We are in Chicago right now because our first granddaughter has arrived! Last summer I bought my daughter this bag to use as a diaper bag. I fell in love with these bags made of coffee bags at the Green River Festival and then found out they were made by one of the former teachers at my former school. It features owls and I had a sense right then that since owls are so popular these days that they would become my granddaughter’s theme.
And they certainly did:
In this photo you can see one of the owl lanterns that I made as centerpieces for the shower. You can also see a photo from my daughter’s “photos of flowers” collection by another former teacher at my former school!
Link to Flower photo CafePress store www.cafepress.com/hope_lovejoy
My mother said that when I was a little girl she was amazed when I pointed from a box of cereal to an advertisement in a magazine for the cereal and said, “Look, the same”. She was less impressed when I was a teenager and talked about the differences between the zoo we were currently at and some other zoo I had previously visited. “Can’t you just be at this zoo without comparing?” she said. I think this urge to compare same and different is at the heart of my urge to collect.
I collect mermaids because they are mermaids and therefore the same but I love to look at what makes them different: the color of their hair (I have some with green hair), the color of their tails (not just green and blue but pink and orange), where their tails start (I have one that starts at her breasts and some that start at the top of their legs), whether their breasts are covered or not, what their breasts are covered with (shells “top” the list here), and what they are holding. Mermen always seem to be holding tridents but mermaids hold a variety of objects including combs and mirrors, fish, shells, pearls, and musical instruments. Mermaids seem to hang around with quite a variety of animals too, not just fish and other marine life but polar bears, unicorns, cats, snakes, and frogs. As I gaze at my mermaids from my bathtub, I sometimes imagine a Ten Thousand Dollar Pyramid category: “Things associated with mermaids”. Do you think anyone would guess it? Of course, I’d mention shipwrecks too.
A leaf on our Spring tree above one of the magazine butterflies I learned to make from one of my younger daughter’s college roommates.
Last year we were in Charleston, South Carolina on Easter. We took a walk on Easter morning and admired people dressed in their Easter bonnets. We saw a woman selling her sweetgrass baskets across from a church and it just seemed right to buy a basket on Easter. This year I filled the basket with some of my painted wooden eggs.
At Christmas my sister, a master of close ups, took pictures of two of my window suns. Both of these were given to me many years ago by my parents. You can catch a glimpse of my Christmas window decorations (feathers and beads).
We finally got our Spring tree up this year. We like to force a live branch and my husband had been clipping one from one of the apple trees at his work. But the trees did not fare well this winter so we cut off the top of a very young tree we found by the side of the road. We don’t know what kind it is and we are hoping it is not the same as one we had a few years ago which produced some very messy droopy things.
In the upper left hand corner of this picture you can see the maple syrup bucket I crafted using a metal pail and the top of a metal birdhouse. You probably can’t see the other maple syrup ornaments (they were refrigerator magnets) – an old wooden bucket and a maple leaf with a painting of a sugar house. Other decorations include:
Green Mardi Gras beads
Shamrocks
Eggs
Rabbits
Chicks
A Kokopelli
Frogs
Insects
A Baseball Glove
A Joker Playing Card for April Fools Day
A Kite
A Bird’s Nest and some Birdhouses
A Beehive
A new addition this year are the brightly colored feathers at the end of some branches. These are in honor of the Swedish Easter trees called Paskris which traditionally sport feathers, eggs, paper roosters, yarn ball chickens, crocheted catkins (which apparently look like hotdogs) and pipe cleaner witches. I found out about Paskris when I pinned a tree from Aunt Peaches on my pinterest board “fall and spring trees”. http://www.auntpeaches.com.
I found more info on Paskris trees on http://www.aswedeinthekitchen.com. I also found and downloaded a picture of a Paskris that included a witch on the deviant art website.
After pinning a few examples of needle felted eggs on my pinterest boards I decided rather than making and pinning a card that said “I used to make things but now I just pin things other people have made”, I should make some felted eggs. I was trying to figure out how I was going to make the designs when I
remembered the egg stencils I bought a few years ago. I had never used them so I’m so glad I still had them.
My husband gave me an incredible book about the amazing designer Alexander Girard for Christmas this year and I have been dipping into it since then. In one of my earliest posts I wrote about his folk art collection but apparently he did not like to be called a collector. “Somewhere here we are going to wind up using the word collector and I want to say immediately that I don’t care for the word at all. I don’t really know what I could call it. It is more a matter of selecting then collecting. And yet a selector sounds like something on a kitchen appliance” he said at some point in the 1950’s.
I started our Spring decorating today by hanging the garden tool ornaments in the kitchen and arranging little vignettes of decorative eggs around the living room. Then we made our annual trip to a sugar house for corn fritters with maple syrup. We always go to the South Face Farm in Ashfield because it is open till 3:00 so we go late and we don’t have to wait.
The sign explains that it was too cold yesterday to boil today so we stopped at Paul’s Sugar House on the way back.
As I wrote in one of my earliest posts, I have been collecting suns since I was a teenager. Most of the suns that are hanging in my house now were gifts – collectors are so easy to buy for! Here is a shot of my dining area suns:
I have been writing to click on the picture to see the whole image because when I check published version on my computer only a portion of the picture shows up. I noticed the other day however that the WordPress ap on my phone shows the whole image, so I guess I’ll say click if the image seems incomplete!
My downstairs bathroom features suns as well:
