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Hey Friends, anyone up for a February daily painting challenge? I started one on a whim this week, and to my surprise, it’s already taken off! 

I’m doing one that is specific to flowers: #28februaryflowers. Instagram is usually where I share my regular artwork, and it’s a terrific platform for anyone trying to build a visual-minded audience, or, just wants to come along for the ride. This is my account, but do yourself a favor and search the #28februaryflowers hashtag to see what others are cooking. OR BETTER YET hope on the love train and post your own! I realize it’s February 2, but nobody will come after you for starting late. If you don’t do all 28 days, or skip a day, no biggies, but coming away with a pile of work feels really good. Winter is a bummer and some of us need to use public accountability to get our butt in gear! 

Guidelines:
1. Post a flower-themed work of art on social media every day in February. Painting, drawing, photography…if you made it, it counts

2. Make an effort to search the #28februaryflowers hashtag periodically and leave comments and encouragement for other participants. – Have fun! 

 

It’s been a while. Most of my brain juice goes to art these days so, with that in mind, I thought it might be time for a throwback edition of Art History Sunday.

This painting is one of my favorites and I think of it often in my moments of self pity; “Blind Girl” by John Everett Millais. It’s utterly gorgeous. It’s unusually saturated in color (for that time, anyway). It’s a teenage girl – you can tell from the title she is blind. You can tell from her tatty clothes she is poor. You can tell from her rough-knuckled hands she has known long, hard days of work. A girl clings from the shelter inside her shawl for familial warmth- a sister? Perhaps her child? We don’t really know. But we can see they sit by the side of the road, likely just after a rain storm, and they are surrounded by jaw-dropping utter gorgeousness. But the blind girl cannot see any of it. The double rainbow, the cows in pasture, the birds in the field, the butterfly on her shoulder…she is deprived of them all. So what does she do? She lifts her head to feel the delicious warmth of the sun on her face. She runs the grass through her fingers to feel the slickness of each blade. She inhales the air to absorb the wonderful smells that only come after rain has passed. And for all her days, she plays songs on her accordion, perhaps not only to make a little money for herself and her ward, but to participate in something beautiful without the luxury of sight. She doesn’t need the world to deliver her something pretty to look at, Blind Girl makes her own kind of beauty: music. Art historians call this work an allegory of the senses, but I think of it as more of a love song to gratitude.

“The Blind Girl” by John Everett Millais, 1856, Birmingham Museum, UK.

Happy new Year friends.

Hope 2018 got on to a great start! A lot going on over here! The bad news is a pipe burst in my art studio and the water ran for hours and everything got wet or covered in frost and the whole place has to be gutted and everything tossed. Two weeks on and the problem has only gotten worse. The good news is I *coincidently* took over 100 works home, my landlord is being unbelievably helpful and hired a demo guy to help me empty the place, Home Depot rents tank-sized dehumidifiers, and the Super Moon stayed up late enoughto say good morning to me. You can see it peeping above the horizon line, just barely hanging in there. Just to the opposite side, the sun was rising in the east. Nothing like a minor brush with disaster to put stuff in perspective, and nothing like Mother Nature to make stuff exciting. Oh, 2018 you keep me on my toes!

Oh my goodness, how is it already October? So much is going on in the world these days…and not all of it good. Some of it downright scary. I just want to blanket myself in crafts and painting and decorating and pound-size logs of cookie dough. My appreciation for dark humor has reached new heights. I have now become the person who trolls Michael’s looking for life-skeletons.

Are they half off yet? Are they half off yet? Oh happy, day the skeletons are now HALF OFF!

This is my face when skeletons go half off.

As much as I like the skeleton situation, my craft itch needed to be scratched. Enter: a spooky spider wreath.

Want to make one? Reulllll easy. On a crafty scale of 1-10, this is a 1. You can do it!

Materials: Grapevine wreath, moss, a paddle of wire, and a variety of spiders.

Start by loosely laying some moss over half of the wreath. You might want to do this outside. It’s messy. Like coyote den messy. Trust me: go outside.

