NOTE CARD PARTY: GARDEN GATHERING...

 

Welcome, today I am participating in Vee's Note Card Party for April, this is a new special feature the third Wednesday of each month at A Haven for Vee.  You too can join in the fun by visiting Vee's linky post for all the details.

Since spring has reached it peak here in my little corner of the South.  My family and I have been spending as much time as possible outside before sweet spring turns into summer swelter.  My thoughts have turned to outdoor entertaining and this is the perfect time for a garden party, ladies tea, or get together with my nearest and dearest friends.  With that thought in mind I remembered a post I did sharing some Spring Garden Party Ideas.  I gathered four of my favorite photos from that post to represent note cards I would send out for a spring soiree.

Haughty Lady Hawthorne...

 Demure Miss Green...

Lovely Lady Dogwood...

All three ladies glammed up for the garden party...

I feel inspired to actually print these and use them to invite my two best friends over for  an afternoon in the garden.

Thank you, Vee, for hosting and for being a source of inspiration!

I hope you all have a wonderful day!

ARTISTIC DREAMING...

The room was filtered in lacy light that threw a patterned counterpane across the worn wood floor.  Its cast shadow corner landing a square of light onto the center of the massive oak roll top desk.  This simple and only source of light in the room highlighted an aged hand bound book that lay askew.  On top of the book rested a pale fabric flower.  

The observer was barely aware of the rooms surroundings save the desk and its highlighted focal point.  A quick glance about revealed an ornate ink well which held an uncapped bottle of ink.  A pen with its dark dripping tip plopped splotches onto the green felt blotter that lay beneath it.  A sheath of paper with spidery writing was stacked nearby, illegible from the observers position.  A spent yellow tallow candle sagged from much use, dried dripped wax having slid down its sides into the bowl of the pewter candle holder it rested in, a burnt black wick crooked like the top of a cane poking out of its center.  The waxy smell of its recently being extinguished lingered about the room.

 A few battered and what appeared to be well loved books leaned one against the other like they were slumped there, tired in their old age, under the small cubby spaces at the back of the desk.  Gilded writing, having faded from much handling, decorated the red, blue, green, and brown covers.  The small cubby spaces were stuffed with all manner of odds and ends and of little consequence to the observer.

The tilt of the sturdy wooden desk chair indicated that someone had just been sitting there.  It seemed as if their presence was still felt in the room.  The observer felt a whiff of a breeze that moved the shadow pattern of lace and drew her attention back to the book and flower.  There was something very mesmerizing about the scene, almost a familiar feel, like the observer knew to whom the flower and book belonged.

She longed to reach out and lift the lifelike flower aside and touch the book that lay underneath but something held her in place.  She could only look intently at them just beyond her reach.  The flower was the palest of lavender, an iris so life like and vibrant, it held such contrast to the book it rested upon.  The books front looked to be handmade, dark and aged with washes of color in earth tones.  Its spine was bound in faded worn away velvet in a brick red color.  The book was thick with what appeared to be handmade paper pages.

More than anything the observer wanted to thumb through those pages because suddenly she knew without a doubt to whom they belonged.  No matter how hard she tried she was unable to move any further into the room or any nearer the desk save for a longing gaze.  The room began to pull away and fade into a haze, a spotlight of counterpane still highlighting the flower and book until...

A flickering flutter of my eyes, where dreams and shades of night fade into the breaking dawn of a new day, I slowly awoke from the dream of the old desk, flower, and book.  The dream stayed with me for days in great clarity and I found myself wishing I could have just held and opened that book but from some reason the flower weighted it down and  kept it closed to me.

The dream was inspiration to try using the method of flower pounding to recreate the petals of the fabric flower and reassemble it as I had seen it in my dream.  I used a simple white cotton sheeting for my flower base and an iris from my grandmothers garden to create my petals.  Note that certain flowers carry more moisture than others and the dye from the petals may spread more than you anticipate.

