Greetings From Arizona: Hiking in Pima Canyon

We are in Arizona for the week. First stop, Tucson, to hang with the In-Laws and drink a lot of wine and margaritas and do some shopping. I already hit up a local Goodwill yesterday and bought up a whole bunch of tin containers to cut up (with the tools I brought in my luggage) and ship back home. We are here until Saturday and then we head up to Scottsdale for our friends' wedding. While I truly love Pacific Northwest weather, visiting sunny locales is nice every so often. But I slathered on 75 SPF and STILL got a twinge of sunburn yesterday. I do not enjoy that at all.

First morning here we decided to go for a hike. Trevor's parents used to live in a beautiful big ranch house in the center of Tucson but decided to down size and moved way up into the Catalina hills last year. The only way to describe Tucson is sprawling. You can drive forever and never seem to get closer to your destination. But I digress. Their new house is really close to several popular trails. The trail head for the Pima Canyon is only about 5 minutes away. Very convenient.


Classified as an extremely difficult hike, the 14 mile round trip would probably kill me. But the first 2 or 3 miles are much easier. We brought walking sticks and that helped quite a bit.
Tucson has had a very wet winter and everything is blooming and on a larger and greener scale than I have ever seen it in 10 years of visiting.

The trail runs right up into the Santa Catalina Mountains, placing you eventually at the top of Mount Kimball. With my wonky ankle, there was no way we were going to go that far.
The plants are very sculptural here. All those spiky green plants in the photos above are tipped with these lovely red flowers. Most of the year they look like brown sticks. Spring is a good time to visit Tucson. And it was a nice 75 degree weather sort of day. (My Mother-In-Law keeps complaining how cold it is. Haha. 38 low in Tacoma last week is cold. 75 is not.)

I had never even seen Prickly Pears in bloom close up before! Those little purple flowers in the background are everywhere. The purple and yellow are very striking together. (They are complimentary colors, you know, so they should look great together.)

The mountains look very green right now. But this will be bad later on when all these lush grasses dry up and become fire hazards.

I think each and every cactus is amazing in its own right.

The little creek running through the canyon was swollen with water. We had to clamber over several watery crossings.
We ended up going a little over 5 miles. It took a couple of hours because you are climbing uphill over rocks the entire time. It is called a path, but some areas are getting squished with all the spring growth. Unfortunately, what I hoped would loosen up my ankle instead made it hurt like hell. It is feeling better today though. My husband just got back from a jog and I am jealous. Today we are going to hit up the Tucson Art Museum to see an Andy Warhol exhibit.

Creating a Special Evening (with Tin)

It was this boy's birthday.......

And since he is my husband and I love him to death, I wanted to throw a party for him....
And drink delicious cocktails...

And eat delicious food....

And hang out with amazing friends....
But I wanted to make special place settings for everyone, something as a little gift people could take home, and I have been loving working with tin so much I wanted to use that material. So I came up with these little pieces....

I don't think anyone noticed, but all the boys got crowns and the girls got birds. (Except for me since I came up with the idea after I had already made mine.) The letters are just these alphabet stickers I bought at Paperzone placed on card stock and cut out with fancy shears.
And then everyone forget them when they left, but I will get them to them somehow!

Thinking of selling these on Etsy, what do you think?

Aperol Spritzer

2 parts sparkling wine, Prosecco preferred
1 part seltzer
1 part Aperol*

You can serve over ice or in champagne flutes. Garnish with citrus twists.

*Aperol is an apertif similar to Campari, but half the alcohol (only 11%) and no diesel fuel taste and with a nice bitter orange finish. It's like looking at Cinderella standing next to her ugly step sister. (Campari being the mean, ugly step sister.)

Tins Charming: Finding My Inner Chicken

The first class I took at Artfest last week was "Tins Charming" by the lovely (and herself charming) Liesel Lund. She teaches at her home in Seattle and around the "arting" circuit.

I made this necklace in class that day and am very, very pleased with it.


I like making jewelry, but I was mostly interested in taking her class to investigate new techniques for adding to my Button Bird Scavengers that I have already been making.

I thought tin would be a nice way to incorporate recycled materials and add color and volume to my sculptures.

You only need three basic tools to get started in tin deconstruction: aviation snips, a can opener, and tin shears.

I immediately ran out and bought all these tins at the thrift store.
Once the bottoms are cut off of the tins and the edges removed, the fun part starts. You definitely should wear gloves when deconstructing, that tin is sharp! Also, emery boards and metal files are essential for smoothing down the edges. You can also add nice finishing touches with a metal punch and eyelets. I have so far bought 2 metal punches and now have every size on the planet to punch except for the size that fits my eyelets! I just ordered a third punch online yesterday for my 1/16th inch punch.
Playing with the metal.

Instead of making another crow, I was inspired to create a slightly larger bird that also had interesting feathers.

It's hard to see it when it is just the wire outline.

Ah ha, now you might have a better idea what I am doing. This is nowhere near finished, but I was so excited about it, I had to share it!

