i made this :: a little viking inspired pot

i had this picture in my head - combining ceramics and the driftwood i like to collect - but i've had trouble finding the right bit of driftwood for the right ceramic bowl. this time, i took a small handful of sticks with me to my ceramics course and made the holes in my pot accordingly. i'm very pleased with how it turned out. tied on with a bit of black, waxed cord, it looks much as i imagined it would. of course, i couldn't resist decorating the pot with one of my favorite nordic petrogyphs (aka helleristninger). 

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the best analysis of the genesis of our reality television president that i've read.

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nigel poor's photography project at san quentin state prison

you may know her from the wonderful ear hustle podcast.

evidence of creativity update (46 - 52)

welcome all of you new commenters (commentators?) who came out of the woodwork on the last post! i guess those flowers learned more than i thought they did at plant school. :-) i'm pleased you all hopped into the fray.

as some of you know, thanks to molly, i am attempting to do and document 100 creative things during 2009 and am sharing them here. i'm up to #45, and so it's time to do a bit of a catch up, since i haven't actually updated this list since april 13! thankfully i take a good 100 photos every day so i can go back in my iPhoto and figure out what i've made since #45.

#46 - a kickass fresh strawberry lemonade. this counts because i invented the recipe myself and didn't look at any of my 600 cookbooks.

6 lemons, squeezed

1 pint of strawberries

1 tray of ice cubes

1/2 C sugar (more to taste if your strawberries aren't super sweet)

whizz it all up in the blender, pour it into a pitcher and pour in one bottle of fizzy water. serve and enjoy the ooohs and aaahhs. add vodka or rum or tequila for grown-up fun.

#47 - a bunch more helleristninger, which i will count as only 1.

#48 - coffee cozies for blog camp

#49 - quite a lot of cakes made with rhubarb of which i will count only 1. recipe for this one is here. you can see that it was good because it was mostly gone before i could take its picture. we've got rhubarb coming out of our ears in our garden. from only two plants! it's apparently an excellent year for rhubarb.

#50 - artistically arranging rocks in baskets. i know this sounds a little suspect as evidence of creativity, but i travel to the far reaches of foreign countries to collect the stones and then spend an inordinate amount of time on arranging them just so and they look pretty when i'm done, so i'm counting it.

#51 - blog headers. i make and change my own frequently, but i recently branched out and made one for amanda and one for VEG. the ease of making fun headers is just yet another reason that i love my mac. because i do them in pages, mac's answer to word, only way better for handling photos--resizing, dragging & dropping them to exactly where you want them. it's all really easy. with free fonts from dafont.com, i can have endless hours of fun.  so it's definitely evidence.

#52 - just today, i made a mattress cover and two pillows for the iron bench in my upper garden. you just gotta love ikea fabrics. so bright and cheery.

bearing in mind that it is a holiday here, i'll give you three guesses as to how i spent the rest of my afternoon...and the first two don't count.

those kind of suspect-looking slabs in the upper left are where husband was at one time going to place the pizza oven, but it's going to stand somewhere else now, in fact, that's what husband was working on all day today. there's nothing you can't do if you can find directions online.

this was the view from where i was, just in case you still haven't guessed...

it was, in all a glorious weekend. hope yours was too.

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a couple of other notes before i leave...

hermit book club - the next read is haruki murakami's hard-boiled wonderland and the end of the world. i'm rereading it so i can lead the discussion on friday, june 12. if you're not already playing along with us, please do join in, there's still time to become a murakami addict like me.

trans-atlantic learning adventures - if you want to see what we did on saturday at the local tivoli (or more accurately what sabin did, trot along over to sabin & addie's blog and have a look. while you're at it, stay awhile and check out their project.

we've begun the countdown to blog camp I--june 19-21 right here in denmark! come and check out the latest madness on our minds over at the blog camp blog. i'm going to get my act together and try to get a bit of a schedule up so you can know when you can find us live online via stikam (if i can figure it out) at blog camp, so that even if you can't be here, you too can participate! if you're new here and don't know about blog camp, check this post to see how the idea was born (husband is pretty brilliant sometimes).

