Recently I read a newspaper article that asserted even walking just ten minutes a day was good for one’s health. Well that sounded manageable and I’m sure going outside everyday is good for my mental health as well so I’ve started taking at least a 10 minute walk on the days I don’t walk for other reasons. (In the past I’ve never been much for walks with no end destination). On some days I walk across the street to the lake since I also believe that being in nature is good for the soul. But sometimes I feel like Nero Wolfe’s Archie Goodwin does about nature:
(The country) is all right, I’ve got nothing against it, and of course in the country something might as well be growing or what would you do with all that space, but I must admit it’s a poor place to look for excitement. Compare it, for example, with Times Square.
Well my neighborhood isn’t as exciting as Times Square but sometimes like Archie I’d rather look at buildings than growing things. One of the things I’ve found interesting lately is the contrast between buildings right next door to each other. For example 625 and 619 Stratford:
Today I saw this interesting juxtaposition on Buckingham Place.
Inspired by the Instagram account of Merrilee Liddiard, I decided to use more of my clothespins and make some butterflies or moths with my grandchildren. I flattened cardboard tubes (the flattering name for toilet paper roll innards) and put out tempera paint and pipe cleaners. My oldest granddaughter made one she described as a pink cow butterfly.
And I made one for each of my Spring trees.
After attending a workshop at the Swedish American Museum on Easter crafts and traditions I was inspired to make some Swedish Easter witches or Pask Karringar. A handout from the workshop explained: In Sweden on Easter Thursday girls dress up as witches in colorful skirts and headscarves and go door to door carrying brooms and copper kettles begging for sweets in exchange for handmade cards. This recalls the folk belief that at Easter witches flew off to Blakulla or Blue Mountain to convene with the Devil. I had read about this tradition before and had read that the girls also painted red circles on their cheeks and I had saved a photograph of a a Swedish girl and some vintage postcards to Pinterest.
I was lucky enough to find the perfect copper tea kettle and some brooms at Michael’s and made a grown up clothespin witch flying off to Blakulla and a little peg girl heading off to beg for treats.
After my Chicago niece sent me a picture of my great nephew incorporating the elves I made him for Christmas into a highway scene and captioned it, “The elves have become construction workers”, I decided to make him a set of construction workers for his birthday. And then when the firetruck invitation to his party arrived I made a couple of fire fighters as well.
After I finished painting them I was appalled when I realized I had made them all exactly the same and wished I’d stained a few of them darker or at least given them different hair colors. “It was like you were on an assembly line”, noted my daughter or “like you were making favors,” according to my niece.
I have been trying to embrace something my husband said to to me when I was being critical of some of these creations. “You can’t expect things to come out perfectly the first time you make them. You’re learning how to do them.” A lesson you think I would have learned before now!
After my foray into hand embroidery I knew I wanted to return to cross stitch but I had to wait for an idea to strike which happened when I read the Hatch Show Print book recently. A page at the front of the book features a silhouette of a rodeo wrangler with the chorus of Angel from Montgomery by John Prine and that was my starting point. While the song is actually written from the point of view of an old woman (the first line is “I am an old woman”) I remembered how much I identified with the third verse as a young stay at home mom so I decided to include it. And while the second verse begins, “When I was a young girl, I had me a cowboy” as I searched for images of old rodeo posters I thought a female rider spoke more to the feelings I had when I played my Bonnie Raitt record over and over again.
This was probably the trickiest pattern I ever designed. I did the lettering of the lyrics with 2 threads directly on the 20 count cork linen since I found it very hard to do it on graph paper first and I made a lot of changes as I stitched.
I began the rodeo poster with this image but I put her in a blue work shirt and bluejeans and gave her red cowboy boots, gloves, and a red cowboy hat. Since I really wanted her hat to show and since I thought it would be too hard to cross stitch her face I used the head from another poster as well.
