If it quacks like a duck…

When my husband and I moved from the urban city of Mesa, Arizona to our small mountain community, we decided to keep our home and turn it into a rental.

Frankly, I was unsure how well I would adjust to small town living. Also, we wanted the security of having a home in the Valley of the Sun (aka, the greater Phoenix area) should we ever need to return.

Being a landlord ranks right up there with going to the dentist. Not fun, but it’s got to be done. At least 98% of the time rentals are easy, as long as nothing breaks and you’ve attracted the right tenants who pay on time, won’t trash your house and don’t harass the neighbors.

The other 2% of the time comes when tenants move out and you must find new ones. Once the house is clean, small repairs done and a good going-over is accomplished, it’s time to place an ad in the newspaper and on Craig’s List. I dread these times.

Answering phone calls, asking questions to get a feel for a person while making sure not to violate the federal Fair Housing Act, and showing the house is time consuming. Then there are the conversations that prove truth is stranger than fiction.

I go into my spiel. Three bedrooms, 2.5 bathrooms, the monthly rent, the security deposit, the non-refundable credit check, blah, blah, blah. Then I take a deep breath and wait. Depending on the caller, next up might be odd question time or sob story.

Yesterday a woman called asking how much the additional security deposit was for pets.

“How many pets and what are they?” I ask.

“Just two cats…and some ducks and chickens,” she says.

Out of curiosity, I ask how many ducks and chickens. She responds with a little sigh, “Three ducks and about 10 chickens. But they’re all small.”

I explain the house is in an urban residential subdivision on a golf course with desert landscaping and a homeowner’s association that doesn’t allow farm animals. The HOA hates barking dogs, RVs, trailers and boats. The HOA president would flip if his morning wake-up call consisted of a rooster crowing at the crack of dawn.

I ask if she is currently renting a place in the city where she can have her animals. She tells me yes, but her landlord raised the rent. Now it’s my turn to sigh.

“Well, good luck on your housing search,” I say, frustrated because I’m now worrying about some stranger’s pet fowl.

I hang up the phone, giggling. I think to myself, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, just be sure it can make the rent. I wonder; did Old McDonald actually own his farm? I’m thinking about re-writing the classic children’s song from the landlord’s perspective.

 

(I took an oil painting class last summer from a wonderful teacher named Cyd Totten. She teaches art at a private girls high school in Phoenix and spends summers at her house in Pine. It was a weeklong class where we painted on her deck while she taught us about color and form. Since I have a contemporary rooster-themed kitchen, I wanted to paint a cute little chicken. Mind you, I am not a painter, but I do *love* color. 90% of this canvas was done with a palette knife using colors I custom-bended.)

A garden of paper flowers

I have to admit, I love when my blog entries go live on the Home Companion website. Even after all these years of writing, it’s a thrill to see my words in print. Honestly, it makes my heart sing!

The latest post is making coffee filter flowers and a project where I worked once and get to use it twice. (Designers LOVE those kinds of projects). I’m teaching a class on this cute little frame at Paper and Metal Scrappers July 19th during a daylong crafting extravaganza.

I went a little wild when I crafted a garden of these flowers (inspired from the book, Paper Crafting with Carol Duvall) because I wanted to use them everywhere. Here are the pictures of the other paper projects I created with them. (Um, yeah, I’m pretty well girly-girl pinked out now.)  I hope you enjoy the pics.

Supplies: (top photo) Coffee filters, Glimmer Mist in Creme de Rouge & Pink Bubblegum, Ranger Color Wash in Eggplant, Melissa Frances paper, rickrack, vintage buttons, frame from the Dollar Store. (middle photos) Glimmer Mist in Creme de Rouge & Pink Bubblegum, heart brads from Queen & Co., chipboard letters from K&Company’s Urban Rhapsody line, paper leaves by Prima, vintage pearl button and bucket from the Dollar Store. (bottom photo) Glimmer Mist for flower, scrap of same Melissa Frances paper, rhinestone, Prima leaves and ribbon).

