Spring came on March 19th a day earlier then the earliest I would have expected it. I hadn’t begun decorating yet although we had brought the Spring totes up from the storage room. When I realized it was the first day of Spring I opened the totes and got out the trees and the ornaments.
At the end of the season last year my youngest daughter found two more of the trees I could only find one of so I put them in the dining room windows.
I was excited to hang the last of my Evanston sidewalk sales purchases – the purple and green plaid bunny at the bottom of this tree.
That cute (vintage?) egg basket with the painted cherry design also came from an Evanston sidewalk sale.
I hung the eggs on the wooden tree again this year. I couldn’t resist the one with the yellow duck and flowers when I saw it at Michael’s a few weeks ago. It reminded me of the duck in The Golden Egg Book – one of my favorite childhood books.
Even though we don’t know when baseball season will start this year I added the baseball glove to the kitchen ornaments this year since it’s a bit heavy for the new Spring trees.
I decided to leave the rest of the Spring decorating for another day and went for a walk in the rain since I can’t go to the gym. I was excited to see a true sign of Spring!
Ever since I first started seeing articles about them last year I have wanted to see these trolls by Danish artist Thomas Dambo at the Morton Arboretum but since they’re a bit outside Chicago we never managed to get there. But with everything else closed because of the coronavirus today was the perfect day for a short road trip.
Made mostly of recycled wood the six trolls are 15 to 30 feet tall or in one case 60 feet long. A few of them have hair made from branches.
I walked past this Unitarian church the other day. The first thing I noticed was that it was called The Second Unitarian Church, I had only ever seen “Firsts” before but never thought about what that meant (Another “You’re living in a big city now” moment). Then I noticed that it had a little library that looks like the church. Unfortunately the little library while attractive leaks so all the books inside it were a bit wet including the one I chose.
Since I taught Sunday School classes at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence for a couple of years, it is fitting that the book is about Godly Play an Episcopalian Montessori Religious Education curriculum I have been curious about since a friend told me about it.
Because it is behind glass it’s kind of hard to take a good picture of it or of the amazing collection it holds but Colleen Moore’s Fairy Castle at the Museum of Science and Industry is reason enough to go to the museum or to stop by for another look every time you go.
Colleen Moore, a silent movie picture star, commissioned her dream doll house in 1928. It was planned by set designer Horace Jackson and interior designer Harold Grieve. It took over 7 years to build and cost over $500,000. It can be broken down into 200 modular pieces and when it was finished it toured for the benefit of children’s charities raising more than 650,000 between 1935 and 1939. In 1949 Moore donated it to the Museum of Science and Industry.
The castle follows the standard one foot to one inch doll house proportion and contains more than 1500 minatures including music scores copied in tiny notes by their famous composers, minature books by Noel Coward, Sinclair Lewis, Thorton Wilder, Sir Arthur Conon Doyle, Edna Ferber, and John Steinbeck, a minature painting by Walt Disney, the tiniest Bible ever written, ancient statues more than 2000 years old, and 1/4 inch hollow glass slippers that would fit a 5 inch Cinderella. It also has amazing wall murals, tapestries, ivory and rose quartz and jade floors, and etched glass windows. It really does need to be seen to be believed!
We have been exploring watercolors in the art studio this Winter. In addition to the traditional watercolor palette and brushes on the tables there are also a series of large collaborative floor paintings being created with liquid watercolors and large brushes, sponges, and droppers.
Liz talks to the visitors especially school groups and their teachers about using the brush to create varied painted lines and about the importance of small motor development citing a New York Times article about how the decline of art experiences in childhood is affecting the ability of surgeons. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/well/live/surgeons-hobbies-dexterity.amp.html
When I was searching for Fortune Teller signs for my Halloween treats I came across a Fortune Teller Valentine’s card. Since the “fortune” is written backwards I thought I’d write my message backwards as well. I decided to use the same message that I used on Halloween: “I see you” and I wrote it, scanned it, and then flipped it in the computer. I figured that no one made valentine candy with eyes on it so I bought some hearts wrapped in red and silver foil. And then I remembered the washi tape with Alexander Girard eyes that I bought at the Milwaukee Art Museum. I attached a set of eyes to each of the hearts wrapped in silver foil and then I attached those to the back of the valentines with glue dots (those things are amazing!)
I kept the garland up in the kitchen and decorated it for Valentine’s Day. The new silver mercury glass heart I bought at a winter pop up shop on Navy Pier is hanging down on the right.
Whenever I see a commercial on TV for Lindor truffles I say, “Mmmm!” so guess what I got.
When I was valentine crafting with my youngest granddaughter I made a Valentine card too. I used lots of washi tape!
