We’re lucky to have this little greenhouse attached just off the back of our bedroom. Unheated, it is only really useful in the summer. But in the summer a lot of my houseplants go for a little vacation here. At first I thought that all that light would be good but soon discovered that it was actually too much of a good thing. It faces west and the hot afternoon sun was too strong for the jades and even the cacti.
Little Buddha shrine under the Christmas Cactus
Being garage “sailors”, we soon collected the perfect foil for the sun and made my plants very very happy. Bamboo blinds cover the windows and on the ceiling we have stapled a collection of rattan beach mats, most found at sales and some for only a couple of dollars in Chinatown.
When I move the plants out to the greenhouse, suddenly the rest of the house seems to somehow feel bigger and lighter. In the greenhouse they are all packed in together. Gazing out of the bedroom, it seems like we have our own private jungle.
The only problem is that plants left in here tend to get huge. The jade hardly fits through a doorway anymore.
The ever growing Jade plant in the shaded corner of the greenhouse
Then there is the added problem of what to do with Jade plant prunings.
Jade plant cuttings waiting for new homes
Well, you can’t just throw them out can you? Well, I don’t seem to be able to. I pot them up so there’s always a bunch of new little jade plants coming up in the summer. Luckily I’ve managed to give a few away. I tell people, to entice them, that in Feng Shui jades are “money plants” and they must have some to attract money into their homes. Seems to work. Hey, everything needs a little “marketing”.
Just a preview of December’s big show
As for the Christmas Cactus, well, as you can see it loves the space, popping out a few blooms for my benefit. It’ll really go crazy just before Christmas. The spider plant, which usually resides in the studio, also vacationed in the greenhouse. It has grown abundantly and I wonder how it’ll fit back in the studio again.
Spider plant looking for more space
But the nights are growing colder and soon my little jungle will have to move back into the house. Somehow I’ll have to squeeze them through the doorways and into corners all over the house. Then the house will feel like a jungle. But through the colder, grayer days of winter that’ll be kind of nice too.
The Buddha shrine is slowly coming along. I haven’t had much time to work on it in the last little while but I did manage to get the base that the Buddha is resting on covered in gold tile. I did say it’s a slow art, didn’t I?
The gold tile is from a stash of Italian tile that I picked up at a garage sale years ago. There is very little of it left and I do what I can to stretch it out. A sneaky way to do that is to cut the tile up into smaller pieces. Luckily the brick pattern I chose perfectly fit the space.
The top of the base where the Buddha sits meditating was filled in with tile while the statue was in place. Much the best way to ensure that by grouting time the space where he will be glued down is exactly right. Right now you can see the broken raw edge of the Buddha statue around the bottom, but trust me, when I grout this, it will all look great and be hidden. I’m considering a sort of verdigris color of grout.
I’ve been doing some of what I call “fine fitting” to make all the little spots left on the back fit well. One of my students this summer, a nurse, left me a pair of forceps and I must admit they’ve come in very handy when fitting tiny bits of mosaic in tight spaces.
I always tell my students to grab all they can if they see a plate that they know they love and will use. Why oh why didn’t I follow my own advice? I’d seen two of these plates a few weeks back in a thrift shop but had the idea that I had much more of it than I actually did and didn’t buy them. Last weekend I hit as many thrift shops as I could, but no luck. Ah well, I’ll keep looking but I may have to come up with another solution for the raw edge around the pond.
All in all, though, I’m quite pleased with how it’s progressing. At the moment my next decision is whether or not to mosaic the back of the stand behind the statue. Will it find a home against a wall? Will the back be seen when it’s all done? On the other hand, it does give it a finished look. Oh, more decisions. But I may find just the right plates and that will make the decision easier. I’d still love to find some sort of feet to put under the stand. Wish me luck.
It has occurred to me that doing this in installments may have set up an expectation. Like daily installments, lots of progress. But that’s not how mosaic works. It takes time. Lots of time. Its a slow process. So if you were expecting something that unfolds in fast forward like time lapse photography, well, you may have to deal with time, real time.