Now take the paddle wire and wrap it around the wreath diagonally. No need for perfection, but it pull it kinda tight-ish. When you come to the end of the mossy half, add more moss and repeat. Don’t worry about fluffing the moss too much – we’ll get to that.

Now grab yourself a spider and slip a leg under the wire. He’s going to stay there. Spiders do that. No glue needed!

For the smaller spiders, tuck the wire over the abdomen just to be safe. Black wire might be better, but I had the green stuff. I’m cool with that.

Now is the time to gently fluff and pull the moss. Let it dangle. Let it look like your crazy 8th-grade science teacher’s hair. Let it dance!

That’s it! Under $20 and snazzy as all get out. Get yourself to Michaels and get your spider wreath party on! 

This guy’s name is Geraldo. If you think he’s scary now, you need to see him when he’s wet!

Happy Halloween!

 

 

When I was a kid I used to envy people who lived near landmarks. I thought, how cool would it be to say, “We are two blocks east of the purple gas station” …and everyone would know exactly where you lived, because even if they didn’t spend time at the purple gas station, a purple gas station just one of those things that’s hard to not know about. Right?

Well folks, as of two weeks ago, I created my own landmark – the house with the flower garage. All of the neighbors can now say, “We are two blocks south of the flower garage.” and so on and so on. It’s pretty much a service to the community.

Your’e welcome.

It’s done. For now. It still needs some touch ups and new light fixture. The fence is ugly. A neighbor came by and saw me taking photos this morning and suggested I work on killing the weeds in the sidewalk cracks. In my head I said, “Lady, if you look at this garage situation and all you see is some weeds in the sidewalk crack, you’ve got problems.” But I didn’t. I said, “Yeah, no. I’m not worried about it.”

In fact, worrying is hot topic that came out of this. When I started sharing the process on Instagram in July, I got umpteen messages from people saying, “I would love to do this but my neighbors would kill me!”

People. What the hell is that about? Why do your neighbors get any say in how you paint your home? It’s art. It’s a visual contribution to the greater good. It’s a message of love. Support. Community. It can be anything you want it to be, and you don’t have to take it to seriously, because guess what? It’s a garage. And if you hate it you can paint over it. If anything, a garage door begs to be a little outlandish.

Want to hear something funny? Our garage doors were already famous. Well, maybe famous is a generous term. But I’ll bet you never mat anyone who can claim their garage was on a beer bottle, now can you? Look!

Here it is in action…

So I was painting, Alice George, local artist/neighbor/part owner of Sketchbook Brewing Company, stops by and mentions that year ago she made a print of our garage for funsies. Then a while after that they needed artwork for a new beer called No Parking, and boom, the garage has been on the bottle ever since. Had no idea!

Now the doors look a little different, but a couple years ago they looked like this…

You’d think I would have remembered to take pictures before the whole house was painted in 2016, but no. So hat tip to Google Maps on that one.

Here are the doors plain white. Not bad, but not good. For some reason a lot of service trucks like to do three-point-turns right here, so there are a bunch of mild indentations along the bottom. You can’t see them in the photo really, but they drove me nuts in person. The door is aluminum so there wasn’t much to be done about it. Even getting an even coat of paint on aluminum doors is hard. As I learned soon enough…

This is with two coats of primer. One coat plain white, one coat with green mixed in. When I paint in everyday life I always ground the canvas in a solid color – garage doors were no exception! After those had 24 hours to cure a few neighbors said “Oh! Green! Nice!” thinking that was it. Little did they know what was coming…

Now we are cooking…

 

You can tell from the variety of lighting and weather conditions, if took a few days. My favorite part of the mural? Bottom right corner.

Abraham made an appearance. It seemed appropriate – everyone who walks by the garage will also walk by the yard, which means they will likely meet Abe. Because Abe knows everybody.

He’s rather pleased with himself. I’m sure some folks will think it’s silly to paint a dog on a garage wit flowers, but really, it’s not just flowers, it’s a portrait. It’s a community. Some people grow gardens and everyone who sees them benefits by proxy. Some of us paint them.

