Monthly Archives for May 2012

Community art

St. Joseph, my current hometown, and Benton Harbor, it’s neighbor across the river, have many, many incredible public art displays.

It’s kind of a surprise, because these are not big cities. They are so tiny that when people call them the Twin Cities I have to stifle the urge to say, “Yeah, but not the real Twin Cities.”

The real Twin Cities are Minneapolis/St. Paul.

I try not to say that very often, partly because it’s rude and mostly because people don’t actually care.
But despite the fact that St. Joe and Benton Harbor’s downtowns are only about five blocks long, sculptures are everywhere.

It’s mostly thanks to the Krasl Art Center, an art museum in St. Joe, though both communities have come up with displays of their own.

My boyfriend lives near the Krasl, so I park in their overflow lot all the time. A few weeks ago, this appeared.

Title: Camper Top
Artists: Alex Gartelmann and Jonas Sebura
Location: Krasl Art Center, St. Joseph

When you park in the same place every couple of days, you stop really noticing it. So when this showed up — not there one day, there the next — it was like it just grew.

I kind of love it. It’s so otherworldly and weird. Like a house from an alternate universe where everything is just like here except 50 percent more whimsical.

It’s empty and I really want to put things in it, like small brightly colored pots and bird figurines, or something else strange.

St. Joe is a small, pretty sleepy town most of the year. It’s a vacation town. But every time I see this weird little house I’m happy to be here.

But what’s that blue thing on the right in the picture up top? That’s one of those things that you stop noticing when you see it so often. And that becomes part of what’s delightful about it.

Title: Connectors
Artist: Micki LeMieux
Location: Krasl Art Center, St. Joseph

This strangeness is just another part of my background. How great is that? My life is so full of weird sculptures that they can become as familiar to me as my own house.

This next one is right on the sidewalk outside the parking lot. Whereas Connectors and Camper Top were part of the Krasl’s Biennial Sculpture Invitational, I think this one’s just on loan. The artist is from Japan.

Title: Construction of the Breath
Artist: Kanri Nakani
Location: State Street, St. Joseph

I think I’d like to make a regular feature of St. Joe and Benton Harbor’s art. Krasl has 26 new sculptures set up all over the place just with this latest biennial invitational, so I’ve got a lot of material to choose from. Just wait until I get to the giant metal hippopotamus.

When you were young

There are two songs by a band I really like called Neutral Milk Hotel (why, yes I am a midwestern hipster, why do you ask?) titled King of Carrot Flowers (parts one and two). Part one starts, “When you were young / You were the king of carrot flowers / And how you built a tower tumbling through the trees / In holy rattlesnakes that fell all round your feet.”

Despite that, and despite the fact that carrots are a plant that produces seeds for goobers like me to plant, it never really occurred to me that carrots actually flower. I just thought it was one more float in that band’s weird lyric parade.

To be honest, I didn’t give it a lot of thought (you are so surprised, I know). Whether carrots flower wasn’t keeping me up at night. But I planted carrots last year for my vegetable garden. The garden failed, mostly because it wasn’t in an area with enough light, and the carrots turned into bitter, wizened little roots. I didn’t dig them up, because at least the carrot tops covered the other stunted, slug-bitten plants.

And this year, my lack of effort paid off! The carrots are still completely inedible, but the stalks bloomed. And they’re really pretty!

Once again, putting off chores pays off in spades. My failure garden taught me two lessons — plants need sunlight to grow and carrots flower. The fact that an adult should know those things already does not make the learning experience any less sweet.

Now I’ve got some shade-friendly plants going in that garden, including a pernicious ivy that might become a problem later. I planted it on one end of the garden last year and this year I found it had sent little tendrils under the ground cover and set up new plants at the other end of the garden. In five years, my house will probably be engulfed. But it’s a rental, so that will be someone else’s problem.

I also planted lettuce, peppers, basil and these here broccoli sprouts in pots on my side deck, where the sun beats down relentlessly.

Let’s see how I manage to not grow vegetables in that environment. I’ve been watering them diligently, so whoever is betting drought might want to pick slug infestation or evil rabbits instead.

I have an idea: If you leave a comment with the correct guess for how my garden will die, I’ll send you a prize! The prize may or may not be an anthropomorphic drawing of the sad death of my pepper, depending on if I can think of something better.

Inevitable craft project alert.

I strung up these mason jar lanterns around my deck. You just take a length of twine, knot it around the jar’s lip, create a loop and then knot it again on the other side. Add a tea candle and hopefully a deck with posts you can hang it from, and you’ve got yourself a nice little light.

So that’s my garden! It might die soon. I’ll let you know!

Metal bark and beaded leaves

Bonsais take forever. Years, if you do it right. Tiny adjustments are made maybe every six months and in between you just have to withstand the urge to sculpt and prune it.

That requires far too much patience. So I decided to keep the bonsai look and just get rid of that, you know, alive stuff that takes so long to do what I want.