I remember reading that the idea that stress is caused by the fast pace of life is actually wrong. Nowadays, we are stressed by things that don’t happen fast enough. We snap our fingers with impatience at microwaves, bank machines and computers that take longer than a few seconds to do their job or load. So mosaic is like a step into the past, where time takes, well, hours, days, weeks but definitely not seconds.
And sometimes other things get in the way of doing things too. Like the fact that sometimes you get sick, as I was for three long weeks. Or that you get company, happy enjoyable company but it puts you off your progress. But lately, I’ve made progress, some forwards, some backwards.
First I worked on the water lily or lotus leaves. That came together well. Then I needed to make decisions about the pond. The plate I’d originally planned to use was a disaster. It broke in jagged edges, was too thick and finally abandoned.
But the one I chose next was an improvement. Lovely, dark green with a pattern that to me spoke of ripples in a pond. The problem with it is that it also doesn’t break as well as I’d like. But that’s also part of mosaic, the lack of control, sometimes you have to go with the flow and work with that. And take more time to piece it together.
Next was the stand that the Buddha is resting on. I’d chosen a plate that just didn’t work with my new choice of pond. Students are always surprised when they discover that you can change things that are glued down. That’s what chisels are for, I tell them.
So off came the plate, and now that portion will be covered in my stash of carefully hoarded gold tiles. Being creative always seems to come down to making one decision after another.
Yesterday, I made progress with the pond. It seemed to go along so well. Maybe it was because I was listening to 10 New Songs by Leonard Cohen as I worked. Music is so important in the studio. Somehow Leonard’s deep smoky baritone and beautiful words just helped the pieces fit.
Now the only problem I face is that I don’t have enough of this lovely dark green plate and may have to use the chisel again to steal pieces of it already ensconced in the background. Or make another thrift store run. Hopefully I’ll get lucky and find more of it. That will take more time. But, time, the slow unfolding of it as you work is really what creating a mosaic is all about. It’s a slow art.
Today, after checking the paper for garage sale ads and noticing so little out there, we have not gone out garage sailing. We’ve decided what is there is so far apart that it would waste gas, so it looks like last week was our last outing. And last week we went all over and spent a dollar, just a dollar. Got 5 CDs but found nothing else we could really use.
So today as a little wrap up, I thought I’d show the sights, the fun stuff, we’ve enjoyed along the way to sales. Because part of the fun of cruising around looking for garage sales is the stuff you run into along the way.
This is something we spied, drove past and backed up again to see it. OK we’re old hippies and here was this van, that just expressed those days. It was flower painted, a VW van known as Hippie haulers in those days, but the bumper had such a fun message. Had to get a photo.
Our flash-backs are all natural
Then one morning we came across this veggie garden out in the street, on the boulevard, in the front yard. Something that’s becoming a trend is growing your own food and getting rid of front lawns. Whoever grew this certainly had green thumbs. Everything was just totally and abundantly sprawling almost over the curb!
Potatoes and squash sprawling over the curbfront yard veggie abundance
Now, we’ve always had a thing about Jaguars, the cars that is, especially the one that Morse drove in the Inspector Morse Mysteries. There is just something about a Jag, the old ones especially.
Look at all those curves
They have a beautiful design to them, lots of curves, and to us, they just suit having people in them. That’s something to notice, whether a car actually looks good with a human in it. So many new cars don’t, people look proportionately wrong or squashed or maybe the car looks so aerodynamic that you only notice that. Anyway, we came across the Jag Show in Oak Bay one afternoon.
Not quite
We tried to make our little Subaru look like a Jag one morning this summer but these were the real thing.
Just dreaming
That’s Will with his choice. I guess, as artists, we are just attracted to this car that is itself a work of art, right down to the hood ornament.
