Looks like contents of a Peruvian antiquities dig, aye? But it's my joyously satisfying box of broken gourds from Licking County, Ohio, that I took 45 minutes to make more broken. These will be rubbed, spray painted, flipped, painted, flipped, sealed on both sides, and then drilled.
I'm going to be making pine cone wreathes, table decorations, and garlands, using natural materials gathered from all over north America. Buckeyes from Indiana, Walnuts from North Carolina, driftwood from Canada and New York, Gourds from Ohio, potato beads (from above my refrigerator, did those myself). Coconut beads and disks, milkweed pods, all manner of nature assembled together to make bio-degradable, interesting bits of recycled decorations.
But I didn't think of peach pits in time. Everyone who canned threw them in the compost pile before I thought to ask. So please start eating peaches, and putting the pits in your dishwater and drying them tucked away in the kitchen somewhere, and let me have them some time--for next year!
Today I'm off to Ann Arbor, a fellow Esty artist and I are going to do the "Ann Arbor Loop," five big thrift stores and recycling centers within one mile, and then just a jig off that circle, there's a middle eastern grocery and bakery that will give you hot bread right off the paddle from the oven and fill it with delicious lentils and onions, MMMMMM! So I'll load up on feta cheese, big black oil-cured olives, ajvar pepper paste, wonderful soft dates, and some nuts for the larder. Those are hard-to-find items in Detroit, just one little place in Eastern market, hard to park there. Husband? he gets to sleep in and then fetch his own breakfast!
Had my physical yesterday, first one since the surgery at Christmas. Flying colors, I've lost weight, put on muscle tone, BP and all the numbers were textbook perfect. Valerie's Life, Part II. Back in armor first week of November, all set to go!
