A New Year, A New Project!

I decided that 2014 is going to be a relaxing year. I'm going to make that happen. Because I'm in complete control of my universe and when I say I'm taking it easy this year, it's set in stone. SO. I'm lining up a soothing, easy project that may well carry me all the way to December... are you laughing? If you know me, probably! 'Cause you know, the taking it easy thing really isn't me.

Ok, no more fooling, let me tell you what I'm really up to! In 1999, I made a set of four stockings and a count-down-to-Christmas calendar for my family. Each stocking is navy blue cotton with faux applique scenes depicted out of scraps of fabric that I used some sort of iron on adhesive to affix, and then I used silver glitter fabric paint to go around the edges. When the subsequent children were born in '06 and '07, I made them new ones to match.

 

To be perfectly honest, I hated these stockings almost immediately after I made them. They're garish and ugly and at this point, I can do WAY better! I'm almost embarrassed year after year to pull these out of storage and hang them up. Of course, my husband who has a very strange idea of sentiment and gets attached to all of the wrong things fights each year to keep them. Right now, a week after Christmas, he could give two shits about them or the calendar or anything related to holidays. I'm starting new stockings and a calendar now, so when the Thanksgiving turkey is slowly churning in our bellies in November, I will a have a stronger argument than his for retiring these atrocious things to the attic forever. I mean, babe, I've worked ALL year on these new stockings! We'll see how well that goes...

Here's my plan for the new calendar. I'm really big into celebrating the origins of Christmas (aka Yule), particularly focusing on the pagan aspect, in December. Odin was only one of the forbearers to modern Santa. There's also St. Nick (he was a real saint), Sinter Klaus... Ok Google that shit because I don't really feel up to explaining it all.

Odin, who in MY portrayal is modeled after Gandalf (because Gandalf is f'ing awesome and needs to be hung in every home for Christmas!), is set among a moon lit sky on a tree lined mountain slope. The moonlit sky is very important as it is indicative of the winter hunt. It's all relevant in pagan/Yule lore.

So I photoshopped Gandalf from a scene in the movie "Lord of the Rings" into two separate images I found that had the sky and ground backgrounds I wanted. When I had everything jiving just the right way, I opened the image in Window's paint and saved it as 256 bitmap. That degrades the colors to give me an easy to follow map.

 

 



 

 

 

At this point, it was pretty simple to trace this out onto paper and then onto a piece of white cotton muslin. I put the fabric into an embroidery hoop, took the image to the sewing shop to buy the appropriate colors of embroidery floss, and am filling in the entire image with tiny stitches as if I'm doing a paint by number. This technique works extremely well for making heirloom products (such as family portraits onto pillows), or making custom patches or badges, as I show you HERE.

 

 

I have been wanting to do a large tapestry in this medium for a very long time, and now I have a great reason! So, here is the start:

 

 

 

The finished tapestry will be 11" x 14" and will be sewn as a panel onto a new count-down-to-Christmas calendar. If you're wondering what I mean by that, picture a piece of fabric with pockets numbered 1 to 25 and an object that is moved from one pocket to the next, each day in December. The numbered pockets will also be embroidered and I'm planning to use high-end fabrics for this project as I'm expecting these to last my family for another 15 years, if not longer. They may last until I'm an old lady. My family may fight over my dead body for them... or maybe not! It's going to be a fun project though and it will give me a reason to sit on my ass and watch trashy television, which I'm expecting to do a whole lot of this year.

Oh! And I'll keep you posted on progress. If you have any questions, shoot 'em in the comments. 



So... You Wanna Build a Water Garden?

I'm something of an addict when it comes to water gardens. I think I enjoy building them as much as I enjoy looking at them. Before I move onto the building, let me tell you why I must always have one.

Water gardens are ridiculously easy to grow. You practically have to try to mess them up. Trimming the plants back in the fall and mucking it out in the spring (that's a really gross chore, actually) is all of the maintenance it requires. I used to think a water garden had to have hundreds of dollars of electrical gear to maintain it. And believe me, there is no shortage of that stuff on the market! Leaf skimmers, UV filters, regular filters... it's a little crazy. Not to mention all of the chemicals you're supposed to dump in it. But, to be honest, I've just let them be for the most part and they get along quite well without me.

Water gardens attract and nourish local wild life. We usually always have tadpoles in the spring, and a resident bullfrog. The birds can get a bath or a drink of water, the squirrels, ground hogs, raccoons, you name it. And if we're lucky, we can see this once in a while! There's always snails and sometimes even leeches, water striders, dragon flies and other fascinating visitors.

I've built a few water gardens and I've lost count which one I'm on. So I'll start at the beginning.

