same name which has been hosted by the Children’s Creative Project in Santa Barbara County, California since 1987. Madonnari Street painting is an Italian tradition believed to have started in the 16th century; the word “Madonnari” is used because Italian street painters would often reproduce the image of the Madonna, St. Mary.
The festival features the work of professional artists as well as the creations of students and amateur artists who are invited to purchase a sidewalk square and decorate it with pastel chalks. Proceeds benefit the Sutherland Parent Teacher Association (PTA).
This year, Liz, who I work with at the Chicago Children’s Museum, was one of the guest artists.
Some of the other guest artists were still hard at work.
When we first got there, this one featured a large mushroom but then a little bunny started appearing and we realized it was the cover of the Richard Scarry book “I am a Bunny”.
The school takes up one large block, and people were drawing on the sidewalk around the whole building – there were so many wonderful drawings!
They get sprayed with floor wax when they are done, which must preserve them for a long time because on the few squares that were not being done this year, we could see some ghost images.
I wrote about the Nettlehorst Little Free Library before and mentioned that it was not visually distinctive, so I was pleasantly surprised today to see that it had been replaced with this beautiful one. Beautiful on both sides too.
There is a flock of chickens around the corner at the school, so I’m guessing that is why this side sports this attractive one!
The book selection varies greatly here. Today I was lucky to find a Kate Atkinson book I haven’t read yet.
This summer, we helped to take care of a neighbor’s cat while she went back to France for the summer. While we were standing in her kitchen as she went over the details, I noticed some cups with figures that looked similar to those on my Quimper pottery. Although I’m pretty sure I was saying Quimper correctly (kam-pair) she did not know what I was talking about but when I googled it to show her she said excitingly “Bretagne yes that’s where I’m from!”
I never really set out to collect Quimper pottery, but because I loved some blue and orange bowls from Spain that my grandmother had given us, my parents gave me her blue and orange Quimper dishes when she died.
The sugar bowl has what I now know is called a “petite breton”. According to the website frenchaffaires.com, Quimper has been the center of faience or pottery production in France for over 300 years and “the folk aspect of Quimper pottery intensified when regional costumes became popular across Europe in the late 1800’s. In the 1860’s, the familiar figure of the “petit breton” wearing sabots (wooden clogs), embroidered skirts or vests with hats or coifs (a woman’s hat) was first depicted on the pottery.”
Since my parents were giving me the dishes, they also gave me a stack of small plates.
And then, of course, my collection expanded (as collections do) when my sister gave me some pieces she bought at auctions.
I realized that all my pieces only show a woman, unlike my neighbor’s cups, although I also have a metal tray with a Quimper image of both a man and a woman that my sister gave me. (Well, actually, I gave it to her, but then she gave it back it to me thinking that I had given it to my mother and she had somehow ended up with it)
And now I have two more examples as my neighbor returned from France with gifts. She gave us the same things she gave all the cat helpers, including some wonderful buttery cookies in a tin.
And because I had mentioned my collection she gave us each a mug with an attached spoon. Mine features a “petit breton” couple!
My husband’s features a new image, but one that I think is also very French!
Of course, some rearranging of the China cabinet was necessary!
We stopped by St.Louis on our way to visit my Missouri (formerly Chicago) niece. I knew St. Louis had an arch but I didn’t know anything about it so I was surprised to find out it was designed by Saarinen, the tulip table guy, and that Alexander Girard was part of the design team.
Our main reason for stopping in St. Louis was to go to the amazing City Museum. It is hard to even describe how much is going on there – incredible climbing structures, salvaged building elements, artistic creations, and even the largest pencil in the world. Of course, I took pictures of some of the mermaids.
I didn’t take any pictures of the architectural elements, but I had to snap a picture of Big Boy since I used to work at a Big Boy restaurant and even dressed up as him for Halloween once.
The room with the largest pencil also included a pencil collection.
I didn’t do much climbing, but I did venture into the school bus that was sticking out of the top of the building.
We also found ourselves at Union Station where there were some hungry koi fish and a heron.
There are many more sights in St. Louis that I’d like to see, so I think we need to plan another trip.
We have a few new big city sights in our neighborhood, too. Nettlehorst School has a new horse. It is a lot brighter than the original!
And the sculptures have changed again. This one is so large that it almost scared me.
