Old Tulips, New Boots

The tulips fold themselves in half when the heads get too heavy for the stems to hold up.  They haven't lost any petals or shriveled up;  just this folding like a heavy sigh.  Meanwhile the slow-to-emerge amaryllis is racing ahead and even has a new little shoot from one of the far edges of the bulb.

I rescue the droopy blooms and stand them in little bud vases, where they still smell sweet while being cut flowers.  This afternoon P and I drove downtown to do many errands including stopping at the Y to work out.  When we passed the cow field at the end of the road there was a low-lying cloud stretched in front of the mountains like a canopy over the wet cows.  One of our errands was to Tops to buy new boots for me, an xmas gift from P.  We ran into D and H at Tops, and H had just spotted the same boots.  They are yummy!

Reviving PieceWork Drawings

 Way back 4 1/2 years ago when F and I first started our little business of recycling packaging materials into wallets and bags, I used to paint each new design and post it on our fledgling blog.  We had started with one design, a square wallet with an antique (i.e. used) button as a closure, and one material-- Kettle potato chip bags.  We spent a lot of time experimenting with other materials and troubleshooting our design.  Meanwhile friends started eating Kettle chips and saving the bags for us. Then someone left a bright blue Purina chicken feed bag on my doorstep, and our chicken wallets became very popular.  A few months after that, a friend's son asked us if we could design a wallet that would be better to sit on than our lumpy little square with the button (which we had thought of as a wallet that would live inside a bag).  And so our second design was born:  our Ultra Slim.  I painted it, and posted it to the blog.

Those original drawings were annotated, pointing out the features of the wallets.  I enjoyed doing them and actually kept it up through that first year.  At the end of the year we had 12 designs, and we made the  paintings into a calender, which we gave to our material suppliers as a thank you.  

But the next year business sped up, and I couldn't find the time to do all those paintings, so I gave up and started photographing the new designs.  Now here we are four years later and approximately 1200 wallets and things later, and I think it's time to bring back the paintings.  Above are paintings of 

one of our new wallets.  As many of our products are, this one was suggested by a friend.  She had seen a very similar wallet but made out of leather;  she preferred the light weight of our material and the fact that our material is recycled.  So we tweaked the design a bit and made it out of her favorite coffee bag  (coffee bags with their aluminum lining having proven to be a great material for our wallets).  The wallet, which we call the Vic, costs $23 and will be posted on our blog and ready for purchase very soon.  It has a card case on the front that you can access very quickly even with the wallet closed.  Inside there is a coin or extra card pocket that flaps up to disclose a billfold.  The whole thing folds into a compact 3 x 4.25 inches.  You can specify any color or theme that you like for the material;  as always, you can specify that it be made a different size and with a button instead of Velcro.  If you absolutely NEED this wallet NOW, email me at weRpiecework@gmail.com or comment here with your email address.

 The second wallet illustrated here is my personal favorite at the moment, and it, too, was requested by a customer who wanted a wallet even smaller than our smallest to date.  She didn't even want to bother with credit card slots.  So we designed this very sleek and minimalist billfold with a pocket inside for very small cards and two pockets for credit cards as well as a billfold.  It's great for carrying in your bag but also fits perfectly in a pocket for when you don't want to carry a bag.

We're selling this one, which we call the Virginia,  for $14 on line, which includes shipping, and a little less if you're local and we can meet up to hand off the wallet.  It will soon be on our blog, but in the meantime, you can comment here with your email address to order it or email us at weRpiecework@gmail.com.

By the way, these are drawings # 3766-3769, but I think I should be able to count them double since they took me a whole morning to do!

While Eating Good Luck Food

I made a new ricebag (actually a popping corn bag from a popcorn company in Pierre, SD) notebook for this new year.  The paper is all handmade-- student paper from when I used to teach papermaking every fall semester.  You'll notice on some of the pages the names of the makers as well as the contents of the paper.  This first page has onion skins added to a base of abaca.   The drawing is of E and B's chickens, made as I watched them scratching and picking in their run this afternoon.  Love these chickens!  Wish I had somebody willing to keep predators away so that we could have our own couple of laying hens;  but with approximately 20 ground hogs, a roaming pack of coyotes, the occasional bear, and Jesse around, things don't auger well for chickens at our place.

