I found these hang tags at Flax Art & Design at 1699 Market St. when I was still in SF. I like them quite a bit since I have become semi-obsessed with birds. Actually, my dog hunted down a wild guinea and I took all of the feathers he pulled out in the yard and am making them a part of a composition. I’m almost done with the piece and will post it soon. Keep checking back for new posts as I have prepared a vast amount of new material. Also, I found this bookmark with a horse grazing in a field, but the photo but the finish applied to the photo was what interested me the most.

I had to move back to Oklahoma for the summer.  That’s why there haven’t been any posts in a while.  There is going to be something great in the near future.  There’s no place like home.  I saw a wild turkey today.

While I was in Oregon pillaging Mary’s computer for interesting things to showcase on HeyPretty, I came across these files of Tibetan shaman chanting during meditation.  She received these chants as part of her curriculum for her Shamanism class at Willamette.   They are very interesting to listen to because some of the shaman are able to emit two different tones from their mouths at the same time.  This technique, often called throat singing, takes many hours of practice to perfect.  Most of the sounds you hear in these clips are made by the Shaman.

Shaman Audio 1

Shaman Audio 2

Shaman Audio 3

Shaman Audio 4

Shaman Audio 5

Shaman Audio 6

Shaman Audio 7

Shaman Audio 8

So, Annalise Lundeen and I made this beautiful video, “Girl In A Box,” for her final composition for Fashion Illustration II. It is amazing. We recorded it at Grace Cathedral Park with her computer’s built-in camera. The story goes like this: a robot girl has found that she can not participate in the niceties of life because her world is not built to fit her robot body. Then, one day, she finds a box with all of these beautiful things in it. Upon finding the box and putting the beautiful things to use, she turns into a real woman. Then, she is elated to have found her way out of this struggle. The title has a dual meaning. First, because of the box that contained the robot girl. Then, the girl she discovered when she found the box on the ground. Our inspiration was the video “Wendybird” by Ellen Von Unwerth and Erin Fetherston. Which is shown below. We’ve been told ours was better than the original.

Sorry its been such a long minute since my last post, I’ve had visitors here in the city, and found it hard to blog in the midst of entertaining them. With that said, time for business. I was walking on Polk St. on Thursday and happened across a store (well, actually it’s two stores), called Belle Cose and Molte Cose, translating from French to ‘Beautiful Things’ and ‘Many Things’ respectively. That is exactly what I found when upon entering the store. From clothing, accessories, and shoes to antiques, collectibles, books, and stationary, there is something in there for everyone. I was there on a budget so I only purchased some vintage playing and post cards, but the entire purchase process is really cute. They hold your items at the desk until you are ready to leave, then they handwrite a receipt, put your items in a tiny bag (box for jewelry) with some sort of adorable decal on it, then you are on your way out the door. The number of splendidly amazing things in this boutique is astronomical, and gets you wondering how the stores’ owner/designer Teresa Nittolo finds all of these treasures. “We just get really lucky,” was the answer I received upon inquiring about the origins of the merchandise. I would venture to say it has a bit more to do with a packrat’s amazing sense for collecting than pure luck, because the store has been a successful Polk St. staple for eighteen years. This would be a wonderful place to by a Mother’s Day gift, just in time for next weekend’s celebration. Belle Cose is located at 2036 Polk Street with Molte Cose next door at 2044.

A pin-up post card. $2

Two fashion inspired playing cards. $1 each

I made this collage for a color family assignment in one of my classes and it is one of my favorites.  Clearly I was working with earthtones on this one.  It started with me trying to find images of naturally occurring objects in order to best capture earthtones, rather than use false examples of the colors.  You can see rust on a water tower, blown glass, a forest, dirt on work boots, sandpaper, a clay desert, and rocks.  The story I was trying to tell while I made this piece involved a father (big boots) taking his young son or daughter (little boots) on a trek through many landscapes.  Or maybe they just went on a hike, as I did with my dad when I was younger.  Also, the large boots at the top in a stand still position symbolized a “letting go” of the child to move about on his/her own because the smaller boots are positioned to be in mid-step.