sabin and i are still working on the questions from friday, but never fear, you'll see the answers sometime this week. if you still have a burning question on your mind, please leave it on that post and we'll try to include it.

p.s. i found my rock. :-)

when one thing becomes another

husband and i went for a walk in the woods on sunday. our real purpose on such a walk is what we like to call forestry. because we always spend some time liberating small beech trees to bring home for our hedges. we're thinning them out, helping the forest, you know, forestry. husband is making a labyrinth in front of our house (we hate being like the neighbors, you see) and it requires quite a lot of beech hedge. we don't mind waiting for it to grow up, so we bring home really small saplings from our forest walks. you can see the beech trees above, they're the ones with the brown leaves that don't fall off 'til the new ones push them off in spring. the ones you can see in the photo are larger than the ones we take, those are like only a foot high.

anyway, on our walk, i kept stopping to take photos of things like seriously tiny mushrooms:

i am amazed at how there are always mushrooms of some kind growing in this forest, no matter what the weather or when you go. year round, there are mushrooms or fungi of some sort. i only know of edible ones in the autumn, but there are probably some you can eat year-round. it's just that you don't want to mess around with that if you don't really know them well. 

we got to talking about inspiration, which, as you well know, is on my mind of late. i said i felt driven to take pictures of mushrooms for some reason that i didn't yet understand, but that i felt it would come to me eventually. and i wondered aloud if there was some way to fast track that process, because right now, it seems like it's taking an awfully long time from inspiration to product, so to speak.  

just as an example, two years ago, when peter, my father-in-law died, we got these ceramic "odin's eyeballs" that had belonged to him. odin is the head god in nordic mythology.  part of the story, which i need to do a bit more looking into, is that odin dropped his eyeball into a well, in order to gain the gift of knowledge. i don't remember the exact reason that peter had these eyeballs (there were several sets, we got one of them), but it also had to do with seeing clearly after the breakup of his long marriage in the late 90s. in any case, they have held a strange fascination for me since they came into our home. they reside on the window sill in our addition and i am drawn to them often. one snowy day, i took them out and took some pictures of them and we used them for our snowman's eyes.

combined with the memory of my friend michellea's fantastic i-eye collage and heavily influenced by this photo from flickr (and who wouldn't be inspired by sandra juto?), i have been feeling that i need to do something with eyes. and somehow, all of this input clicked into place on friday and i came up with this pillow, which will be the first item i list in my etsy shop later this week, together with two more i'm working on that are of the same theme.

but it took me a really long time to get to this point (especially if you take into account that the first inspiration came clear back in 1990). if i really want to have an etsy shop and be part of a local artist's group and contribute something to eyebuzz's first 'zine, i'm going to need to fast track this inspiration a bit. (i'm trying to find my way here and any advice is appreciated, by the way.) 

yesterday, in an attempt to get on this creative fast track, i gave myself a little exercise. i saw this beautiful embroidery by the ever inspiring margaret ooman of resurrection fern on flickr :

and i gave myself the assignment of making one like it from all of the scraps that were laying on the table after a weekend's worth of creativity. what i thought was that i would imitate it, that i would make a nest and a bird and eggs. that it would, of course, reflect my scraps, so it wouldn't be an exact copy, but that i would somehow end with something similar. well, something interesting happened along the way. i began by making the nest, but when it was finished, i saw something else. i saw a bowl. and among my scraps, i spotted a red felt circle, which demanded to be trimmed into apples. and in the end, this is what i created (#24):

i can hear the echo of margie's lovely nest, but i did end up making something my own. which i guess is what inspiration is about. and i did manage to fast-track the process--since i saw the nest on flickr on friday and made this already on sunday. so perhaps there's hope if you just push yourself a bit. if not, there's surely a ton of things i've been pondering in the back of my mind from the inspiration gleaned years ago, if i can just coax it out. 

i promise to stop harping on about creativity very soon. i'll start my new job and get out of the house and be with people and the navel gazing will surely taper off.  thanks for bearing with me in the meantime!

