What My Friends Are Blogging

You may have noticed that sidebar to the right with a list of other sites to visit when you get bored with my blog. I'd like to highlight two friends who've made the blogosphere plunge in the past year:

I've known Wendy Shang since we lived in neighboring dorm suites our first year of college. (I won't say how long ago ;o) Her first novel The Great Wall Of Lucy Wu is being published next year by Scholastic! She's blogging about the writing life at Skytale and is also a contributor to From the Mixed-Up Files of Middle-Grade Authors, a new blog that's starting off with a blast this month by giving away nine books!

I first met Mel Kolstad on-line through the old ATCards site (now ATCs For All), but I now count her as a "real life" friend :D since we also get to meet every month in person to trade ATCs with the Milwaukee Artist Trading Card group. Mel recently made the big plunge of becoming a full-time artist! Her first blog Much Ado About Stuff now has its own spin-off blog Ephemeraology focusing on her love of vintage stuff.

So go check 'em out!

Joseph Cornell Is For The Birds!

The Milwaukee ATC group's June theme is "For the Birds," which solidly trounced "Favorite Artists," the theme I voted for, so I combined the two and made these Artist Trading Cards inspired by Joseph Cornell's Aviary series. The parrots in the first ATC above are the same ones Cornell used in The Caliph of Bagdad and Untitled (Parrot and Butterfly Habitat). You can see these and other Cornell parrot boxes grouped together in this great post at the Kiwi's Angels parrot blog.

For my ATCs I started out with Patti's Parrots Faux Postage from Ten Two Studios and some vintage text glued to some serendipity collage backgrounds. Then I gessoed around the parrots to blend everything together and create the weathered white painted surface that Cornell had in his Aviary boxes. Then I added punchinella (sequin waste) to suggest bits of cage wire. The round things are the plastic labels removed from tabulating machines (a craft supply shared with our ATC group by one of our many generous members), and I also had some old air mail stickers.

To suggest a three-dimensional shadow box, I painted 19th-century newspaper text to look like wood and cut it into strips to outline the card. Then I added shadows around the corners of the box and behind the "props" with a wash of acrylic paints. Definitely need to make some more of these! :D

Outdoor Cat Update

This past week was the one-year anniversary of Outdoor Cat going through the Wisconsin Humane Society's Trap-Neuter-Return program. I last reported in December that she had moved inside for the winter, and now that spring is here, she still prefers to stay inside. She'll still ask us to open the front door, but then she'll usually only stay around the front porch for awhile, eating some grass and watching the world. As soon as the neighbors come out, she runs back inside.

It's interesting how many typical indoor cat habits she now has, such as scratching at the bathroom door if it's closed and sleeping next to my chair in my office. Occasionally if I don't get up at 6 a.m., I'll find her sitting on the bed beside me, staring very earnestly at me. We no longer close her in a separate room when we go out, and for the most part the three cats tolerate each other, though there's always the occasional hissing match when they cross paths. At 6:10 this morning I had both Nuts & Outdoor Cat walking over me, within a foot of each other without hissing because they were both intent on getting me out of bed to feed them. And BOTH had food in their dish but wanted me to pet them and move the food around for them before they would eat. (Naturally my husband slept through this ;o)

Next step will be moving OC's litter box down into the basement with the others so I can reclaim the guest/sewing room!

Do You Zentangle?

I admit, I tried to avoid the Zentangle craze, but then I saw Sandy Bartholomew's article in Cloth Paper Scissors, and then checked out the Tangle of the Week on her blog. Next thing I know, I'm making Zentangle ATCs, though I wasn't able to keep to just black & white!

Another great source for design ideas is Molossus' blog Life Imitates Doodles, which provided inspiration for the Gem card below left:

The one on the right above was embossed metal, and I'll definitely have to try some on the sewing machine since there's a strong doodling link between the tangle patterns and the free-motion stitching I learned from Diane Gaudynski. In the meantime, it's ink pens & Twinkling H20 watercolors for me!

A Picture A Day

While I haven't had much time for blogging, I'm still doing my 365 photo project, taking a photo a day (some days are better than others - there are a lot of photos taken at night with bad lighting)

I also submitted a photo for the New York Times "Moment in Time" event, where they asked people to take one photo at the same time around the world on May 2, 2010. They apparently only expected to get a few thousand but ended up with over 13,000 submissions (and counting). I photographed some Artist Trading Cards in progress on the dining room table.

You can see other photos on the NYT Lens blog and in this spontaneous unofficial Flickr group. Eventually the NYT plans to have a gallery up and running where you can see all the photos submitted! Just give them a bit more time.
UPDATE: You can see all the photos they received here. Alas, because I had trouble with their submission form on the day, mine was one of the ones lost in the e-mail submissions.

Simple Sweet Scones

Long ago in the days before the internet (the 1980s), I was struggling with a scone recipe from British Heritage magazine (I think the measurements were by weight rather than volume), and my college housemates took pity on me and bought me Biscuits and Scones by Elizabeth Alston.

Twenty years later, the spine of the book has cracked so that it will usually just flop open to the recipe for Simple Sweet Scones.

2-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, cut up
1/4 cup granulated sugar (or 1/3 cup for sweeter scones)
2/3 cup milk

Preheat oven to 425F. Mix flour, baking powder and salt together in a large bowl. Add the butter and cut in with a pastry blender or rub it in with your fingers until the mixture looks like fine granules. (I prefer the finger method.) Add sugar; toss to mix (with your hands - not tossing it up into the air ;o).

Add milk and stir with a fork until a soft dough forms. Form the dough into a ball, and knead gently on a lightly floured board (about 10-12 kneads). Pat or roll the dough out into a circle about 1" thick and cut out scones with a biscuit cutter or round drinking glass dipped in flour.

Place scones on an ungreased cookie sheet, and bake for about 12 minutes or until medium brown on top. Put a linen or cotton dish towel on a wire rack and lay scones out to cool, covering them loosely with the cloth. Serve with butter & jam (or whipped cream or clotted cream if you're feeling decadent), and a nice cuppa tea.

Paint Fabric While the Sun Shines

We had a sunny 62°F day here, so I ignored the housekeeping and yard work and pulled out the fabric paints for the first time this year.  I used some cotton pieces that I had previously painted but didn't really like plus two 12x12 plastic stencils from Crafters Workshop that I bought at Legacy Scrapbooks in Cedarburg last year. First I experimented with some Tulip fabric spray paint.  It's a pump spray rather than an aerosol so the effect can be splotchy, but it turned out pretty groovy with the "Flower Frenzy" stencil (shown above).

I had originally bought the stencils to use for sunprinting, so I tried that as well. I painted a layer of contrasting color (Pebeo Setacolor) over the previously painted fabric, and then placed the two plastic stencils, using thumbtacks to keep everything in place on this very windy afternoon. In the photo below, the Flower Frenzy and Cosmic Swirl stencils are visible at the top, and a piece I sunprinted earlier with Cosmic Swirl is at the bottom.

So here's what I made today - the top two are sunprinted, and the bottom pieces were spray-painted.