CRAFTY INTERLUDE

I thought I'd interrupt the Portland vacation recap with a little bit of craft. It has, after all, been a while since any of my own personal creative expressions were highlighted here. (Note to self: get back in the studio!)

Kurt and I spent the weekend doing some nesting: I did some spring cleaning and house rearranging, while Kurt worked in the yard. One of the little organizational projects that showed itself to me was figuring out how to organize my growing collection of awesome earrings. It didn't take long for me to come up with an idea. I took an old wooden frame out of my studio, found a scrap piece of brass screen in Kurt's man cave, and put the two together to make this handy earring showpiece. The best part: it only took about five minutes to put together. And now I have all of my wonderful earrings on display, instead of in a knotted mound. Putting the finishing touches on the day's outfit has never been so easy.

Actually, there is a little bit of Portland in this post. If you look closely at the frame of earrings, notice the ones on the second row, second pair from the left. I got those at the Museum of Contemporary Craft's gift shop. More on that wonderful place to come.

FOR THE LOVE OF CEDAR

I came home yesterday to find this scene: the yard strewn with cedar tree trunks, the porch railing gone, and Kurt wielding a chainsaw. It took a moment for my mind to process it all. When I did, I realized what a truly strong, creative, resourceful, and brilliant husband I have. And did I say strong? He hauled each one of those tree trunks (there are five) out of the woods behind our house. All of that, and it was his birthday yesterday. Guess Kurt wanted a new porch as a present and gave it to himself.

There will be more porch/house developments happening tomorrow. I'll catch y'all up on Monday.

Till then, a good weekend to all.

MAKESHIFT STUDIO

I spent the better part of my weekend making drawings. Fortunately or unfortunately, I didn't make them in my studio; I made them on our dining room table. See, the thing is, I have poison ivy. Yeah. And so, seeing as how the studio is, in a word, hot, I brought my supplies inside. More specifically, into the conditioned air. What a wonderful invention. But I digress. The drawings.

Inspired by the talented Ann Rice, I cut up a few grocery sacks and got to work. I've always loved working with Kraft paper, and now what a wonderful resource: brown paper in the kitchen closet! And it's free! I particularly love the creases and edges and marks--the qualities of the original sack that become a part of the finished drawing.

So I spent the weekend at the dining room table, creating nine drawings (and framing them). They're mostly pen and gouache, with a little bit of collage here and there. It was so fun to create these little things--little sketches that don't live in a sketchbook. The one pictured below is called "Electric Pie." You can see the rest of the drawings here.

Mmm, pie.

INSPIRATION FOR A SHELF

I mentioned last week sometime that I was going to make a shelf. Not just any old shelf, mind you, but a shelf to hold family photographs. The shelf is finished, the photographs installed. I love this shelf.

It's a simple wood number, painted green, with a decorative paper edging. The edging is the thing that makes this shelf better than your everyday run of the mill shelf. That, and it references on of my favorite photographers, believe it or not.

The seminal work Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans contains some of Evans's best known work. And rightly so. The photographs document a tenant family in rural Hale County, Alabama, during the Depression. The portraits of the place and the people are hauntingly beautiful and a lasting historical record. But it's the photographs of the interior of the family's home that I think about constantly. The image below is one of those photographs. I love the evidence-of-life-lived here (in much the same way that I like Laura Letinsky's photographs mentioned in the previous post). And so it's obvious, then, that I responded to the paper doilies on the mantel's edge and decided to incorporate that into my own shelf project.























It's kind of odd, I suppose, to think that a shelf project was inspired by Walker Evans and the frugal decorating techniques of his documentary subjects. But there you have it. A beautiful photograph. And a beautiful shelf.