Fun Summer Craft Project with Children

Now that the sun's coming out a little more :) here's a fun DIY art project.  They're called cyanotypes or sun prints and they're based on an early photographic process using chemicals on paper.

They couldn't be easier to make  - you just need the right paper (we sell gift packs at the store) and sunlight and water and a little imagination.  Here I placed some plants on the paper and exposed them to sunlight for a couple of minutes.....the timing can be a little tricky.  If you leave it on too long, you'll overexpose the image.  You want to wait until the paper goes light, light blue.

                             

Then you put the paper in a water bath for a couple more minutes......

 At first it might not look like much but let it dry and flatten out the paper.....everything goes a dark cyan blue....hence the name cyanotype....

 I like to write on my pages with a white jellyroll pen that stands out nice and sharp against the blue. 

Here's what the packs of paper look like.

 Click here should you like to go to google images and look at other cyanotypes.  And click here to read about Anna Atkins, one of the earliest photographers who made beautiful cyanotypes of British Algae.  And thanks to Geninne Zlatskis and her great blog for first getting me interested in these.

Give me that Old Time Religion

People, what rock have I been hiding under? Yesterday I went for the first time ever to the Masonic Cemetery on 25th and University.  It is, I think, the most beautiful public garden in all of Eugene.  Indian plum and thimbleberries grow next to paths lined with wild grasses, columbines, oregon grape, and the sweet cicely (whose skinny seedheads provided some lovely anise flavored trailside refreshment). Mix in  gravestones in all stages of decomposition, including some shockingly current ones (like apparently you can still be buried there should you choose to purchase a plot), a crazy crypt or two, plastic flowers, american flags (we are after all just days past Memorial Day), and the best collection of heritage roses I have ever smelled (we are also right on the downside of the peak of rose season) and you'll have some idea of the beauty you might encounter there.  The roses deserve a whole story of their own.  And, despite the fact that people are buried there and there's lots of trails and human activity,  the place has a slightly wild and untouched feeling because they have a pretty interesting no mow policy which you can read about here.    I got to the top and a huge squall hit complete with thunder and lightning.  It poured.  I had the whole place to myself.  It was divine.  This is all by way of saying, I want to encourage all of us to get out to places we've never been to before.  And all the better if it's something you might go past all the time but have never really checked out.  Because beauty hides in the most obvious of places. 

photo lifted from Eugene Masonic Cemetery website.



Playing Dress Up

 Becky is saying, "Come hither and we shall enjoy ourselves immensely frolicking  through the jewelry cases..."

                          "Perhaps these Exstasia  antler earrings handcarved from mammoth ivory?"
                                 It's a big beautiful jewelry world out there.

What's Inspiring Me

It's all about wood at the store these days from Bryan Nash Gill's new book Woodcut....

                                        

 to these one of a kind myrtle wood cutting boards made from big thick slabs sustainably harvested and lovingly made by my friend Annie out on the Oregon Coast.

                                 And there's even woodgrain letterpressed onto the box of Tatine Candles!
                          (who I think have the wittiest and most beautiful candle packaging out there)



Columbine Columbine

Remember that part about how I'm going to start cleaning up and organizing my myriad number of photos? Well my intentions were good when I started but I ended up with this...... a little meditation on the columbine - one of my all time favorite flowers.  Chris brings these from her yard every year and I had to take some home.  And then I remembered this song from the Decemberists which starts like this:

Gentle leaves, gentle leaves

Please array a path for me

The wood's all growing thick and fast around
Columbine, Columbine

Please alert this love of mine

Let him know his Margaret comes along

 



It's Been a Long Time Coming

Our Passionflower website is old as the hills - perhaps I'm exaggerating a tad but I will tell you that the home page has a photo of a young girl peering in the window.  See that's her above.  Well a couple of years back she was in the store with her dad and told me, "That's me on your homepage"....I never would have guessed as she had recently graduated high school.  Just to give you some inkling of how ancient the site is!!!!  I have been working for a while on revamping the site.  It's been a somewhat painful project with lots of missteps along the way.  Basically I'm a retailer not a web designer.   But I am pleased to say it's coming together slowly but surely.

Here's a shot to whet your whistle about some of the yumminess to come. 

photo courtesy Thomas Dick for the Passionflower website.

The Best Perfume in the World

If perhaps you were thinking about collecting rosebuds, now would be the time....say if you live in the Willamette Valley (or Bulgaria or any one of a number of places where the roses grow wild and native and lovely).....

You can dry them and string them and smell them and wear them and make potions and lotions and tap into the most ancient of perfumes.....  True pure rose....

Above photo is rosa glauca from my yard - this just an amazingly beautiful foliage plant ......I also love the rosa rugosa which give me big fat, fat buds for stringing.  But I think it is our native rosa nootka that gives the sweetest scent.

And should you like to put yourself into the rose collecting frame of mind,  here's a post from Chelsea Fuss at Frolic about the annual rose festival every June in Bulgaria.