Art 4 Me

I’ve been feeling a bit blah lately. Maybe it’s the heat, or maybe its just having my son home and not wanting to hole up in my office all summer. Whatever it is, I’m just not feeling as creative as I should.

To combat the blahdoms, I decided to work in my studio for a couple of hours last night while Greg and Ty watched a “boy” movie (something with lots of explosions and car chases). I pulled from the shelf my paints and a small 5×7 canvas frame I bought at the dollar store last week that I covered in gesso.

I started playing with texture and color, never intending for the canvas to actually “become” something. I just needed to get those creative juices flowing again.

Once I was pleased with the colors, I decided to cut a square in the canvas and put something there. Again, no idea as to what would fill the hole. I dug around in my ”Nature’s treasures” basket of things I collect during our country walks. I found a dried spikey pod (I think it’s called Devil’s Claw) and started painting it. I wired it up with some copper, added some more doo dads and, of course, some paper elements and viola…a mixed-media assemblage.

I think this canvas did the trick. I feel a bit more inspired to get back to work on the memory projects I need to do. I love photos and words, but sometimes, I just need to step outside the box and do something strange and wonderful.

Been tagged..again

The wonderful Lisa Engelbrecht tagged me recently. This one is simple, so I definitely decided to participate.

1. Write the title to your own memoir using 6 words -

Discovering my own potential and creativity

2. Post to your blog — DONE!

3. Link to the person that tagged you -

Check out Lisa’s incredible hand-lettering. I have her DVD just waiting for me to get a few hours to take a little video journey to learn her cool techniques.

4. Tag 5 more individuals -

Oh, this one is too hard so I’m changing it. If anyone wishes to play along, do so in the comment field. Give me the six words of your life’s memoir.

Have a beautiful Monday!

The Ugly Truth

As a journalist, one is trained to get to the lead. This means tell the news first and then give the background. But there is something I want to write on my blog and I feel readers need the background to understand the complexity of the news.

Here goes: I met some pretty amazing people at winter CHA in February. I think Karma was at work during those three days that went by way too quickly. I met a few artists whom I felt like I’ve known forever and we became fast friends. It’s only been five months, and yet, these women are girlfriends representing all the goodness of that word.

One of the women I met was Lauren Nwachukwa. Her art was in the Designer’s Showcase and I immediately spoke to her about a work project. While it was work that brought us together, it was a instant kinship that created a friendship. In my humble opinion, Lauren is wonderfully talented. She is educated, opinionated, hard working and pure in heart. She is a big personality and I love that about her.

Lauren was the victim of an ugly incident during a recent teaching gig on a well-known circuit. She called me the day it happened and my heart hurt for the injustice and ignorance of it all. Mostly my heart hurt for my new friend who did nothing to deserve such treatment at a scrapbooking convention. Come on, people; it’s scrapbooking for goodness sakes. Not life or death!

I consider myself fortunate to be among Lauren’s friends whom she spoke to about her feelings of anger, hurt, bewilderment, pain, etc. Along with her other girlfriends, I encouraged Lauren to blog about what happened, particularly after watching an Oprah re-run with Bill Cosby and Dr. Poussaint where Dr. Poussaint  addressed this type of ugliness. In my opinion, getting REAL means expressing and sharing the full range of life’s experiences. Life is messy. Why pretend otherwise?

Ok, so here’s the lead of the story: Take a moment to read Lauren’s heartfelt blog entry. If her words touch you, as they touched me, leave a comment. Recognize the courage it took for Lauren to stand up and speak her truth. Not for drama, not for fame, not for any other reason than the fact that she needed to be true to herself, both as a person and an artist.

Hearth and Home

A friend of mine recently guilted me into setting up a Facebook site. I did a MySpace page a few years back and just never really got into it for a variety of reasons. As I was adding a link called “10 Random Photos” to my Facebook page, I picked a shot of my fireplace. I’m not sure why, other than the simple fact that I LOVE my fireplace.

My big handcrafted store fireplace was built sometime in the 1960s by a hippie/master mason who scoured the Pine/Strawberry area during summers looking for work. He pulled his trailer behind his truck, searching for cabins sans fireplace with large open properties where he could set up home for a few weeks.

