The Installation....

For months now, mosaic genius, Norene Schmuck, has been working on a piece for our house.

In particular, an aspect of this house which I have never liked.

Funny how long you can live with something like that isn't it?

We have a loft above the living room which had this awful, rough railing made with OUTDOOR deck rails.

Here we are, 12 years after moving in, FINALLY taking it down!

YAY!!

We decided to put a big, wide bookcase up there in its place.

Eventually, I will get one of those light weight, bamboo ladders from Chinatown.

Even though we can access it from upstairs, I always wanted a library ladder and this is the next best thing.

Anyway, we were then faced with how to finish the rough, dark brown board below it...

Super Mosaic Artist to the rescue!!

I gave Norene a few ideas I had, and she set to the task...

Drawing, designing, dreaming of what could be...

Picking through her vast (and I mean VAST) collection of broken dishes...

Finding just the right colours, shapes and characters...

The mosaic would consist of arbutus trees, sky, hills and sea...

Little treasures can be found every time you take a look...

She even incorporated an old piece of china that I brought home from Ireland...

It's the blue 'moon' bits surrounding the raven...

After seeing what goes into doing this kind of art, I am a witness to the hard work and vision it takes to create these types of artwork...

Hours of cutting pieces, fitting them into place, gluing, grouting, wiping grout, 

polishing, polishing and MORE polishing.

Finally on Sunday, she brought the 5 collective works over for installing...

More glue...

drilling...

screwing into place...

And then....

VOILA!

The picture really doesn't do it justice.

You should see how the light catches the pieces of china!

Here is the one on the far end, around the left corner...

A tree with the phases of the moon...

 

According to definitions of this type of mosaic art, "pique assiette", it means 

'scrounger', 'sponger', 'gatecrasher or 

'one who steals from dishes'.

To see more of the progress of this piece, and other incredible works by her, visit Norene's website/ blog

http://noreneschmuck.com/blog

Transformed...

Seems with all of this cold and snow, my latest creature has been influenced...

I was working on a baboon, native to a more warmer climate when it started to snow...

He was transformed...

Meet 'Yuki'.

Japanese for...you guessed it...Snow!

Have you ever seen these creatures in action?

They are easy to attribute to anthropomorphism!

Just have a look at this little BBC video...

Song for Friday...song and dance...

Well, ladies and gentlemen....

It's Oscar weekend and once again, I don't think I've seen any of the nominees on time!

We don't have a theatre nearby so we end up watching flics after they've come out.

There's a few I would like to see in the theatre like 'Black Swan'...for the dancing.

For now I leave you with a classic from 'Chicago' which took home its share of awards...

Get out and dance this weekend and have a great one all!

 

SNOW DAY!!

Did somebody say the word 'Spring' the other day?

Ooops! I think that was me....

But I also said "Not quite."

It's funny to think that only yesterday, my girlfriends and I were on the beach collecting sea glass.

It was a mighty cold wind BUT the sun was out and the ground was green...I swear!

This morning when I woke at 7 I drew back the bedroom curtains to this...

Seems we've had a little late blast of winter here on the coast...

The walk out to the barn was quiet...

Not very many people out on the roads this morning...

I love being the first to walk in new fallen snow!

Ahead is a blanket of pure white...

 and behind, only tracks from myself and Griffin...

 For those of us in this temperate climate, there is a few things we tend to do when it snows like this.

A: Hope that we don't have to drive, because frankly, we're no good at it.

and

B: Get out the camera and head outside.

and 

C: Hopefully make it to the grocery and video store to stock up for the next few days.

I love that snow changes the look of everything.

It's work is magical.

Delicately sugar coating even the most mundane things...

Even the most ugliest of ducklings can become a thing of beauty and form...

And the most lovely things become even more precious...

I remember when the t.v signal would go out when I was a kid and we called the fuzz "bees in a snowstorm".

Well here's the real thing!

Trees are cloaked in white fur...

Turning some to remind me of Sesame Street's Snuffulupagus...

Down at the usually dark slough, the reflection took on a new light...

The hen house transformed into a future Christmas card...

And the field becomes a winter wonderland...

Snow...clean, quiet, peaceful snow...

 Our little resident Anna's hummingbird, still coming to the feeder between night time torpor...

...and Griffin, just like a kid, wants to play in it all day long!

The best part about snow around here is that it never lasts for long.

We enjoy it whilst we can, for, really...I think I saw some crocus' poking their little heads out just yesterday...

On plants...

I don't keep as many house plants as I used to.

Mostly because of space and the intensity of light here.

I know, most people wish they had more sunlight, but here our windows face south

and the windows are very large, so the sunlight can almost be too much.

In the colder months, we can, on sunny days, claim to have 'passive solar heating'.

All this means is that the heat of the sun coming through the windows, is enough to warm the house sufficiently.

So the few plants I do have must be kept out of this blistering light and since our space is limited, so are the amount of plants I grow indoors.

I have my 3 little cacti, which sit on the windowsill...

This one has needles that look suspiciously like a tiny house spider I've seen in the bathroom.

I have a few orchids, which I've learned, like neglect and just a tiny bit of water once a week...

Then there are the sometimes prickly and healing aloes, which seem to love the heat of the loft...

The ferns that I keep out of the direct sun seem to do really well here.

And I love ferns...

I have three strange ones.

One is dormant and not very photogenic right now.

The second is called a rabbits foot fern...for obvious reasons...

These are external roots that creep outside of the pot.

Some people think it looks like giant, furry spider legs.

It really is a lovely fern.

The third is called a Mother fern.

She is growing in a small pot set into a giant pot which holds my palm...and loves lots of moisture...

The lacy, fronds grow up to a meter long and the really interesting thing about this fern is how it reproduces...

Babies are growing right out of the bigger leaves...hence the name Mother fern...

So I have taken a bunch of these babies off of the mother plant and will try growing them in one of these little peat pot greenhouses...

Who knows...maybe I will go into the fern growing business if these little guys do well!

Not quite....

It seems that the cold hand of winter is loosening it's grip around us...

I spied my little batch of tiny snowdrops coming up...

Their small, nodding heads, so cautious but brave, coming out on a sunny afternoon...

And cautious they should be, because right behind the house, in the hills yesterday morning

was the real thing....fresh snow, only a short  distance from here.

But these little souls keep the faith that, yes, spring is on it's way.

I'll join them in their hopeful show and maybe even start some seeds in the greenhouse tomorrow.

Song for Friday...For History.

February is Black History month and I thought I would honor a woman

who crossed many hurdles during her 92 years.

Lena Horne was of mixed race and struggled to fit in on both sides.

She became a strong advocate for change in the civil rights movement.

Even dating back to WW2, when entertaining the troops for the USO, she refused to perform for segregated audiences or for groups in which German POWs were seated in front of African American servicemen", according to her Kennedy Center biography.

Because the U.S. Army refused to allow integrated audiences, she wound up putting on a show for a mixed audience of black U.S. soldiers and white German POWs.

Seeing the black soldiers had been forced to sit in the back seats, she walked off the stage to the first row where the black troops were seated and performed with the Germans behind her.

Lena Horne died in May of last year, leaving behind an amazing career as a singer and dancer.

One of her best known performances was that of the song "Stormy Weather",

but I thought I would post this lesser known performance.

Here she is with Kermit the Frog on Sesame Street singing

"It ain't easy bein' green"

I think it held a lot of deeper meanings for Lena as well.