FREEBIE FOR MONDAY: COLLAGE BACKGROUND

Well, it was certainly hot enough yesterday. After nearly a full summer of, literally, sweater weather, we suddenly have temps in the 95-100 degree range. (That's 35-38 degrees Celsius, for the non-Fahrenheiters among us.)

I spent a lot of time in front of a fan yesterday, meant to do "work" on my laptop, but got distracted and played instead. Bad girl! Bad! Or good, depending on how you look at it, because I made art, which is, after all, my favorite way to play.

I call this collage sheet "Echoes".


Now then, if you click on the image, it will enlarge for you. After that, press the F11 key on your keyboard. All the stuff at the top and bottom of your screen will go away, and the image will get even bigger, and you can save it at what I hope is full size. Press F11 again, and you'll get back all the stuff that just went missing.

Want to alter the page? Leave your email in a comment, or email me, whichever you prefer, and I'll email you the page as a Photoshop file (psd), and you can manipulate the layers, remove one and substitute your own, etc.

Hope this is something you can use!

SUNDAY RERUN: Achilles, Cole, DeLila, Tsarina Coffee Pot People

It's Sunday! Time for a Sunday ReRun, a blog party hosted by Chari, over at Happy To Design. Anyone can play, so if you have a favorite blog post or three, click on the Sunday Favorites button in my lefthand sidebar and come join the fun!

This is from August of 2004:

I took pictures of most of the new Coffee Pot People® today. Here are four of them, and I'll put up more tomorrow. I'm hoping to have at least a couple more finished tomorrow, too. The show at Edgefield is next week, and I want to have as many as possible put together. They are so much fun to do, it's hard to believe not everyone does something like this. You know, not exactly this, per se, but something like it, something that lets them laugh at the places the imagination can take you, and feel the satisfaction of seeing it take form. Guess it's one of those "different strokes" things.

First up is Achilles. He used to be a terra cotta cupid that my stepdaughter gave me, but then a tenant's friend pruned our rhody for us, the cupid was sitting at its base, it's head and foot got knocked off, and....my DH was appalled when I showed him what I intended to do with the dear departed's remains, and was afraid Lauree would be upset, but Lauree absolutely cracked up when she saw him. By the way, "Achilles" means "lipless"! I thought that was just a riot, since this little guy is definitely Greek. At least, I think he is.

(Update: I realized later that Achilles Mom had intended to name him Raphael, after the Greek fisherman with whom she'd had a brief, torrid, and entirely imaginary affair, but switched to "Achilles" when she saw her regrettably thin-lipped newborn. Oh, and the DH considers Achilles one of his very most favorite Coffee Pot People!)

Achilles

Next up is Cole, jazz musician, looking cool above the tub of coals he holds. He does still work as a barbecue, and especially likes ribs, since I failed to give him any myself! (Update: Cole later married Isabella M. Goode in a televised ceremony at the Portland Convention Center.)

Cole Webber

Now DeLila is something special. Some folks party, and we all know the sort who would put a lampshade on his/her head and get silly to get attention. Who but DeLila would have thought of wearing one for a skirt, though? This girl really knows how to party, and gets lit pretty much every night. Really. There are candles in the base, and a tea light behind her hat. She's even better at night than she is by day. Come to think of it, I know people like that, too.


DeLila, party girl extraordinaire

Last, for today, is The Tsarina. A crown on her head, and stars in her hair


The Tsarina

SHOW SOMETHING SATURDAY #5

I have a video to show you! My friend, Christine Claringbold makes cool stuff from old phonograph records--

Clocks

Bowls

Cuff Bracelets

Suncatchers and Window Clings (which aren't from records, but are still cool.)

Spinners for the yard

I love everything Christine does, but most of all I love the spinners. They're so bright, and cheery, and they MOVE.

And today Christine's daughter, a young teen, created this video of them for her Mom. Isn't this just great?

(Hope this works--I borrowed the video from Christine's FaceBook page!)

FRIDAY FENCE POST #53

I'm posting this late, but they do say, "Better late than never." Hope they're right!