I hope they move the orange bags at the bottom soon, and I hope they don’t mean it isn’t bolted down!
I remembered to take a picture of the Hebru Brantley Fly Boy statue outside the Chicago Children’s Museum.
While no one was posing under it in a Fly Boy stance as someone usually is, I noticed that the Harry Carey restaurant next door’s new photo opportunity was getting some action.
A popular posing opportunity downtown is the Wings of Mexico statue. One time, when I passed it on a bus, I was surprised to see that my younger daughter was the one posing on it.
Last weekend across the street from the wings, I spied an enormous champagne cork from the bus window on the way to the Blues Festival. It was gone by the time I went to take a picture of it, so I was glad to find that I could take a picture of the Wings instead and that they have stayed around longer than they were originally meant to.
And speaking of the Blues Festival since it was at Millennium Park, I snapped a picture of The Bean – the quintessential big city sight.
Last year, during Stitchtober, I started thinking of other series of images that might work with the prompts from @ajpritchett. While he and most of the others who stitch do individual pieces, I have done two that incorporate all the prompts. Two years ago, as I read the prompts, I thought of fairy tales (blog post #stitchtober2021), and last year the prompts made me think of Greek myths (blog post Stitchtober 2023). One of the categories that I thought might work with typical Stitchtober prompts was tarot cards, but I wondered if I could even stitch 12 or 13 tiny tarot cards, so I decided to try stitching one.
When I think of Tarot cards, I think of the Rider-Waite deck and as a collector of suns specifically of the sun card. Stitching a 2″ version was not easy and I can say with certainty that even if this year’s Stitchtober prompts work perfectly, I will not be stitching a piece that includes 12 or 13 Rider-Waite cards.
I stitched the card on white duck fabric using only 1 or 2 strands of embroidery thread, and although it was challenging, I ended up being pretty pleased with it. At first, I thought I would frame it in the hoop, but when an embroiderer I follow on Instagram wrote that her round flower design wasn’t round enough, I thought. “Well then, my little rectangle definitely isn’t round enough!” So I decided to look for a frame. I was headed for Michael’s when I thought of the local shop Four Sided instead, and I found the perfect frame – a small (2.5×3.5) shadow box frame from Lawrence Frames.
I didn’t know what I was going to stitch next, but a few days after I finished the tarot card, I read an article about Clint Eastwood. He was asked how he stays so productive at his age and he answered, “I never let the old man in.” I loved this sentiment and did some research on it. I found out that he has been saying it for years (sometimes saying “never” rather than “don’t”) and that he originally attributed it to an older man that he knew. It also turns out that after he said it to Toby Keith, he wrote a song based on it called. “Don’t let the old man in,” and it was included in the movie “The Mule.”
I had just received a notice for jury duty and my husband pointed out that I could decline due to age. That didn’t feel right to me and when I thought about the quote I knew why. And I also knew I wanted to embroider it. I pictured it in a black and red tattoo font. I had a piece of 20 count linen that seemed like it would work with letters that were 10 x’s high, so after doing a little googling, I designed a font. The Michael’s I go to has been out of black embroidery thread for a while, so I bought balls of cotton perle and used two pieces of black and one of red.
At first, I just stitched the letters – using “never” rather than “don’t ” and changing “man” to woman. When I finished, I had no idea what I was going to do with it. Then, at a street fair, I saw a silkscreen or painting of the Chicago flag on a stretched canvas and thought, Ah hah! I could stretch it over a purchased canvas if I could find one. It turned out there are stretched canvases that are 12″×4″. 12 inches was perfect, but 4 was a bit big, so I added the heart. It was too small to stretch around to the back of the canvas, and after a few days of mulling it over, I settled on gluing it to the sides with fabric glue (it was barely big enough on the bottom) and then gluing 1/2 inch twill tape over it to cover the raw edges. I think it came out even better than I could have expected.
I hung it next to my bed, which was looking a little lopsided after I put the cross stitch cats I stitched many years ago above the tribute to my youngest sister. I put the tarot card on my dresser, and I must say my room is getting pretty full of my embroidery!
I was excited to see a new little library in my neighborhood the other day, but as I got closer, I realized that it was a different kind of library – a seed library!
Unfortunately there were no seeds or plastic containers!