This is what I started with, eight or nine years ago. The rental house I was living in had this funny wood framed box sitting in the middle of the backyard for no apparent reason.

The landlord said I could remove it if I put something better in it's place. So I decided to make a little pond.

I dug the hole, and then I dug up rocks from the very back of the yard. Actually, where I got the rocks was between the backyard and a creek that was owned by the city. So the city probably owned the rocks. I didn't think they would be missed. They were well underground and needed to be dug out. I also got my first liner for much less than was expected. I hadn't realized until much later that the store had it mismarked and they charged me for weed barrier. What should have cost me $60 was only $11. Like I said, I didn't know this until a year later.

Some gravel from another part of the yard, and some free mulch from the city dump and we were off to a pretty nice start. I didn't have a bench, but a neighbor let me have a stump to sit on.

I put a small ten dollar pump in it to keep the water moving since it had no plants at first.

I collected wild plants from the creek area, including bulrush and cattails. Visiting my local lake yielded some nice finds too, with a bit of duckweed. I had  hoped to find water lilies in the wild, but no luck. I purchased one from Walmart for $4.89.

I transplanted a few other plants from the woods nearby and some roses from the front yard.

The photo on the right is my first pond, which cost me less than $30 dollars - just from being resourceful, working really really hard and getting very lucky.

But if you're a ponder, you'll understand why this wasn't quite enough. You see, ponders always want bigger, better and more elaborate.

I wanted a bigger pond!

I met a really sweet lady from a pond forum on Garden Web. She had a rather large liner just sitting in her shed and wanted to give it to me. I accepted, but I wanted to gift her something in return.
She agreed to accept a large painting of her pond. I'm glad she did, that liner cost her $80 to ship to me! She also included some starts of some plants. Some of them made it, like the pretty soft pink grapefruit lily and the purple irises, and others didn't really like the weather up here. She was from Florida. Her painting took me a year and it's really quite large. But it was such a labor of love, let me tell you!

Thanks to her I was able to double the size of the pond. I used my old liner to put in an upper tier.

My landlord brought me over some hostas, and I built a little wooden bench from some branches (for the legs) and some pallets my husband brought home from work.

I was building stuff from pallets before Pinterest made it cool! :D

The only cost for this was the cost of supplies for the painting and the shipping - all of which totaled less than $10.



I quite loved the pond after this and continued adding found plants around the perimeter and at one point, we bought a wooden and metal bench from a yard sale for $5. Here are some pictures!

I built this little arbor from branches I found in the woods behind the yard.

I still have these purple water lilies, and they are still very prolific bloomers.

Each year I have to pull them up and cut back the roots and stems and repot them. If left alone, the roots would matt up all over the bottom of the liner.

I originally wanted a water garden so that I could have it as subject matter in my painting. But I've actually never gotten around to painting it.

I am able to take some rather nice photos, though!

This waterfall worked out for a year, but the upper pool leaked too much so I took it out.

It was nice while it lasted!

One day my husband announced that the house across the street from his ill father was available for rent. I didn't want to move, but it was important for him to be closer to his dad. I wasn't going to leave my water garden, though!

I drained the pond and put the plants into a kiddie pool, and then I dismantled the whole thing.

I laid the liner out to dry before folding it up.

 Each of these rocks was loaded up onto the back of the moving van and brought with us. Damn right. There was NO way I could part with them, having excavated each one by hand and carried it up a thirty degree slope!

Our landlords had been really good to us. We also felt that we had been good tenants and deserved to get our deposit back. Therefore I made sure this hole was filled in before we left. I dug up dirt from the creek area and hauled bucketful by bucketful and painstakingly filled it back up, with enough on the top to allow for settling. But you know, they still stiffed us on the deposit.

 The new house had a nice slope in the back corner of the yard. This seemed a great place to put the pond. The slope would be perfect for a larger waterfall, and it wasn't beneath a tree, which I always regretted in the previous house - it always filled up with leaves quickly!

Digging a hole for a water garden, you always want a deep end for deep water plants like lilies, and a shallow end for marginal like cattails and rushes.

And boy, was I right about the waterfall! It was beautiful!

But there were some problems with this. The pump required to run the waterfall was a power hog, so we didn't run it very often and dirt would pool up in the filter, clogging it. The pump sucked... literally and metaphorically. It was always breaking down and needing to be fixed. It leaked a lot, too.

No one ever saw the pond except for me, on days when I chose to walk all the way to the back of the yard and sit by it. And without any shade, I never wanted to! After three years, I decided to move it again.

