My husband and I made this gate. We’d needed a new gate for years, our old one was falling apart, the hinges we barely hanging on, and we’d thought it had had enough of our Midwest winters and that we wouldn’t get through the next one. Having one huge project in one summer is a lot on anyone’s plate, let alone two! We’d built the new garden at the beginning of the season, and this gate was finishing out the summer. I won’t go into all the details about what we’d done, but feel free to ask me any specific questions in the comments!

Getting the 12′ posts set was one of the hardest things on this project, primarily because we had to take out the old posts. What a bear!

After building the gate frame for both sides and fence pickets sandwiched in the middle, my husband installed the insert. There’s a template, but it’s a little confusing, and it asked for a 9/16″ drill bit, which is odd. Just ask for 1/2″! Still, that’s the size you need… ; )

The pergola for the top was actually easier than it looks, but there is a lot of measuring and cutting. We wanted to keep the end cuts simple. Easy for me, because I didn’t get up on the ladder. Thankful the Mr. had no problem with it!

We decided to only replace the fence on one side…

And, to have a ninebark on the other side, between the post and the house. From a design perspective, I wanted a softer edge instead of a fence on both sides of the gate. With such heavy wood taking up two thirds of the space, we needed something to give the eye a rest, and to incorporate the structure into the yard. We didn’t want it to look like a fortress! ; )

Our house number is the next project, stained glass mosaic. You can bet I’ll be posting those pix too!

These have been sitting on my desktop for a while, and in my sketchbook a little while before that. So happy with how they turned out : )

Have a loveleeey, something. Day. Life. Lunch. You pick and make it the loveliest ever!

May the 4th (Star Wars pun not intended) was the last piece I’d posted before our summer vacation started at the end of May. Our district is done before Memorial Day, and they had their first day back yesterday. We spent a lot of days reading (naturally we did the Summer Program through the library), evenings at the bookstore,

cooked, vacationed (along the way I’d met up with one of my clients, and quick FYI, this was rootbeer, from Sprecher’s),

saw some barn quilts, took in some fireworks,

We really enjoyed Stranger Things and cannot WAIT for the second season! Speaking of stranger things, our older son has been writing for an online magazine, at 14, about comics, film and television (everything he loves). I can’t believe it, we’re so proud of him!

canned, knitted (some for a hospital, some for friends and fam), sewed (some for RARE Science, some for friends and fam).

Drew, a lot,

celebrated birthdays, cooked some more, attended the county faire,

and just all around have had a lovely summer! We are looking forward to Autumn though, with all its fab color, crisp nights, sunny days, and again with more of the cooking. I’ve heard there’s a pumpkin shortage coming, but each year we’re overwhelmed with them, I think being the number one producer and exporter of pumpkins skews our perspective a bit!

I did make a video of the process and progress of our garden, from May to present. The beds will also be “hoop houses” so we need to still attach more pipe to the sides, get the smaller pipes for the hoops, and I need to make the covers…

Music is Ghosts ‘n Goblins by Thiaz Itch under Creative Commons. Hope you’ve all enjoyed your summer, will post more soon!

a : )

Happy Friday!

I wanted to share this cute lil art bag I’d made for a very dear friend (a very late birthday prez), from oil cloth, grosgrain, and a jean jacket (I save all my denim)! I love making things for my friends. They’re each so unique, that I like to give something showing them how much I appreciate that they’re in my life, and a gift that no one else would have. The stone fruit fabrics were part of a theme as I’d sent a little cookbook using stonefruit for the seasons in pies and galettes. I tried to make the pom zipper pull to match the dotted grosgrain at the bottom. Hope all her pencils fit!

Was able to spend some time in a different direction today : )

Last week, I’d finished my RARE Bear and sent him off to be stuffed and given to a very courageous kid. I’d found out about this organization through Spoonflower, as they’d had a “sew in” in March. Volunteers sewed up these cute little bears for children who have diseases which, not only is there no cure, but not researched because they’re so rare and the funding just isn’t put into treatments. Click on RARE Bear Army if you’d like to help the cause!