Sculpted right down to the hood ornament
All summer we’ve tried to take in Jazz in the Park. Often during intermission we wander around Beacon Hill Park taking in the sights. Now what is it about a duck with it’s bottom pointing up as it looks for food underwater that I just can’t resist taking a photo?
Upturned duck
And this photo, of the trees, just behind the bandshell, brought to mind Emily Carr, an eccentric, now finally famous, local artist and writer.
Emily’s trees
If you’ve never heard of her, you must look her up. She’s been an inspiration to me most of my life. I love all of her work but the trees she painted are my favourites. Just looking at these trees you can see how she felt moved to capture the flow, the strength and beauty of these coastal trees.
So that’s it, a hodge podge of our little travels. The garage sailing season is over and that time will now be spent on other things, like work in the studio on mosaics or work on sculpture. Or maybe finishing up projects started and forgotten over the summer. An end to one season and the start of another.
I thought it might be fun to work on a pique assiette mosaic and post the progress and the process from the beginning but in installments. Something to look forward to for some and something to keep me from procrastinating. Because I do procrastinate sometimes. Doesn’t everyone? Maybe procrastination is too hard a word. Let’s just say I get distracted by all the other things like worries and other work. But once I start on something creative, I find myself getting happy.
We are really into garage sailing. Not just for the good finds, but for the time out, the enjoyment of it all.
This mosaic’s main piece was found while out garage sailing. It had been tossed on top of a pile of things in the back of a truck full of junk waiting to be hauled off to the dump. I just happened to see it while on my way from one sale to another on the same street. The little Buddha had been a lampstand, but the base was broken. I found the owner of the truck and he very kindly gave it to me, probably wondering why I would even want it.
It sat in my studio for weeks. Now and then I’d show my find to my students, proudly holding it up and saying that some day it would be the start of new piece. As soon as I had some time.
Then finally, last week, the little Buddha finally got his day. Will and I needed something to change the day, something to do to relax, get happy. We pulled out the Buddha and began. First we pondered, should we keep the light fixture attached and make another lamp? I looked around the studio for dishes and ornaments to compliment him.
some of the pieces that would compliment the Buddhatrying out ideas
Some of these dishes had been saved for a long time, all slightly Oriental and exotic. One idea followed the next and soon we were in the flow. We saw him in front of a pond with a floating lotus flower, meditating with some sort of ray pattern as his backdrop. With this sudden realization we dropped the idea of keeping the light fixture, dismantled it and saved it for some future project.
cutting off the broken lamp base
Will carefully sawed off what was left of the lampbase.
As always, things just seemed to come together. The lotus flower was part of a broken ornament and was originally going to be part of the pond in front in our design.
Then it turned out it fit just perfectly into the front of the Buddha ornament itself. Ok, no problem, I had a slightly worn lotus shaped tea light holder to replace it’s original spot. Oooh, tealights in front of him, now that would be good.
Sketches were made, deliberations on the placement of the pond, the back drop, the curves and layers, and finally the pattern for the stand was cut out of newspaper. Will, obliging as always, went down to the workshop and cut and screwed and glued the base for me from plywood.
While I listened to sawing downstairs I broke the dishes and spent some time doing a few trials of placement for the back-drop.
Finally, I could start. And in the bloom of the moment I actually got quite a bit of the backdrop covered.
The golden pheasant plate has become the border, the pheasants flying over his head. One oriental plate with a black background became the ray and two other plates also having a floral oriental feel but with white backgrounds became the filler.
Next will come the pond, the lotus flower and leaves. Will I need a spot for another tealight? Decisions, decisions. Trial and error. Too much pattern? Will it “work” together? I love this part. Doing a bit, stopping, standing back and looking, assessing. I’m getting happier.
I can see clearly now, the hedge is down…well about 2 or more feet anyway. Ok I stuck that song in your head now didn’t I? Couldn’t resist it.
I’ve had that song in my head all week as I watched that hedge get trimmed.
