Tidy tea bags

One of my favorite things to use in my paintings are recycled tea bags and coffee filters.  Our kitchen is my studio, so I don't really have anywhere to store my supplies.  One of my favorite ways to store my supplies are in old cosmetic/toiletry suitcases, I have one for paints and one for my tea bags and coffee filters.   In between meals and at night I will tuck them away in our pantry, right above the pasta!  This seems to work pretty well, except my suitcase with the tea bags and coffee filters was becoming quite a little disaster.  It's easy to pack a lot of tea bags and filters into one of these suitcases!   I was getting into the habit of just pulling out everything in handfuls and then cramming it all back in.  I was finding it hard to find colors and pieces, so today while I was trying to find some brown, I decided it was time for a cleaning.




I love to keep all my tiny little pieces of painted  tea bags and coffee filters that are left over from previous paintings, because you never know when you might need them, but what to do with all of them? 



I found some little birdies I had drawn on tea bags but never used, and a little reminder that it was time for tea.

 

While looking around the house for something I could use to store all of these little pieces of paper I remembered  I had bought another little suitcase over the summer at a yard sale and when I opened it I saw the perfect little tray for all of my tidbits of paper.  I had totally forgotten about the little tray that was inside it.

  

How perfect!  I was able to seperate all the little pieces by color and even my little pieces with drawings and words have a place!


 

Isn't it amazing how something so simple can make one feel so happy?  It feels so much better to have it all organized.  Now I have one suitcase for coffee filters and one for tea bags and scraps.   Now I need to figure out what to do with all my scrapbook paper, old texts, and found papers!

Around here

We are in full harvest,

 

picking, cutting, and eating lots of tomatoes,

























making lots of tomato sauce,


















canning tomato soup,



fermenting beans,



shelling beans for more soup,



freezing pesto for winter pastas and pizzas,



enjoying the happiness and beauty of these,



eating raspberries until our bellies are full!

























and finding (very) small snippets of time to start some new paintings!

Zinnias

I'm sure I've told you before that one of my favorite flowers are zinnias.  Their colors are so vibrant and bold and come in so many different colors.   I forgot to plant zinnias in my garden this year and have been seeing them blooming all over town.  I started this collage back in March or April and was distracted by something else and hadn't felt like finishing it.   I guess seeing all the zinnias around motivated me to finish it.    For some crazy reason,  I had decided to cut each petal out of painted tea bags.  I really wanted the look and feel that the tea bags give.  I was going to put a butterfly in this collage, but the zinnias really took center stage and  started to have an  almost pattern like feel to it  and having a single butterfly just didn't seem to work.

So here is my zinnia garden!

Go check it out!

Hop on over to A Life Sustained where Courtney has an interview of me and you can enter to win ANY print from my Etsy shop!  Courtney is a stay at home mama who blogs about living more simply and sustainably which are things that I'm always trying to do.

September 1st

Today was Fischer's first day of first grade!  He was so excited to go to school. He just can't wait to learn how to read this year.   Last year he attended the Waldorf school here in town, but this year we are giving the public school a try (he did go to the public preschool so it's not entirely new to him). Luckily he is an easy going kid and is just going with the flow.   He was very happy when he got home from school and had many things to tell me, he was all smiles and looking forward to tomorrow all ready!

A happy little chorus

Crickets are my #1 favorite sound of summer!  (thunder might be tied with them, but I just can't decide, I love them both so much!) I LOVE crickets.   I've always associated summer nights in Wisconsin with crickets.  Just like cicadas, I always thought that crickets made their music all through the summer, but they don't  They start in late July just like the cicadas.  In the country they start a little sooner I think, but I didn't start to hear them in town until late July.  

The evenings first started with a few singing and as the days went by, it has become a full on non-stop chorus at night.  There must be thousands of these little guys out in our yard!  When I walk through the grass and our garden, they are hopping all over the place.  They are even starting to sing during the daytime too.  I've looked forward to hearing these little guys since last fall after our first frost.  