Finished!

FOMO, aka Fear Of Missing Out. We don’t have enough time to do what we want to be doing as it is, why do we spend time thinking we should be doing what others are doing? My husband and I talk to our teen about this all the time. I often listen to a podcast by Andy J. Miller, and this week’s was about this very thing. He said everything I’d been thinking, and it moved me to create this. Isn’t that how art works? You get input, you feel something, you make something. I really enjoyed this for some reason, maybe because of its spontaneity?

Happy St. Pat’s! Recently, I’ve created a few personal lettering projects. I think they’ve kind of taken the place of my 52 Bugs, which really fell off! They’re all a little bit different, but they do have a lot of textures in common. I really enjoy creating letters, the variations on the same theme. There are only 26, but they make up our entire language, and they connect all of us (even when we don’t spell words correctly, or abbreviate, the idea is still being communicated). And there are so many ways we can create their appearance, they’re still communicating. An H is an H, a D is a D, it can be ornate, thin, tall, wide, simple, serif or without, but people are still understanding what it is. I have enormous respect for people who can hand letter, It’s not simply creating letters by hand, it’s designing how they’ll fit together for a specific purpose, to communicate a feeling or an idea. The lettering foreshadows the story, or article, or event…I think if you can hand letter an entire title or phrase, or can design an entire typeface (and I mean alternates and symbols as well) then you have the skills to design anything. So here are a few that I’ve completed this past week. I’ve got so much to learn about letters, but I’m getting closer to that goal with every project!

These took a lot longer than I anticipated, but, still in plenty of time for the plantings! I had seen a similar post, so I won’t take credit for the idea, but with all the paint stirrers we had lying around (and picked up a few more) this was a great way to put them to use! I used an exterior paint for the base, and a gelly roller pen for the lettering. I am going to coat it in a clear finish, something not harmful, except for the bottom bit that goes into the dirt. If I can’t find that, then I may have to wrap in plastic, otherwise, what’s the point of organic seeds? Wish me luck with that! The last photo is on its way as part of a very late gift!

Actually, I finished this a couple weeks ago, but I’ve been really involved in our middle school’s production of Once On This Island, so I haven’t posted in a few weeks. I had knitted up these Fetching handwarmers from Knitty, with slightly larger needles to give a looser fit. I can wear them in the studio, or, wear them outside with glove liners. When I bought this yarn, which was just Lion’s Heartland in Yosemite, I got a clearance deal on a ton of it because our JoAnn’s was moving. When I asked why they didn’t just move all this stuff to the new store, I was told it was actually cheaper for them to take the loss than to pack up trucks and move it. FTW! I decided to knit up a neckwarmer to coordinate with the hand warmers. I don’t have a pattern for this, I just used the Knitty pattern as the motivation and starting point, and knitted it on the fly…

It’s true, I thought Svengali was a real person. Maybe I was mixing him up with Rasputin. I do that a lot!

My sketch is getting fleshed out!

The first photo is my sketch from last night, just some seedlings that I’ll take to a final pattern. The second and third photos are from the Chicago Cultural Center, where we’ve wanted to go forever. There’s mosaic and stained glass everywhere, and yesterday, Theo Jansen was there with his Strandbeests. They truly are amazing, and way larger than you think! I took lots of photos and movies, but none of them do these DaVinci-esque beasts any justice!

Not really sure how I’m going to implement these in a pattern yet…

It’s inevitable that I mess up when working with ink, but this isn’t bad…for after 10:00

Better late than never!

Guinness and I are on door duty tonight, everyone’s doing other things so I’m working on this between trick-or-treaters!

My 13yo son decided he wanted to go as some post-apocalyptic creature…zombie…thing… This is for his loot bag… I also came up with our pumpkin design for this year, but we’ll see how well it turns out! It’s a bit over-detailed…