My view for many long months went from my kitchen window and then smacked abruptly 20 feet later right into the hedge.
Before
Oh sure, you could see the sky and the sunset above it but it was not enough. No I wanted more. I wanted to finally seeing the distant mauve hills of Sooke that are miles and miles away.
Now I know it’s supposed to be kilometres being Canadian and all, but how does kilometres and kilometres away sound? Metric is not poetic, although in this case it rhymes.
You can just barely make the hills out, in this photo, but let me tell you, in the winter, when all the leaves are gone, and it’s cold and wet, this view is worth a million bucks to me.
After
So it’s not an ocean view or anything really magnificent or earthshaking but I need it. I need to see that distance on the horizon. There is something about being able to see for a long distance that is somehow calming, and hopeful at the same time. Maybe the hedge makes me feel claustrophobic? Like I’m boxed in with no where to go, no future? I don’t know.
But next time to you go the ocean, or you stand out on top of a hill where you can see for a long distance, pay attention to how you feel. There is something physical that happens, to me, anyway. I just naturally take a deep breath and let it out slowly and my stomach and the rest of my body just relaxes. And crazy as it sounds, to me, if I can see the distance I feel like I can see my future much more clearly.
Now if only I could convince the guys to cut it down just a couple more feet…..
I wonder if everyone feels just a bit disappointed every year at the end of the garden season. I know I do. So many things that I had planned to do never actually happened. No time. Not enough energy either.
The hostas are wrapping it up for another year
Last night as I watered I noticed the hostas are starting to fade. Summer has rushed by as though on fast forward. But for the most part we have enjoyed our little garden.
The Fuscia is in it's prime
The fuscia is gorgeous now, the grapes are starting to turn and the gooseneck loostrife is the best it’s ever been.
The gooseneck loostrife
The grapes are beginning to ripen
The day lilies, now almost finished and slumping, flower stalks dried out, were beautiful in their prime back in July. The unknown groups of purple flowered plants are now standing sporting only seed pods.
Earlier they were a riot of purple around the gardenNow spent and ripened to seed
I am of two minds as to what to do about spent plants. On one hand I want to have a tidy garden and cut out or pull out all of this spent plant life. But I have noticed in past years that the birds do enjoy eating these seeds throughout the winter, benefitting from my negligence.
We had plans to find more plants that flowered all the way to September. Unfortunately, only the solitary dahlia survived the winter here, which had us lose quite a few plants, like the hebe. Somehow we never got around to finding all those plants although we did find a few like the maidenhair fern.
The maidenhair fern
But now our inexperience and lack of time have caught up with us.
I know I have to accept the fact that summer is almost over. Plants set seed, die off, they have no regrets. They have done their jobs. But I, not ready for it to end, still wish for a green and flowering garden. Ah well, time to accept reality.
And maybe it’s also time, if we had any, to start thinking ahead to next summer and make some solid plans to get the plants we didn’t get this summer. After all we’ll have all winter to make plans. Or so we hope.
But time, time and energy, those are harder things to get. By the time summer is over I have generally run out of energy. I’ve come to the conclusion that the only people who have those wonderful luxuries of time and energy to spend extravagantly on their gardens don’t have so many other things they also want to do. Like teaching mosaics, making art projects and sculptures, participating in and preparing for art shows, or building a business, not to mention reading, dinner parties with friends, garage sailing, too much to list.
Maybe I should spend some time this winter thinking about how to have a garden that looks green and wonderful all summer without needing so much time and energy. Should I should switch to more bushes? Or more perennials? But I know what we really need are perennials that bloom at different times over the length of summer.
Or maybe I need to think about the fact that energy and time are limited, especially if you want to do other things besides garden. I’m one of those people who wants it all. But the end of the summer in the garden is teaching me that I must prioritize, compromise and reassess what I really need against what I want. Ah, maybe that’s the answer or at least a path to explore.
