since i am not feeling very well today, i'll simply give you all some vintage button eye candy to drool over. most of these are victorian, all are metal and will become rings and pendants in the near future. i adore them and find myself inspired to not only set these buttons, but create some "gems" out of metal myself and set them as well. i just got most of the buttons pictured in the mail yesterday, which is a pretty magical thing to find when coming home after a long work week at the day job!

today feels like spring outside with every little bird singing and green things pushing towards the sun at each turn. brilliant blue skies. phooey, i really don't want to work today, i want to play! specifically, i want to paint. what is it about painting that i find so relaxing, so deeply meditative? perhaps it's simply that when i paint, it isn't with a market in mind. that fact, combined with the intoxicating smell and feel of oil paint ~ ahh! the painting pictured here is from five years ago, when i was teaching public school in michigan and painting to unwind at the end of my work days. it hangs in my bathroom now. it is oil and pencil on wood panel. some of the works from that period i did exhibit and sell, but their creation never had that goal in mind. it's funny, but whenever i get an intense longing to paint, i can step back and see i am feeling really stressed and overwhelmed. someday i will be working one job (my business) and will go back to painting to relax. i will, i will, i will.

when i was little, my mom sewed nearly all of our clothes. in those days, it was cheaper to sew than buy ready-made at j.c. penny or sears. when i was 11, my mom sent me to learn to sew at the sears sewing school -every saturday during the school year for a couple of years. i fell in love with fabric early and the notion that i could create a garment that no one else had was very special. through high school i sewed my own clothes and altered things i found at the salvation army thrift store. this was the early 80's in the midwest, no one else I knew was doing this. there was an adorable print fabric i remember from a peasant style blouse i made in middle school, pale green, with little mice on it, all in other shades of green in the mint to olive range. when i saw an ad on craigslist for a vintage fabric sale, the first thing i thought was - maybe they have the green mice fabric! the sale was of a lifetime collection of an elderly lady who was going into a home and couldn't take the fabric with her. some of the pieces were even from her mother and dated back to the 1930's. tables heaped with neatly folded pieces of small yardage because she had been a quilter. dozens upon dozens of patterns, many i remembered from childhood and my mom's crafting projects. but no green mice. finally i asked, do you have anything with mice? she went to the back room and brought out this brown fabric with colorful mice running across it! the other fabric patterns i got at the same sale, i just couldn't resist them. i'd love to put all the blue-green patterns into a summer dress, with yoke, bodice, sleeve, skirt and hem all being a different pattern. and the bright geometric in the top photo? i was thinking it would make a really smart bag. one of these days i'm going to have to take a vacation from everything, both jobs and the studio -and just sew for a weekend.

meet carson fox, an artist whose work i admire greatly. i stumbled across her in my classic way, late-night internet surfing. the piece above is part of a series of sculptures inspired in part by victorian mourning jewelry and artwork, which was often made out of woven human hair. carson uses synthetic hair for obvious reasons, scale being the most obvious in my estimation. i don't know any thing more about her than the story her website tells, but the work speaks volumes on it's own. i love it's creepy beauty - it suggests animal, human and plant life all at once. i imagine that the inevitable air currents in the room made this piece sway ever so slightly, almost like it is breathing. this work sums up some fundamentals of my aesthetic. it is tactile, grounded in the body yet ghostly, it has a dialogue with history and traditional craft and it is stunningly beautiful. All of the work on her site explores a tension between surface beauty and darker, messier subjects. I find her work deeply inspiring and exciting. this piece, titled looped dread, is from 2006.

yesterday the mail delivered my first copy of seed, a magazine i am officially in awe of and in love with. seed is like the hot professor in college that was such a compelling mix of smart and cool, i could hardly wait until the next class. of course i am fascinated by all things ecology and nature, that's obvious by reading this blog. i'm also curious how just about everything works, grows and connects. seed magazine is about where science meets culture. there are wonderful articles on artists, poets, musicians. there is also politics and religion in the mix, yet it is all grounded in science. string theory, dark matter and jellyfish, oh my! the photography is world class, the writing approachable ~as a whole, it is a delicious experience for a geeky artist like me. check out their web site, but be careful, you might just fall in love, too! the image above is by artist michael pinsky, titled come hell or high water, from a great article on the work artists are creating in response to climate change and other issues. read it here.