Apparently, he’d knock on doors, quote a reasonable figure for building a fireplace and set up camp. His reputation was impeccable and his work sublime. He could only build about two a summer because of how labor intensive the work was to hand cut and place each stone. There are only about a dozen homes in our area featuring his beautiful craftsmanship.

The coolest thing is that I never knew my fireplace’s story. I found it out when we were doing the major remodel to our cabin. One afternoon, a man pulled up to our house when no one was home and walked right into our property! Luckily the plumber was working under the house and called me on the cell phone to tell me a stranger was walking through the rubble. I came quickly to check it out.

The stranger was the best friend of the man who built the cabin in 1958. He worked alongside his friend and enjoyed many wonderful weekends in our house. I invited him to pull up a crate and there we sat, amongst the dust, as I interviewed him about my home.

When I told him we had a builder come look at our house for an estimate and the man told us to take out cabin down to its foundation and start anew, I saw the blood rise to my new acquaintance’s face. That’s when he told me my fireplace alone would cost thousands and thousands to re-create and would never be as pretty because there are so few master masons working these days.

My stone fireplace was, and still is, the heart and hearth of my home. I love it. I decorated the mantle with my funky treasures, family photos and a piece of my artwork. I lucked into the quote from Wall Words, finding it in the online clearance bin for a mere $20. It’s perfect and exactly expresses how blessed Greg and I feel to live in our beautiful little mountain community.

Pretty in Pink

I finished my demo for my July class at PMS. I created another series to run this summer that I call “Seeing with New Eyes.” It comes from one of my favorite quotes by Marcel Proust: “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”

My students know that I am Fall kinda gal. I instinctively reach for rich, deep color combinations. Lots of chocolates, greens, oranges and reds. My base colors are almost always plucked from the many, many shades, hues and tones of green. (I love almost every shade of green.)

Part of challenging myself to see with new eyes is to create projects completely outside of my comfort zone. To that end, the last few projects I’ve created have been, wait for it…pink.

It’s particularly difficult for me to use pink because I’m the only female in my house (other than Meg, our black-and-white lab mix). It irritates the hell out of me to buy new paper art tools and the only color choice I have is pink. My sister loves it. “It’s the universal color of love,” she tells me as she hands me a new pink top or scarf she’s bought me, noting my reaction of holding the garment by as few fingers as I can get away with.

As I was mentally creating my July class, I wandered around Paper and Metal Scrappers touching all the pastel-ey papers in search of pinks I could live with. A dose of lime green helped me get my mojo going. In the end I chose lovely patterned papers from My Mind’s Eye (I love this company’s stuff!) in the 29th Street Market collection. I chose papers from Jen Wilson’s Girly Girl line and grabbed some paper embellishments from the Cheerful line. One of the tips I give my students is to use patterned papers in the same line when creating a layout or mini book. Success is almost guaranteed because you won’t have to worry about coordinating color hue and tone.

I love the layout. The colors are happy and the photos of me and Yoni, my best friend since college, truly makes my heart sing. I realize using pink is not a big, earthshaking “new eyes” concept for many scrapbookers (particularly mothers with precious little girls), but for me the layout signals success to another self-imposed artistic challenge.

Sneak peek

I’m working on something fun and summery. Can’t say who its for or when it will be published, but I thought I’d do a sneak peek of some close up shots. I addition to publishing the project, I’m also teaching a class on this technique in July at Paper and Metal Scrappers , the incredibly hip paper arts store in Payson, Az. This is only a tiny piece. I love the way the main project, and all the supporting ones, came out.

Solider, I salute you

The first day of summer break, we drove to California for a family vacation. We traded our timeshare week for a stay at Gaslamp Plaza Suites Hotel, located smack in the heart of downtown San Diego’s historic Gaslamp quarter.

My hubby worked remotely for the first two days, which left Ty and me to figure out how to pass the time. Big things, like going to Sea World or the Wild Animal Park, were out of the question since Dad really wanted to do those as a family. I asked Ty on Tuesday, the day after Memorial Day, what he wanted to do.

