Friday, February 17, 2012

Two of the 8 Host an Arty Party for the rest of us





Carol and Donna just threw a spectacular Valentines Day Party for the 8 and their respective spouses. The table was so beautiful it could easily have been a spread in a top magazine. The food was to die for! Delectable rasberry tarts, pear tarts, chocolate covered strawberries, crab dip ... I could go on, but you can see in the pictures how awesome it was. We'll have to walk the beach every day to work off such a fantastic spread. Donna and Carol made everything! To say we were overwhelmed is an understatement. Wow!

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Cindy the Muse becomes Cindy the Model


In November I designed and printed a scarf inspired by both the wonderful Liguus Tree Snails with their bands of beautiful designs and my good friend and fellow "Piece" Cindy Michaud. Cindy loves black and white checks and she loves red. So, I dressed a snail in fairly traditional patterns, like swooshes and triangles and added a few black and white checks for fun. I stuck to a red, black and white color scheme. I had Spoonflower print it on both cotton silk and voile. The silk one is shown here.

The fabric I got back in December was beautiful, but not exactly red, black and white. Lesson learned - printing at Spoonflower is like printing anything - colors can be a little quirky - the red turned out sort of a coral and black is sort of gray. Nevertheless, I made up my scarves and presented a voile one to Cindy. She actually wore it out to a meeting today and made it look really good. And when I asked if I could get a photo, she was a good sport to pose as my model.



And then she became hysterically funny recreating poses she'd observed on (I'm assuming) Next Top Model! Not all of them are shown here!



I'm always so inspired by the Pieces of 8 - and they're such a hoot!

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Surf's Up

A few years ago my grandson, Nic came down for a visit. He is a lover of all sports involving speed and balance so we went up to Cocoa Beach for some surfing lessons. It was a great day to be on the water, a storm front was coming through so there were waves and wind. It felt a lot wilder than it was. To an eleven year old it was the pipeline on the North Shore of Hawaii.

Ballard Park, Original Oil on Canvas

  I had not painted outside in two years, so this was quite a challenge. It was one of those paintings I had to improve upon in the studio. ...