Halloween Projects

October has been a crazy month. Art and Soul, a retreat that I have been helping out with finally happened at the beginning of October, and consumed about ten days of my life. I got a day or two off in the middle of it which went towards working, Brandon’s show, and a lovely morning of mushroom hunting with Marcus our pooch and Rasa, Charlie, and their mutt Lukas. Thats the way to spend a sunday morning, let me tell you. After that was finished (and Brandon’s opening) we sort of heaved a collective sigh of relief that all that stress was off our shoulders and finally got back down to the business of having a house and a garden that needed some last minute before-the-weather-goes-all-to-pot work.

The following picture is of our end of the year harvest. Those are almost the last of the tomatoes, there are some greenish ones trying to ripen in the greenhouse still, Brandon dug up the garden on thursday and planted the winter cover crop seeds. This photo is from about ten days ago I think. Look at those pretty Dahlias. I cut most of the plant back, but there are still a couple flowers hanging on. The real suprise is all the freaking raspberries we’ve gotten. I got the double crop kind on accident and our fall crop is WAY bigger than our spring. Not that I’m complaining mind you. And a few of the Peppers. We didn’t do to well with them this year, i think a weird spring combined with the trials and errors of greenhouse gardening conspired agaisnt our pepper crop this year. But its still a pretty picture!

The house with its decorations. Oh, how much do I love me some plastic jack-o-lanterns… And check out my latest in chicken/duck foraging technology: the white wire fence. It works really well, I must reccomend this highly to fellow poultry owners.

The lanterns at night. I got a strand of big clear christmas lights and stuffed them in each pumpkin on down the line. Works great!

Senna and Val came over on Friday to carve some scary pumpkins. We also watched Pet Cemetery, which I’ve never seen before, and it was great. Kids are even creepier when they are undead. The pumpkin carvings from left to right were done by: Senna, Me, Val, and the chicken is Brandon’s.
My friend Suzie and I were brainstorming paper mache figurines for Halloween ideas while I was painting her living room. I decided to try some of them out, and Clara and Jack are what came out of my playing! I am VERY pleased with the result, check them out and lemmie know what you think! Their heads are made from paper clay formed over ping pong balls. The bodies are old clothespins, and the arms are pipe cleaners from Joannes. I used some of my bottlecaps for their signs.


Happy Halloween Everybody!
Maggie

of cats and fishermen

So a friend of mine has been doing this online swap thing called “swap-bot” for the last few months. You basically find a swap (or create one) that you would be interested in doing, sign up for it, get assigned people to exchange with (you get something from one person, but you send your thing to someone else), and make or buy the items for the swap and then send them out. She loves it. Shes done potholder swaps (handmade), bathroom stuff swaps, candy swaps, all kinds of stuff. So she decided to set up her own swap: clothespin dolls.

She’d been trying to get me to sign up for a while, but for some reason I never got around to it. Well, you can’t not get around to it when its your own friend’s swap! And, hey clothespin dolls sounded really fun. So I signed up.

A few weeks later I got a package from Alaska in the mail. I looked at it and was like, Alaska? Why am I getting a package from Alaska… And then I opened it and it was the best surprise–my first swap! Check him out below. Hes sideways (Sorry) but check out his little straw hat, and his overalls, and his tiny fish on the pole. If you look real close you can see that hes fishing for half-grown chickens in the pen below him!
Well, this gave me the inspiration I needed to make my dolls! The next night, being all done with jewelry-making for the day, I went around my studio, and started busting out all my diverse art supplies: fake flowers, felt, rhinestones, paint, ink, vintage plastic doves–you know, the usual art supplies. Having covered my drafting table with pretty, colorful things, I started making my cats.

I don’t know why they had to be cats. I just decided it and so it had to be so. Cats in fancy dresses, although one dress is fancier than the other. But they have matching rhinestone collars! I think they are both Siamese cats. But not twins. And they both have matching pet birds holding paper messages. Perhaps they are homing pigeons and they will send messages back and forth to each other from their new homes. I will be sending them off this week, I just need to come up with names and perhaps a tiny history for them first.
I really enjoyed making these dolls. I think they were a form of three dimensional doodling. I spend most of my art making time making jewelry, and often the same jewelry over and over again (which I enjoy making, don’t get me wrong) so I kind of forget how to create new things. It was really fun (and kind of challenging) to work those different brain muscles. I think I’m going to keep doing swaps to keep working my brain out!