D is for Dollar General, Dog and Daylilies

Something I noticed when I drove from Maryland to Mississippi was that as I got to the more rural areas in the south a Dollar General store would suddenly appear in the middle of nowhere. It seemed very random, but there were always cars. Now I see this as a smart strategy. The store is often on a divided highway between 2 towns so if you live, say, 20 miles from town you may well be able to go to a Dollar General that's closer than that to get a gallon of milk or whatever. Good for you not having to drive all the way to town for a couple things and good for Dollar General for being the only game that's closer.

Having the day get away from me (in a good way) is the downside of writing the posts for this challenge day to day without a real plan. Today I had a visit from friends who brought along their sweet dog. She's a boxer, almost as big as me, and once tried to get in my lap. I love her soft ears. I happened to have my camera in hand so today D is also for dog.

On the farm, D is for daylilies that grow along the fences. In some places they are out of control and I've been advised they need to be "divided" (which I will google to learn how to do). Some have already made their escape, marching in a lovely straight line right out of the gate into to the wild and woolly field.

So tomorrow is E. I have no ideas for a farm related topic yet. Will have to put on my thinking cap. Tune in to see what comes up.

C is for Cow Culvert

                                                               
C is for cow culvert. Our new home is the farmhouse and some of the land Darling Man's grandfather farmed back in the day. He farmed and had cows. At that time the land across the road, now a pine forest, was pasture for the cows. The barn was on this side of the road part of the land we have now. To get to the pasture the cows used a tunnel built under the road.

I think this is so cool and can imagine Darling Man and his sisters sitting there as children watching the cows cross under and emerging on the other side.

C is also for the creek that borders one side of the property. It's not particularly pretty at the moment.

The last C is for the chimes hanging on the front porch. One of the joys of living in the country is sitting on the porch watching and listening. We lived in a townhouse in Maryland before moving here and I hesitated to hang the noisy chimes there, not wanting to disturb neighbors. Only the chimes in the middle are loud so I like to sit and listen hard to hear the quieter ones.

So far this A to Z challenge is kind of fun. Of course, it's only the third post and the tricky letters are yet to come. Things around the farm and living in a new place seems like it will work as a theme. Will reserve the right to go off on a tangent when my mind goes blank, as it is wont to do. That could be interesting, too. Or dead boring...

B is for...

B is for Bruce, Mississippi, the Blues and Leo "Bud" Welch.

I live in Mississippi now, birthplace of the Blues and home of the Mississippi Blues Trail, Here's how the website introduces the Blues Trail.

Welcome to the Mississippi Blues Trail,

your unforgettable journey into the land that spawned the single most important root source of modern popular music. Whether you're a die-hard blues fan or a casual traveler in search of an interesting trip, you'll find facts you didn't know, places you've never seen, and you'll gain a new appreciation for the area that gave birth to the blues.

Checking this out is on our to-do list. For starters, tonight we are going to the Calhoun County Backroads Music Festival in Bruce, MS - the nearest town 10 miles from the farm. This is a fundraiser to add a marker to the Trail for featured artist Leo "Bud" Welch one of the last Mississippi Delta bluesmen. He recorded his first gospel album at the age of 82 and a blues album a year later. What a great example of it's never too late.

B is also for birds which are my totem animal. I love seeing and hearing them here on the farm. I haven't been able to get many pictures yet but here is one of cedar waxwings. Love the tip of yellow on the tail.

A is for...

A is for arrrgh. And also the A to Z Challenge that I just signed up for. Which proves I must be crazy or maybe just terribly bored. After all, you'll notice I haven't posted anything here in almost 4!!! years!!!

Anyway....I read about the challenge on a friend's blog (she actually writes on her blog) and decided what the heck, sounds like fun. Or maybe not. The idea is to write a blog post everyday in April except Sundays. That comes to 26 posts, one for each letter of the alphabet.

I don't have a theme so will be winging it and hoping for inspiration.
I like taking pictures around the farm (did I mention we moved to a farm?)
So A is also for anthill. This big new one that showed up today out by the shed.

Big Creativity: Crafts Projects

These are the projects we did in the Crafts course I took Spring semester.  From the left:
*Basketweaving.  This didn't thrill me.  It's made from 2 round hoops and long skinny strips of bendy wood.  The liner is from a wooden bread tray Darling Man and I received as a gift many, many years ago...wedding maybe?

*Cardboard loom weaving using yarn, yarn needle and a fork to make a pouch that was lined and embellished to make a purse.  The blob in front of the purse is a pom-pom attached to the handle which is an old 70's era chain belt.  The big button for the closure loop is my old Target name badge covered with yarn.

