In the mornings I meet my friend and her cat so we can power up a steep road in the neighborhood.
Some mornings there are turkeys yelling in the middle of the road.
None of this keeps me too busy to paint. I just wanted you to see these pictures.
There is a large project at my church right now. It has been occupying a lot of space in my mind, figuring out what to do and how to do it.
This needs plants, many many many plants. How many? I don’t know.
Fortunately, I know someone who knows. Melanie Keeley has a native plant nursery in Three Rivers and she is a genius expert botanist. (Her nursery is Alta Vista—call or email for an appointment.)
First I had to make gopher baskets. It wasn’t easy, but I had help. We only bled a little bit.
Six or seven friends met Melanie at church one morning. She chose and brought 35 plants, placed them, and instructed us in the planting requirements. Some didn’t need gopher baskets, and some that did needed a hole snipped in the center of the bottom. Weird. Maybe gophers don’t bite tap roots.
After we finished planting and hand watering, we returned in the afternoon to cover it all with mulch. There wasn’t enough, but whatever got spread was an improvement.
Then two guys set up a watering system. Seeing them (lower right side of the landscaped area) in this poorly photoshopped shot gives you an idea of the scale of the project.
In addition to working on the planting project, I repainted a cabin sign.
Then I started on a design for embroidered caps for my friend to sell at her store, Stem & Stone in Three Rivers. (The link is a Facebook page, so I can’t open it, but maybe you can.)
There are two versions here because the embroiderer charges by the stitch count, and we don’t know what the different prices might turn out to be, so we want options.
After she approved these two arrangements, I used colored pencils and Photoshop to turn these into useful designs. (The one on the left isn’t showing completely here.)
She’s not in a big rush. That’s good, because I need to design a ranch map and get some paintings finished.
I love the variety in my job and life!
4 Comments
It’s fun you have such a diversity of projects. That keeps things interesting!
Elisabeth, excuse the cliché, but variety is indeed the spice of life!
I tried to comment on yesterday’s post, but the whole she-bang is gone–comment link, even the blogpost itself disappeared. I was going to say something about those pretty yellow flowers, and if you found them in Three Rivers, or elsewhere, and if the latter, I think I may know why the post went away. But I digress.
Anyhoo . . . what was the groundcover that was planted around the church sign?
Nice work on the Mixter sign. I’m sure there are others there that need freshening up. We have had ours done twice, now. The elements are rough on paint!
Poppies and lupine–can’t beat that combination!
Yeppers, Sharon, yesterday’s post was an accidental mis-dating problem. It will reappear on Friday.
There were many plants around the church sign: low-growing buckwheat, monkey flower, some sort of low-growing sage, ceanothus, one redbud, and a few others I have forgotten.
Thanks for the compliment on the Mixter sign. It is so severely grainy that it is sort of messy-looking up close.
It will be fun to see how my friend uses the poppies and lupine!