Camping and Crafting

OK so it wasn't actually "camping," but I did spend this Labor Day weekend at a log cabin in wisconsin without television or internet.  Our little group of 5 all piled into my station wagon and made the 3 hour trip up to Gilbert Lake, which I still haven't located on a map, to spend the weekend swimming, tubing, water skiing, tanning, reading, boating, cooking lots of good food, and playing my new favorite game, Apples to Apples.

And of course, Jenny and I found some time to do a little crafts project - 5 Frank Lloyd Wright inspired picture frames for each of our lady friends who went on a nice little trip up to Taliesin a few weeks ago to see the home that FLW built for him and his lady friend, Mameh.

Overall, it was one of the fun, most relaxing, and cheapest weekends I've spent in a long time - a welcome respite from city life!  Below is a pic from our sunset booze cruise Sunday night.  

The Generosity of my Students

Every now and then, a student will give me a little gift.  sometimes they will be a handmade card - one I received recently said on the front: to miss heather. open now, close later.  Inside it exclaimed "your the best!"  From this same student, I received another something in an envelope, which turned out to be this.  I'm not sure what it has to do with me, really, but it was a very nice little fashion drawing.  look out, project runway!

I have another student who likes to give me candy at the end of every lesson.  While I will only occasionally eat the candy, I always accept it, just in case he comes up with something really really good sometime.  Yesterday, he gave me a pumpkin head pez dispenser with a full roll of lemon pez (he says "my favorite flavor, even though they taste nothing like lemon").

My personal favorite item in the past few years was Piano Pig: a girl scouts project, which is nothing more than a paper lunch bag with some faux pink fur on it and a face drawn on.  The student who bestowed it upon me said I was to show it to every student . . .  maybe I will someday.  For now I just keep it at home by my own piano.  

Horto in Urbs.

Which is the Chicago Parks motto, meaning Garden in a City.  This is the opposite of Chicago's motto, which is Urbs in Horto, city in a garden.  

On my back deck, I have my own garden in a city.  It's comprised of flowers which my mom helped me pick out and plant, as she did last year as well (my first summer in this house).  This year, I added some of my own plants, some seedlings which I started inside back in February or March.  Out of the 6 different flowers I planted back then (including some candy cane striped zinnias - I was really disappointed that they never sprouted) I had only 2 viable plants: some white marigolds and 2 (out of 8 possible) morning glory plants, which I proceeded to put outside while it was still cold and I had given up for dead.  

I could tell that the marigolds were going to be fine and when they started flowering in early July they proved me right.  Now they are about 2 feet high and can barely support themselves (you can see them on the left in the above photo).  I'm not normally a big marigold fan, but these have been very satisfying flowers.  

I was ready to throw out the morning glories, but my mother said they would be fine and she was certainly right.  Some people call morning glories weeds, but a weed is really just any flower that you don't want growing, and I did want these to grow.  Grow they did - covering my trellis better than either of the honeysuckle bushes I had bought to fill up that trellis.  And about a week ago I noticed we had our first blooms.  One thing I love about them, and my African daisies do the same thing: they curl up for the night.  All of these flowers are living and breathing, of course, but there's something even more human about these flowers that go to bed and wake up each day, and don't really wake up on those cloudy days, just like us.  

crafty saturdays

Last summer, my friend Jenny and I got together on a Saturday for crafting.  The project we decided on was making a tshirt for our friend Dan who was getting ready to move to L.A.  Equipped with stencils, "spouncers," paints, and a red handkerchief for inspiration, we set to work making what would become a legend in crafts projects.  The scarf I'm wearing in my profile picture is the prototype for the stenciling we did on the front of the shirt.

This past Saturday, we set to work again, this time making seed paper.  Using my blender, my shredded documents, water, and food coloring (and a half broken window screen), we made some blue paper and mixed in small flower seeds, the idea being that we can make confetti from the paper and the confetti recipients can plant it and grow daisies.  I'm a little skeptical, but I'll try anything once.  Time to clean the bathtub!

and here's what we did while we waited for the paper to dry: make duct tape wallets.  here's Jenny (stuck to the makings of her wallet):

and here's my wallet!

an old resolution

I just got home from a fun Chicago Sunday getting burned on my shoulders and pawing through lots of previously owned treasures at the Randolph Street Market Festival (formerly the Chicago Antiques Market).

This sale happens the last weekend of each month in the summer in Chicago and this weekend marked the one-year anniversary of the first time I went with my friend Jenny.  We had a wonderful time at that first sale: I got burned that day too, as I recall, and we learned how to haggle.  Our haggling really came in handy that first day and we came home with lots of old tablecloths, aprons, and scraps of fabric which we had resolved to each do something with (I planned to make an old table runner into a pillowcase) before we returned the next month.  Today, as we looked through many "new" pieces of fabric, I remembered this resolution that Jenny and I had made.  As is true for most resolutions that any of us make, we did not see them through.  So I bought more fabric and I again resolve, in the public forum of my blog, that I will use up some of my fabric before my next trip to the antiques market.  

Perhaps even next weekend, when Jenny and I are planning to have one of our crafts days, I could make this dream a reality.  I won't force Jenny as much though, because she is being artistic and creating real art these days.  Check out Jenny's stuff!

Seeing something old for the first time.

While I was in Florida last month, my beloved camera broke.  For the first time in a while, I was surrounded by things I wanted to take pictures of that, if I had had a camera, I wouldn't have looked twice at.  

At the end of June, my dad got me a new (red!) camera for my birthday and equipped with a 2GB memory card, I started taking pictures of just about anything decent looking.  Now, I generally don't approve of those people who take vacations with cameras around their neck, but on this revisit to my mom's town (where I am no stranger) I started to take pictures of the area and finally saw this town not as a ghetto past its heyday, but a beautiful vibrant community full of culture.  I give you, New London:

A New London initiative: filling empty storefronts with artwork.  This one is my favorite/the most disgusting thing I've ever seen:

Right across the street from my mom's house is a graveyard that has gravestones as old as from 1700 or so. Not too shabby. Also, there is a mound where Benedict Arnold stood and watch Groton burning (imagine me as Benedict Arnold):
Thanks to my new camera, for helping me notice these things for the first time!