With this Pique Assiette mosaic shrine, the fruity patterns on the dishes created the main theme. As sometimes happens there was one dish that started the ball rolling. In this case it was the little plate with cherries.
Without a clear idea in mind, I started to set aside dishes I found with fruit patterns on them. I didn’t know where it was going, had no clue really, just a feeling that someday I’d do something with a fruit theme. Besides, all these fruity dishes were really quite beautiful. For months no real idea came to me as to what I’d do with them.
Then one day, probably while out shopping for dishes to break, with some of my students, I happened upon this wonderful little bird. I don’t know who designed this bird, who lovingly sculpted the original, but thank you, mystery artist. Ok, looking at it, it’s probably a collectible ornament, maybe even worth money, but to me it was the missing piece. It was the piece that twigged an idea. Fruit and birds, birds and fruit. We have grapes and kiwi in our garden as well as a small apple tree. Birds love these fruits. They like to take a tiny bite and move on to the next fruit.
I saw the bird on a shelf and immediately knew the bird should be reflected in a mirror. Then I needed fruit. Where to get some? Well, thrift stores are full of fake fruit, nice squishy fake grapes and cherries, pear salt and pepper shakers, apple and orange ornaments. It didn’t take long at all to collect what I needed.
I often tell my students that making art is all about making one decision after another, often using intuition. In this case, once I had the final ingredients, all the decisions seemed to make themselves. For one, I made everything rounded, the shelf, the shape of the support, it all seemed to call for roundness, fullness, dare I say rounded fruitiness.
I could have done the mosaic pieces as a random overall pattern but chose instead to group the patterns in flowing areas to set off the cherry plate. The piece was almost too easy to do. I let intuition guide my decisions and with the find of the bird ornament, the piece just “flew” together. OK, OK, I’ll stop now.
Then last, but not least, I wanted it feel abundant, like the way that trees and vines full of fruit make us feel. Under the shelf, I glued veritable bunches of those nice squishy, kitschy grapes and a few cherries, so it was practically dripping abundance. I’ve given the pretty bird a setting, a home. I like it, it makes me smile. That’s all I really need.
Mosaic Inspiration #4 I talked about the intuitive process to create an overall random design on a flat surface like a mirror. And if you’ve looked at our stepping stones you’ll see that I use this method there as well. I admit, I like working this way, it’s meditative and challenging at the same time and never boring. And there are benefits!
Now, I have to say that working like this is especially fun on 3D surfaces like pots. I’ve done quite a few pots in this manner. In each case, I selected dishes that had colors, patterns and textures that I liked together. To those, I added some solid colors and a few marbles. Marbles have a way of glowing when the light shines through, that I find totally captivating.
I tell my students that doing intuitive mosaic design has one really great benefit, especially if you tend to be a control freak. You will learn to let go. Working intuitively allows you to forget control and just go with the flow. After all you are not creating a picture, or a rigid pattern. Nope, just an overall pattern with a mixture of surface designs. Ah, the freedom to just let go and mix it up.
Going with the flow also applies to fitting dishes onto a curved surface. A dish does not have the same curvature as a pot. To make up for this you often have to adjust how you apply a piece to the curve of the pot. Oh sure, you can keep breaking the piece till it’s small enough to apply to the curve ( um, this could be called exerting control) or…you can just find the curve of the dish and find a place where it will match the curve of the pot. Ah, even less control.
Using dishes that have color on the bottom as well, creates an extra little benefit. The ridge on the under side of the plate, once broken, can be pieced back together to create some very nice undulating lines, thank you. I’ve used this often to create a flow or direction. It’s a little trick that I totally took advantage of on some of these pots.
The last little benefit about applying pique assiette mosaic to pots is that unlike a flat surface like a tray or mirror frame, you can’t see the whole surface at once. You may ask, how is this a benefit? Well, if you get tired of one side you just turn the pot around and viola, you have a whole new surface to feast your eyes on.
