EdytheAnne

Red Coat Remake

A couple of summers ago, I went to help my lifelong friend Libby clean out her late 19th century barn.  The place had some real history.  Three or four generations of one family had lived there and when they sold the place they left a LOT of stuff behind.  I was up for the challenge and excited about the things I would find. 

We worked for days hauling out old World War 1 and 2 souvenirs, plate negatives, vintage clothing galore, antique books and more agricultural ephemera about raising chickens then I ever want to see again. Somewhere, under the stacks of 1950's 4H, award winning, sewing projects I found a wool coat with BIG wooden buttons.  It was a brilliant red and looked plenty thick enough to keep you warm and highly visible while trudging through deep upstate New York snowdrifts on your way to the chicken coops. My friend  didn't even question why a Floridian would want to launder and pack that coat up for a trip home to sunny Florida.  She knows me and knew the red wool coat was destined for something arty. 

There is just something amazing about the sight of bright red anything contrasted against snow white, add a little evergreen to the color mix and bam.... Christmas is all you can think about. So, inspired by the beauty created by God in nature itself and an old red wool coat, I made a few Christmas ornaments to brighten up my tree this year. 

I've got a couple in my Etsy shopand have also posted a pattern for making them yourself just in case you find an old red coat or can get your hands on some red felt.  The PDFs are also available for purchase directly at PayPal for $5. Just click the Buy Now button.

A Rolling Stone

This Florida girl has been doing a lot of traveling lately.... 5,000 miles to be exact.  You see and feel a lot along that many miles of highway.  For a single season, flat lander like me, any highway that takes me anywhere above sea level is my favorite road.  Seeing mountains and trees in flaming colors is just about the next best thing to heaven.  If this old earth can be this full of amazing color and texture, then heaven is going to be mindblowing.

We peeped the leaves from Door County, Wisconsin, down through Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina and got our last glimpse in the North Georgia mountains.  It was a feast for these sand and sea soaked eyes.

Leaf color was not the only thing to see.  In Asheville, I stopped by Earth Guild for a little fiber shopping spree, then on to the Southeastern Animal Fiber Fair.  These are the artists who work with and love sheep, llamas, alpacas, rabbits and goats.  Many of them are raising and shearing the stock that produces the wonderful fleece they use.

  
There was a lot of talk about natural dyes made from berries and veggies, spinning wheels, and the warmth of cashmere and alpaca.  The tables were piled high with roving, wool for rug hooking and applique. Bins of fleece, baskets of colored roving, and racks of every imaginable type of yarn, filled the hall to bursting.

  
I wanted to buy hats, mittens, scarves, warm vests and snuggly blankets, but alas, why would I need them in the 90 degree weather I was returning to?  

Sure, I miss the fall, love the crisp air and misty mornings, but, would I want to be slushing through the muddy melting snow? I wondered about all of this along the 5,000 miles of highway and as we looked for a new place to retire.  For now, it looks like the house in Florida is still my home, at least for one more winter.  However, if you know anyone who wants to move to Florida and has a home to trade in the Smokey Mountains, let me know. I might be game for a new set of mittens.

Eye Catching

My grandfather was a hobby photographer and I was apparently one of his favorite eye-catching subjects.  His old slide collection is full of deteriorating pictures of me as an infant, me in my ballet leotard, my Easter bonnet, my Brownie uniform, my Christmas morning pajamas and the little polka dot bathing suit I so loved. 

You would probably expect to find these kinds of pictures in a family collection, but now, having spent my life as an artist and a serious amateur photographer myself, I can see something unique in these old photos.  I may have my bonnet on and the picture may be of me and my grandmother, but there is an element of surprise in each of them, as if they were not posed, as if something caught his eye and he (always equipped with a camera) seized on the moment to literally capture it in time. 

As I rifle through the slides I come across a close up of a rose in the afternoon sun, a picture of his dog, Kit, frantically trying to contain her wandering litter of pups, a wave crashing violently on the rocky New England coast behind his house in Swampscott, Massachusetts and the images make me weep. Life should be eye-catching.  It was for him.  I hope it is for me. 

When I'm gone, my family will find a close-up of a waterlily on a pond in Missouri, my cat Mia, stretched out on a sun bathed patch of my dining room carpet, a winding road leading....who knows where and lots of random shots like these which, for some reason caught my eye at the time.

They will also find tons of scrapbooks, full of the family photos I have taken day after day. I wonder if they will "speak" in the same way my grandfather's do, 50 years after they were taken. I wonder if they will say I love them and the eye- catching world I live in.

Thinking Handmade

Necessity is the mother of invention and recent downturns in the economy, specifically my own, have necessitated a  fresh approach to managing my Christmas expenses this year.  I'm thinking, handmade, homey, resourceful, and just plain economically frugal.  I want to do this without sacrificing creativity or quality and.... I want to use the craft stash I already have at my fingertips. 

This is a bin of old wool and felt scraps I've kept around for kids to make projects out of when they come to visit.  Some of it is boiled wool and some of it is low quality craft store felt. 

This is one of those huge metal rings full of plastic bags containing every conceivable color of DMC floss all sorted and faithfully wound around little plastic bobbins.  I used to cross stitch.  I must of thought I would be doing it for eternity when I see how much of this stuff I have stashed away. This and some fiberfill stuffing will just do fine for what I have in mind.

