A few years ago, my husband’s boss was horrified that his daughter had gotten something from the dump. Apparently, he kept repeating over and over again. “She got it from the dump! Do you believe that? She got it from the dump.” I guess he imagined her climbing over piles of garbage, not just picking something up from a table where people put discards that are too nice to throw away. My husband was pretty amused by his boss’s disbelief as he was used to me occasionally bringing things home from the table at our regional recycling center. Here in Chicago, there is a table like that next to our dumpsters, and the other day, when I walked in the door, my husband suggested I go down and take a look at it.
And when I did, I saw why because there was a little house that clearly went with the ones on one of our Christmas house shelves. It’s the red one in the back. It was originally from World Market, and it still lights up!
I also took the white Santa on the left to add to the Santa display on one of our speakers. I’m not sure why that little mouse Santa I bought to peek out of my husband’s stocking last year looks so huge in this picture.
I don’t think I ever wrote about our best “dump” score. I couldn’t believe it when I saw this drum sitting on the table a few years ago. I left it there for a while, so someone who would actually play it would have a chance to see it. But when it was still there a few hours later, I knew it belonged in our collection!
I don’t check the table constantly because I think that would lead to disappointment or perhaps to acquiring too much stuff. I think it’s more fun to just happen on the perfect thing occasionally!
The first few times I returned to the new Brown Elephant, I didn’t find anything. Well, except for the perfect fabric cover to cover my “leather” iPad cover, which was leaving little black flakes everywhere.
After several visits, I was really excited when I spied a Molinillo Whisk. I’ve wanted one ever since I saw my first one at a farmer’s market stall. The chocolate vendor wasn’t selling them, just using it as a decoration, but he demonstrated how you rub it back and forth in your hands to make Mexican hot chocolate. When I got mine home, I had to figure out how to display it, and I thought of combining it with a decorative rolling pin I bought a few years ago. I realized a white pot that came with a flower arrangement from my Brooklyn niece would be perfect. I added a few wooden utensils we rarely used as well as some from my bin of wooden things for children to use with sand or salt. Then it took a few more trips to the Brown Elephant and to Marshall’s to get everything standing up.
On another trip, I found a gourd mask that was perfect for our gallery wall. Of course, now we need to find something to hang below it!
My last trip yielded some items for holiday decorating. The Fall fairies I made many years ago look perfect in these tree chairs.
I also found two painted figures that Google search leads me to believe are Hungarian. They’re hanging out with the Matroyskas right now, but I think they’ll move over to the sideboard when it gets decorated for Christmas.
I’ll have to take a picture of them there (and of the sun ornament I also found) when we get our Christmas tree.
I was with my daughter last week when I spied these adult size and child size Chicago little libraries. I made her pull over so I could take a picture of them and was so glad I did when I spied yet another little library for tiny creatures.
I found more little libraries on Instagram too. Kelsey and Ryan of Newbuild Newlyweds, spokespeople for Ryobi tools, built a very fancy little library.
I’ve never seen a little library with wallpaper before!
Talk about carrying it to the next level – they have already made two trips to Goodwill to stock their library.
And in the department of little libraries that are actually little something elses, this library I also found on Instagram was temporarily transformed for “Spooky Season”.
Recently my youngest granddaughter asked if we could do that owl thing again by which I guess she meant go back to Coxsackie, NY, over a 12 hour drive away, to look at the artist painted owls and check them off on the brochure. Luckily, when I was on the bus going to a weaving workshop at the Hull House, I spied some painted owls out the window as we rode through Greek town.
I wasn’t sure that there would be a brochure and I knew the checking off part was important so I found some images on some websites and Instagram and made up a checklist we could use when she and her sister came to our house last Tuesday during what my daughter refers to as a “no school November”. After some peg people crafting and slime making, we headed to Greek town with the checklist on a clipboard.
We did see a poster of all the owls in a restaurant window, but we were unable to find a copy. It didn’t matter, though, as they happily checked off the ones with pictures and made tally marks on the bottom for the ones that weren’t pictured. We found all 28!
Today is the second day of Dia de los Muertos so I’ll start my Fall post with a picture of my mini offrenda ornaments that commemorate the lives of my parents, my youngest sister, and my oldest daughter. I love embracing this tradition and hanging my wreath each year.