Two fences, and two photos, today:



For better viewing, click on the pictures!

THRIFTY THURSDAY TREASURES

Don't you just love thrift stores, and flea markets, and all the other places where you can gather treasures on the cheap? Here are some of this week's finds.

I got the beautiful box above at the best price ever: FREE. Somebody threw it away, and another person rescued it and passed it along to me! Awesome. And it is a box. Here's the mirrored inside, with metallic gold painted compartments:


Also picked up this beautiful purse, with its shantung "silk" lining, which has a drawstring and forms that lovely "pouf" at the top. It was 40% off $4, which means I got it for about $2.50. The brightly printed tin next to it was $0.99. Don't know what I'll do with it, but for a dollar, it was too pretty to pass up.


Last, this darling little angel, less than three dollars, and the beautiful dish for fifty cents!


The angel is for my bedroom, which already has twenty or so. Or I might give it to Mama, who also has a thing for vintage angels. The dish will, I'm pretty sure, become the base of a Mega Blossom--can hardly wait to get creating with it!

Eeek. Supposed to be somewhere in forty minutes! May all your days contain JOY.

Win Beads! Swap Recipes!

See those earrings? Lori Anderson, over at Pretty Things is giving away a goodie bag full of lucite beads, including the ones you'd need to recreate those lovely earrings. She'll do the drawing on Aug 10, so there's plenty of time to try to win!

Also, if you click on the button in my left sidebar, you can sign up for a recipe swap. It's my favorite kind: No snail mail! Just email your favorite recipe, with maybe a little history/story for background, and Parsley, at Seasons of Mind, will compile all the recipes and create a document, which she will the email out. Isn't that a lovely thing to do?

I got such lovelies at the Fabric Depot outdoor sale today. Maybe tomorrow I'll post photos of my haul. Right now, I will just wish everyone who may drop by here a pleasant goodnight.

FAERIE WORLDS, PART 1

The weekend was wonderful! Sarah and I had a karaoke date after I arrived, Saturday evening, and sang our little heads off, and laughed and giggled and (possibly) drank just a teensy bit (really, just a teensy) too much. There weren't many people there, which meant we got to sing a lot, including two duets.

And. About the time we were getting ready to leave, one of the other patrons, a lovely young blond with a throaty alto voice, asked us if we were sisters! When we told her I was Sarah's mother, she called to her other friends, asking, "Can you believe she's her mother?!" I was a bit worried Sarah would be insulted, but since they seemed to think my 36-year-old was just barely old enough to get into the bar, she was okay with it, lol.

Back home, we talked a bit more, then realized we were both tired, but (we thought) not sleepy, so we went to bed, each of us carrying a novel. Neither one of us read more than a few pages before dozing off, and I found out the next morning Sarah never even made it out of bed to turn out the light in her room. We were so tired, in fact, that instead of having "all morning" to get our costumes fine-tuned we had to rush, but we were only a little late in meeting Sarah's friends to go to Faerie Worlds.

It's about time I showed off some pictures, isn't it? I'll put a few of my favorites here, separately, and then a slide show at the bottom. Otherwise, this post would be about 89 yards long!

Daughter Sarah (left) and her friend Tiffany

Me (left!) and my new satyr friend

You can't see his furry legs or hooves, but this is a young faun

I think this faerie was sprinkled with pixie dust!

Created with flickr slideshow from softsea.
This was such a lot of fun, like a big costume party where you didn't need an invitation and needn't know any of the guests, but something occurred to me later: I dislike the statement, "I believe in fairies." To me, you might as well say, "I believe in chairs," or "I believe in dirt." Those are not things you believe in; they are things that ARE. Same with the fairies. We make up fantasy stuff about them because we don't have much (I do not say we have none) firsthand knowledge of them, and I think most of it is probably wildly inaccurate, to say the least.

But not the fact of fairies. They simply are, but rarely let themselves be seen by the big, clumsy, heavy-footed humans stomping around in the woodland areas they populate.

And now that I've thoroughly weirded you out, I will say, "Good night, and may the little folk be kind."