So that’s it. It’s a garage. It’s a mural. It’s a garden. But let’s get this clear; I didn’t paint my garage doors 12 kinds of crazy because I wanted them to look pretty. I painted them because I wanted every person who passed by them to see something that conveyed a sign of welcome. It might look like a bunch of dumb garden flowers to some, but it was made with love and inclusiveness in mind. These doors say, WE ARE GLAD YOU ARE HERE! …Because we are. Because that stuff matters. Because there’s too much pain and pointed fingers going around these days, and if we have the ability to offset some of that garbage for our neighbors and strangers alike, let’s do it.

I’m lucky enough to live in a pretty diverse neighborhood. Our block alone has every age, race, religion, sexual orientation, marital/relationship status, immigration status, gender identity, socio economic situation, and then some. Few hundred feet in one direction there’s public housing…few hundred feet in the other direction you’ll find million dollar homes. That’s pretty unusual. Maybe in big cities, but for a suburb? In the midwest? That slice of variety doesn’t happen a lot. It’s pretty cool. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to live exactly right here. But there are some mornings I sit on that back porch with Abe and I see people going to work while I listen to the news, and it occurs to me, every day, these doors are crossed by someone who has been made to feel defensive, or outcast, or ashamed, or unwanted, or somehow lesser than others. There are so many scary things going on these days (Hello, Charlottesville). So many people sharpening their teeth. I can’t really do a lot about that, but I can say this little plot of earth will counterbalance some of that ugly with something beautiful. And positive. And welcoming.

How boring would a garden be if every flower looked the same?

PS: If you want to broadcast a message of inclusiveness from your house and aren’t quite ready to do up the whole garage, these signs are pretty cool. You have to order a minimum of five, but they are pretty cheap and make great gifts. Win-win, America!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Heyo! Local friends – quick note to let you know I’m helping put together a community art project with my favorite local store, Stumble & Relish. We will be weaving with fabric strips into a fence and it’s going to be AWESOME. No special skills required, but may involve sitting on the ground (read: keep your summer skirts and white jeans at home).

Come on Chicago peoples, you know you want to!

Party runs from noon to 3pm on July 28, be there. Will also be a bunch of cool sidewalk sales going on in the area, so really, you can’t lose.

See you then!

 

Colors  are funny things.

As humans, we draw conclusions about all sorts of stuff when we see someone driving a bright yellow car, or wearing a pale purple neck tie. Colors communicate an infinite variety of information without a single word (whether we like it or not). Colors are unapologetically time specific as well; if someone tells you there is an avocado green refrigerator in their kitchen, you know exactly when that kitchen was built. Why, there is an entire generation of children who came up in the 1970s thinking harvest gold was a neutral. Poor things didn’t know any better – they saw harvest gold everywhere so of course they logically assumed it went with everything. Every passing generation picks their own signature color mascot and the latest has arrived: Millennial Pink.

Have you heard about it? You think it’s a color, right? It’s not; it’s an entire spectrum.

It is pink as a movement, not a swatch you can point to on a shelf. Usually a color is just a color then somebody puts it in a bottle of nail polish, slaps a name on it, and that becomes the standard… but like so many millennials, this color refuses categorization.

Yes, it’s pink. But it’s almost unpink. It’s peachy. Sometimes it’s beigey. Sometimes it’s so pale it’s almost cream. It’s all of the above and then some because it’s also a metallic. Whoa. Right? All this time you thought it was rose gold!

This was a confusing concept to me, so when Michael’s asked me to write a piece on the growing pink movement, I knew I needed to directly to the source for all things on trend: a teenage girl, aka: my neighbor Emma.

Our conversation went like this:

Three items of subtext here.

1. Who knew you could fit an entire generation gap in nine lines of text? In conclusion – Things are different now and *that* is why millennial pink exists.

2. Nobody is throwing shade to Barbie at all! Barbies are cool, and Barbie pink is cool, but the line between familiar pinks and the new pinks has been drawn at Barbie’s feet. Only time will tell – Will Barbie join the millennial pink revolution?