The anticipation of those warm summer nights and the chirp of crickets=love.  I love falling asleep to their sounds.  I find it  very comforting and beautiful.  It is something that I'm holding on tight to right now because I know it isn't going to last.  

I do wonder though, are their people out their who don't like their sounds?  Do they find it irritating and annoying or maybe they don't even notice it?  It is amazing how truly loud it is.  I remember my first summer back in Wisconsin after living out in Idaho where the nights were very silent.   I was lying in bed listening to the crickets and it was non-stop chirping and I couldn't find a break in the noise or differentiate one cricket from another and it almost felt maddening, but luckily this feeling only lasted for a few seconds.
 
This little painting was created while I listened to those little guys make their music for me on these last summer evenings.  Oh what a happy sound! 

A little reminder

 
"Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You."   Dr. Seuss

Remember it is okay to just be yourself, whether that self wants to be a tutu wearing, dancing cowboy who has a frog for a sidekick! 

Finished!

Here are my finished quilt squares for the Harvest Parade.  It feels so good to be finished with these and not have them looming over my head anymore!  The next step is to meet up with the ladies and put all of our pieces together and finish it up. I can't wait to see what everyone else's look like.























I really had a hard time getting motivated to do this.  The whole time I was doing this, I kept thinking how I couldn't wait to finish so I could start a new painting.  Sewing kind of felt like a chore to me and I was very happy when I was able to tuck my sewing machine away.  I enjoy drawing and painting so much now, that it is all I want to do.  I almost feel a little obsessed about it!  I guess that's a good thing right?





























Now that my sewing machine is put away, I've got my pencil in hand, drawing up cute little crickets.  This will be my last insect painting for awhile, unless of course I do some butterflies, but they don't really count.



























Have a wonderful weekend.  Can you believe it's the last one of August already! 

What's that noise?

 

I have to admit, this isn't one of my prettiest paintings!  I've come to love these noisy little guys that emerge from the ground to fill my late summer days with all sorts of buzzing sounds.  As long as I can remember, I've always associated summer in Wisconsin with the buzz of the cicadas.  When I was a kid, I found the noise to be a little irritating, but now I've come to really appreciate it and look forward to it every year.  I always thought the cicadas made noise all through the summer, but upon moving back to Wisconsin a few years back, I realized that they don't start to emerge until late summer.   I think the cicadas that I'm used to are the annual or dog day cicadas, given this name because they emerge in late July and August.  Did you know that the cicada is the noisiest insect in the world and only the male makes the sounds?  I really look forward to hearing my first cicada in the summer.  This year Amelia and I heard it at the same time, it was the last week of July, and Amelia looks up at me very excitedly and says "cada mama, cada mama".  I love that she was so excited about it and that she actually remembered it from last year!  Along with crickets, cicadas are one of my favorite sounds of summer. 

Turning 40

Yesterday was my 40th birthday.  This was something that I've been dreading for years.  40!  I just can't believe it.  Where did time go?  I don't feel 40.   Forty just seems like such a big number.  I remember turning 30 and feeling really sad.  To be honest, yesterday I didn't really feel sad like I thought I was going to.  Recently I started to accept the fact that, yes, I will be 40.   What's the point in fighting it, it's going to come anyway.    

The kids and I spent the last week at my parents house  while my husband was out of town for work.  My dad gave me back the coffee cup that I gave to him when he turned 40.  I was 14 when I gave it to him and we gave him such a hard time for being "old".  It was so strange to hold that cup, the cup that I've seen in my parents cupboard for years, and to now be  that person that my parents were,  in what seems so long ago. 

Yesterday came and went and today I feel just like I did on Friday when I was still 39.  I really feel ok about it all.  I'm such a better person than when I turned 30.  My 30's to me felt like when I really started to find myself.  So many things happened in my 30's.  I became a wife and a mother.  I realized how important family was and moved back to Wisconsin from Idaho.    It was through becoming a mother that helped me realize that one of my true loves in life is art.   

It still feels a little weird to read the saying on that coffee cup and know that it now applies to me, but I've decided to embrace it and know that "Life Begins at Forty"!