Sunday, February 09, 2014

Gone Gourding

Friday afternoon, my Oldtimer and I went to the "Running of the Gourds" at the Pinal County Fairgrounds.  It's a small fairgrounds, waaaay out, even further out than we live.  Nice drive, though, with beautiful vistas.  When we pulled into the parking lot, we were amazed at the license plates from EVERYWHERE.  This event has quite a following, obviously.  There were cute little outdoor displays, put out by the gourd farm that sponsors the event, a building full of fine art gourds from many different levels, a building full of vendors of art gourds and the materials to do your own, bins of unfinished gourds for sale, and - of course - expensive fair food.

We both took a photo of the display outside the little educational building, called Kindergourden:
Unfortunately, we didn't think it appropriate to take photos inside the fine art display (although one person seemed to be taking photos of everything, with her iPad - she did a fine job of holding up the line).  And many of the vendors had signs up asking that you not take photos, so we didn't.

So...despite all the beautiful things we saw, and there was a lot of exquisite artwork, much of it with a southwestern theme, the only other photos I have to share are of me seeking gourds from the bins.



I came home with five gourds, two of them warty.  More projects-in-waiting!

Thursday, February 06, 2014

Round Robin Comes Home

I've been working on some personal things the last few days; yesterday I spent a good amount of time in the "treehouse," journaling and working on some personal symbols while listening to Clarissa Pinkola Estes' "Untie the Strong Woman."

It more or less slipped my mind that the fabric collage round robin that we started back last June was coming home this week.  The last person to work on it delivered it to my doorstep while I was out this evening.

As a reminder, this is my starter panel:


And this is what it looks like now:


This shows the colors a little more accurately, though not all the way to the edge:


It's up to me to decide how to finish it off and get it ready for display.