3. The “like not girly at all” is the pivotal point here. At the risk of over-simplifying, it is important to understand that there are parents of recent generations who have avoided associating their little girls with traditional “girly colors” because they weren’t gender neutral enough and that carried a whole bunch of emotional baggage they didn’t want to stick on their kids. So yeah. Say what you will, but it appears that those little girls grew up and took their colors back – Hello millennial pink!

It’s for girls. It’s for guys. It’s for anyone who wants a neutral color when blacks and taupes don’t cut it. It’s the color of the day. And good news: it is gorgeous AND IT GOES WITH EVERYTHING.  Pink is here to stay!

Scrapbook Paper  | Typewriter  | Camera  | Pom Charm  | Yarn  | Paint Marker

Pink is a fantastic color for any sort of creative adventure because it stands on it’s own, or pairs nicely with other surfaces. Want to punch up a regular leather bag? Add a pink pom. Want to bring a fresh new take to an old knitting pattern, use a neutral pink yarn. The possibilities are endless!

Poppy Wreath  | Yarn  | Geod Charm  | Bakers Twine  | Lace Paper | Crystal Geod Charm  | Envelopes Envelopes

Thanks to Michael’s for giving me some fun homework with this one.

Millennial pink – it’s a thing! Who knew?

 

Greetings from Finland. Actually, greetings from the Åland Islands – an archipelago of Islands next to Finland. Actualllllly, greetings from the ferry boat between the Åland Islands and Finland, specifically, in the cough syrup purple colored lounge next to the children’s’ arcade. I have never been on a ferry boat large enough to warrant a children’s arcade, but I had never been to Finland before this, so, there’s a first time for everything. Right? Right.

There is a woman sitting at the next table talking about how much she hates her sister-in-law and how she never sees that branch of the family but she keeps tabs on them daily because the sister-in-law keeps a blog, and the woman she is talking to just got a Who Farted look on her face and said, “Guhhhh. One of those!” Only she said it in a British accent so it almost sounded formal. British people are always doing that. Oh, how I wish I was British sometimes!

That, “Guhhh.” reminded me though. I am months past due for a blog post. If you follow me on Instagram you know I’m on social media pretty much every day, I just haven’t been putting much into the blogosphere.

Why?

Welp. Maybe now is a good time to play ketchup. Not catch up; ketchup. Playing catch up is what you do when things are as you expect them in the end. Ketchup is when things are messy and smelly and get sticky residue in between the car cushions. There’s been a lot going on behind the scenes. Stuff got complicated…

For one thing, if you looked at the site on a regular computer in the last four months you probably saw that it was formatted a bit wonky – no margins, some backward text, yada yada. That was the front end – the back end was far more messed up. I thought it was some outdated html code in need of repair, but no, it was bigger. Total gut job. Hiring a developer to rebuild cost more than the ad revenue the site brings in six months, so I sat on it for a while and decided what to do. For a while there I thought I’d call it quits, just keep to Instagram and call it a day. But you know what? I want to be here. I want to write more than photo captions. But, with all this time for thinking I decided I want to change things up a wee bit. For example.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time on crafts.

A few years ago I was crafting and photographing three days a week and hoping to push it to five. These days I put all my creative energy into painting. That’s it. Regular unfancy painting. Mostly on canvases. And then I sell them. Sometimes prints, but mostly originals. At last estimate, I’m at a little over 300 originals sold since I opened that shop on Etsy in October 2015. Some of those are just drawings, but it’s a decent pile of work. And I never would have had the confidence to begin the journey had I not received the encouragement from you guys: THANK YOU!

That said, out of that 300, I can count the number of buyers who came from Aunt Peaches readers on my fingers. In short, my readers might like my art, but they don’t buy it. Why is that?

1. Because art is deeply personal and it is unreasonable to expect everyone to like my stuff enough to spend money on it.
2. Because my readers are creative people and they’ll make their own art. And that is awesome!