E and B's dogs are extremely polite.  But when E lured them into an adjacent room to eat their doggie ice cream while the party guest were eating dinner, the dogs daintily picked up their little cups with their teeth and carried them back into the livingroom to eat with everybody else.

At the top left is a group of interesting things on a table top in the livingroom.  The bird is a large hawk that we saw as we were walking down the street after the party.  It was dark brown on top, lighter brown underneath, and with a white tail.  Enormous yellow feet and a serious looking curved beak.

Early Morning at Beaver Lake

Jacob has been trying to take some sunrise pictures out at Beaver Lake (where we keep our canoe) for a while, and we've never managed to get the right weather, all of his equipment (including the all-important SD card), the right time, etc.  So this morning we set out before daylight in the icy dark around 7:00.  For once it all came together!  Here's J sitting out on a pier (bottom left), and on the bottom right, just before the sun came up-- the sky was pink and white with streaky clouds that reflected in the water-- perfect.  I sketched boats while wearing my fingerless gloves-- a very chilly process.

I especially liked a couple of silvery aluminum canoes that had long rows of rivets.  These were pulled up on the shore, and next to them was another aluminum canoe-like boat.  In the next couple of days Jacob should be posting some of his photos from today on his blog.  

After our outing we didn't waste any time getting to Greenlife for a warm breakfast.  When I got home, I sat in my studio and drew the tulips.

All eight of them are blooming now, and I wish I could paint the sweetness of the aroma that surrounds them!

Teething Bees Coming Soon

On the right is a springerle, a delicious anise-flavored molded cookie.  This one was made by my friend L, who used her German grandmother's recipe.  These cookies were traditionally hung on Christmas trees and then given away as gifts to visitors.  L gave us a box of them yesterday, and they are too pretty to eat, to delicious not to eat.

And today Maya came over to make a prototype of our new teething bee design.  We made it out of honey-colored, black, and light blue towel cloth, and we think its textured material will be very inviting for teething babies to chomp on.  Sewing it was tricky.  Since we sewed the stripes onto the honey-colored cloth, when we sewed one side to the other the machine had to sew through six layers of very thick terrycloth.  When we sewed through the side with the wings, the layers increased to eight layers.  Maya did this part of the job completely alone.  These will soon be for sale exclusively in West Asheville at the Bee Charmer store at their Haywood Road location.

Day in the Country

 Today we drove up to our friends' L and Bs house, a handmade house deep in the countryside in the high mountains north of Asheville.  We were going to spend a day with them and some of their friends decorating lebkuchen, cooking together, hiking, playing/listening to others play music, and relaxing in the comforts of their off-the-grid home.  One of my favorite things to do at their house is explore their collection of interesting objects.  On the right are a jug vase with a candle in the top and a very small ceramic cup made by a local ceramics artist.  The cup is much smaller than the jug, and its colors are blues, greens, yellows, and white predominantly.  I want one of those cups!

 We often hike through the woods that separates the house from L's studio and B's office, and I have never before been able to find my way through the woods without much help.  SO today I decided to draw a map as we walked.  L suggested I look with open focus to better discern the trail from the surrounding forest floor.  I took off my glasses, and was surprised at how much easier it was to notice where the trail went when I wasn't focusing intently through glasses.  I've been practicing going without glasses a lot lately, like the way it feels to have more open, relaxed vision.  So on the way home I led the group and didn't make a single mistake for the first time ever.

On the left is an old out building near the studio that seems to have a mural on its side.  It looks like ice floes in an ocean.  On the right is a quick sketch of a Queen Anne's lace flower that had its seeds held in a nest formed by the dead seed heads.  All of the dried QA lace flowers had this odd seed nest.  On the far right is one of the guests playing a dulcimer while several other people played fiddle, guitar, banjo.

This is one of what seemed like a hundred lebkuchen.  Decorating them with music going on all around us helped the cookies come out looking like dancing women!

More Play, Many Tulips

Every one of the tulips has unfurled a crimson bloom.