Hello! Today I would like to tell you about an artist whose work I quite adore. Kirsty Mitchell (website here) is an art photographer who, for her Wonderland series, built elaborate set pieces, props, and costumes and utilized the natural beauty of the English woods and countryside to create windows into her Wonderland. The details are so exquisite and the boundaries between the woods and the Wonderland so carefully blurred, that many of the pieces look like they must be…
I have recently completed the latest cross-stitch I’ve been working on, a pattern published in 2000 by one of my favorite designers, Nora Corbett of Mirabilia Designs, whose designs are always oh-so eye catching. This one is called Scent of Old Roses, and yes, the title was definitely one of the reasons I just couldn’t resist it. Though another reason was the somewhat understated website photo, which, as you will see, doesn’t quite capture the quite glittery effect of the…
I am an introvert, and I like to travel. I also have anxiety, though, so those first two traits don’t always go together as well as you might like. I also like to go for walks (less scary). As a happy traveling/walking introvert, I was once asked by a friend of mine who is not an introvert what did I do while I was walking. She was baffled at how I would sometimes walk the two miles from campus to…
So…I would like to sometimes write posts about art that I think is super awesome, because there are so many super-awesome things, and we should shout about them when we think of them so that more people can know about these awesome things! Unfortunately, this will not be one of those posts (though I will try to balance things out a little with some shout-outs). This post, unfortunately, is going to be more plaintive. Why don’t I love steampunk? Really. …
In this post, I shall present to you two different (but also the same) representations of my brain. Because you see, I have a lot of hobbies. I’m pretty sure my husband has more – and neither of us is also including the fact that we have kids into the tally – but I do think it’s fair to say that I have a lot. Once, when I was younger and complaining to my mom that there were so many…
Okay, so the building I work in is right by a pond, and the result is that there are a lot of Canada geese around, especially this time of year. The result of that is that I am not a fan of geese. They are messy, loud, threatening creatures, who like to walk down the road in front of your car at 1/2 a mile per hour. If I, occasionally, admit to any sort of a soft spot for them,…
For Christmas this year, my daughter requested a wire-and-bead tree, like the ones you can buy in gift shops but, you know, better! I’m no good at defining little projects, and had indeed done similar tree constructions when I was a kid that were definitely at least bigger than the the ones usually on offer. And so I collected supplies, hoping, hoping that the colors I was picking out were the right ones. (I have excellent color taste. And my…
content warning: Marshall fire, community disasters, evacuation In my very first blog post, I mentioned that starting this blog was a sort-of resolution I made at the beginning of 2022 after the Marshall fire. This was a big fire that happened in my home town right after Christmas. We had been having a very warm, very dry winter up until that point, and that day it was very windy (very windy for a place where they test wind turbines because…
My Serial Stream-of-Consciousness Stories (SSCS’s) are a series of stories that I started in 2018 as something to dabble with, but that I picked up in earnest in 2019. I’m a very slow writer, and at the end of 2018 I had just finished the first draft of my 2nd book. That meant that 2019 was staring down the barrel of a lot of revision time. I like revising, but I’m very slow at that too, and my first drafts…
Here is my first-ever blog post! It is going to be a very short post, because I am slow when it comes to learning and doing new things, and WordPress is definitely a new thing for me, and it is getting late…but I really want to get my first post posted today (January 1st) and not tomorrow! Last year, after the Marshall fire, my unofficial New Year’s resolution was that I wanted to finally start the blog I’d been thinking…