…But that means a blog like this (in its current state) will not support me. Any time I spend here is time I take away from from something that does support me. In short, blogging about crafts is no longer a luxury I can afford.

So here we are.

I have been ignoring this blog because I don’t want to use creative energy away from something that doesn’t/wouldn’t/couldn’t make me money. Is that harsh to hear? I’m sorry. I’d like to tell you I don’t do this for the money but the truth is I do. I’m a freelancer. I work for myself. I’m financially independent. I don’t have a spouse to lean on. I don’t have an immediate family to pick up the pieces when I fall. It would have been much safer to have chosen a different carrier path, but this is where I am. I’m a painter. I paint. I feel good when I paint. I feel my cells shift when I paint. I’m at my best when I paint. I like myself better when I paint. I‘m a better person to be around when I paint. 

So I paint.

Mostly flowers, sometimes other stuff. Hard to say. If that bores you and you want to see someone paint cutesy crafty things on shoes and party decorations, that’s cool. No really, that’s cool! But you won’t find it here. There are hundreds of other amazing websites providing that kind content and the whole of Pinterest is waiting for you. Go get it!

I’m shutting off the comments. 

This was a hard decision. I have made some wonderful friends through blog comments over the years and for some time there, your encouragement and kind words were the highlights of my day. I lived for comments. But stuff changes. People hardly ever comment anymore, even on bigger/larger/more successful blogs. It just doesn’t happen. Now I find that for every nice comment there is at least two negative and ten spam comments…and a whole lot of unsolicited advice. Last week a woman left a comment on a three year old photo of my bedroom and told me I needed to buy new furniture to catch a husband. I get a lot of those. The weird part is, I think she thought she was being helpful. This is the part when you tell me to let it roll off, and I do, but you have to understand that when you  spend most of your day alone, every act of communication has an impact on your day. The ripples of thoughtless comments from strangers have done far more damage than words can describe these past two years. The good no longers outweighs the bad.

So I’m getting rid of them.

I’ll leave the comments on this post and a few other recents open temporarily, but eventually, everything will close. If you have something you reallllly want to tell me, I trust you will find another way. Sometimes the hallmark of true friends is the ability to be silent together.

I’m closing all advertising and sponsor posts. 

This site has never made more than a part-time income, although, there were certainly seasons I treated it as a full time job. I’m no longer catering content to fit some vanilla idealogy of what other people want. Fuck that. I’ll write what I want. I’ll write fuck if I want. I’ll make typos and not worry about it. I’ll be random and weird talk to you like we are friends in real life, but probably a lot more liberal because the conversation will be one sided. It’s my site, my sandbox. What I say goes. Will some people not like that? Yes. Is that my problem? Nope.

I have some wonderful relationships with longtime sponsors like Michael’s and ILovetoCreate.com – if one of them wants to come back, I’m all for it. In fact, I have some back logged blog posts for them I’ll publish in the days ahead. But I’m not taking on anyone new. The sidebar ads are gone. And so are the archive libraries of all sponsored/non-sponsored posts. Don’t worry, the old posts still exist, but the pages with idea indexes were destroyed in the rebuild. From here on in, if you want to see me wallpaper a fridge, just google “Aunt Peaches Wallpaper Fridge” and you’ll get there. It’s easy – I promise.

I’m going to write about what it’s like to run a creative business. 

When I was researching what AuntPeaches.com would be about, someone once told me to write the blog you want to read. Seven+ years later, I want to read a blog about running an art business. Haven’t found it. So, I might need to write it myself. It’ll still alternate photos of cats and cute stuff I want to make and do and celebrate, but it’s going to look a little different.

So that’s what I know. I’m changing. The site is changing. If you want to come along for the ride, this is your ticket to board.

We cool? I hope so.

And if not, that’s okay too. Not everyone is comfortable with change. My growing pains need not be your pains. And if that is the case, I send you love and light and hugs and cat videos from afar.

For everyone else, I have a bunch of unpublished posts to get up in the days ahead, and after that it’ll scale back to once a week or so.

Let’s get this party started!
-A