End of Summer Bittersweet

Change of seasons is always bittersweet for me. I absolutely love the summer – my seaglass walks, seeing family at the beach, harvesting tomatoes and basil from the gardens and cooking on the grill almost every night. Autumn is sneaking in now though and I am bidding farewell to to the heat and closed windows. I am opening the house to cool nights, cutting back the spent flowers and looking forward to fall foliage...so why not put up a wreath to welcome the season!

Bittersweet is an invasive vine that curls around just about everything. It is flexible and easily wound into a circle. With a little help from my friend Willie, we made quite a mess!

For the time, I left the leaves on the vines but they will eventually dry and drop off. To add some interest I looked for anything in my yard that would look autumnal to add some character to the circle of green now and as it becomes barren.

 Dried coneflower seed heads, dried black-eyed susan seed heads, deep purple and soft green hydrangea blossoms were intertwined between the layered bittersweet vines. There is no need for anything else to hold this wreath together as those "killer curly" vines are just like twine.

The new wreath with one from a past year.

The elements are so gorgeous up close and personal!

The completed wreath. 

I will add to this when the bittersweet leaves drop off with more pods, seed heads and anything else that feels right. It is all about going with the flow, using found materials and enjoying the process!

Happy Almost Autumn to all!

Seaweed Sunday

A follow up to my beach week that is long overdue! My week staying at the family cottage resulted in more collecting...par for the course if you know me at all. Because there is virtually a complete absence of seaglass (not like when I was a child) I found myself drawn to something else.

At first, the driftwood I found in abundance pulled me towards the high tide line and above. But as the tide pulled out, I noticed a plethora of interesting seaweed! The bluestone walkway was HOT and I spread the fingers of my new found favorite weed out to dry. 

Serendipity, a great word! Just so happened that my brother had a book and he was "cleaning house" a bit...so I am now the lucky owner of a book that may keep this interest in seaweed alive. The interest mind you, not the actual seaweed! I believe I found the description of the seaweed that caught my attention in the first place. 

I was not able to identify all the seaweed I collected and some was quite difficult to dry...but bear with me here. It isn't as boring as it seems!

The pressed and dried seaweed was just like pressing flowers but with a head start on that hot bluestone, was taken out and shaken off. Lesson learned, wash all sand off before drying! Then the "what to do with all this stuff" question arose. Do I do what is expected or do I go out on a limb?

My favorite piece (top photo) above did not fit in the mattes and frames on hand. That will be saved of course but no expenses here please-use crafty leftovers to give this beach week project a home. Using the paper choices I had on hand...well, what color do you think I went with?

Ta da!

 An antique desk, a flower bouquet in a seaglass filled jar, a simple rock jar and some bling. This corner has many other pieces of artwork coming along in addition to the prints you see here. Stay tuned as to how the scene develops. For now, my seaweed adventure is done. I definitely plan on drying more and hoping to find even more exotic looking species along our Connecticut shoreline.

Beach Week

Summers growing up on Fairfield Beach were long and lazy. It is still that way if you let it be so! Although childhood was a bit more carefree, without worries of what to grill tonight, going home to water those tomatoes, and throw a job in there for a few hours, I truly love my time in the family cottage. Starting off the week we witnessed a "shelf cloud" (thanks Judy for that knowledge!) and a dazzling display of lightning on the horizon.

Storms over the water are so much more dramatic!

Walking the beach every morning you see the child that you once were. A future architect or designer in the making left their handywork for my enjoyment. A home floor plan laid out with such care and diligence. I remember the castles I built and flags made of sticks and seaweed. This is exactly what I mean when I say summers were carefree and a time for creativity to unleash itself. No rules, no clocks to watch. Just use your imagination for fun instead of television or computers!

Sights and sounds are still the same as when I was a child. Passing oyster boats, seats to sit awhile (with just a little sway that was remedied) and of course the ebb & flow of tides, sunrises and sunsets. 

The quintessential planted cinder block overflowing with marigolds and portulaca greets you at the back door. Wait, we are all in agreement that the back door is the one on the road side and the FRONT door overlooks the beach, correct! That is the only way to have it at the beach!

A collection is started, an idea is developing. Some forage in the woods, I gather on the beach. Nature in its most basic form takes on a different meaning when pulled from the natural habitat. The shape, the texture and the beauty of seaweed is made more apparent when spread out to dry.

As it dried it lost its color the shape was awesome....so the collection continued all week with pieces pressed and saved for a special project coming soon! Losing the boundaries, letting the beach enter in and relax you with not a care as to what others think of your new found passion....ahhhh, this is what a beach week means to me.

And then a birthday to celebrate family & life! What would it be without sparklers instead of candles! The traditions continue, the beach way of life is absorbed unconsciously by the next generation.

 

Morning has broken, like the first morning...what else can you think when you wake up to such  unscathed beauty?

 

 
Solitude, serenity and a bit of feng shui? Feng means wind and shui means water. In Chinese culture wind and water are associated with good health, thus good feng shui came to mean good fortune....hopefully Pappa D was on the right path by creating his own zen garden below in the sand!

And then there are always surprises left with each passing tide.

Leftovers from from a true clam bake the night before? I am jealous....wishing we could still dig cherrystones and quahogs from the sand bars and whip up some Rhode Island chowda, stuffed clams or clams casino from our harvest!

But the prize I found at the end of my beach week ...

...was truly inspiring. An almost perfect miniature horseshoe crab about 2 inches wide was washed ashore and lay on a tangled mess of seaweed, flotsam and jetsam. So fragile and brittle, I scooped it up and felt like a child again, practically running back to the cottage so that I could show off my last (at least for now) gift from the sea!

Enjoy the rest of the summer everyone!

Driftwood

Driftwood is a wonder of nature. In the abstract is can be just as wonderful. Looking closely at the swirls and eddies of wood grain that mimic the sea, I could not but help envisioning a series of "Ansel Adams like" images.  Deciding on the platform of either black & white or au naturale was a facebook question I posed. The outcome will be apparent by my images! 

Thank you all for your unbiased opinions! I love the fact that choices were made and you were not afraid to share. In the end it was up to me to make my own decision because the votes were just about even! These images will be matted in black with a beveled white edge to enhance the gray tones, then framed but not sure where they will end up!

The original driftwood was an entire tree at times. Not something I could take home!

I am really wishing I added a black border to these now just temporarily to make them pop off the screen!

Coming up with names for each image (which helps me identify the ones I want to post) was a fun little task in itself. Names like gnarly, cavernous, folded tree, holy cow, ax attack and last but not least, dolphin face...my "willing to go out on a limb" facebook experiment piece.

But to appreciate why I choose to try my hand at abstracting you must see the subjects in their world, on the beach where they rest. At the high tide mark they are rolled and pushed and covered in various amounts of sand with every passing tide.

Time for another walk to see how they fared during some recent stormy weather. They could be gone completely, moved or joined by a few friends!