Here is the challenge... use this stuff to make a gift for an 18 month old girl for Christmas. Make something she will LOVE.

Okay, that works.  If you need some inspiration or patterns, check out this site.  Now, on to the next stash busting, dollar stretching, handmade holiday invention.

Food Memory

I've heard it said that certain smells and tastes can unlock a flood of memories and I'm here today to to tell you its true.  I have a well developed food memory mechanism.  This makes me a foodie, a food traveler and sometimes a reminiscent cook.  There was a lobster bisque I ate  in Switzerland 15 years ago that has never left my memory and a bowl of potato salad in upstate New York at a roadside family dinner I wish I could take you to right now, and then there are "THE COOKIES".

 

I was driving up interstate 24 on my way from Florida to Missouri and badly in need of a cup of coffee.   I asked a gas station clerk in Monteagle, TN to point me to a Starbucks.  After telling me Starbucks was nowhere close,  she pointed me down the road to Sewanne, telling me the Blue Chair made a pretty decent cup of coffee.  I pulled up to a little house, in a tiny town, with an inviting little garden and a line of folks stretching from the front door, sown that path and out to the sidewalk, all waiting in line for the chance to buy "THE COOKIES".  The man in front of me said he had gone to the hardware first and was sure his wife was going to lock him out in the dog house because there were so many folks in front of him he might not get his hands on any.  "If there are any left when you get to the register, he said, you better try one".  

 

I got my coffee, a wonderful scone and snagged the last ambrosia cookie in the place.  I'd never had an ambrosia cookie before and had no idea what was in store for me.  Long story short, that was the best cookie I ever had in my life. When I got back to Florida I scanned every internet baking site I could find for recipes for this gem of a cookie, this pinnacle of culinary delight.  It took a lot of experimenting with a lot of recipes before I found the right one. This recipe makes a lot of cookies, I freeze them and eat them two at a time for a month, or bake them for parties and always get rave reviews from startled munchers. 

 

Today, while I munch down on my memories, I will remember bees buzzing in a blue hydrangea bush, a nice sunny day, the scent of fresh baked cookies and coffee mingling in the air, miles of highway ahead, an audio book in the cd player and grand-babies waiting at the other end of the road.

Oddities

I have a tin box on a shelf in my studio marked "oddities".  Inside, are things I've collected which somehow defy clear description.  Perhaps I don't know what it is or how it is meant to be used or I find its appearance to be somehow strange.  All I know is I am attracted to it and have therefore, taken the time to collect it and store it for future art purposes.

 

See the jar of painted clay balls?  I love the colors and the non specific, organic, non manufactured shape of them.  I love seeing them in the jar. What the heck are they? Who in the world took the time to make them?  Were they marbles for poor children or bullets for happy soldiers?

In fact I have lots of art tins filled with what might be termed odd by others. 

 

I remember the day I found these.  I couldn't wait to have the antique dealer ring them up and put them in the sack for me to take home.  They are my wonderful vintage wooden hair rollers.  Was I going to roll my hair up in them and give myself a perm?  No. Of course not, but, many long gone women sat in beauty parlors having their hair rolled up for hopeful events like weddings, engagements, graduations and dates, so much so, that the paint is worn right off the surfaces. 

 

I guess collecting these random things, then finding beauty in them, is somewhat strange in and of itself. This probably makes me odd or at least eccentric in the eyes of others, but I find it odd that people don't take the time to notice and ponder these funny little bits of the past.  Its as natural as breathing for me.  The time has come to take these things out of tins and make them into new beautiful things, so keep your eye on my progress. You never know what might pop up on my page next.

In the meantime, I've expanded my sales venues out on the web and have opened an Artfire Studio Shop to begin listing my new odd art products for sale. 

Clockwork Bee

I'm pretty comfortable around a computer until a dreaded hardware, software or mal-ware problem hits.  Then I come unraveled.  So much of my world is centered on having these wonderful technological advances just function predictably and flawlessly.  When they crash, as they have done twice in 6 months for me... I find myself longing for the old days when I was happy picking my pictures up at the drugstore and getting a letter,  when I never even imagined these admittedly wonderful things like digital photography and email.  I think this technological age leaves a lot of people thinking along the same lines. Perhaps we love cottage style, shabby chic, steampunk, antique and vintage things because they comfort and calm us. I must need a lot of comforting is all I can say, because I have tons of treasures that fall into those categories and my art work always has vintage overtones. 

Lately, I'm loving the steampunk I see out there.  These pieces are influenced by the Victorian Industrial Age and science fiction writers like Jules Verne.  They imagined a wonderful world of brass gears and clockworks that would mechanize common tasks and rise into magical realms of the imagination.  With all the watch-parts and vintage jewelry I have around, I thought I'd try my own hand at producing a steampunk piece or two.  This is my first piece, The Clockwork Bee.

Imagine this tiny messenger being wound up and let loose to fly around the world.  At present, all it really does is hang around your neck looking pretty interesting.  It's in my Etsy Shop now and will be joined by a swarm of others in a few days, along with some nice vintage clockwork pendants and cuff-links.

Now, I have to get back on tech support with Adobe and see if I can return to the wonderful world of REAL technology.