I had to make changes while I was stitching here too as some of the colors got lost next to each other. I found the saddle particularly challenging to work out on the graph paper and then when I stitched it turned out that the rust color of the saddle couldn’t be too near to the red of the boots so I had to redesign it while stitching.
I also searched Rodeo cross stitch lettering and using a couple of those as references designed my own letters to give some of the flavoring of the original letters. After I had stitched those letters and the horse and rider I added more type to mimic the look of actual posters.
I stitched the image and lettering of the poster with three threads and the background with two threads using two similar colors to mimic the antiqued look of the original poster.
While stitching this I confirmed that I prefer the way I do cross stitch to the way others say to do it. The author of a cross stitch book I recently purchased writes that you want to have all your x’s crossed the same way because it just looks neater but I realized that apparently Neater is Not what I’m looking for!
We “went to” another Intuit home tour on Zoom the other night and when Intuit President and CEO Debra Kerr thanked collector Jan Petry for sharing her collection she mentioned that she knew Jan was anxious to do so. Jan replied that the thing about collectors is that they really like to share their collections. I would add that collectors also really like to look at the collections of others so I was happy recently to get a text from my Birmingham niece with a photo of her seasonal mantel featuring the ceramic egg collection that she and her daughter have painted over the years and I zoomed in to see the details.
Of course I immediately reciprocated with some photos of my wooden egg collection.
I bought most of them on my lunch break walk from a small store on Green Street in Northampton many years ago. It was my impression then that the store owner purchased them in Europe. I haven’t added to the collection recently although I did purchase the larger light green one from World Market a few years ago.
This year a small antique store recently opened on Broadway and I always look in the window as I pass it on the way to the gym. One day an eclectic selection of eggs including one painted wooden one with geometric shapes appeared so I bought it. The next time I walked by there was another painted wooden one – red with flowers similar to but more elaborate than many of mine – so of course I thought I needed that one too. When I went to buy that one the store owner asked me if I had seen the ones that were inside a dish with a cover. Hidden Easter eggs, how appropriate! After examining them I decided to buy one that was both etched and painted rather than the one I had come in to buy. Obviously, I had to return a few days later to buy that one.
I have to admit when I heard Thaddeus and Emily Sachs Wong announce their generous gift of an update to the art studio by artist Hebru Brantley, I was not pleased to put it mildly. The idea of huge colorful characters looming over the studio sounded intimidating and I was reminded of all the times parents wanted to paint huge brightly colored murals at Nonotuck. But I reminded myself that a children’s museum is not a classroom where children spend an entire day but a place that is meant to be stimulating.
And when I saw the space that the Hebru Brand Studio team had created I was pleasantly surprised. While the colors are bright they have a nice tone and the one large mural of Phibby is not too overwhelming.
The brighter characters and a video introduction are outside the studio.
My favorite thing about the new studio is the art we are doing in response to it which was inspired both by Hebru Brantley’s murals and the plastic wrap murals some street artists use to create temporary art.
Drawing attention to the lines of the black and white mural of Flyboy and Lil Mama above the sink, we are inviting guests to draw pictures with permanent markers including chisel tips and then to use brushes to glue them to the plastic wrapped around the newly painted posts. Color can be added using pieces of cellophane or crepe paper.
An auspicious beginning to the new studio!
The Chicago Children’s museum opened back up again this summer and I started volunteering again this Fall. It is now open Friday through Sundays and the Young Artist Program that ran Monday through Thursday mornings is no longer happening. So I have been volunteering on Friday mornings and learning the workshop format.
For the first few months that the museum was open visitors created a garden collage. In addition to an explanation of the techniques to be used the workshop introduction includes an essential question. For the garden project it was, “What makes a garden interesting?”
I hadn’t heard of the concept of essential questions before so was glad to find this posted slide.
When I started volunteering the project was making finger puppets and the essential question was “What makes a good puppet friend?”
“How is using a paintbrush different than using a pencil?” was the essential question for the painting project that followed. “A pencil already has the color in it.” was my favorite answer.