“I want to take a trolley ride, Mom.”

I didn’t want to shell out $32/adult and $16/child to ride the tourist trolley that visited all the usual places. Instead, I thought it was time to teach my country boy about big city public transportation. It turned into an educational lesson where Ty figured out how to take the Orange Line from Gaslamp Quarter to American Plaza so we could transfer to the Blue Line. Then to take the Blue Line to Old Town Station so we could catch the Green Line for Mission Valley Center. We also picked out other landmarks throughout the day so Ty could learn how to navigate cross town busses.

He was unsure of himself at first, but soon got the hang of things. He quickly went from being a wide-eyed country boy looking for people to exchange smiles with to sitting stoically on the seat and keeping a bored expression on his face as he looked above, rather than at, his fellow passengers.

At one point in the trolley ride, I told Ty to get up from the seats we were sitting on. He asked me why and I nodded my head in the direction of the man in a wheelchair who was coming aboard. I explained it’s respectful for able-bodied people to give their seats to elderly or handicapped.

The man thanked us as we moved diagonally from him. Ty knew better than to stare. He did, however, keep glancing at his legs or rather lack of legs, which were cut off above the knees.

“I bet you’re wondering why I don’t have any legs,” the man said, smiling at my son, who looked at me after the question was raised for visual clues as to how best to respond. I smiled at the man and then at Ty.

“I was wondering, but my mom would say it’s rude to ask.”

“Well, buddy, I’m a soldier. I lost my legs in Iraq,” the man said softly, looking straight into my son’s eyes.

Ty looked at him earnestly, a flicker of sadness crossing his young face. He looked at me and then looked back at the man. Then he said something that made my heart drop to my knees.

“I’m sorry you lost your legs, but thank you for fighting for our country.”

The soldier was so surprised by such an honest and heartfelt response from a child. My eyes grew wet with tears that I quickly blinked back. My heart filled with pride when I realized, yet again, what an extraordinary difference my son makes to my world.

(Yes, I know this photo is out of focus, but there’s something about it that I love. I took it when we were getting on the Shipwreck Rapids ride at Sea World. It’s a wet ride and I was worried my camera would get ruined, but Ty was so blissfully happy that I pulled the camera from my bag and took a quick shot. So quick, in fact, it’s not even in focus. Rather than deleting it, I decided to blog it. It’s a real moment for me of Ty being a happy kid living totally in the moment. We lose that ability as adults and something about this blurry image calls to me as a reminder of being in the now.)

MyLifetime.com is looking for you

Grettings folks,

I received this note from a producer of mylifetime.com. I wanted to put this out there because if you, or someone you know, is an “extreme decorator”, this very cool website wants to create a new star!

Though I definitely do more than my fair share of decorating, I don’t fall into the extreme category. I think it’s because while I love putting up the holiday decorations, I dread taking them down. It’s the same reason I don’t garden. I love buying the flowers and adding the color, but I’m not so great at the watering (in Arizona you have to do a lot of watering to keep a garden) and the pruning when everything dies off. Just laziness I guess.

Anyway, here is the note I received from the producer. Please pass it on to anyone who think should take part in this experience. I can’t wait to see who they discover.

***

CONTEST GOING ON NOW — Visit mylifetime.com to enter!

We’ve all driven by the house that oozes holiday spirit; the one with 2,000 Christmas lights in December and mechanical zombies and a ghostly soundtrack in October. myLifetime.com has the perfect chance for these master designers to flex their creative muscles with its new show, “Extreme Decorating.”

myLifetime.com is currently searching for the most creative Fourth-of-July home decorators for the show and we’d like you to encourage your crafty readers to enter!  Potential contestants should submit photos of their festooned holiday homes and a brief description of their wacky holiday decorating style at http://www.mylifetime.com/extremedecorating

Once chosen, three finalists will be awarded $500 and star in the original online video series. The grand prize winner will be awarded $1,000, a Weber® Genesis® E-320™ Grill and tool set and the title of “Extreme Decorating Star.”

The submission deadline is June 15 so they better act quick.