Craziness

Well friends, things are getting crazy round here. We are getting to the final stages of taking our little nest apart and making ready for our exodus. So...... I may not be around much soon. But.... I will be keeping a travel photo journal. I decided to keep it here on the blog instead of Sqrl & Bee, it's just easier to up load and all. So.... Check in to see the adventures of Sqrl & Bee transcontinental, it should be fun.

~ And yes, there will still be a green collage coming, soon one day and then blue and than purple, I promise.

Bird

Look at this guy, he was such a ham this morning. Puffing his little chest out and fluffing his wings. I was out snapping pictures of a snowy egret that was visiting the field behind our home and this little guy kept chirping at me, he wanted his picture taken. I just love our sparrows, I'm going to miss them so much. Especially when they would bath, they would get so excited and dance around in their little bowl and sing. Sweet little things.....

Nesties

Finally some nesties.... These are so fun to make and I love using up my fabric scraps. I'm still deciding on what (if anything) to put it the nests. I made a ton of paper mache birds mostly for the wreathes and I have a lot left over. I was thinking though, that birds usually make nest that just fit their itty bitty bottoms with not much room to spare. These nest would be like mansions for my birds. So then I was thinking of just putting eggs in the nest, kind of like Momma just stepped out to get dinner. The Bee is dabbling in a little needle felting, which is very cool. So I was thinking of may be making some feltie eggs may be for the nests. I have some wool that a friend sent me dark chocolate brown and a oat color, I could do some spotted eggs may be.

Well..... We'll have to wait to show off these pictures because Blogger is not cooperating.

Mellow Yellow?

Is Yellow mellow? I don't know if mellow is the word that comes to mind when I think of yellow. I think of yellow as an intellectual color, a thinking color, an industrial color...... Well, last Friday we had yourselves a yellowie kind a day in Eureka. A perfect kind of day for yellow since the sun had temporary won the forever on going battle with the clouds. Today would be more of a grey/white day. Anyway, yellow turned out to be harder to find than red and orange and it was very often found with black....

Coming soon...... Green.

It's an Army of Sqrl's

What more could a girl ask for but her very own patterns. I just say what creature I want and proof, magic it's 3D. Ah, if it were really that simple....... As you can see 10 sqrl's later we finally have one that works. I can take no credit for this. I certainly don't have the patience or focus to do this. This is the work of the Bee. He has the amazing ability to take a concept, a drawing in a sketchbook and build it into a 3D model. Sounds simple but it is so not. I can't even begin to describe how grateful I am for this help and how excited, because the sqrl is just the beginning.

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.

New Things

This, above is my newest medium...... I have been wanting to try silk screening forever. It's always seemed like something beyond me, too complicated and too toxic. Well it's certainly not complicated and it can be toxic but it doesn't have to be if your willing to do it the old fashioned way. Now days people use a technique call photo emulsion, which more or less burns whatever image you want onto the screen, it's really time efficient and easy. But of course you must use toxic chemicals to do this. So we're just doing it by hand, literally. Which means tracing the image onto the screen and than painting all the negative space. Making it quite time consuming and you must have a steady hand, which thankfully I have. In the end it is worth it because than have a silk screen that you can use over and over. The one above is my first so it's just test, sort of, to practice pulling prints, before I try it on fabric. Oh I have so many idea running through my brain about this.... Endless possibilities.

The other new obsession (and this will make me an official dork) is Battlestar Galactica. Not the original!! The new one on the SciFi channel, though we don't have the SciFi channel, we don't even have a TV. A friend first recommended it when we were discussing our mutual love for Firefly. He said we must see it. That was over a year ago, since than we kept reading about it here and there so we finally broke down and rented it over the holiday.

We are officially obsessed! It is so good..... Must see it from the beginning, in my opinion. Great story, really great actors and not your typical scifi show. A little dark a little sexy and really deep and not very cheesy at all. Thank the Gods it's on the SciFi channel or it wouldn't make it. Good shows with a lot of underlining meaning, that make you think and fall in love with the characters (like Firefly) don't make it on regular channels like Fox. It''s like the general audience only wants tranparent shows like The OC. I'm surprised Lost is still on, it's so different than the usual. I haven't seen since middle of last season so it may have changed but at least it makes ya think a little and the actors are good. Can't stand bad acting, really.

My favorite shows let's see..... Buffy - big time Buffy fans, go ahead laugh but it's the best show I've every episode but one. That was last springs obsession. We watched seven years of Buffy in four months. Yep, big dorks here. Firefly is the absolutely best sicfi show ever. Both Buffy and Firefly were produced and written by Joss Wedon, love his stuff. Carnivale was a great show on HBO, weird and creepy not scarey just a little creepy. And now I'll add Battlestar Galactica, trust me it's good..... So as you can see none but one of these shows are still on. Buffy ran for a long time surprisingly but both Firefly and Carnivale were dropped. And Firefly had a huge fan base but Fox still dropped even after the fans raised money and bagged, yes they begged.

