Sunflowers Outside My Window

In an urban garden you take or make your inspiration where you find it. We never planted these sunflowers,they were just the result of mishaps with the bird feeders and a hole in the seed bag.
They bloom where they landed without plan or effort.

They're just outside my living room window. The first thing I see each morning and the last thing I see each night.

I had invested quite a lot of money in seed for 3 or 4 different varieties of sunflowers in different locations around the yard and garden but these simple surprises put them all to shame.

Yes, they inspire me and will continue to appear in drawings and paintings throughout the season.

 It especially amuses me the way the horse that's a school logo on the playground across the street appears to be running through my magic garden.

 I shot this photo just outside my front door to give you a closer view.

Indoor pants

 It rained off and on today so I thought it would be a good time to give some of my houseplants and fairy gardens some attention.

The other nice thing about spending the day indoors is that it gave me a chance to make some pretty cards, do some watercolors and write a few letters.

Starting a new garden painting

Long after the tea and the salads were gone, there's always art.

Today I started painting it from a photo and acrylic paints.

A Day Painting in the Garden

The weather was perfect today so the garden was a great place to paint. there was just enough shade to keep the paint from getting hot and a light breeze to make it both refreshing and comfortable.

 The concept behind this painting is how my garden pops into my art. I'm a little stuck right now as far as far as what I want to put on the little canvases in the painting but I'm sure it will come to me soon.

Another Approach to Drawing Practice

One way that I get some drawing practice is to grab some plain note cards, double stick tape and any pictures I find laying around here. I stick the pictures on the cards and then whenever I have time, they're all ready to draw on and it's fun for the people that I send them to because they get both the drawing and the picture that inspired it.

I get practice, send unwanted photos out of here and they get the practice drawings in the mail. Everyone likes a letter so it works out well all the way around.

Adding flowers to a painted birdhouse

Scrap Basket Sewing Project/Recycling/Quilting/ Painted and Hand Dyed Fabrics

What excites me most about this project aside from being able to use up odds and ends is the fact that I painted a lot of these fabrics myself. Including some where I'd gathered leaves from my yard, applied paint to them and used them to stamp leaf designs on fabric.

 I've no plan for the patchwork design. I simply added whatever I could find in the order that I found it. Whatever size it becomes I'm looking forward to curling up with it in my recliner on chilly evenings.

Art in the mail

 On this card it was fun to combine my photo with a pencil drawing.

 This was on the corner of an envelope that I used with a card that had a picture of a button collection on it. The reason it's in black and white is because I got a new set of pens and wanted to try them out.

This button drawing was a lazy scribble on the corner on an envelope.

Pink Flowers

Because I plan to do paintings with these it's important to photograph them from every angle and at each stage along the way so that I can create a painting that feels like the flowers and breathe a little life into the canvas over our long Midwest winters.

Yellow Flowers

Garden Plans and Progress

This may not look like much to most people but we've put this gravel path between my wheelchair ramp and the driveway to give me easy access to the container garden and the patio area where all of the lawn furniture is. It also gets me to the worktable on the other side of that storage box. Next year I hope to run the gravel all the way over to the hosta on this side and up to the curb on the other so that my husband no longer has to mow that corner of the yard.

I'm having these lemon lilies moved to another part of the garden so that I will be able to take care of them better and they'll be easy to cut when I want to send flowers home with visitors.

The look of the front border changes all of the time depending on which of my treasures are blooming. I'll be building a path over to this side of the garden next ( the lawn is uneven and the power wheelchair keeps dropping into ruts along the way)

Sunflowers and Lilies

Garden Living

This to most people this is just the end of a driveway but to us it's our summer living room and dining room. In a perfect world there wouldn't be parked cars, neighbors or traffic but a gardeners best tool is an imagination that lets you ignore those things, listen to the birds and create beautiful spaces anyway.

The little coffee table is also a footstool so I'll be getting my sewing machine out soon to make a padded cover for it. I need more cushions and pillows for the other furniture too so I'll see what I can do about that as well.

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The area next to the "living room" area is my dining room and tea table.

The beauty of this arrangement is that it can easily be moved  around if you have more company and need to entertain a larger group. We've got an outdoor extension cord for power and we often run and electric tea kettle or a hotplate out here. Each year we make changes and improvements.

I' always eager to see what happens with our project next.

Garden lifestyle and routine

This photo was taken along the driveway at the edge of my garden. It's a shaggy mess but I'm loving it more than ever before. The big surprise is how really tiny these multi flowering sunflowers are. I'd been expecting something
more impressive.

This is becoming a regular routine with me lately. I head out to the garden with a cup of coffee or tea and when I've relaxed a while and finished it I fill the cup with lettuce and pick enough peas to fill the saucer before I head back to the house.

The stargazer lilies are beginning to bloom and I'm really looking forward to working with them. This year I'll start with water color and then move to pencil, ink, and acrylic paints.

I'm still painting and re-arranging the patio furniture to make it a lot more pleasant to have company in the garden and to make it all about relaxing, sharing and healing in the garden.

I hope to be sharing more photos of that soon too.