Goodthoughts

Artful Eggs

It's time to dye the eggs for Easter again this year!  I love doing this annual ritual because I always dye eggs with my friend Charlotte in her kitchen filled with springtime surprises!

This year Charlotte shared her stash of little bantam chicken eggs with me.  We spent a lot of time talking and laughing and drinking homemade lemonade. Not to mention munching the sugar cookies shaped like bunnies!  The truth is I would never do this by myself.  It's way more fun to do this with good friend who hasn't forgotten how to play!  So here's how we did it.  

These eggs are dyed using bits of weeds and flowers we found in the backyard. The design on the egg below came from a dandelion flower.

 Charlotte soaked brown and red onion skins in water.  We pressed the wet flowers and leaves on the egg, covered it with onion skin all the way around and wrapped tightly with thread. Lots of thread!

Then we placed the eggs in a pot of water and boiled for about 30 minutes.  We carefully put the pan in the sink and added cold water. The magic happens when you take off the thread, onion skin and flowers to reveal a beautiful work of art!  The next egg shows a dandelion leaf in a lovely shade of yellow!

 

 

A sprig of rosemary left its mark on the next egg.

Can you pick out the violet leaf? How about that dainty stringy weed that's in everybody's yard?

This last egg was the tiniest.  A mixture of violets and weeds turned it into an abstract beauty!

We oiled the eggs and shined them up with an old washcloth.  After their photo shoot I arranged the eggs in a blue bowl in the hall.   They make me happy every time I walk by...remembering time spent with a good friend enjoying the wonders of God.  Find some wonders of your own this Easter season!

Catching a Dream!

I've had a dream for almost 8 years of starting a ukulele band at our church.  I know it's a little crazy.  I get amused looks from friends when I talk about it.  They weren't exactly knocking at our door to sign up...until NOW!  You see there's always been one problem, I actually have no talent for singing or playing the ukulele.  Yeah, that's kind of important you might say.  

I love my friend Ruth.  She always has a smile on her face.  Ruth understood my dream.  She bought a ukulele of her own two years ago. Ruth was ready to join the band!  She even learned to play Swing Low Sweet Chariot.  But what we really needed was a leader.  Somebody who could play the ukulele like a pro...but most importantly...somebody who knew how to have a good time.

That person turned out to be under our nose all along.  She was Ruth's sister, Judy.  Judy is a guitar teacher in Roanoke.  I never dreamed she would consider coming all the way to Chatham to lead our band.  But one day I asked her... and low and behold...she said YES!!  She's perfect!  She's a talented teacher. She loves God.  And she has a huge notebook of old hymns and silly songs!

So, a couple of Sundays ago we had the very first practice of the Chatham Baptist Church Ukulele Band in our den.  We had 8 people come(Chuck's taking the picture)!  Judy taught us Rock-a-My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham and we laughed a lot as we tried to make our fingers land on the right spot!  Judy wants us to not just strum down like we're chopping wood. She she says we also need to strum up... so we'll sound more melodious.  

I'm having a problem on my upstroke.  I keep accidentally sticking my finger in the hole of my ukulele. Judy says I'm going to be trouble!!  You know, I think I'm really going to enjoy this ukulele band!!

 

Creative play

Today was a great day!  I've been dragging all week with a tired, fever, headache, coughing sort of virus.  I perked up enough today to feel like doing something again, so I thought I'd work on an unfinished watercolor painting.  I decided to just play and see what happened.

This painting is about the ukulele band I want to start at our church...it's a little obsession of mine...a longtime dream I can't get out of my head!  I can see it all happening as plain as day...a group of all ages...all musical abilities...talented...mediocre...and no sense of rhythm whatsoever (I fall in the last group) getting together to learn to play the ukulele.  We'll play old silly songs that we sang as kids and old gospel tunes and whatever else we want to.  I'm getting excited just thinking about it!!!  More about that later...back to painting!

I'm painting in watercolors on a stretched canvas...mainly because I didn't have any watercolor paper and I wanted to see how the canvas accepted the watercolor pigment.  It seems to work just fine.  But I had quit before I finished and it's just been sitting around in my studio gathering dust.  The neat thing about watercolors is that they come back alive and workable again with just a little water.

Here's how it looks so far.  This is more suggestive and loose than most of my bluebird paintings.  I added the girl with the ukulele looking up at the bird and the big triangle above it.

The triangles are symbols of the ways God guides us and intervenes in our lives.  I love the way watercolor puddles and gets darker in certain spots. I raise the canvas up and let the puddles drip down the canvas all the way to the bottom.  I like the way it looks.  When all 4 triangles were done...they reminded me of giant flowers  reaching for the sunshine.

The top triangle looks like it has a sideways heart in the center.  I didn't try to paint that.  I was painting a red triangle inside the yellow one and the watercolor was really wet and just sort of rolled around into that shape...so I left it.

I gave all the 3 ukulele players' shoes an ever so faint touch of red for their journey...you've just gotta have the red shoes!

Maybe it's finished...maybe not...we'll see how it feels after a few days.  But just squeezing out the paint...playing and watching the colorful drips made me feel so much better...now... if we could just get our band organized... :-)

  

Building a SnowGrannie

We had a beautiful snowfall on Sunday...about 6 or 8 inches...gigantic flakes...sticking to the trees like big cotton balls! 

Yesterday the snow was too powdery to make a snowball, but today it was just right.  After lunch I put on several layers of warm clothes and went outside to play! 

It's amazing how warm you can get in 20 degree weather when you're pushing snowballs around the yard!  I stacked up 4 fairly small balls in front of the gate to our front yard.  I decided to just play and see what direction my snowman would take.

Well, he decided to be a she...a SnowGrannie!  She was beginning to take on the shape of a Mrs. Butterworth's bottle so I just went with it.

SnowGrannie was a lot of fun to make.  She has a round, chubby face with celery slices for eyes and chocolate chips for pupils.  Her smile is dried cranberries. 

She's wearing her Mardi Gras pearls tied in a fashionable knot. A bouquet of rosemary tied with a ribbon is a reminder to everybody that passes by that spring is just around the corner!

Too bad SnowGrannie won't be around to see it...
or maybe she will...lingering somewhere in the front flower bed...perking up the pansies... so they can raise their pretty faces in a few weeks and welcome spring on their own!