From the garden...

The basil and tomatoes are from the garden.  Add fresh mozzarella from the market along with some nice oil and vinegar and we have tonight's starter... Caprese salad.  Yum!

This used to be one of my favorite salads when I lived in Italy that study summer (was it 2006?). Our little Florence apartment was near a lovely street for shopping and we could get all these ingredients easily. Good memories of good times! I will have to dig up some photos from that summer one of these days!

Second set of asemic post cards...

For the same swap I mentioned the other day on THIS blog entry.    HERE is the original MMSA swap page.

I wanted to send in 4 cards but had only 3 of the backgrounds I used, so I made another set of 3 more today on a different background. Now I have one each to save for my reference.

So these started with a lighter background and I used some map scraps, old gelli paper scraps, postage stamp, other ephimera from an antiques catalog, a hand-carved rubber stamp and pens.

Hot pink and orange...

When Evie and I had our first apartment in San Francisco way back (1970?), it was painted a lot of bright colors. I remember the bathroom was bright pink and orange! THIS MMSA swap reminds me of that! The swap was for hot pink and orange so I took some white cardboard and gelli printed those two colors to start, swirling them around and getting nice blobs of color. That would have been fine for the swap but I had to add something, so I added a couple of stamps...

Here is one of them closer up to see the  color blends:

As with all these swaps, part of the fun is in making them and then part of it is in receiving post cards from others! It is amazing to see the variety from the same prompt.

Linked to:
Mandarin Orange Monday
Paint Party Friday

Asemic postcard for swap...

Sometimes a challenge comes along that intrigues me so I need to drop everything else and do it. Such was the asemic writing postcard challenge for MMSA (Make Me Some Art swaps). Asemic writing is wordless and without contextual meaning. 

Google has a lot of cool examples of asemic art HERE.

This evening I played around with it using 3 previously Gelli-printed post cards. I also used: tissue pattern paper,  stamps from India, topo map fragments, black and purple pens. This is what I came up with.:

I will probably use 2 of them for the swap and keep one for myself as usual. Then I will probably make a few others in a different look so I can send in the maximum of 4 for the swap. 

Getting back to Mail Art...

I took a long break from doing Mail Art these last years but those of you who knew me back when might remember all my stamping and mail art post card days... well, they might be coming back! Now that I have time to play, AND a new Post Office Box, I have reawakened my fondness for interesting little pieces of art via snail mail, aka mail art.

My friend Leslie has been doing this for a while (and has sent me things now and then) and also introduced me to the MMSA site (Make Me Some Art) a year or more ago, but I only did that sporadically. I also now and then made some post cards or ATCs for SwapBot then stopped when I had no extra time to play. Now I have time and I plan to let that be more of my art fun -- things I can fit into little snippets of time here and there and which are so much fun to do.

So yesterday I finally sent Leslie one of the two bird postcards we made together months ago. I forgot to scan the one I sent but it was very similar to this one which I kept:

Then today I continued to work on a few cards I had gelli-printed and stamped a long while ago but had never done anything else with. I added some doodles and paint pens and got them ready to send out. The top two are near ready to go, the bottom 2 need more work:

They made me think of the art pages I did last year in Roben-Marie Smith's style so I added more doodles in that vein. Nothing too serious, just something light hearted to send as a mail art postcard.

Want to exchange mail art cards with me? My snail mail info is in the CONTACT ME tab above...

Moving on...

On the plane, coming home from a visit to my sister in Oregon, I happened to look up and kitty-corner to me was a man typing up a welcome back to school Powerpoint presentation. It hit me then that I don't have to do those anymore and I smiled.

Today is the first day of school for my teacher friends here. I think it is finally sinking in:  I have retired! I no longer have that stress hanging over me and I can finally relax into the next chapter of my life. Up until now it has still felt like "summer vacation" so it wasn't as definite. But now, the vacation time is over and I don't have to go back to school. I am smiling.

So I went out into my garden to see what I could find and aside from the dying flowers and old veggies from the summer there was a bit of life...

A couple of our new lavender plants are in full bloom and smell great! The others are still with buds but no open flowers, a little slower to get started. I want to fill the garden with scent now that I have time to work in it! Time to research good fall plantings and what I can do now for great spring flowers.

This year I will remember to plant the sweet peas in the late Fall so we actually have them in the Spring...

It's already on my calendar!

Goodbye Maggie

RIP Sweet Maggie... 1999-2014

You came to us a LBD (little brown dog) and stole our hearts with your smart sweet personality. Thank you for 15 years of life together.  You will be so missed.

 

Hanging out...

For my birthday last weekend Andy took me to the Big Springs Gardens for a lovely hike and delicious lunch.

I find it very difficult to believe I am 62. The sixties always seemed SO OLD to me... Now that I am there, they don't feel anything like I imagined. Not that I can really put into words what I thought I would feel like.

And I think when I was working I FELT older than I do now. Nothing like retiring to bring on some energy!