What I Did On My Summer Vacation

Griffin started school this week (3rd grade! woohoo!), and I've been going through all my photos from the spring (when I started my little hiatus) and summer. I really surprised myself with the amount of work I've accomplished, both in the studio and the garden, not to mention photographing all my past work and getting my etsy site up. It's nice to be able to remind myself how nice it's been before I go back to my dayjob.

Laurey and I have been coming to the Los Angeles Arboretum since we were in kindergarten, and now it's so nostalgic to bring Griffin and Coralie. This is what we always called the jungle, but I think here it looks like a cathedral......

After a hard winter of work and stress and a miserable backyard, I panicked that I wouldn't have tomatoes this summer and frantically put the garden in. By June it was doing pretty good (and looked really lush):

Here's Lord Orp, my mom and Mary's Buff Orpington rooster, master of his domain (and three dozen hens!) This was from our Easter visit. Doesn't he look grand?

That was the vacation right after I'd finished on the last music box job, where I basically sat on the front porch for a week in complete exhaustion, pretending to read and do some needle-felting, but secretly dropping crumbs to attract the chickens so I could just sit and listen to their soothing (if somewhat comical) murmuring, and be mesmerized by their motion.

Here's my studio this spring, right before I accepted the fact that a breakfast nook is not enough space to keep an office, drawing and painting space (the drafting table) and a flatfile (under the drafting table) together with jewelry production (the drafting table again) and jewelry supplies (the flatfile again), and spent a week re-organizing "the Shack", my 6"x 8" studio space out back and moving jewelryland out there:

I'll post "Shack" photos later. Here's the pinboard in the "Nook" this summer while I was tagging up all my Copperwear for mom'n'mary's farmers' markets:

And because I need to wrap this up, I'll leave you with these last two. I'm really proud of how my technique has improved (proud to have come up with the concept to begin with!)and am really jazzed to have a vista opening up before me with all sorts of new design options. I feel like when I was a kid and couldn't wait to hole myself up with all my colored pencils and a fresh pad of paper......