#20 and #21 and the biorhythm begins to shift

#20 - an ikea jack, wherein i took a cheap silk ikea pillow cushion and embroidered felt flowers onto it.

#21 - wherein we (being sabin and myself) constructed paper robots and hung them on the ceiling:

and then, to amuse myself, i printed in A4 a picture taken on the beach at the north sea back in january and pretended to take my merfish to the beach to meet the rock i picked up near the great pyramid in 2000. i think they liked each other quite a bit.

and then i doodled a few things in my inspiration book, read an interesting article about sustainable cities,  chatted on the phone to the most creative, funniest person i know,

played around a bit with embroidery thread and tactile felt in my favorite colors:

and then inspiration struck. and not only did it strike, i acted on it:

the biorhythm must be coming into alignment between the intellectual and the physical so that my thoughts can now have accompanying actions. phew. either that or it's because the sun is shining and there's a whiff of spring in the air. whatever it is, i'm not fighting it.

now you see it

saturday was snowy and icy and it was steadily snowing in the evening as we drove home from sabin's best friend's birthday party. then, it warmed up overnight and the snow is nearly gone now 24 hours later. what a difference a day makes!

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and the creativity continued this weekend:

18.  felted soap. yes, you read that correctly. i felted a bar of soap for the upstairs bathroom with beautiful rovings bought last year in this etsy shop:

19.  and i also felted some stones that we collected on our winter beach trips during my sister's recent visit (more about that tomorrow):

i love how they look and even more how they feel, tho' husband and our best friends teased me mercilessly, especially when i took 78 pictures of them in different locations with different cameras and different lenses. there's just something special about the heaviness of the stone under all that wooly brightness.

i also made some fabulous bread, but didn't get to photograph it because it was devoured immediately. bread recipe over at just know where you are.

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and on saturday, a whole lot of TtV photos:

hope you spent your weekend on something worthwhile.

evidence of creativity

molly at ohfortheloveofblog is working on doing 100 creative things in 2009. i said (kind of awhile ago) that i would participate in this endeavor and while i'm good at taking photos of all the stuff i make, i'm not so good at counting (i'm a LITERATURE person and literature people are not math people). but, i thought i might make it easier on myself by posting a picture of all of the evidence of creativity in my life since january 1 and thereby be able to count it all. a few caveats: i will count drawings, but not photographs, tho' i do think that photos are a product of creativity (at least some of them) and i will count especially creative cooking, because i believe it's undervalued in general. and i will also count only things that are finished, not works in progress (of which there are many)...so here goes:

1.  drawing of new embroidery thread

2.  painted and arranged new shelves (yes, i think this counts, it took me hours)

3.  sabin's birthday invitations - made with gocco printer

4.  pipe cleaner flowers  - made together with sabin

5.  countless inspired dinner salads (which i will count as one, tho' i make one pretty much daily)

6.  crafty blog banners

7.  sabin's robot birthday cake

8.  this was a really inspired burger, so i think it counts

9.  many wintery root vegetable-based soups

10.  orange lap quilt (made together with karoline, husband's oldest)

11.  teal/lime quilt made from ikea fabrics

12.  squares for the bushfire charity quilts

13.  valentine's day red velvet cupcakes

14.  googly-eyed snowman (he is but fleeting creativity, but creativity nonetheless)

15.  i've been drawing quite a bit of late...here's a peacock i did and might still color in...but i'm counting him because i like him as a pencil drawing as well and i think if i do a colorful one, i'll just draw it with the colored pencils from the beginning.

16.  fabric cover for my food processor

17.  my new blog banner and the new one i put up over on just know where you are. i'll only count them as one, because all i really did was change the pix and the font.

looking through the folders, i can see that i have at least as many projects underway--sewing, knitting, papercraft, painting, little clay houses, even some bread dough that's rising as we "speak," so i'd better get cracking. are you creating something this weekend?