Thursday, December 8, 2011

Birdhouse ornament


The Art Guild of Orange Park  had its annual holiday party this past Tuesday night  - a fun pot luck dinner, one of my favorite things! We were all supposed to bring a homemade Christmas tree ornament too. I was totally stumped on this, but ended up buying a small plain wooden birdhouse at Michael's and then painting it and decorating it with ribbon and bows and decoupage birds, trees and holly.

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Introducting my grandson



Life in Florida is still so busy! But I hope to get more time for art soon. I'm very excited to be a part of the startup of a new pastel society called the First Coast Pastel Society, which is for our area of Florida. We are planning our first group event this coming Saturday, a plein air paint-out. So maybe I'll get some work done then!

In the meantime my 2-year-old grandson spent the day with me yesterday and we wanted to paint! So I got our a couple bottles of tempera fingerpaint I had bought a couple weeks ago and we painted. I love his a lot and figured it deserved a blog post. :-)

Monday, September 5, 2011







This is the only sort of painting I've been doing lately. I just moved to Florida last week, after leaving my home of 30 years in New Jersey. Quite a change! But my son and his family moved down here a year ago, and I really wanted to be closer to them, and could no longer afford to stay in my home in NJ anymore either, having been forcibly retired from my job last year.


So I bought a cute little house in Florida in the Jacksonville area. It's on a small pond, has 4 bedrooms, a living/dining ell, den with fireplace... I enjoy sitting in the kitchen in the morning, drinking my coffee, and looking out at the pond. I've already had a couple visits from a great egret.


With 4 bedrooms I even plan to make one an art studio! Yay. The only thing I dislike about the house is the color all the walls are painted. The whole house is done up in a color I would call something like "baby poop brown". A dark and depressing color. Actually if it was the same color but about three shades lighter I'd be fine with it. But I find the color dark and heavy - something belonging in an old gothic mansion in England.


So I'm trying to get some paintijng done before my furniture arrives. The first room done is the "John" room - the room I'm fixing up for my grandson's visit. I've also finished the art studio, and gotten a first coat on the guest bedroom and part of the living/dining area. Today I plan to finish the guest room and do the master bedroom.


My art supplies are all on the moving truck. It will be fun to set up my art studio when the truck finally arrives, which is scheduled, so far, for either tomorrow or Wednesday.

Thursday, August 18, 2011

Another Baby Quilt

While up in Canada this past week I finished up another baby quilt I was working on, for the son of the fellow who was our caretaker for many years. He is the same age as my son, and they played together as kids when we would go up to Canada. Kevin's little boy Keaton is 7 months old and I've been wanting to get this quilt to him. This was a challenge, made from odds and ends and scraps as so much of my fabric was away in storage. The cat in the middle is a single piece of printed fabric, and it seemed appropriate since Kevin and his wife are fond of their cats. I just needed to find other fabrics in the right colors that I could use to expand upon the central cat. I was pretty lucky in finding scraps that incorporated the right colors, though the quilt still wound up a good bit smaller than the one I made for my grandson.


But I did get it finished while I was up there, and left it with Kevin's mom to get to him.