Since we put curtains up in the living room windows this year, I didn’t see how it was going to work to hang the Fall branches in them. We decided to switch things around – Fall branches in the dining room windows and Halloween trees in the living room. It turned out it was actually better to have the Halloween trees in the living room – they are more visible and less likely to get knocked over now that no one has to wedge themselves into a chair in front of them.
And it’s fun to have the branches in the dining room. A maple leaf was the perfect souvenir from our girl’s trip to the Canadian Falls this year.
It was actually a key chain, but it definitely belongs on the Fall branches. On our last visit to World Market, I was hoping to find a fox ornament since we have a lot of owls (my oldest granddaughter’s theme) but not many foxes for my youngest granddaughter. Since they had already started switching to Christmas and none of the Christmas foxes were right, I had almost given up hope when I found a basket containing a few Fall animals, including the perfect Fall fox!
Look at that acorn! And the plaid pants and sweater!
Everything else pretty much landed where it has been in other years, so I didn’t take a picture of the top of the china cabinet or the sideboard.
I made a new arrangement by combining two previous year’s seed pods for the end of the hall.
And I put out both the Greek myth Stitchtober pillow and the pillow I made from a quilt square my sister had pieced given to me by her daughter, my Brooklyn niece.
I put last year’s Stitchtober tarot tablecloth out as well.
Adam didn’t post a list of Stitchtober prompts this year, which was probably just as well because I was working on a secret Christmas project. (There is a hint of it somewhere in this post.)
My youngest granddaughter always buys her fortune when she sees a Zoltar machine, and I thought it might be fun to feature Zoltar on my treats this year. I did a little cutting and pasting from various sources to come up with the design, and then I tried to remember what the machine says when someone is in the vicinity. Chocolate eyes seemed like the right choice for treats.
The day after I got the Zoltar card ornaments printed and figured out a way to attach them to the eyes so they flipped up (because of the way they got printed – don’t ask!), I laughed aloud when I came across Zoltar while reading the comics. Zoltar was the theme of Sherman’s Lagoon for several days.
Too bad I doubt the recipients of my treats read the comics every morning!
Last week, a friend and I took a little daycation to Chinatown. We met at Macy’s and decided to take the train there and the water taxi back.
The building on the left in the picture had some great architectural details, including a peacock that I just had to snap a picture of. It made me kind of sad that my peacock fans are not hanging up here in Chicago.
We ate at a restaurant on the other side of the street, so I took a picture of the peacock building from there. The peacock was on the side of one of the doorways.
After lunch and a few souvenir shop stops, we walked up to Ping Tom Memorial Park to take the water taxi up the river to the Wrigley Building.
Since it was a Daycation, I was glad to find the perfect souvenir.
I only expected there to be three dolls, but when I got down to the third doll, I could hear that there was another one inside. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get it open, so I decided to put it in the freezer to try to shrink the wood a bit. Even after an hour or so, it didn’t open, so I put it back in. When my husband took it out and got it open a few hours later, he started laughing because he could hear that there was another one inside doll number four. He couldn’t get that one open either, and at first, we thought we’d put it back in the freezer but I did some googling and found out about the rolling method – putting both hands on top of the doll and gently rolling it. That worked, and I was pretty surprised when he brought me the fifth doll as it had no face – only a single flower. For now, they’re sitting in front of the other Matroyskas, so we can admire them for a while before they nest together again.
When we entered the Lakeview East Festival of the Arts from the landscaped end at Hawthorne Street, we decided to walk all the way down on the right and then back up. I wanted to divert from that plan almost immediately when I caught a glimpse of a robot with an alphabet block body. I had always wanted to be able to buy a robot made of recycled hardware parts by Easthampton artist Mark Brown, but I didn’t think I could afford one. My favorite Mark Brown robot’s body was made of an ice cube tray. I was intrigued by these new alphabet block body robots not only because they reminded me of the Mark Brown ones (and I hoped since they were smaller they might be less expensive) but also because they reminded me of our Alphabots by Hillbilly Healy.
When we finally got back to the booth, we found that the robots were attractively priced at $20.00 and were basically flying out of the booth. I was attracted to the yellow Q block for some reason, and he was quickly purchased and popped into a bag with a bonus robot.
Neither the robot nor the bag are signed, but I checked the Lakeview East Festival of the Arts website and found that the artist is Andrew Ozark from Livonia, Michigan.