*Latex Mask, stuffed and mounted on foam board.  First a clay sculpture was made, then a plaster cast in which may layers of stinky latex was applied in thin layers.  Every layer had to be dried with a hair dryer.  It was tedious and hot work and the result way better than what I expected.  The background is cloth and the mask is painted with acrylics.

*Enameling on copper using stencils (the yellow flower on green background)  It's glued to a wooden box from the craft store - one of the few things I had to go out and buy what with being the Queen of Clutter.  The inside of the box is finished with fleece squares leftover from a tied blanket I made a few years ago.  I knew they'd come in handy someday!!!  Also learned cloisonne using silver wire to make the pattern for the enamel but I couldn't find it for this pic.  Sigh.

*Wire Sculpture.  Can't tell from the pic but it is a woven wire bracelet with spiral wire and bead embellishments.  We had to embellish everything.

*Metal Working.  We learned to use a drill and a thin sawblade to cut patterns in copper to make a bracelet.  It's way too big for my wrist and the cutting was painful to my old joints so this project, like basket weaving, didn't blow my dress up either.

*Paper Mache bowl.  Used a pottery dish I already had as a mold.  Decorated with decoupaged flowers I already had cut out for some other undone project from the past...sigh.

*Book with handmade paper pages.  I really enjoyed this since I already have dabbled in making books and was excited to learn how to make paper.  It was messy and the paper was too thick to be really useful but it was a fun project.

*Final Project was a Concept Book and this was my favorite thing we did.  The book was supposed to be non-traditional and tell something about me through color, text and concept.  I wanted to do something about the secrets I keep and what I've learned from them.

The "cover" is a wooden cigar box.  The pages alternate, a quote from a Zen calendar reflecting a lesson learned, a handmade tissue paper envelope containing a secret about myself that I keep and a page with a "secret" I tell about myself.  The binding is accordion folded ribbon.


I go back to work full time tomorrow and I don't know how that will affect the Small Life Big project...but that is another post.

Big Creativity: What I did during my break from blogging

So...what have I been doing for the last 4 months? you ask.  What I haven't been doing is de-cluttering.  Instead I took the last 3 courses I needed to graduate from community college and made the decision to focus on that and let the rest slide.  And slide it did but more on that later.  All three courses turned out to be great classes for learning about myself.  The big surprise?  Math was my favorite!  Who knew I like math and I'm good at it?  Well, except for probability...

The other 2 courses were Communication/Speech and Crafts.  Big Creativity provided by Crafts (of course) and Math.  Speech provided opportunities for introspection and working with classmates all of whom were young enough to be my kids.  Well, not all at the same time, of course, hee, hee.

For the next couple posts, I'll share pics of Craft projects.  For now, here is a pic of my final Math project currently displayed on top of a bookcase.

Our assignment, in lieu of a final exam, was to take something we are interested in and find out how math is involved and then to share it with the class.  I chose art because when I was young I wanted to be an "artist named Ramona."  I don't remember why the name Ramona... Anyway, I didn't have any traditional artistic talent, couldn't draw, paint or sculpt (Play-doh lumps anyone?)  I did like crafts like making purses out of random boxes.

As an adult I've done some collage but often don't know where to start or get ideas and I didn't have a lot of confidence about what I was doing.  So for my Math project I decided to see if I could use Math as a basis to make an art piece.  I read several Math books and looked through even more...

I settled on combining the Fibonacci Sequence and the Golden Ratio to make the piece.  The triangles are the right triangle that's used to make a Golden Rectangle and has the special quality that 5 copies can be put together to make a larger copy and five of those can be put together the same way and so on and on.  (Any old triangle can be made into a larger copy by putting together 4 copies of the original)
Put together enough (1250) little Golden Right Triangles and you get a Pinwheel Tiling

I used a picture of the tiling to find the "super" triangles and enlarged 2 on graph paper, transferred that to plain paper and Darling Man made 50 copies on watercolor paper for me to cut, arrange like a giant jigsaw puzzle and paint.  (May I just say watercolor pencils are a great invention)  I used taped together graph paper (89 X 144 squares, a Golden Rectangle drawn using the Fibonacci Sequence) as the base with the triangles in the center and black cardstock around the border.  The frame was found in the clown closet in the basement but we haven't talked about that yet!

I loved how it turned out and that it's really big (24 x 36)  I think it's neat that I put it together and painted it vertically but like it better displayed horizontally.

Here's a closer pic so you can see the triangles a little better

 There's a cool thing to do with pentagons, too...



I