It's Pie Day!

Some dear friends are getting married today and celebrating with an evening bbq, and we're bringing pie. Shawn's strawberry rhubarb is on the left and my apple is on the right. This is his 2nd strawberry rhubarb pie in a week and if it tastes anything like the last one, it's delicious. I loathe forming upper crusts, so opted for the heart cookie cutter crust, which seemed appropriate. Both recipes are from the Joy of Cooking. I venture away to more exotic cookbooks but always come back. Their basic pie crust is really the best.

It's in the bag

Well, instead of finishing the paintings I've started, I launched into another one this weekend, so no finished projects to share just yet- though I think I'll show some works in progress later..

I wanted to share this photo of some small paintings I shipped out a while back. I rarely buy prepared surfaces or canvases for painting, and instead lean towards painting on what I have on hand. When I started making small paintings to sell on Etsy, they were all on these nice wooden blocks a friend had given me or on recycled floor tiles. I wanted to protect them in shipping, but didn't want to just wrap them in bubble wrap. I ended up making these little envelope pouches out of left over canvas and using the vintage buttons I've been collecting, with no project in mind, for years.

A lot of my paintings lately are too big or thick to fit into these nice envelopes so I think I'm going to have to scavenge for some more recycled tiles this weekend.

Rhodies

Yesterday we took a break from house work and visited the Rhododendron Garden. Growing up with rhodies everywhere I thought they were run of the mill and kind of ordinary. Cover an entire park with them howver, and let them grow to mammoth proportions, and they're extraordinary. Oh and its free after 6pm, which is how things ought to be.

Home

Encaustic on hand built birch wood panel 12 x 24"
This is the finished piece with the bird transfers I was working on yesterday. I'd started out last weekend, making an encaustic painting of the bird house in our back yard. I wasn't sure where it was going to go, until I figured out the tranfer method yesterday. I'm really happy with how it turned out. I added some collage elements with the thread and painted over the surface with oil paint in some areas. I did a raw umber oil paint rub over the entire surface to accentuate the texture of the wax, which gave it a nice antique look. I also finally figured out a satisfying way to sign my encaustics using the letter stamp tools I bought months ago.
I've got some hummingbird paintings, flower tiles and another larger encaustic flower piece in the works and I'm aiming to get them all done this week. There truly aren't enough hours in the day.

Wax transfers

With some trial & error, I'm learning how to do image transfers onto wax. This is a detail of a larger piece I'm working on. It's not quite finished, but I'm really excited by the possibilities of collaging images onto the wax. This is how It's done
1. make a xerox copy of an image
2. heat the wax surface where you want to apply it so that it's soft, but still solid.
3. place your xerox image face down on the warm wax.
4. burnish the image - I rubbed the back of the paper with a wooden spoon, but scissor handles seem to work well too.
5. If you're not sure the image is completely transfered, you can heat the back of it with your heat gun- but not too much!
6. apply warm water to the back of the image with a sponge and rub gently.

If all goes well, the image will have transfered onto the wax and the paper with rub away. In some cases, part of my image rubbed away, but even then, the effect is pretty cool.

This is all I could get in before work, but I'm excited to get back to the wax tonight. Though the season premier of my absolute favorite show is on tonight, which could set me back..

Garden favorites

I remember when we first moved into this house and bought plants at a furious pace. We couldn't wait to have a full garden. Five years later, we're nearing plant capacity. I miss visiting the nursery and picking out plants based solely on flowers and foliage with little regard to how big they might actually get, but it's fantastic to wake up and see what's blooming in the garden.

We've even committed a few plant names to memory, and euphorbia is no longer 'that prehistoric guy'.

¿Cómo se dice? ¿Cómo se llama?

I didn't get a chance to see Obama speak at the waterfront on Sunday, but heard from many who braved the heat and walked for hours only to find they couldn't get anywhere near the stage. A 75,000 turn out in a town of 568,380 is pretty amazing.

The Oregonian has a great photo set of the event on Flickr.

It was projected that Obama would win the Oregon Primary by a large margin, but even so, driving by his election headquarters after work and seeing the excitement outside got me a little misty.

Acid green is the new black

I'm completely smitten with my new digital camera. It's a Canon PowerShot SD750. I haven't figured out all the features yet, but can't get enough of the color accent feature. It picks up a predominant color in the scene and turns everything else black and white.

Today was really hot. We went to a swimming spot on the Washougal River. There's been a lot of news hype about people dying from shock after jumping into the freezing rivers. I only took one dunk and it was absolutely what the day called for. Perfect.

Primary Flowers I & II

A pair of new 6x6" encauastic flowers for the shop.

Silver briefcase mystery

We went for a walk to the park last night and upon return, this was sitting near the curb by our house. We thought about opening it in case it contained a million dollars in unmarked bills, but the 2nd theory was that it contained a bomb, so we decided to leave it be. As of this morning it's still there..

More waxy flowers

24 x 11.5" encaustic on braced birch panel.

Strawberry rhubarb pie

I made this tasty pie on Saturday for a birthday party. It came from the same cookbook that I got the sticky bun recipe from. It appealed to be because it called for a crisp topping instead of the double pie crust. The top crust kills me every time.

As per the recipe, I was to have enough dough left over from the bottom crust to make a lovely leaf design around the top rim. I got three leaves out of it.

The top crisp was still pretty dry after baking it. Maybe it had too much flour? I remedied that with some gobs of butter melted over it. No such thing as too much butter right?

Next post is about painting, I promise!

front porch barber shop

It's a sure sign of Spring when haircuts can take place on the front porch.

I've been cutting my husband's hair for about six years. I used to cut my own hair in high school with sometimes disastrous results. I'd like to think that I've since improved, but occasionally still have an off day. There's no method to my cutting. I'm an intuitive barber. Sometimes it works out and sometimes.... well, it will always grow out. I suppose that was also my grandma Barb's philosophy. I just didn't see it that way when she chopped off my carefully feathered bangs in fifth grade.