Here are two wire trees I made a month or so ago, after watching this how-to video.

I used 24 or 26-gauge wire and tiny seed beads. I picked up the halved geodes at a local jewelry store.

I have some experience working with wire – I used to make butterflies and dragonflies and once a Chinese dragon out of it, but I haven’t done much with it in years.

I just like these, though, I think because they have those satisfying bonsai shapes without the guilt that comes with not watering them.

To get them to sit properly on the geodes I bent the wire roots to curl around the rocks and then put a bit of hot glue under the base of the trunk.

I’m working on another  right now that I’d like to try to melt onto the rock instead of glue. Scott has the tools to melt the wire, but I have no idea whether that will actually work or just will destroy the tree in the process. I’ll try to document the experiment, if I can manage to do that while not wrecking my new wire tree and/or any of my fingers.

The new tree I’m working on will have slightly different “leaves.” I bought these quirky, irregularly shaped beads that kind of remind me of pine needles when they’re all bunched together. We’ll see if the resemblance holds when the tree is done.

They’re also very tiny and I hope to complete my wire tree before I’ve lost a bunch of them. Unlikely!

Visiting home

Location: Como Park Zoo and Conservatory in St. Paul, Minn.

Event type: Mother’s Day

Conditions: Packed to the friggin’ gills.

I flew home to Minnesota last weekend to visit my family and for Mother’s Day we stopped by Como Zoo, an idea that everyone else in the Twin Cities happened to also have.

I live in a small town now. I’m not used to crowds or, you know, traffic. There were people yelling at bicycle riders. It was un-Minnesotan, I tell you.

I took some pictures, but you will not see the crush of the crowd illustrated in said pictures. That’s because, while there, I observed everyone following the same photographic rules. 1. Take extreme close-ups of flowers, 2. Take pictures of animals zoomed in as far as you can, but still be too far away for the photos to ever be worth looking at again, and 3. Take pictures of your family members sitting on benches.

I call this one Autumnal Space Alien:

This one is Koi Pond with the Backs of Children’s Heads Cropped Out, Because Who Wants to See Their Heads Anyway:

Here is Tilt-Shifted Photo of a Bonsai, So It Looks Like An Even Tinier Tree:

These are photos from my parent’s backyard. Zoomed in photos of flowers just never go out of style (never. Ever).

Tiny things must be photographed is such a way that they appear tinier, part two.

And, photo from my airplane after they let us turn on our electronics, which also came after the plane turned away from the spectacular sunset I wanted a picture of.

That was my photographic tour of Minnesota. If you found it lacking, well, that’s because I didn’t get any pictures of Timber Wolves, which all comprehensive photo tours of Minnesota are required to have.

[Update]

My dad contributed this photo saying, “It was very crowded. But a trip worth making nonetheless.” So true!

Butterfly under glass

I flew home for a Mother’s Day weekend, which meant hanging out with my parents and brother, a crazy amount of sushi, a trip to a massive dog park and the BBC’s Sherlock Holmes.

Also, a wee craft on the side. I thought I’d share the gift I made for my mom. Some people just get a card, but not me! Because I literally forget that that’s an option. I would spend so much less time gluing and coloring if I could just keep in mind that card-giving is a thing.

Keep reading for the how-to!

Continue reading →

Lion in the park

I went to Chicago a while ago with a couple of friends and we stopped by the Lincoln Park Zoo. It was early in the season, and cold, and all the animals were somewhere inside. Except this lion, so she was our Lincoln Park photo opportunity. I just had my rinky-dink digital camera, but it’s got a pretty nice zoom on it. From where we stood, we thought the lion was sleeping and so it wasn’t until I looked at the photos that I saw the camera had caught the light in her eyes.

DIY blacksmithing

Last Saturday, my boyfriend busted out what is, hands down, the most impressive DIY project I’ve seen up close – a handmade forge.

Scott worked on it for weeks, cutting up a washtub, digging clay out of a nearby riverbed and baking the thing for hours in his apartment oven (did not smell great).
The forge works by running a metal pipe with holes in it down the center of the washtub, with the clay forming sloping walls from the washtub’s edge down to the pipe. Light some coals inside the washtub and, with a hairdryer blowing cool air into the pipe and forcing air up through the holes, you’ve got one very hot little forge.


The above picture shows the forge with a metal bar heating in the coals. After heating (for only about 10 seconds, any longer and it turned to metal butter!), Scott bent the bar, hulk-like, for a motorcycle part.

He does stuff like this all the time – he’s even thinking of making his own tail lights by carving them out of red resin. In his corner of the internet – on motorcycle threads and such – they call this chopping the bike. As in, it’s been customized to such an extent that it’s been chopped, it’s a chopper. In my neck of the woods – where there are just as many tattoos, but more fuzzy animals and cupcakes – it’s called crafting of the highest caliber.
This particular craft also took forever, so I wandered away and took pictures of a flowering tree in his yard. Behold!