Alphabots on both ends of the shelf!
I stopped by Inkling a gift store in my neighborhood that has some vintage items for sale and was immediately captivated by this rooster and his wonderful comb. He is standing on a blue base that says Portugal, so after I brought him home, I did a little research and found out that he is from the city of Barcelos but that he has come to symbolize Portugal as a whole and is sometimes referred to as a good luck rooster.
There is a legend about the Rooster of Barcelos and here from https://www.kinashi-san.com/post/the-legend-of-the-rooster-of-barcelos is the short version of the legend:
“The legend of this rooster dates back to the Middle Ages. It begins with a pilgrim on his way to Santiago de Compostela. He had the misfortune to stop off in Barcelos, when the town was hit by a series of robberies and burglaries. The pilgrim is accused of being a criminal and sentenced to hang. As a last request, the poor man asked to see the judge, who was about to enjoy a rooster. He promised that if he was innocent, the animal would come back to life and start crowing. And it did.”
It is considered good luck to place the rooster with its head facing the entrance door “to bring blessings and ward off negative energies from entering the home,” but I love the way he looks from the side so that is how he is positioned in our home.
I have a tendency to write notes on envelopes and other random pieces of paper when the need to remember something strikes me. The other day, I was organizing a pile of things (another tendency) that I wanted to save and file, and I came across this envelope and the quote, “Collecting begins with lust.” I remembered that I wrote this during one of the Intuit collector tours, and based on other evidence on the envelope, I concluded it was from last December and that Doug Bristol was the quoted collector.
Lust, I thought, really? But I looked it up, and after I got past all the sexual references, I found the definition “intense desire for something.” That made me think of a recent experience involving my newest collection of wooden mushrooms. Since I found one wooden mushroom at Marshall’s, I feel almost compelled to return again and again and look for more. On one trip, I found one from India, but it had what I thought was an enamel coat over the cap so that only the stem looked wooden and like it belonged with the rest of my mushrooms. So I reluctantly left without it. But I pined for it or dare I say lusted for it and when I realized the enamel was the same color as the inside of the bowl on the shelf above the mushrooms, I returned to Marshall’s the next day and was relieved that it was still there.
Lust satiated!
I have been visiting and writing about museum studio spaces, but I’ve also been reading about the concept of facilitating art experiences in museum galleries rather than in a separate art studio. At the Hyde Park Art Center, I recently had the opportunity to observe a small studio space and participate in a workshop right in the middle of the exhibition, “The United Colors of Robert Earl Paige.”
The Woodshed (from the title of a book by abstract painter Jack Whittier) is a structure in the center of the gallery which includes some drop in art materials for people visiting the exhibition and is also used for hands-on public art workshops once a week during the exhibition.
I was at the museum to take part in one of the hands-on workshops, which was a collaboration with Intuit: “Notes from The Woodshed Workshop: Materiality & Technique: How do materials shape the process?”
The workshop started with a tour of the gallery led by Hyde Park Art Center Community Engagement Fellow, Keny De La Peña who talked about Robert Earl Paige’s career and several of his techniques. We then went over to the tables that were set up in the gallery to learn more about Batik and the process we would be using. Robert Earl Paige joined us and showed us some more of his pieces as he told us a little more about his technique. (Unfortunately, I didn’t snap a picture of him, but here is one I found online.)
And then surrounded by his art, we began to explore the materials. After we sketched out our designs we went into The Woodshed to apply the wax, which was melting in an electric pot sold for salons – a big upgrade from the electric frying pan and tin can method I used many years ago when I did batik with melted crayons. Then, we returned to the tables for the dying process. The expectation was that we would apply the dye with foam brushes in a method similar to the ones Paige uses.
I had been thinking about what I wanted to make for days, which turned out to be a mistake. I envisioned an indigo design that I could make into a pillow that would complement the ones that I made from a piece of African fabric I had been given when I was high school (I had originally made it into a dress). Unfortunately, because the dye we were using was sold for tie dye, the blue was not indigo but turquoise, and because I was only using one color, we dunked it rather than using the applied brush method.
While I’m not going to be making a pillow, it was fun to try Batik again and to think about how ” materials shape the process.” It is always fun to make art with others, although this time it was a bit intimidating.
But as always, their designs sparked some ideas, and I think there will be more batik experimenting in my future!
Collections and Other Stuff I Like 