Haiku My Heart: Maya

She wrote from the heart,
a phenomenal woman,
a voice for us all.

Rest in peace, Maya Angelou.


Haiku My Heart hosted by recuerda_mi_corazon.

Renovations Continue

Work continues outside my apartment door, albeit exceedingly slowly.  The drywall has been installed

and this week, taped and sanded.

By the time I get home each night, only a thin layer of white dust and the tools of their trade remain behind to show they were there.

I must admit, the sight of this roll of mesh tape sitting unattended was tempting to me.

If it was already open, I would have very few qualms about taking a inch (foot) or so for my journal (okay, maybe a yard) - the mesh adds a wonderful texture underneath gesso or paint. But it's a brand new roll, still wrapped in plastic, and I tell myself if I really want some, I can just head to the hardware store and get some of my own, no need to steal it.  So I left it there.  Every day.  For 3 days now.  Perhaps I am being tested.  Good girl or bad?

I wish they'd tidy up their stuff and put it away, or move on to the next floor. A girl can only be good for so long!

How Did I Miss That?

Do you ever have one of those experiences where you realize that you hadn't really been seeing something that you look at every day?  For me, it's usually a freckle on my face - suddenly one day, I'll notice one and think, "Hey, where did that freckle come from?" Then I ask someone, "How long have I had this freckle?" and they say, "It's been there for years!"

This time, it was my Tim Holtz design ruler.  I was reading one of his blog posts and one of the steps was to poke evenly spaced holes with a sharp tool using the holes in the ruler. I actually thought to myself, "Gee, I must have an earlier version of that ruler. Too bad mine doesn't have those holes."

(Hand slaps forehead) Silly me, of course my ruler has those holes. Honestly, I had never noticed them before!!

Of course, now I see them every time I look at the ruler.  Crazy.

Just to be sure I'm not missing anything else about this ruler I should have noticed by now, I'm going to watch this video very carefully!!

My Little Bird Book

My friend Laurie has pointed out to me that I hadn't posted any pictures of the book I made when I took a class with DJ Pettitt in Florida at the beginning of April.  Not sure how that happened but better late than never, here goes:

I call it my little bird book, not just because of the quail on the cover that DJ taught us how to paint

and not because of the bird's nest on the back cover (ditto)

but because I ended up adding a number of the photos of the birds I saw in Florida to the pages, with (in my humble opinion) great effect.

First, the individual pages were gessoed and then painted with a number of techniques we learned in class.  I tried to keep the results random and rather organic looking, using earthy tones.

Then we sewed strips of fabric to the painted pages. As you can see, I used a number of decorative stitches but again, I stuck to those that had a nature theme, such as leaves or flowers.  As the time, I was just thinking of the cover designs, trying to keep the idea of a quail and her nest.

The paper pages were interspersed with fabric pages made of cloth, ribbon and lace and whatever else we wanted to embellish them with.

The spine of the book was made with a similar combination of fabric, lace, ribbon and crocheted pieces, then buttons were added as the signatures were stitched to it.

In the end, it was as if the painted pages were made with the photos in mind, even though I hadn't taken any of the pictures before I did the painting.  When it came time to add the photos, many of them seemed to match perfectly with the way a certain page had been painted - a very serendipitous result!

For example, the painted area in the top right of the page below reminded me of branches and suited the look of branches in this photo and the way the bird was tucked into a shadowy recess within.

I'm so thrilled with how the book turned out. I like to flip through it from time and time and wonder about whether I should add more to it - another photo, a few more embellishments maybe?  For now, I'm just enjoying it just the way it is and thinking about the next one I'll make.

Here's just one more photo, of me and DJ together!  So glad I took the class and got to spend time with such a lovely person and talented artist.

Ice Cream Weather

I'm trying to walk 10,000 steps every day. Today I was 1,000 or so short so I took myself out for a quick walk after dinner. Except my feet happened to take me past the nearby convenience store where I popped in to pick up one of these:

I couldn't resist, it felt so much like summer today. 

Just this once...

Construction Update

I had a quiet day yesterday, working on an art project that is a gift for someone. I meant to finish it last year and didn't, thought I'd work on it over the winter and didn't do too much. Now I just want to get it done but needed a few hours of uninterrupted time to get it really going and I finally had that yesterday. Still a ways to go but at least it's moving ahead now.  On the plus side, the recipient doesn't know anything about it so they don't know I'm running so late on delivery! :)

Today was a different story - more active, cleaning up and clearing out. Spent some time today cleaning off my balcony.  Quite a layer of dirt on everything after a long winter and of course, due to all the extra dust in the air from what is going on down on the ground:

The construction work continues, even on Saturdays. Yesterday was the first warm and sunny, summer-like Saturday we've had this year and I chose not to be out of the balcony because the noise of the trucks and heavy equipment is bad enough when just the windows are open a few inches.  Not to mention that they started work around 7 a.m. and kept going until late afternoon.  They're not supposed to start work until 7 according to the local by-laws but that doesn't seem to stop them from getting ready earlier than that, which yesterday involved banging those heavy metal buckets around starting about 6 a.m.  So much for sleeping in on the weekends, it's not possible in this neighbourhood right now!

At one point, I counted 9 dump trucks waiting to be filled up.

I'm not sure where that big pile of dirt came from or where it is going.

Luckily, they don't work on Sundays so today was blissfully quiet.  I carted a few loads downstairs to the garbage, clearing a bunch of stuff that had been accumulating on my balcony over the past few years, cluttering things up.  Once that stuff was gone, I washed a thick layer of grime off the table and chairs and vacuumed the rug.  I also had to sweep up a lot of leaves from the artificial tree I have out there - it sheds as much as a real tree in the fall! How can that be?!

Now all is tidy out there but I am worn out.  I think I'll turn in early tonight...no doubt those dump trucks will be back first thing tomorrow morning to wake me up early!

Haiky My Heart Fridays: Brave

Newborns take first steps
Explore the world around them
So small yet so brave.



What I didn't know about my new camera is that it has a setting that allows you to take pictures while simultaneously shooting a video.  As a result, the photos I shared on this post the other day where taken while filming the above video.  So now we have the best of both worlds!

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