I know that “ghost bikes” are placed where people have died in bicycle accidents so I wondered when I was riding the bus and caught a glimpse of a white painted shopping cart in front of the Jewel supermarket if a pedestrian had died while crossing the street to shop. Since the cart had a sign with the name Eugenio Escriba, I googled it and the truth turned out to be more disturbing. Eugenio died on November 20, 2019 in the custody of the store’s security after being detained for suspected shoplifting. There still aren’t a lot of answers about exactly what happened and what action Jewel-Osco has taken in regards to the security staff so I imagine that whoever put the ghost shopping cart in front of the Jewel is hoping to make sure the neighborhood continues to ask questions.
Last year a friend bought me a mermaid ornament for Christmas but she kept forgetting to bring it when we met for coffee. This December she had promised herself she would finally remember it but she forgot it again. Since we had met at a new coffee place near her apartment we walked over to get it. After a year I was glad to finally see what my new mermaid looked like. While I had bought a similar one with black hair in Rockport, I was glad to see the new one was a redhead and I hung her right up above the mirror but then I forgot her when I wrote the post about my new mermaids. So to rectify that here she is:
Upstairs in the Chicago Children’s Museum there is a fascinating room titled Michael’s Museum.
There is a regular sized door to the right of the small door and visitors who venture inside find more than 100 of the collections of Michael Horvich. Michael has always collected items that are “small in scale” and at first they were displayed throughout his house. When they were moved to their own room and special glass cases were constructed, the house’s guest room was renamed Michael’s Museum. In 2011 the museum moved to the Chicago Children’s Museum.
On the Michael’s Museum website Michael says that he has always been on the lookout for “small, magical, interesting, romantic, and unique items” to add to his collections which he calls “Discoverings, trinkets, curiosities, small things, or treasures” He occasionally uses the word miniatures but he doesn’t really like it. He says a lot of his small items remind him of the “olden days” of his childhood.
About collecting Michael says, “I find there is magic in numbers and if I can collect many of the same identical item, I do” A numbered list of his collections includes #93 Plastic Boxes and #100 Pencil Nubs.
His collections also include Day of the Dead items and Minature North American Indian Arts and Crafts.
And lots of tiny books.
There are so many items here. Some of them have labels indicating they are on loan from other people’s collections. One of the most fascinating to me were the small dolls on this shelf labeled “Frozen Charlottes”. According to Wikipedia they are china dolls made between c1850 to c1920. The name comes from an American folk ballad “Fair Charlotte” based on the poem “A Corpse Going to a Ball” by Seba Smith, which “tells of a young girl called Charlotte who refused to wrap up warmly to go on a sleigh ride because she did not want to cover up her party dress; she froze to death during the journey.”
I could spend hours looking at all the “tiny treasures” and I suspect many other grown ups could too. Unfortunately, you need to be accompanying a child to come to the museum and the ones I’ve attended with don’t spend much time here. Since I volunteer at the museum I can stop by on my own but I wish it was accessible to other collectors as well. Michael’s Museum does have it’s own website so it is possible to see some of the collection on line. www.michaelsmuseum.org
Most of the Christmas presents I received this year were invisibly integrated – clothes, a cookbook, a beautiful cutting board, a couch blanket, and other lovely things. I also got four mermaids – three from the same niece. One of the mermaids she gave us was on a card. The paper cutting of the lotteria card La Sirena was accompanied by two other card images – El Sol and El Gallo. Unlike my sun and mermaid collections my chicken collection is small and all but one of the chickens lives on two of the black box shelves in the hall.
So it only made sense for the card to go above this set of box shelves. I cut the card down, backed the card with purple tissue paper to match that which was behind the paper cutting, and framed it a small clip frame.
The second mermaid is a Frida Kahlo mermaid tile. I knew where she belonged right away – in the bathroom behind the sink with the other tiles. We moved a mermaid that was hanging there that wasn’t a tile and hung the new tile up.
This was a kind of “she looks good for now” situation but I knew I had to be on the lookout for another tile that would pull it all together. I can’t believe I found the perfect one last week at a Salvation Army store.
I like that she is the same kind of flat colorful tile as Frida. I think she complements the other tiles well too. We took down the seahorse tile (which being real not mythical didn’t fit in so well anyway) and the white merboy and mergirl are on hiatus (although I already have an idea where they might go). The mermaid that wasn’t really a tile moved out to the bedroom.
It was quite a surprise when we got another mermaid from our niece at a second Christmas celebration. She is cut from an aluminum can and colored with alcohol ink (according to her packaging) and we had the perfect place just waiting for her! I had hung the miniature weather vane mermaid on the left bottom shelf swirl this summer. The new mermaid fit perfectly on the right one.
And I got a mermaid tile coaster and matching cup from my brother and sister in law. They seemed to belong in the bathroom too. The cup usually sits on the tile but I photographed them so the tile is visible.
It’s always fun to figure out where the gift additions to our collections go!
Collections and Other Stuff I Like 