I love these creations by Betsy Timmer. She uses textiles, felted wool, and household objects like broom bottoms and irons and finds a place where woman and daily objects meet. The second image is my favorite. It’s called M. O. M. It stunned me, with how naturally the life jacket became breasts. I do like the image of mother as life jacket. We save our children, keep them afloat artificially until they can do it for themselves. I think a... Read more

I’ve been super busy! I haven’t been posting updates or anything, though we’ve been working hard. Lots of great moments thus far, eating the first cucumbers from our vines, sharing chocolate cake with sea foam frosting with friends and family. Finding a beautiful swiss chard plant had grown in the compost next to a blooming borage plant. Feeling the fluffy cloudlike texture of dried and crumbled sage as I put ours into a mason jar for the winter. We’re waiting... Read more

I doubt anyone is going to notice, but I skipped page 9. It has a lot of texture, so I’m going to have to photograph it instead of scanning, but no worries, I had page 10 finished too. I’m really enjoying working with textures and mixed media. In this one I used pastel, acrylic, colored pencil, and home carved stamps. Here’s what it says:You pretend you speakSnowflakes swam in the forestThe evening cameRound and round Next I want to get... Read more

I wanted to share some great images shot by Dina Goldstein. She calls them Fallen Princesses . They’re about a more realistic images of the Disney Princesses so popular these days. Right now my older daughter is obsessed with princesses, and has told us that they can’t make mistakes, and never get dirty. It’s a little disturbing. At the same time I remember a time when I was obsessed with princesses, in a way I connect it with a deep... Read more

1. Plant something – Just weeding.2. Harvest something – Peas, lettuce, chives, basil3. Preserve something – more oregano, dried in my dehydrator, and then I use a pestle to crush the herb through a sieve into a bowl. I don’t even have to peel the leaves off the stem that way, and you can control how big the bits are by how big the holes are.4. Reduce waste – My DH and I brought up our hand tools from our... Read more

I wanted to share some of the fun ways I store my stuff around the house. So I though I share my jar collection. I get a lot of bulk grains and spices at my local co-op and what I end up with when I take everything out of my canvas bags is a pile of floppy thin plastic bags slithering all over the table, filled with little bits that love to spill out of any hole onto the table,... Read more

So this one was fun, I used stitching in my art for the first time and enjoyed it as well as cutting out the little birds from cardstock. If I had it to do again I would cut the chained hearts out of plain paper instead of patterned paper. Read more

We haven’t had a lot of time this week for the garden or house since we were hosting a Midsummer campout this weekend on my in-laws property. We had a lovely time, dancing and eating and healing together on their beautiful land. I would have had some lovely pictures if my camera hadn’t been out of batteries! So on to my weekly update of my adventures in food and energy independence. It was mostly baby steps this week. 1. Plant... Read more

I tried out my watercolor pencils on this one, and while I liked them for detail work, I ended up going back to my beloved pastels to bring out the big areas of light. I was feeling kind of lonely when I drew this one. I’ll keep the next page for next week since they’re very different. Read more

I tried out my watercolor pencils on this one, and while I liked them for detail work, I ended up going back to my beloved pastels to bring out the big areas of light. I was feeling kind of lonely when I drew this one. I’ll keep the next page for next week since they’re very different. Read more