texture

Botanical Garden

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We discovered the New York Botanical Garden a couple of weeks ago. The boyf's mother came into town for his birthday and she inquired about seeing the Monet Garden exhibit. Neither of us had been there, and it sounded intriguing, so we set out for the Bronx. 

It's hard to express the beauty of it, as cheesy as that sounds. I'm not interested in showing sweeping pictures of the entire exhibit, because that feels wrong somehow. Go see it, if you're in town; it's open until October 21. The greenhouse is amazing. And to have all the flowers in bloom and at the same time inside the greenhouse, well I can only imagine what sort of biological-greenhouse-feat it took to do that. If you go in October, tell me if all those flowers are still magically in bloom!

I fell in love with the crepe-like texture of this Clematis. And I was strangely entranced by the reflecting pools they had.  

Look at the striping on these beauties.

Technically this one isn't part of the exhibit, but I just had to show it. I'm think it's a staghorn fern and it grows from the ceiling (or attached to other plants) in tropical climates. Holy crap. It is so alien. I LOVE IT!

Lego Lion

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I was recently at the NY Public Library. I (gasp) had never been inside before and went with a couple friends who were in town. Besides seeing the awesome ceilings and amazing wood work, there were two lego lion sculptures by Nathan Sawaya at the entrance. They use more than 60,000 standard gray lego blocks. 

Look at that texture! Yum. I really wanted to touch it, but the security guard at the door was eyeing me somethin' fierce.

New life

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A small portion of what I've been making involves using old clothes or scraps of fabric. Oddly it has nothing to do with my interest in preserving our resources or attempting to reduce waste which I try to do as much as possible in the other areas of my life, but more to do with not spending money for virgin fabric. Not to mention I get the biggest thrill out of trying to figure out what to do with an odd piece, and moreover the person on the receiving end gets a one-of-a-kind item. Win-win, really.

 A couple months ago I received this awesome pink with sequins wool tank from a friend. She had it for years, and it was going to the fiber recycler. Unfortunately it had a few moth holes, rendering it unwearable so I decided to take it and turn it into... something. Except I couldn't quite get inspired. Recently - 6 months after receiving the tank - I had a chance to use it! Stay tuned to find out for what...