The weather has been lovely lately. Perfect for gardening and that’s where I’ve been for the last two weeks. I had massive amounts of weeding and plant relocation required for creating new veggie growing space. We have one lovely flowering tree that loves to seed other little flowering trees. So I moved no less than six Althea trees, sacrificed a few more, moved three Trumpet vines and butchered a lot of ground cover that was way out of control. I then put up a new fence around the new garden space to keep doggie dear from not only squishing the plants but doing his business on them. I also weeded out my raised bed from last year and put a new fence around that space. Along with tomatoes and yellow squash (or squish as the boys like to call it) I’ve been adding several honey bee attracting flowers. This seemed be an issue last year so I’ve been researching, purchasing and planting lots of pretty flowers. I am happy to report that it works! Now I am not a  fan of anything that stings, but I’ve found the honey bees to be very docile. They usually fly away when I walk up to the garden. My brother-in-law (the bee keeper) taught me that fuzzy body bees are good and shiny body buzzy things are mean. So hurray for fuzzy honey bees!

Here’s the garden spaces all planted up for the season:

Also have lots of flowers in full bloom around the house:

Since I’ve been outside so much there hasn’t been as much of creative juice for the artwork as there usually is. But I’ve managed to get a few things in here and there. Still been messing around with the deconstructed screen printing. This one below has been printing twice. I want to incorporate stitching and whatever else comes to mind, when I get the itch to work on it again.

Then I made my first Flip Journal. Thanks to Kate in my art group for showing us all how to do it in a great demo!

Here’s the pages I did for the round robin journal exchange. This is Lynn’s poetry themed journal. One poem is by William Blake and the other my son. He was really excited to see me make something out of one of his poems.

Then I finally got to reinforcing my fabric box. I was given some old welding rods by my next door neighbor. So I metal embossed them, cut then glued then stitched them into the interior of the box. The box is now looking much more box like. Then I stitched my box top hinges into place, because gluing them never really worked. I may or may not do more, it’s kind of a mood thing at this point.

Still working on photographing Irene’s artwork. The flickr page should be public soon. I’ll keep you posted.

Seriously, no more rain please. My back yard is turning into a little jungle. I would like to start getting it into gardening shape, but these 40 degree, windy, rainy days just don’t work for me. Oh, the sinus infection that was turning into bronchitis has finally started to move on thanks to my doctor and many wonderful medications. But thanks to all the pounding, blowing rain all my pretty lilacs have been blown away, leaving me little to smell now. Oh well. Just needed to vent there. I feel better now.
Once again, the actual money making work has taken over my free time and unfortunately that isn’t the fiber stuff. I have lots of ideas and a growing pile of ufo’s. I’ll get to them, it just doesn’t give me a whole lot of exciting photos to post and blog about, sorry about that.
I had a great Mother’s Day weekend thanks to Victor, even though I was coming out of sinus infection hell. He got me a new scanner that can scan medium format negatives. Doesn’t sound that exciting but to me it is. I have several roles of 120 film from my Holga and vintage Diana cameras that I want to digitize and now I can!
West Winds Studio now has it’s own Flickr.com page and soon I will be uploading everything and we will start organizing it more. I’ve started photographing the sculptures and they are just as cool. It will be worth the wait, I promise.

That’s what I plan to do with my artwork today. I have a couple pieces going to Perrysburg, Ohio for a show in June. Another piece is finally heading to South Dakota as a very, very belated wedding present for a cousin who is expecting her first baby next month. Yes, I included some baby essentials as gifts. I did get two pieces out already to the Plymouth Art Council’s current art exhibit “Music in Art”. My Muse Box was juried into a show called West of Center at the Northville Art House in June. I am very excited to have four pieces in the new book 1000 Artisan Textiles. It’s the first time I’ve had my work published.

So I am trying really hard to stay out of trouble. Still photographing artwork at the in-laws and working a couple graphic design jobs. Everyone in the house is sick in one form or another. I have a Spring cold from hell right now. We have all these beautiful Spring days that I should be out enjoying, but no, I’m inside snuggling up to a box of tissues instead. The artwork producing for the last week or so has slowed to a trickle, if not stopped completely.

For the time being, I think I’ll just get the rest of my work shipped out and enjoy the fact that I’ve managed to get some good stuff done so far. I’ll get back to the blogging in the next few days, but right now I need a tissue.