Stampaganza! was the latest project and the essential question was “How can you make a picture using rubber stamps?” The educators suggested using the stamps – in a different way than they were intended – to create a picture. Since we often ran with an open studio rather than a workshop format, examples were displayed on a large clipboard that could be brought to the table.
Next up: Big changes to the art studio!
I had forgotten to take pictures of the felt balls and cones I gave my grandnieces for Christmas and had asked my niece to send some photos if she had any. She sent these two the other day – the first time she had seen either of them play with the cones and the balls together.
Now I’m just waiting for them to make the ice cream cone connection!
Speaking of (or talking of as my oldest grandchild used to say) that piece of grass between the sidewalk and the road as I did in an earlier post, the ones on Michigan Avenue can get quite elaborate. This year I spotted one of my favorite Christmas images – a red truck hauling Christmas trees.
In another earlier post I wrote that there were no street murals in my neighborhood but it turns out I only had to walk another block further west.
And I did return to look at the unfinished mural Uptown. Based on what I had seen I just expected a beautiful quilt pattern but it turned out to be a much more complicated piece.
I had been thinking of other clothespin ornaments I could make with the 99 clothespins I had left over after buying a whole package to make one Anne of Green Gables ornament. Even though I had decided not to make a Wizard of Oz Dorothy clothespin ornament, I couldn’t help but think that the best way to make ruby slippers would be to dip the ends of the clothespin into glue and then into red glitter. I was also thinking about some ballerina ornaments I made many years ago. I had made their skirts out of doilies and I had dipped some of their heads in glitter rather than making embroidery floss hair. All these ideas and memories percolated in my head and Valentine girls emerged!
I dipped their heads and feet in red glitter and constructed their outfits from washi tape, ribbons, doilies, and tissue paper. Their pipe cleaner arms with bead hands hold traditional Valentine offerings. I constructed the cards and the candy box and just happened to have a tiny rose.
My valentines this year were also a result of brain percolation. At Christmas my Brooklyn niece and her husband were talking about their trip to Nashville and I had taken out the Hatch Show Print book to show them. It stayed on the coffee table and after awhile I picked it up and read it and looked at all the images of letterpress type. Then on Martin Luther King Jr. Day at the Children’s Museum, Derek led workshops on Pochoir which is using stencils to create posters and we offered stencils in several fonts or type. For our next session we introduced rubber stamp art and I was drawn to the huge basket of letter stamps of many different sets of alphabets. When I saw an image of a valentine with a typewriter and the phrase “You’re just my type” I knew what I wanted to do for my valentines. And of course I knew which candy went with them!
With almost all of the winter decorations back in the storage unit, we could incorporate the rest of our Christmas gifts. My sister gave me an enameled tray and two bowls and they inspired an entire rearrangement of the top of the sideboard.
The copper tray hosts the matching bowl and the two Turkish coffee pots from my parent’s basement. And it really shows off the small plate my Pennsylvania in-laws gave us a few years ago. The larger bowl from my sister which has a bronze outside and a beautiful green inside is going to sit in the middle of the dining room table (after the amaryllis from my Maryland in-laws is finished blooming) so the gourd basket (we bought it in Denver and it has graced the dining room table for around 50 years) with its round gourds (we acquired at some point) now sit on the left side of the sideboard. A perfect place for our youngest grandchild to access the round gourds that she likes to hide around the living room. (They are a stand in for the wooden Easter eggs that will appear on the sideboard in March.)
One of the things I buy for my husband are gargoyles so when I saw a wooden one at the Christkindlmarket I knew it would be the perfect Christmas gift. He ended up on the top of the white bookcases with the Matroyska dolls.
Alligators, turtles, and frogs are animals we gift each other and this year I got a bright green turtle from Guatemala in my stocking. He’s actually a magnet but I thought he should join his ilk on top of the CD shelves.
Looks like he is having a good conversation with that frog.
Collections and Other Stuff I Like 