Once dry, I sketched my petal shapes onto the fabric and cut each of them out.  Natural dyes like this will fade a little over time, exposure to sun, or washing so I decided to lightly tint my dyed areas with a light kiss of color using a watercolor wash with thinned down acrylic paint.  I misted my petals lightly with water to dampen them then lightly touched my color around the outside edges, letting the paint bleed naturally towards the center giving them a more realistic look.  I stippled a little yellow acrylic paint down the center of the petals to mimic the "beard" of the iris.  I also pounded a couple of plants leaves in the process, washing over them with a light green wash.  I  then dyed some thin ripped muslin strips to match the leaves to use in wrapping the stem. 

I used a heat gun to lightly singe and curl the outer edges of the petals to give them that natural looking ruffle of the live flower.  Using white coated florist wire I glued a piece of wire to the back of each petal and repeated the process with the leaves using green coated wire.  I shaped each petal to mimic the natural flower and attached each one using green florist tape until I had the flower head secure.  I wrapped the ends of the flower wire around three sturdy floral wires to give the flower stability.  I glued a strip of the hand dyed muslin at the flower head base and tightly began wrapping the stem, adding a drop of glue every three or so wraps, inserting leaves as I moved down the stem until I reached the end of my wire, securing the last wrap with glue and cutting away the excess.

I was actually quite amazed with the result, it very much resemble the flower in my dream.  If only I could have gotten my hands on that book!   I am absolutely positive that it contained some sort of amazing art work and that would have been something to recreate.

I hope you each enjoy a beauty filled day!

  

SORTING, SQUISHING, STITCHING, AND POUNDING...

 So, what's going on over at the Quill you might ask and I would answer, a whole lot of sorting, squishing, stitching, and pounding.  

What are you sorting you might ask and I would answer, stuff I culled from the studio and scraps of this and dabs of that, things I am assembling into inspiration art kits to list in the shop.  (I would insert here a huge thank you to those who purchased kits!) What kind of kits will you have this time you might ask and I would answer, cool ones!  Seriously, there will be one for the sepia lovin' collage enthusiast...

And one for the nature lover...

And one that is pure child's play...

And one that is over the top lavish Victorian in theme...

I hope to have these four complete and listed by the weekend.  That takes care of the sorting part of the post, moving on the squishing part.

So, you might ask, what have you been squishing, and I would answer, I have been squishing flowers.  Did you know that you could squish them in your die cutting machine?  Me either, but you can, HERE at Stamping With a Passion is a post I found on making flower prints on watercolor paper with your die cutting machine.  Very cool!  Mine, not so cool, my flowers were too wet due to the rain here and did not imprint well even though I brought some in to dry out before trying the technique.  Once it drys up a bit I will try again...

So, you might ask, what have you been stitching, and I would answer, scraps.  I had a small basket of scraps that had accumulated from various recent projects that needed to either be used or scrapped.  I noticed how they all had that beach like feel to them and decided on stitching them rather than scrapping them.  I made them into various backgrounds that I hope to use in a memory book of our upcoming summer vacation to the beach...

This will be the grands first time to see the ocean and I think a fabric book would make a special keepsake.

So, we have covered sorting, squishing, stitching, and now pounding.  You might ask, what have you been pounding, and I would answer, flowers.  I know, I know, the poor things are being brutalized around here, well not many, just a few.  This might sound crazy but I had a dream about a fabric flower and had a desire to try and recreate it...

I will tell you about the dream and the result of the experiment of reassembling a pounded flower in my next post.  I also promise the sun printing tutorial is coming soon, as soon as it stops raining and we have a sunny day!

That is about all that is going on at the Quill.  

What are you up to?

NOTHING TO BLOG ABOUT...

Think, Think, Think is a phrase often uttered by Winnie The Pooh when he faces a puzzling problem. It is usually accompanied by him sitting down and much head-scratching.  I have been sitting down this morning with much head-scratching think, think, thinking and trying to come up with a blog post.  I have nothing to blog about.

I thought about sharing a bit of Easter at the Quill but that is over with and this was the sum total of my "decor" if you can call grabbing a few things from around the house at the last minute and foofing them up with candy actual decorating...

Nope, nothing to blog about here.

Then I thought about talking about what new things are unfurling at the farm...

But then I thought that spring is probably being overdone so, nope, nope nope, no blog post here.

