martha stewart craft paints in the garden

Summer breeze so softly blowing,

In my garden pinks are growing;

If you'll go and send the showers,

You may come and smell my flowers.

                      

                    - Old Garden Poem

A few weeks ago I was doing some potting of some flowers and I was distressed by how faded a lot of my old containers were. Some were plastic, some were that biodegradable stuff. Either way, there need some color enhancement.

Luckily, a few weeks earlier I had been to Michael's Craft Store and bought a whole bunch of the new Martha Stewart Craft Paints.  These paints are supposed to be good for glass, metal, ceramic, plastic, wood, paper and probably more. They say on the bottle they can be used for outdoor stuff. So, I grabbed some colors and began painting all my old faded pots and added some color to my terra cotta pots.

It was instant better color and it made me happy. The above pot was a taupe color. I covered it with a light pink. Here are some more that I painted. It's a bit hard to tell with the hydrandgea taking over everything, but it looks way better than it did.

Then I painted my little table that had gotten so worn out in the sun. I happened to buy the exact color. Here's what it looked like last summer:

And here is what it looks like now. Even with the pretty Geranium covering it you can see how much better it is. It basically looked brand new. It did scratch when I put something on it though. But, that is to be expected. It wasn't sealed in anyway.

Since I painted these we've had some hot days and a number of rainy days. The pots still look really good. I'm excited to use these paints for other things. There are lots of great colors. 

Hope you have a wonderful Memorial Day Weekend. I'm gonna finally plant some veggies this weekend. Here are a few more pics of the potted plants.

a few days at the beach

I spent some time at the coast last week. I took my parents and we had a few days of sun, sand, great food and some gambling. It was great. It was beautiful most days and it made me wonder why I don't go more.

I grew up in a beach town. It was 10 minutes to the beach and you parked and just walked out to it. After that I lived in the Bay Area, which was surrounded by water and you could be at the ocean in less than an hour, usually. Driving 2-3 hours to get to the beach seems like a long time to me now, but I really need to do it more often.

This was taken from my room

My parent's dog, Abby. This was her first time seeing the ocean and she loved it.

Vintage Color Palettes - Boat House

On a sunny day in spring, the world can actually look like this postcard. The bright blues and spring greens. So lovely. Lately in Portland spring days like this come in about one hour increments between rain and wind. Maybe in Chicago it's different. I would like to be at this boathouse.

These colors are a great combo of you want a refreshing and bright vintage color palette for any project. The color hex codes are from left to right: 0f5193, c2cb2c, f5040c, ff8373

May

When I was a kid all I knew about May Day is that it was a day to leave flowers on people's doors. My sister and I gathered flowers from the yard and put them in empty strawberry baskets, probably decorated with construction paper or pipe cleaner handles and left them on our neighbor's doors.

They looked nothing like this fancy one at the left from Martha Stewart. Every year when May Day passes I say I will do it next year and of course I don't. Maybe if all my friends lived in my neighborhood I would.





The last few days I haven't been able to think about flowers. I've been copying, collating, stapling and pasting postcards into 100 zines.

The majority of these are for the Independent Publishing Resource Center. They have a club called Zine of the Month Club.  Subscribers get a new zine every month from an IPRC member. Coming soon they will be featuring Paper Crush #4 as their zine of the month. Yay!

a random selection of postcards that are included in each zine

all ready to head off to the IPRC

Happy May!

Poem In Your Pocket Day!

Tomorrow is National Poem In Your Pocket Day.  It's part of the month long celebration of National Poetry Month every April.

I heard about this day last year and was looking forward to participating all year long. I'm a subscriber to the Poem a Day emails from Poets.org. When I would get one I especially liked I would flag it (well, star it is what Google uses). Today I went through and found my favorite of the starred poems and created a layout for it and printed it up.

My plans were to do the layout old zine style cut and paste, but the day kind of snuck up on me. When I realized it was tomorrow and I was actually going to be out and about tomorrow I wanted to make sure I took the time to make some poems for my pocket. People will be receiving the poem Detail of the Woods by Richard Siken. Here's a scan of my layout.

You can participate and print up some poems that Poets.org have all ready to go. Or you can print out one of your favorite poems. 

It's a great way to recognize poetry and National Poetry Month. Plus, you might discover a new poet you really like, like I did. Have fun!

Vintage Color Palettes - Wood-Lily

I'm extra fond of this color palette. I like these dusty army green colors that you don't see as much anymore. When they are matched with orange or red, it looks great.

This vintage card is actually a small trade card that came in boxes of Red Rose tea. Each is only 2.25" x 1.50". I got a number of them and the colors are all really great.

If you want the Hex colors, they are in order of top from bottom: fa4607, ff792d, ,405738, 90b285. Here's what the back of the card looks like:

well done

There's nothing I like more than a well done artistic project that comes wrapped in a beautiful package and contains a number of aesthetically pleasing (to me) items to create this one overall atmospheric theme. When it contains music, charming illustrations and zines - even better!

That is why I am such a fan of Frances Castle and the releases of Clay Pipe Music. Somehow I stumbled upon Castle's illustration blog and saw her posting about her new cd, The Hardy Tree. She posted some of the music and it was right up my alley - and something I have a hard time finding. I was immediately in love. I really enjoy some noise and fuzz mixed with melancholic melodies and pop. It seemed like the perfect winter afternoon cd. And it is (wish I could post a listen for you, but none are available that I could find).

Clay Pipe Music, is a London based label run by Frances Castle. Set up as a way to release her own music, and music by like minded others - and to indulge  her passion  for design and illustration. Each release comes in hand crafted packaging in very limited quantities.

The packaging and the mini zine that came with the cd was so perfectly done and added so much to the overall package. I was very happy that I ordered it from England - especially after I saw that they had sold out (a second pressing is now available).

Then a few months ago Clay Pipe Music co-released a compilation project called Tyneham House (in box shown above) that featured music from various artists they've worked for before, but who remained anonymous. The music on this release may have been written beforehand, but all of it evokes the feelings of being at Tyneham House - a large house that was part of a now ghost village. Tyneham was once a thriving community, but was requisitioned by the British Government during WWII for training. The village remained in possession of the military long after the war and the town never recovered.

Again, what came was so beautiful, the box, the little color zine and a bonus cassette.

And the music is perfect. Beautiful, easy, pastoral and melancholic afternoon music. Most is instrumental, a couple have words. The ones with words especially conjure Nick Drake for me.

Here is one of the songs from the Tyneham House cd:





In the notes that came with the box it said that many of the musicians were influenced by the music of The Children's Film Foundation. This interests me quite a bit and has led me to some interesting you tube videos. Today I was watching this one hour show from the 70's from the CFF about time travel.

Overall, seeing projects this perfectly done overwhelms me with desire to create something like this. Although truthfully I don't know that I'm capable. However, it's enough to have examples of the kind of perfect little worlds I would create if I could.