Artfest 2010: The FAT Book

Now, in my last post I pointed out that if you had to choose between making Trades or the Fat Book, do the trades. But the Fat Book is lovely. I think quite a few people spent way more time on their FatBook pages than the trades.

I had a hard time with the theme Fairy Tales. I made my Goose that Laid the Golden Egg pages, but unfortunately none of my pages were in the book I received!

This was one of my favorites.

The one on the left is Swan Lake, the one on the right is yet another felted treasure that far surpasses my goose.

Nice collage.

I like the attitude in this one. That is a little how I felt about the theme.

Gorgeous embroidery!

A lot of work went into this little instant princess. On the back are instructions but she made her own little tea bag!

Nice textures and colors.

There is also a Charm trade and an Artist Trading Card trade. I think next time I would like to try the charm trade.

Artfest 2010: The Trades

Remember when I spent all those back breaking hours making my baggie trades? (Heather remembers too, she helped me one whole day and I still owe her something for that.) Well, the pay off came. And came and came and came.

The first night at Artfest, in the Commons before dinner, everybody begins to trade like mad. I barely saw what I was trading, it was so crazy. I didn't even get a good look at everything until I got home and was able to lay everything out on the dining room table.

This little felted ball, from lovely Lori in Helena, Montana, is one of my favorites.

I was quite enamored by the several felted objects I received. Maybe because I don't felt, I think this is just the neatest thing on the planet.

This hand painted little gourd is pretty unique.

Lots of sweet little charms too.
This domino came in a bag with some papers for collage, but I just love the heft of this, you can tell it's old. About a third of the trades were materials for you to do your own thing with. I appreciate that.

I really, really liked this crow charm too. I am definitely going to be putting that on a necklace.

Far too many things to show, but my advice to any would-be Artfester is that is you had to pick between doing the Fat Book and the trades, do the trades! You get to meet all the people you exchange with on the trades, the Fat Book just shows up all done and you don't have any faces to connect to the pages. Plus, now I am even more inspired to work with these little goodies!
Photos of my Fat Book coming next!

Art Fest: Showing Off the Work

The last night of Artfest, they have a show off your work session where anybody can put out anything they worked on or made. These are just a few of my favorites.

Besides the classes, this was my favorite of the activities. It was really fun to see what people came up with. That horse sculpture is amazing.

I also liked the range of styles. Steampunk to abstract to realism, it was all here. Hundreds upon hundreds of items, I couldn't get to photograph them all.
That octopus lamp is made out of the same hog gut as my Cyclops bird. (see post below for more on bird) It looks like tissue paper.

This big bird painting/collage was awesome too. I talked to the woman that made it and she said she was about to give up on painting and then she made this and now she's changed her mind. Nice.
Keeping it real. Here is me looking like ass after 4 days of little sleep, poor showers, and no make-up. Yech!

Home From Art Fest

I am home from Artfest 2010 up in Port Townsend and I am FREEZING. While I was gone, my husband let the heating oil run out. (I am pretty sure I warned him to order heating oil. He says I told him nothing.) We had the tank refilled today, but when it runs itself out, it usually clogs the intake hose because all the grit at the bottom gets sucked in and then it stops working.

So now we are waiting for the furnace guy, Dave, to show up and do a little maintenance. Dave is a funny guy. He's worked on this furnace for years and I think he really hates having to come to our house. He's really large and our furnace is under the house and he has to crawl into our crawl space to work on the beast. It was pouring rain all day but at least now it has mostly stopped and so he won't get super muddy. But my hands are so cold, I really want to crank the heat.

That's my excuse for not posting up all my cool Artfest stuff today. Fingers are cold, don't want to work. And I have some fun photos to show.

When you go to Artfest, you take 3 days of art classes up at Ford Worden in Port Townsend. You sleep in the old navy barracks and they provide meals and extra activities at night as well.

I had never been to Artfest and I was going by myself and didn't know anyone that was going to be there. I picked out my classes based on technical learning--which classes would teach me the most skills to experiment in my work later on? It was a tough decision. In the end, I took a metal charm mold making and casting class, a class learning to deconstruct decorative tin cans and use eyelets and punches to create jewelry and assemblages, and a class using wire sculpture and hog casing.

Yes, you read that right, hog gut, the stuff they stuff sausage into. This is a vat of it that we took strands out of for making our work. It's pasteurized and packed in salt and it didn't exactly smell bad, in fact it made the whole room smell a little like wet dog. One person in the class was pretty disturbed about using it. (We were warned ahead of time that the class was not for the squeamish.)

It comes as a tube (obviously) and you slice it open and spread it out and cover your sculptures. It shrinks and tightens as it dries. It doesn't like to stick to stainless steel, so I had a challenge getting this cyclops bird covered.

I like the idea of using a natural material to cover my sculpture, but this stuff does deteriorate, so I am not sure if I will be using it a lot in the future. It does have a lovely translucent look.
I played a little with ink stains.

Oh, good, the heating guy is here. Now if we can get some heat, my frozen fingers can thaw out and I can get some more posts up!