Monday, July 27, 2009

Rescue Me show at AaCP meets Chibi & Orange

My daughter and I took a quick stab at cartoonish type painting/drawings on canvas yesterday. Left is Chibi Puppy by my daughter and right is Orange Kitti, by Macee (my new name given to me by friends). They go to Arts at Canal Place for the "Rescue Me” featured Artist show. Most paintings have part of the sale donated to our local animal shelters. Along with the normal show, there are these small cute paintings made by members or the public that are being donated so the proceeds will go also go to the Animal Shelter.

Sunday, July 26, 2009

Road Trip to Lost River

It was time to add more inventory to Lost River Artisan Cooperative. Now available are cool copper rings, more earrings and necklaces and my newly designed 22's for $22! Since I was making this beautiful country ride, I decided to invite a few friends along. Dalis and Ceil were gracious enough to hang for the day, though we did leave another wonderful friend (Piver) behind that was out sick, sniff. Dalis and Ceil decided it was time to introduce their products (that consisted mainly of glass jewelry, but also included felted purses and "lambscapes"!) to the Lost River area. They were juried in while we ate lunch in "The General Store" next door. What yummy chicken tarragon salad sandwiches they had! MMMMM, my belly growls as I rethink the meal.
Here are the girls as they prepped their lovely work for sale. Sassy vixon jewelry for sale!
This is a cool old tractor that sits outside the Lost River building. What a beautiful location for the coop, nestled into the trees.
Of course there had to be purchases, as well as installation of our work, because we like to support other artists' talents. We purchased yummy coffees, a tasty pecan pie jam and this fun textural large pot and serving dishes by Kathryn Kavanagh.

Monday, July 13, 2009

Art in the Park on Deep Creek Lake

I love this little festival. It's location is lovely, right on the bank of Deep Creek Lake and in front of the Discovery Center in the State Park. There are usually not a lot of vendors, it's a small festival, but it proves to be a wonderful, more personal experience and there is nature abound. Grand Daddy Long Legs usually find their way onto my inside walls, which is only appropriate considering my inspiration sometimes originates from them. The customers are usually super friendly and very supportive of my style of work, and this year included both jewelry and sculpture.
This lovely hottie with the WAY cool shades is Annie. She's chillin' during a great weekend of sales of her wonderful homemade paper art that includes journals, lamps, 2D originals and prints and even sculptural paper items!


Annie happened to have front row view of a major event happening in nature DURING the festival. It just so happened that in the past week, the park volunteers said that a colony of Wild Honey Bees were relocating queens. Apparently there can be 4 queens born of the original and they had already seen two be relocated. The third happened during the festival. It may be hard to see, but in the center of this photo is a darker area on the branch - sort of shadowed. This is where the bees were protectively swarming over the new queen as they began the relocation. Off to the left you can see peppery dots that indicate a large number of bees still in the air. One of our favorite vendors was directly under this unusual occurrence.
In the very center of this image you can see a vertical shading in the tree. This was the clump. At one point, almost the entire section dropped for the weight of the bees on the queen was tremendous. Of course the bees never touched ground as they fell, for they quickly gained flight and recovered the cluster. My camera couldn't zoom super close so you can't really get a gauge on how large this clump was from the image. It was a unique event to be seen by such a large group of people and as the volunteer explained... there aren't many Wild Honey Bees left in nature. It doesn't appear like much in such small photos, but it was quite the site to see so many bees taking flight over your head.

Another occurrence was going on at the same time.... ahem... the sale of many pieces of jewelry in my booth such as the new "cut-out" designs featured here! They were taking flight onto many a ears over the weekend!