Who's that?

It's Rupert the robot.......



Oh yes, and don't forget Ratso (see the little mousie nose sticking up there), the mouse that lives in The Bee's pocket.

Well.. I hope all who celebrate had a great holiday. We don't celebrate here in our house but we did go for "drinks and goodies" at a friends house on Christmas eve and that was real nice. Christmas day was quiet and relaxing. I started working on a new project and am so very excited about it. You see, we have this tree in the little courtyard in front of our apt. Not sure but it's some kind of weepy birch kind of tree. When it's windy it sheds it's branches and it's branches make the best wreaths. Well, it was so windy this week I thought we were going to blow away and I couldn't help getting excited about the all the downed branches that I would find in the morning. Now, I know I shouldn't be making anything right now with the amount of junk I already have to move across the country but you see I just can't help myself. I can't just let those beautiful branches lie. And I'll be seeing so many wonderful people in the beginning of our trip so now I'll have presents to give. I like giving presents, even if it's just an excuse to make things... Shh, don't tell..... Since I'm just totally digging on the whole paper mache' thing, I've decided to make two little birds for each wreath and nuzzle them into the branches. This tree makes a very nesty looking wreath, perfect for birds. This got me thinking nesty so now I'm working on making little nests. Not as easy as you'd think. For little tiny animals with little teeny bird brains and no thumbs or even hands for that matter, it's pretty impressive this nest making. It definitely took this big brained animal with poseable thumbs quite a while to figure out how to build a nest. Well... I've got one done and working on another I want to put a smaller bird and some eggs in each nest. They are so darn cute I'll have pictures eventually. Now I just have to find a similar tree on the east coast..... Above are some the prints that came on of our silk screening fun last week. I think I'm quite happy.

Happy Winter Holidays!

An Orangie Day

Well, I had an Orangie kind a day on Saturday. This is a fun little thing to do. It will nicely ingrain this little town into my brain too since we'll be leaving here real soon. It's a funny thing, orange is often found with blue. Blue is oranges complementry color on the color wheel. May be people are just naturally drawn to the two colors together. They do look good together, well most complementry colors look great together red/green, purple/yellow... Well I'm not a big fan of the whole purple/yellow thing. I think purple just not my color. Well anyway the world is full of orangie things and their so often found with the blue things, check it out for yourself.

A Musical Tribute to Battlestar Galactica

Action Stations, Action Stations!!

By Andrew Frueh, the Bee

REDwood

Well... I spent most of my time this weekend messing around with silk screening and not paying much attention to SPC. So alas I don't have a great self portrait to show today. But, this one is at least appropriate since it's one of my new silk screens. Oh also perfect 'cause I do live in Redwood country, at least for now. I hate that I'm only posting once a week. Arrrr..... This weather with it's gloomy days. But this weekend we had our first sunny day and about a week and a half so I snapped all the pictures I could think of. I'll have something to show and tell this week, at least..... Yeah! for sunny today also!!!!

A RED Saturday Morning

I am in there, just hard to see. If you look closely you'll see... But even without my little shaddow hidden somewhere in there this collage really is me. A day in the life of me, or at a Saturday.

Well... This week for SPC I decided to do a collage. This is my pretty typical Saturday morning. Food shopping at the Co-op, dropping off books at the used bookstore, stopping in at the best smelling fabric store in town (yes not only do I just love this store and the people who work there I also love the smell, weird?), next was the herb shop to pick up the best chili powder there is. Here we met (randomly) a person his name was Isaak. A new person of like mind and ideas. Yes there's proof that you people are out there, just hard to find. Oh and to the hardware store and everything in between. This was all done on foot, yes I love that.... One of the main reasons we are moving to the city as apposed to the suburbs. Because, well can you walk to anything in the suburbs?? I love, love, love doing all my errands on foot, oh I said that already..... Well anyway, this little color collage has inspired an idea in my little ole brain. I think, I'm going to do one for every color for the next couple weeks, we'll see if I lose interest by the time I get to violet. But I do love color. As a child I was particularly obsessed with color and rainbows (I'm starting to see a pattern here. Let's see, for all my two readers out there how many times can you count the word obsessed?? Humm, what does this say about me?)I used to keep all my crayon shavings in a pencil box, because I love all the colors, my imaginary friends (yes I had them and I'm proud of it) were all named after colors and surprisingly Pinky was my best friend. For those of you who know me well enough, know that I'm just now excepting small amounts of pink into my life. Hey, I just thought of something...... May be I was traumatized because Pinky and the gang (she was, of course the leader) just got up and left one day, no good bye, no nothing. May be I internalized it. I don't remember them leaving, they were just gone. May be I can't remember because it was too traumatic. Ok anyway, I love color and I going do an Orange Saturday next weekend and then yellow after that and so on. It's kind of fun, when you go around looking for a color it starts to stand out and present itself. Then you see it everywhere. Good therapy for the color obsessed. Oops there it is again.