Bee Thankful

Disclaimer:: I don't exactly believe in all the "Indian" and Pilgrim part of Thanksgiving. It makes me quite sad thinking about it and certainly makes me not very excited about celebrating the day. But I do believe in giving thanks, although this should happen everyday not just once a year. It is good to celebrate all that you are thankful for.

Some things that come to mind that I am thankful for since I could go on forever I'll just do a few instead of writing my life story.

1. My boss calling me at 12:00 today and telling me to go home.
2. A job where I can bring my sewing machine to work and sew and create all day long.
3. My bestest friend in the whole wide world - Bunsen.
4. My incredible group of girlfriends, I am blessed with knowing and loving so many beautiful strong, intelligent women.
5. Having so many Mothers, especially me Mom and Grandmom and also not being a part of the bad mother-in-law club, I'm happy to say I love my MIL.
6. My Dad who is the funniest, most hardworking man I know. He's full of, how he says, "useless information" (I think he knows everything)
7. Even though I don't make much money (because it's almost impossible to make money in Humboldt) and I still have a rich life and everything I need. We live a simple life.
8. Saving money.
9. Being an artist, having the ability to create what I see.
10. Living in a world where I have the freedom of education, and information is everywhere.
11. I can cook and do it well, I think it's genetic thing.
12. Having a really good childhood - makes for less baggage in life.
13. Being taught to seek happiness not money (though I know it helps).
14. Organic food
15. The experience of living in LA and here in Humboldt.
16. All the adventures I've been on - Greece, France, road trips.
17. My imagination.
18. My big brother.
19. Really good books and stories.
20. Huge world of creative people right now on the Internet. All these blogs I read all the time. So much inspiration out there. It's a great time to be creative. Tapping into that current feels so good. It also feels so good to find so many like minded people.

These guys don't have names yet.... Their a gift to me Mum.

face shots

Mrs. Clair - She's a gift for my Grandmom

Clair face shot

Not sure what these guys are, but I like 'em. I'm going to keep working on this idea and see where it goes.

Abigail who is sitting on Ellis the Egret, William and Molly

Geeze, it seems like it's a once a week posting trend here.... I could blame it on the fact that when I get home from work it too dark to take the pictures, 'cause ya can't post without a picture!!! So I broke down last night a just took some pictures anyway and I'm just going to have to level them. Still a little dark but it'll do the job. Some of the pictures as you can see were taken at a different time with different light. I wanted to show off the whole doll, last night when taking the pictures I was focusing on their faces. So please ignore the harsh differences.

Well I can finally say - WE HAVE FACES!!! I'm happy with all but one. Miss Abigail (who hasn't yet been introduced here) I tried like ten different mouths on that poor girl and not one fit. So in the end I embroidered a mouth for her and I think that one worked best, but still not perfect.

Oh and I can't take full credit for the little dolls and Clair. My Mom bought the doll bodies and sent them to me when she was moving because didn't get a chance to do anything with them. So now I'm moving and sending them back to her, finished. I just dressed them, gave them wings and a face. They need names though.

Sqrl & Bee Studio..........

Sqrl & Bee Studio has a new look.... It's still got a couple of things I want to change, but overall I like our new design. It's clean, simple and to the point. We wanted something to just display our little but growing portfolio. The hardest part is gathering all the art and stuff and photographing it. It surprisingly takes forever to do this. Our last site was too much about web design. I didn't want to make it look like that's all we do. We're just artists and we happen to know how to design and build websites, that's all.... On another note we offically leave on Feb. 1. That's a big deal. Originally we were saying we'll leave sometime at the end of Feb. We didn't know exactly when because this job Andrew currently has. So he settled it with is "boss" and we're leaving the first of Feb. That gives me 2.5 months to pack and ship and pack and ship. Crazy stuff 'round here... I already have a good stack of boxes all of which are ridiculously heavy and will cost me a small fortune. But I have no choice in the matter and I knew this would happen so I saved my pennies.

dream journal

I haven't done this in a long while... Actually I haven't been remembering my dreams much lately. Things are quite stressed here in our house lately. May be that's the reason for not remembering. Anyway there was a lot of dreaming going on last night. But only one detail that I really remember and I really like thinking about it. I wonder what it means??

I was outside, at a little table. It was almost like there was a sewing machine on the table. It had lots of compartments. There were three broken eggs on the table with two newly hatched birds and one breaking out of it shell. I was tring to move the new chicks into the little compartments and put little towls over the compartments to keep them warm. Then I went find my Mom and tell her about the new chicks. When I found her, she was in a garden, a really big fancy garden. She had big, tall tins (sort of like these olive oil tins that people plant herbs in, in Greece. But way bigger)attached to the bottom of her feet. Like she was walking on stilts. So she was real tall, I was looking up at her.I remember thinking "Wow, Mom your really good at that". She stumbled a little and than I saw that she was braiding trees, like how your braid hair. But these were pretty grown trees and she was just braiding them. Then she said "damn Aunt Rose and her crazy ideas" (Aunt Rose is her sister). And that was it.