By this time, we had purchased our house and could do whatever we wanted to it. We have a two tiered porch, that when we first moved in, had a stair case coming from the top balcony. We didn't like this staircase, partly because it looked an eyesore and partly because our little ones would use it to carry out their escape plans. After their third time sneaking out, we took the stairs off and had a rather empty space that was perfect for the pond.

I dug the hole so that it looked like the pond went beneath the porch. Moving the pond has shrunk it considerably, but it's important a water garden fit the space that it's in appropriately and this felt like the best size to sit beside the porch.

One day, I hope to build a second one on the other side of the porch so that it looks like the porch is sitting on top of a singular pond.

 My kids had quite a lot of fun that day helping me move the pond, though I believe I did most of the work while they played in the pit.

This hole wasn't quite so difficult to fill in, since I could backfill the dirt that I had dug out of it in the first place.

Here is the pond as it sits presently! It's filled to the brim with plants and snails, frog spawn and probably leeches. In this spot, everyone can see it and we enjoy it every day, even in the winter. You may notice there is no longer a pump on it, because I've decided that they are much more hassle than they're worth. One day I may add a spitter, who knows. There are three varieties of water lilies, the irises my friend had sent me, and the cattails and bulrushes that I pulled out of the creek in the very beginning.

You can build a water garden out of so many things! They can be large, medium sized (like the ones I've shown here), or they can be as small as a pretty bowl with some gravel in the bottom and lily growing out of it.

You can visit Garden Web's Pond and Aquatic Plants forum to get a lot of advice and see some really amazing ponds!

There are many books that you can buy or check out from the library, as well.

 Do you have a water garden? I'd love to hear about it!

Make Your Own Paint and Tips For Painting With Littles

The consistency of this paint is between watercolor and craft paint.

As an artist, I have plenty of experience producing and packing up a painting station and dealing with some of the common mishaps of artistry. I am also a profoundly messy artist. It is not uncommon to find me at the end of a painting day with oil paints smudged up and down my forearms, my thighs and my face.

As a mama, I have plenty of experience painting with wee ones. My kids see me painting and what a good time I’m having, they want to paint too! You know what? Paints aren’t cheap and kids go through them quickly. I’m always running out.

What’s a frugal artist-mama to do? Well, make my own paints, of course! So along with giving you a few tips for painting with kids, I will give you paint recipe using materials most of us keep in our kitchen. Mind you, these paints are staining. Make sure your kids are wearing old clothes and don’t give them this paint the day before their scheduled portraits.

Plenty of space to let her artwork dry.

Set up a work station with lots of space. If you’re worried about your table top or flooring getting stained, you can purchase an inexpensive vinyl table cloth that can be wiped down and reused over and over. Kids are messy and the best creativity comes from being allowed to get into the project.

Have several clean shop rags ready to clean up spills or blot paint brushes. We prefer not to use paper towels at my house and instead we use inexpensive shop rags that can be washed and used repeatedly. I find this much more convenient (as I always have plenty) and Earth friendly than throwing away dozens of used paper towels. It’s also much less expensive.



Use a wide flat bottomed bowl for rinsing their brushes, rather than a skinny jar or glass. Those glass jars are tricky when you’re a little one. I prefer a margarine tub or something similar that will sit flat, hold plenty of water and be difficult to tip over.

Give them paints in individual cups (recycled yogurt cups work well) rather than a pallet. There will be less mixing of the colors. I find that giving my little ones paint pallets with small wells of colors becomes a big muddy mess as they can’t seem to help themselves from trying to pick up all of the colors at once. Maybe that’s just my kids…

Make sure you have a place set aside beforehand to dry the artwork.  My kids like to paint in sprees and will have several drippy sheets of paper by the time they’re done. We often designate the covered porch for a drying spot, but sometimes it’s rainy or windy. The kitchen table is handy if we take the time to clear it off. What’s annoying is having to run around with a soppy wet sheet of paper and finding no good place to set it.



Play some music. When kids are just learning to paint and draw, much of what they create is interpretive. Music can help get their creative juices flowing and keep them into their painting for longer periods. This would be a great time to play some jazz or something with a lot of feeling and  movement.



Don’t instruct them. That would be so boring! We know the sky is blue, so what if they want to make it green? Who cares if their apple tree looks more like a bush than an actual tree? What of it? Just let them be, let them play around. Interfering will just throw up creativity blocks and maybe even put them off of painting. Just as forcing kids to read books they don’t enjoy can put them off of reading, trying to make them paint or draw the way you want them to can put them off of art completely.

Have the kitchen sink clear before you start. Wow. No brainer, right? Except I always forget to do this and I find myself scrambling to clear the lunch dishes out of the way to have a place to dump the dirty water, rinse the brushes and clean the kids.

