Things I Love Thursdays

I love to be creative.  I also love nature.  

Here are some other ways I have been delving in to both.

I love my new pan pastels.  : )

This summer I am spending some time on a regular basis sketching up the clouds with my new soft pastels.  I have a couple perfect spots where there is an unobstructed sky view right at home:  one on a north second floor balcony, and one facing east from the middle of my backyard.  (no powerlines, no trees, no nothing.)

I love studying clouds.

It's oddly familiar to sit and do this plein air as they call it.  I feel like I channeling my mother.  I secure my paper to a board with wooden clothes pins and sketch quickly and loosely as the clouds drift by, ever changing.  Clouds change FAST, so this is kind of exciting - like trying to catch a butterfly.

You know I love to look down as much as I love to look up.  LUCKY ME - I found a terracotta flower press at a garage sale!  It came with a big book to boot.  To be more specific - it's a microwaveable flower press!

modern day wild-crafting?

No kidding.  I didn't know it when I bought it.  You can quickly dry a pressed flower in less thank 2 minutes.  Done.  The color retains VERY well too and there's no chance of anything going funky.

I did up a bunch of samples and it's amazingly fast.  This is wonderful.  I can collect prairie plant specimens now and save them indefinitely.  Love that.

As for these specimens... we shall eat them!  : )

Happy summer and happy Thursday!

Sunday Snapshots

Summer has come and we are all becoming sunburned.  What a gorgeous weekend.  We've been enjoying sprinklers, lemonade stands, swimming, and some truly gorgeous skies as the heat of the afternoons bring on some brief & intense thunderstorms to cool off the evening.

I left a meeting on Wednesday night to get completely drenched in a last-minute thunderstorm.  The sky went orange, the wind blew, hail fell,  BUCKETS fell, and in 15 minutes... it was all over.  I stopped on the way home to stand out on 8th street and snap this next photo.

from my cell phone camera on 8th Street... it was so much more electrifying in real life.

Scenes like those are the reason that prairie people get all upset and take great offense to comments like, 'there's nothing to see here - just empty space'.  We hear the jokes all the time.  Breaks our hearts.

I've been finding great joy in the prairie floor.  I've been looking closer, and capturing different views with my zoom lens.  I was lucky enough to find a clay & felt flower press complete with a guide for beautiful mixed media work at a garage sale on Saturday  THAT intrigued me!

a closer look at the prairie.

THIS is what you get when you don't cut grass.  We are so used to mowed lawns.  If you let grass grow or find tufts of it at the base of a lampost, you'll see pinks and purples, mauve and plum, even a touch of indigo.

grass in bloom

Look at the pretty colors below!  Seed pods in peach, pink, plum, ochre, so many greens & yellows...

My mind is full of ideas - things to draw or hook or stitch or...  QUILT!  I ended up at Periwinkle's on Saturday, looking for BEIGE.  haha.  It didn't happen.  I came home with these lovelies!

To me, they are all familiar summer prairie colors.  Then I realized that this is my annual thing.  I make loads of threadpaintings for shows through the school year, and then by Canada Day I am banging out a quilt just for me.  I have the quilt top nearly done already!  I'll show you more later in the week so stay tuned.