I think, think, thinked some more and wondered if a walk down the winding road to the singing creek would be blog worthy...

Where I followed little heart shaped Wild Dogwood blossoms as they rode on babbling bubbles across slippery moss and sandstone...

 Sometimes sticking long enough to pose for a picture...

And how the story weaver in me took off writing in my head as I clicked away at each little nature heart on its journey, but that was all just folly, nope, nothing to blog about here either.

I could have told you about getting caught in a sudden shower of glistening rain drops...

How Handy Hubby and I had to make a run for it back the farm house from the curve where old Johnny Marse slid clear down to the bottom of the holler backwards in his battered pickup one winter when the ice was on.   How he was pretty sure he was "uh meetin' his maker" askin' forgiveness for a blue blaze of cussin' when he slid off the ravine, he said he just sat back and waited for the end while it was just trees that flashed before his eyes as they whizzed by and not his life.  

How when the wild ride that would rival Mr. Toad's was over he ended up stuck in his truck wedged between two trees til some bypassing Blue Tick Hound set up a holler and Johnny's daddy come to see what he had treed, begin surprised that it was his son Johnny.  But, you don't know where that scar in the earth is at that curve of the road and since you don't know Johnny either and can't here the tellin' of this tale in his distinct voice you won't find it as funny as it really is so, nothing to blog about here either.

I thought about my favorite photo I took over the weekend of a small bush growing wild on the roadside with its tiny little bells for flowers...

But that is all there is to tell, not much to blog about.

My last thought was of how Easter morning dawned bright and clear at the farm and how it hit me like a ton of bricks that Handy Hubby and I were the only ones about the place and it would remain steeped in silence on this holiday.  No family, no big meal, no dying or hunting of eggs, memories of the past weaving themselves through the quiet rooms, laughter here, a snippet of conversation there, love everywhere and most present of all was the big lump in my throat that I could not seem to swallow.

Not being able to go through with our holiday plan for the day we spent a quiet time of reflection on the banks of the Buffalo at Tyler Bend where so many happy memories of summers past resided...

Sheltered by the bluffs, soothed by the sound of the lazy rivers flow, serenaded by the lone cry of an eagle we watched two adults with brightly colored totes darting across the river bank collecting stones as if they were prized eggs being tossed into colorful baskets as they called to each other, "Look at this  one!  See what I found!", tourists.  Easter egg colored canoes slipped past on the mirror like surface with paddlers waving and calling out, "Happy Easter!  Happy Easter!"  And how I wondered if I could possibly drag the most gorgeous piece of weathered water washed wood back to the farm to use as a curtain rod but we were in my car and the piece of wood was probably as long as my car so I sighed and left it there.

Not much of a story there either, think, think, think, nope, nothing to blog about here today.  

Blog fodder is such a puzzling problem.
Think, think, think...

SHOP LISTING: ART & EMBELLISHMENT KITS...

 I have been doing a little bit of a studio de-stash and putting together some art and embellishment kits.  I have finished and listed four themed kits in my shop, Quill Cottage Curiosity Shoppe.   Each kit contains ephemera, fabric, trims, and embellishments perfect for making cards, tags, or collage projects.  Each provides a little extra inspiration for jump starting your creativity.

Pretty Paper Doll...
SOLD, thank you!

French Flair...
SOLD, thank you!

Autumnal Treasures...

Bountiful Birds...
SOLD, thank you!

Kit contents and pricing can be viewed HERE.

Besides putting together art kits I have also been working on more backgrounds to use in my artwork and trying to finish up a free tutorial to share with you on some simple surface design for fabric, sun printing.  Many of you had questions about that process I thought I would share how I do it with you.

 If I can get the sun to co-operate I can finish up the photo portion.  It has been popping in and out behind the clouds the last few days and the one key thing you need for sun printing is...sunshine!  Hopefully I can share that with you next week.

I know you are all busy making plans for Easter weekend as are we here at the Quill.  We are having a big family celebration here tonight.  It is my son's birthday, our first family cookout of the season, and an Easter egg hunt for the grands.  There is nothing like a gathering to warm the heart with gratitude and love for the blessings of family.

I wish each and every one of you all a blessed Easter!