Spending Lazy Days with Friends in their Gardens

One of my favorite summer pastimes is spending lazy, warm days with friends in their gardens. Today, we sketched in Cynthia's garden full of lanterns, roses and pots full of geraniums, nasturtiums and pansies.

Last week, I visited Marianne and loved the time spent in her country garden- talking, reading, being outdoors, listening to bees, birdsong, and the chickens.

My friends tend wild gardens- richly planted with a variety of flowers, colors and foliage- a little unkempt like English cottage gardens. Their wildness and abundance touches some inner place in my soul- a Northwest "tropical" garden full of life and lush growth.

Fabric Jewelry Ideas

Saturday, I took a class from Dawn Grunwald on making fabric jewelry. She shared a couple ideas that help make free motion machine stitching easier. First, use an embroidery hoop. It helps to give more control in moving the fabric. Use small stitch setting on machine. Move the hoop slowly with fast speed stitching. The results are smaller stitches and a better way to create your design.
She layers sheers over fabric, cuts the stitched forms out and makes a necklace. See how Alisa Burke takes a similar idea using M and J Trims here.
We also made pins with layer of reclaimed silk fabric, felt, a little needle felted yarn and a button on top.
For the pin back, we cut a piece of felt into a circle, made a couple slits to feed the pin back and glued the felt and pin back to the layered pin. It's a great idea and the pin back will not come off.
This makes me want to get out fabric scraps and play.

Dream Catcher Garden Art

For a garden art exchange for our Portland Art Collective picnic, I made a dream catcher. It always fascinates me how a work of art evolves. My DH gave me a box of old lock parts and the shims caught my eye. I originally planned to make a wind chime. On one of our walks, I found a wire circle from an old hub cap and realized that I'd make a dream catcher (12½ inches in diameter).

I used the ball-peen hammer to dimple both sides of the stainless steel shims (3½ x 1½ inches). With a center punch, I indented the plate where I wanted to drill holes.

put on my "power tool hat" and drilled the holes

wired beads to each shim

and wired the shims together.

To make the dream catcher twirl in the wind, I attached a large fishing lure swivel. Voila- a dream catcher.

Sketching at Hughes Water Gardens

Summer is here in the NW with sunshine and 90°F temperatures. Yesterday, we sketched at one of our favorite spots- Hughes Water Gardens off Stafford Road. Be sure to check out their website for their Waterlily Festival and Invitational Art Show. Artist will be in the garden Sunday July 25th and July 31st giving demonstrations. The leaves of the lotus above remind me of nasturtium leaves but many times larger.
Colorful pots line the garden paths
Hydrangeas bloom in a variety of colors
Statues and other garden art offer a surprise around every corner

Nihonmachi- A Lost Neighborhood

Last Saturday, I took a class with poet Kaia Sand to explore two of Portland's lost neighborhoods- Nihonmachi and Vanport. Readers may remember my interest in the Japanese
internment during WWII here.
It's been a long time since I've taken a writing class. We met at Floyd's Cafe in Old Town, did some practice writing exercises about place and old neighborhoods we remembered from our childhood and how they are different today.
We visited the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center to learn about Nihonmachi or Japantown in Portland. Then we walked to the Japanese American Historical Plaza at the north end of Water Front Park on the Willamette River. I wrote the poem below to honor this old neighborhood and its residents.
Nihonmachi

Nihonmachi- lost and revisited
A different, extinct place
No Kanji speak
No Issei
No friends' door stoop conversation
No stacked laundry bundles butcher-paper wrapped with family name
Where to live? No hotels only registered historic buildings
Where to bathe? No 20 cent bath houses
What to eat? No Teikoku Mercantile

April 28, 1942
Did you see the Exclusion Oder No. 26?
It changed everything
Silence, people gone, forced out

3,500 mandated to Portland Assembly Center
aka Pacific NW Livestock Exposition Pavilion
Where cattle stood days before
the stench, the rain, the exhaustion, the unknown dark fear

Gaman- accept what is with patience and dignity

We have to gaman
We have to gaman
We have to gaman

Crowded trains bound for Minidoka
A dry and arid landscape

We have to gaman

Persevere, be resourceful, make do
Create with what is here- scraps, found objects reinvented into beauty

We have to gaman
We have to gaman
We have to gaman

Rose Garden Sketch with Costa Rican Artistas

Today, we sketched with artists from Costa Rica at Portland's Rose Garden in Washington Park. June is the best time to see the garden in full bloom. Clouds covered Mt. Hood but we got a good view of the city and the roses.

One of my favorite roses-

From left to right- Carolina, Cynthia, Rosmery, Sonia, Jeannette, Raquel and Ana.

Rosmery gave each of us one of her watercolors that she painted while in the garden. I'm going to have to play with using just watercolor with no pen. I love the use of water and paint to get different textures. Muchas gracias Rosmery!
The artists, Rosmery Vega, Sonia Alfaro, Jeanette Trejos and Raquel Mora, will show their artwork Saturday, July 10th from 3-8 pm at Onda Gallery on NE Alberta in an exhibit entitled, "Place and Imagination".
Please come to their artist reception, meet them and see their art. They belong to a woman's art collective called Jadeazul from Grecia, Costa Rica. Their trip to Oregon is hosted by Partners of the Americas.

Travel Art Supplies with M. Graham Watercolor Palette

Our sketch group is hosting a group of women artists from Costa Rica this next week and we made them travel art supply kits with a M. Graham watercolor palette. The kit includes a sketchbook with 15 pages of watercolor paper, a glue stick, a water brush, a pen, tissue paper and a palette.
I learned how to make these palettes from Cynthia Mooney. I used 150 grit sandpaper to give tooth to the Altoids tin surfaces.
Then I conditioned some Sculpey clay, put some Sobo glue on the bottom of the tin and then pushed in the clay. The Sculpey clay is heavy. Cynthia says she prefers to make these palettes with paper clay which is much lighter in weight when dried.
I formed wells in the clay with the end of a marker and baked them in my clay dedicated convection oven at 275°F for 20 minutes.
I covered the bottoms of the tins with red suede paper and the tops with garden sketches using the adhesive from my Xyron machine.
Then, I added the M. Graham watercolor paints. These are my favorite travel paints because they do not dry out and go onto paper smooth, with great color. Make yourself a travel art supply kit and enjoy using it on your vacation this summer. You'll remember your travel art as much or more than your photos.