The other morning I woke up really early and just couldn’t get back to sleep. I’m talking 4:30 AM. By 5:30, I gave up going back to sleep and sat out on the deck sipping hot chocolate. It was just so wonderful out, cool, green and quiet. The light is totally different at 5:30 AM. I should do something with this time, I thought. I should use this time to do something I really like.
You’ll never guess what I really like to do in the garden. I love to make compost.
A gardening fashion statement?
There’s something about clomping about in my gumboots, layering all the ingredients of my compost that is quite satisfying. Well, there’s something about clomping about in wellies that makes me like to pretend that I’m Barbara Good in the Good Life.
If you have never heard of The Good Life, you are too young. If that’s possible. Anyway, this was a very popular British TV series back in the 70’s that featured a couple determined to be self-sufficient on a 50 by 100 foot lot in a trendy area of London.
Anyway this couple, Tom and Barbara Good, had a veggie garden , chickens, even a pig at one point, instead of a lawn and flowers and a wood stove in the kitchen. This was all much to the consternation of their trendy Yuppie neighbours. Anyway, if you can, rent it. It’s even rumoured that the Queen of England plopped herself down on the couch every Tuesday evening to watch it.
We get everything second hand, we’re into sustainability, conservation and all that.
Actually five wheel barrows, if you count the handy little green weed barrow
We have about four old wheel barrows, all for free, giveaways. Now you may wonder how does a couple on a 50 by 100 foot lot possibly use 4 wheelbarrows? Well, we do use them. Mostly to store all the weeds that we pull and the finished flowering plants. We don’t always have time to do the compost so basically I just store the stuff in the wheelbarrows and let it get sort of pre -composty. Then when I can, I “do” the compost.
Now, if you’ve been searching the internet for all kinds of ways to make compost , you’ll know there are many ways to do it. Then there’s my way. And here is my little dirt secret. I cheat a bit.
Our free black composter
For instance we have one of those big black composters, which I got free, by the way, given away by a neighbour. I like to use that one for all the kitchen stuff like tea bags, coffee grounds with the filters (unbleached of course), peelings from fruit and veggies, egg shells (I crush them usually). I save all this stuff in two plastic recycled containers on the kitchen counter. As soon as they get full they get emptied out into the black composter, but, and this is where the cheating comes in, with each load I add a few trowels of dirt from the compost already made.
In winter I leave a pile of this finished compost close by so I can scoop it easily. I like to think that I’m adding some good bacteria and worms to get to work on all this bounty. Putting the kitchen scraps in the black composter until its composted, keeps it away from the rodents. We do have rats in Victoria.
Then we also have a pile of sod, from making new flower beds. This is the dirt I talked about in a previous blog, that is hard, dry and no self-respecting earthworm will touch. So there you have the ingredients, the old sod, the kitchen scraps from the black composter, and the wheel barrows full of decaying weeds and the secret ingredient, finished compost added to the mix.
The pre-composted weeds
The old sods for the backyard lasagne
Now I like to think of lasagna. That is layers. I put a layer of sods which I break up into the smallest bits I can by hand. I water that really well. In fact, my latest trick is to keep the hose going on a fine spray pointed at the compost
Keeping things wet
while I layer to keep the dust down and wet the stuff as I go. Then on top of that I put a layer of weeds, also broken up as much as possible. Then I add a layer of composted kitchen scraps from the black composter. All of these layers get thoroughly watered down, since the compost needs to be wet to work. Then back to a layer of sod, then weeds, then kitchen compost with some finished compost added.
We have two bins next to each other. We usually empty them both on to the garden in the spring but we save a bit for the cheating. That is we save some good finished compost full of worms and wigglers to seed the new layers with.
A layer of black plastic keeps the moisture in
The last thing we do is also a bit of a cheat. We put black plastic over the working compost to increase the heat and keep it wet. A dried out compost won’t work.
Then by the next spring we have “black gold” as we like to call it. All for free, all natural and the garden loves it. Barbara and Tom would be proud.
