What I Did This Afternoon...

I took my mom out this morning for a nature walk at the former celery farm in northern New Jersey. It was a beautiful day, and we returned home before lunch. My mom wanted to sit outside in the front yard, and I wanted to join her, but I don't want to spend too much time reading or doing nothing the whole afternoon.So, I decided that I would do a small project - making printing tools out of eraser caps and pencil erasers. I took outside two pencils, eraser caps, cutter, Staz-On ink pad, and a stack of blank business cards. In less two hours, I came up with eight different designs on my own. Using only 6 eraser caps and two pencils, I managed to complete 8 different designs.
I got up and went inside the house to scan all of the cards into one file. And then I took my laptop outside to do more processing on the printed cards. And got myself to work on all of the photos and the cards. I decided to play more with the cards by duplicating the cards several times over. And I liked the last one above, and did something to it to get different effect. Wow.This is really fun and cool. All of the work including the hand-printing, photo-cropping and editing, and writing this post - it took me about 6 hours. Yes, I do have a lot of photos and stories from the past five weeks, and I will be sharing them with you shortly.

A Great Mail Day

I took a little rest after several hours of yard work and house cleaning today, and after a quick nap, I checked my mailbox. Oh la la, I got two packages today!
I love Charles Harpers' illustrations - very geometric and stylized. Ever since I got one of his posters from National Park Service long time ago, I have been collecting his books except one (The Illustrated Life) which is simply too big and heavy. The above book is what I got in the mail - small enough to hold with one hand, and I like it very much.And another package from Hannah Grey Curiosities and Dry Goods - very big box. I ordered one "Son of Mystery" grab bag for only $35.00 (plus shipping), and look what I got. I'm very happy with the great selection. Thanks, Shosh!

Oh, I forgot to tell you about the great mail art related stuff that I got in the mail during the past few days - I will tell you about that at a later time!

It has been a while...

It has been a while since the last time I shared cool stuff with you. I have been very busy with just too many things to do. While I was doing heavy spring cleaning, I was sorting and putting things together. I happened to have these ampersands that I found in different rooms in my house, and I wanted to show you the ones that have been added this year to my present collection.
I bought two standing ampersands (metal and fabric covered ones) at Anthropolgie. The black plastic was given to me by Seth; the brass one given by an ArtFest attendee; the rubber stamp ("Ampersand") I bought somewhere I don't even remember; and the round one given by Bee at ArtFest, and the stamped masking tape came from the top of the large metal one.

Springtime is passing by so quickly that I could not keep up. I hope to write the posts on the following items very soon:

1. Cherry blossom trees in Newark, NJ
2. Museum of Modern Art, New York City
3. A Day in Charlottesville, VA
4. Wedding at the Winery in Virginia
5. American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, MD
6. Philadelphia Museum of Art
7. Weekend Class at the Center for Book Arts
8. Plus a bunch of other stuff.

These will have to wait until I am done with the spring cleaning and other important projects. As always, your patience and loyalty is very much appreciated!

Tagged Again - Third Time!

I got tagged by Dorit Elisha, and so, here's seven more little-known facts about me:

1. More than five years ago, I took ballroom dancing lessons in foxtrot, waltz, swing, tango, rumba, samba, and cha-cha. My favorite one is samba. Can I hear the music well? No, but I do have an excellent sense of rhythm, and I haven't danced for a long time.

2. Back in March of 1996, I attended an all-day workshop on clay animation at Disney Institute. Very labor-intensive, but lots of fun - I still have the videotape.

3. When I had my own apartment, I had over 1,000 cookbooks. Right now, most of them are in rental storage and I'm very anxious to get them out of storage and start creative cooking again.

4. My family used to have a small dog (mixture of terrier and poodle) and he loved pizza, and cupcakes, and anything with garlic.

5. At the three weddings, I was the best man. That's enough.

6. The last time I went snow skiing was when I was a high school senior. I hit a tree right in my neck and lost my glasses. Miraculously, I'm still alive and have never gone skiing since then.

7. During the summer of 1979, I took a train trip across the country from New Jersey to Chicago, Chicago to Seattle (long before I knew about art retreats), Seattle to California, and back home in New Jersey. It was a wonderful trip.

I am supposed to tag seven individuals, but this time, I decide that the buck has to stop with me. :-)

Early Bloomers

Yesterday, my mom and I went out for a Sunday ride, and I decided to check out the iris gardens even though I knew that it might be too early.
The iris gardens contains a very large collection of irises, and I never saw any other collections larger than this one. I saw some color up the hill, so we decided to go up. We walked up the hill and saw the miniature irises in several beds - the first ones to bloom. Note the white arrow on the map above - that's where we saw the early blossoms. I have been to these gardens before, but never saw the ones that bloom during the early season. Here are few of the many pictures (all of them are miniatures) that I took:
I am amazed at the wide variety of the colors as I often think of irises as purple flowers. I plan to go back there in two weeks where the tall bearded irises (near the large tree above) will be blooming.

Trouble with eMails

I found out from several of my friends that they have been having trouble sending me emails. Several of them have bounced back to them and I have inserted a temporary email address in my profile in case you need to contact me. I am so sorry for the inconvenience.

Artist Trading Cards

I have been meaning to show you the ATCs that I got last December from an origami ATC group (15 members) hosted by Anita B. The origami ATCs are swapped 3 times a year - on a quarterly basis. The fourth swap is handled by another person, MaryAnn, for a much larger group (50 members) during the origami convention (to be held in NYC this June). There were no required theme for the December swap, but I noticed three dominant themes were used: Christmas, Winter, and New Year.
The next swap was done last month of March, and the theme was Emotion. It was not an easy one, but I thought the group did pretty good with that.
I also joined an ArtFest 2008 ATC Fatbook group hosted by Bee Shay, and picked up this book on April 2 in Fort Worden, WA.I took pictures (below) of the book "opened" with the cards still inside. All of the cards were taken out, and oops, I forgot to photograph (above) the book "closed" with the cards still inside.
Two pictures above and below show the different images on the black sturdy cards.
Pictured below are the cards taken out from the book above.
The cards below were traded one on one (individually) when I was at ArtFest last month for three days.
I am amazed and inspired by the wide variety of media and techniques used in these cards.