Now that you have some handy-dandy Painting with Littles advice, here’s a quickie paint recipe if you’re interested.



This is half an egg yolk with 2 tbs. water and 1 tbs. flour.

6 yogurt cups (preferably with lids)
3 egg yolks – make sure you get all of the white part off.
6 tbs. flour
12 tbs. water.
Food coloring

In a small cup, beat the egg yolks until there are no clumps. Add 3 tablespoons of water, and then the flour. Add the rest of the water, until you have a slightly thickened consistency. Divide this up between the six cups and add the food coloring. I used McCormick brand that I bought at a regular grocery store, however, you can use natural food colorings and even make your own.

For the paint shown, I used between 20 and 50 drops of coloring of McCormick Neon. These are just rough estimates. Have fun and fool around with the combinations.



These colors are very vibrant, and also quite staining.

Red: 50 drops of pink
Orange: 40 green, 10 pink
Apple Green:  20 drops of green
Dark Green: 30 blue, 10 green
Blue: 40 drops of blue
Purple: 40 drops of purple
*When my little girl mixed the green and the purple, it made a perfect black!



You can add a bit of water if necessary to lighten the colors more. As you can see in the pictures, the colors are quite vibrant. Once your little ones are finished painting, you can put the lids on the paint and keep them in the refrigerator for up to one week.

Happy Painting!

Fiddlin Sam

By Marianna Dengler and Illustrated by Sybil Graber Gerig.


Every week I take my children to the library. I will sit in a corner, keeping them in view while they both search for their own bedtime story for the week.

I will then make my way to the educational section and pick up a book on whatever topic they had expressed interest in. This time, I was going to check out a book about evaporation and condensation.

As I was sitting, however, this book drew my eye from across the room. The cover is stunning with the brilliant colors and light effects.

When took up the book and rifled through it, I was nearly overwhelmed at the beautiful illustrations. The cover image doesn't do the inside of the book justice. The level of skill the artist shows is stellar and equally matched by her use of the paints and her knowledge of color. I am in awe.

And then I read the story. Fiddlin' Sam is an old country nomad, wandering the back woods, hills and valleys of the Ozarks playing his fiddle at one farm and then another. As a Missouri girl, the setting made the book even more special to me as I have spent some good times myself wandering around the Ozarks and playing in the woods.

Sam is loved and admired by all for his skill. It is said he could fiddle away peoples worries, their cares, even the aches in their bones and when Sam came to play everyone would stop their work and gather around him to dance. But Sam is also determined to do as his Pa had taught him and pass the knowledge on when the time came, just as his Pa had passed the knowledge onto him.

This is a tremendously beautiful story and the images are breathtaking. I will be purchasing my own copy to keep for myself and it will be an absolute treasure.

Fiddlin' Sam

What I Do

I have not been promoting my business on this blog! How silly of me! So what do I do when I am not blogging? That is, besides being a mama, wife, and all of the crazy stuff? Or my bazillion crafts and hobbies?

I am, by trade, an artist. There are so many varieties of artists, so let me be more specific. I am a fine artist. That makes me sound hawt, doesn't it? I'm afraid it's not that glamorous. Most days when I work you will find me scurrying about with smears of paint up my arms and on my face, with pencils and paint brushes sticking out of my hair, and smelling like turpentine.

I have had many little side tracks over my years and gotten pulled in many different directions, career-wise. I wrote a novel once, but scrapped it when I couldn't take criticism. I've published many poems, started a sewing business (I made baby carriers and purses). I learned to make formal wear, thinking that could be a money maker. I've written cookbooks, learned to make jewelry (I still have the desire to create a jewelry company using ONLY naturally found items and hand-made beads that I find in the wilderness). I bought tattoo equipment and learned to tattoo, I even made a bit of money off of that. I learned to knit and I toyed with the idea of knitting hobby-horses and plush toys to sell publicly. ADD often has it's way with me.

I always come back to painting and art. I was five years old (to the day) when I decided I was going to be an artist when I grew up, and paint pictures for people to love and appreciate. That idea is so deep and integral to my inner person that despite the many other "me's" I become, I never stop being an artist and I will never give up painting even when I take breaks.

This past month and a half where I've posted in this blog nearly every day has been fantastic. But it's time for me to get back to work, back to my craft, back to my truest me. I will stop being so stingy about keeping that self off of this blog. And I will of course still blog regularly, just not daily like I was. So if you haven't seen it yet, take a peak and see what I do. I promise not to neglect this place, I do have some good stuff lined up!

In the meantime, take a look around at my other blog! Visit: Destany Fenton Fine Art and Portraiture



"Swinging High"  ©Destany Fenton 2012, all rights reserved.