Over spring break my friends and I challenged each other to bring back gifts for one another, and this tin was given to me by Annalise. Worlds of Fun is an amusement park in Kansas City, MO. I’m not sure if that is where it came from, but she found it in a Colorado thrift store, so it is a very likely possibility that the park was the origin of this little box. Also, I’m a really terrible pack rat, and, as a result of that, I’m always searching for new containers to store my collections in. Annalise knows me too well. The image reminds me of the movie “Somewhere In Time” starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour. In the movie, Reeve’s character must travel back to 1912 to unravel a mysterious feeling of deja vu that has been nagging him. The costumes in the movie and on the tin are beautiful, and perfectly reflect the turnover in fashion that was the early 1900’s. The sepia tone helps set the mood of the time, as does the steamboat in the background.

I found this playing card near 2nd and Harrison, and I thought it was really pretty. Playing cards are one of my favorite things to find in the street, because it means that somewhere someone is missing a card from their deck, but its not lost because I found it.

This is only the lid to a tin, but pretty none the less. I found it in the northwest corner of Golden Gate Park, near the Conservatory. It was just up the hill from where Mary and I found the floral mandala. There is even a tiny mandala on it.  The tin-lid is tiny in real life.

I went to Oregon the weekend before last to visit my friend Mary. I scavenged her computer for blog-worthy content, and came across these sound clips of bird calls. Mary is doing an internship researching wildlife for Tallgrass National Prairie Preserve in Kansas, and the director of her program sent these to her. These will be calls she has to be familiar with to locate these birds in the field to monitor their habits and migration patterns.

American Crow Baltimore Oriole Bobolink Brown-headed Cowbird

Clay-colored Sparrow Common Grackle Common Nighthawk Common Yellowthroat

Dickcissel Eastern Kingbird Eastern Meadowlark Eastern Phoebe European Starling

Field Sparrow Grasshopper Sparrow Indigo Bunting Lark Sparrow Least Flycatcher

Marsh Wren Mourning Dove Northern Bobwhite Orchard Oriole Red-tailed Hawk

Red-winged Blackbird Savannah Sparrow Scissor-tailed Flycatcher<- OK’s state bird.

Sedge Wren Song Sparrow Swainson’s Hawk Turkey Vulture Upland Sandpiper

Western Kingbird Western Meadowlark

It was really interesting to listen to the songs of the birds that I had thought foreign to me. Upon listening to some of them, I recognized them and could then match the song to an image, in my head, of a bird that I had seen. Even more interesting, was to imagine the birds whose songs were entirely foreign to me and then find and image of the bird to check my imagination. Most often, I was one hundred percent wrong.

I made this collage for a color-family assignment in Visual Merchandising. This was my neutrals composition. I like it a lot because of the generally soft shapes. Apparently, I can’t cut anything in any shape other than a rectangle/square. I’m working on it. My theme/story for this collage was ‘beauty in antiquity/age/death.’ That’s is why the entire thing is black and white, aside from the off-white/yellow skull. Though I hate to call it yellow, because bones aren’t yellow. There are images of many film/style icons: Audrey Hepburn, Sophia Loren, Grace Kelly, Mia Farrow and Marilyn Monroe. Many of the other images suggest antique design, vintage style, and soft elegance. The skull may seem out of place, but to me it is beautiful. I remember finding animal skulls, as a child, in the forest surrounding my house, and I always thought the color of the bone was so organic and beautiful; almost more pure than white when I think about it. So, I present to you, my black and white collage.

So, yesterday I went to the Green Apple Music Festival at Speedway Meadow in Golden Gate Park. As my group was searching for the rest of our friends, we came upon another amazing floral display on the ground. I found out that these compositions are called mandalas. They are used extensively during prayer and meditation rituals in Hindu and many branches of Buddhist religions. Traditionally, they are made from sand or painted intricately on wood, but in honor of Earth Day, which is tomorrow, the group in charge of this mandala used many elements including flowers, rocks, marbles, sticks, and recycled glass bottles to compose this beautiful piece. The coolest part was that festival-goers could choose flowers from a huge assortment and incorporate their own designs into the mandala. Men, women, and children of all ages were placing their elements among the existing parts to create this ridiculously communal masterpiece. I apologize for the picture, we only had a Polaroid camera with us, so we were trying to conserve film for the remainder of our day, but you get the idea.