More Show & Tell

They look very mischievous in this picture.

Well Stephanie over at Little Birds posted her pattern for her little stuffed trees a couple of weeks ago I was quite excited because I really like her simple trees. I'm not a pattern person, they make my eyes go cross and I usually get frustrated from the beginning. Always better off figuring it out on my own. But her pattern was quite simple, well it's quite a simple tree. So I gave it a try. Much of my fabric is packed, so I didn't really have anything that felt right for a tree and hey, do I ever follow the directions on the side of the box.... No, almost never not I follow a recipe without making at least one small change. It's in my nature to make my own rules, patterns, recipes whatever you want to call it. Anyway, my trees turned into tree angels. Hey my Mom always taught us to think outside box..er..patteren. So these ones are mine and I made a couple for my Mom since she's got a new house this year and a new house calls for a couple new Christmas decorations, don't ya agree?



And do I even need to say anything about this little guy.... He now has friends, a giraffe and well, I can't seem to decide whether he's an alligator and a crocodile.

Got all kinds of things to show and tell today.... First I found two very different artists today that just rocked my world and I have to share.

Nick Brandt... Now we've all seem wildlife photography and lots pictures of the Serengeti. But these, I don't know are just so different. There's magic in these pictures. I just stared at them all morning.



Kurt Halsey Frederiksen.... I love his illustrations. Something about the simplicity of the faces and the use of color. I like the little sayings also. I wanted to buy a print from him but it looks like he's only currently selling christmas cards and post cards. I'm emailing to find out if I can get a print. The print above is not the one I would have choosen to show but since it's a flash movie I was limited by what I could use. So... Look around in his work, it's so good.

Ok Next is my own stuff..... I'm currently obsessed, it seems with circles. As you can see a little of if below with my Bee Thankful card and my red SPC for this week. It all started with this mobile. This idea has been haunting me forever, it feels like anyway. I saw something months ago in salon window that was something similar and couldn't get it out of my mind. I thought about it and thought about it ,always coming up with some complicated way of making it. I failing uttering twice in making it and eventually put it aside for some other time. But..... It still haunted me..... This is a good example for the importance of stepping back and looking what your doing. My Mother-in-law taught me that. I come from a hard working family and when I started painting with Carole (MIL) she would have us break after only working five hours and say it's time to quit for the day. This felt so wrong to me, I didn't work enough, we'll never get this done.... Well, her theory is that your work will suffer if you get lost in it. You must step back or step away from it for a while to get a new prospective. Over time I could see the logic in her theory and she was so right on. So back to the mobile. It eventually dawned on me the perfect way to build this mobile. And it was so incredibly simple that I can't believe the ridiculousness of my past attempts. Just paper, string and starch paste (or glue). No wires, no paper mache. And I just LOVE this mobile.... Love, love, love. It is so graceful and simple and organic, very organic it reminds of bubbles. I have so many more ideas.... The best part is that I used all straps of paper to make it, straps leftover from Andrew's handmade poetry books. I kept the straps not knowing what I'd do with them and not knowing they had the ultimate destiny of becoming a great mobile. Now this picture above does it no justice, there is almost never any good light now days around here with the sun setting early and tons of rainy, cloudy, foggy days. But I had to show it off, I'm just it love. It's about 6 feet tall. I've made two others that are much shorter only about three tall. One is made with different colored solid origami paper and the other is with printed origami paper. Both are quite beautiful but not as graceful as this white one. Well... Can ya tell I'm excited??

SPC Red - Week One

Phew.... I made it, it's due tomorrow. I didn't do any for November. Mostly because I couldn't connect with the theme. The theme was Glamor and now that I think back I could have come up with something, I'm sure. I'm just not a very glamorous person in the traditional kind a glamorous. Not to mention it's hard enough for me to get it together to do a self portrait every week. The weeks are going by so incredibly fast right now. I swear, one day it's Monday and the next day is Friday and I have no idea what happened in between. This is what happens when you live in a waiting void. It's starting to make my head spin all the packing, shipping, coordinating, thinking, figuring and waiting. Well this month's SPC is Red..... Good choice, I think. I like the color red a lot, it's rich and warm and womb like. This week, for me was something of a quicky. I just realized yesterday that the months changed and there would be a new SPC. So I had a day to prepare and figure out what to do.... No real meaning in it, just red.