A few panels that I did during watercolor class, in the Garden Home are of Portland, Saturday, July 21..

I took a watercolor workshop today (Saturday) through PCC, taught by Jude Siegel. Funny story — I bought her book, A Pacific Northwest Nature Sketchbook a couple of months ago to inspire me and then I thought I would sign up for a class for further inspiration.

A couple days before the one-day workshop, I figured out that the woman teaching the class that I signed up for, was actually the artist who did the Northwest sketchbook I had just bought. Ha! What a wacky coincidence!

My best painting of the day is the title image — five panels of sketches around Jude’s yard. I liked the class a lot although I wish we would have spent more time on watercoloring. Oh well, I believe I will be doing some watercolors in the yard tomorrow.

Perhaps the raised garden beds, and the flowers in front and maybe even the new fence. Then, I will come in and post either about curried macadamia nuts or seared ahi tuni with a shitake cream sauce. Woo!

Edited to add, yay! It got there to Andrew at Spittoon Extra. It’s really cool to think that my art project from the basement last weekend is now in England!

I recently registered for What’s for Lunch Honey’s Blogger Postcards Around the World event. So fun. Buy or make a postcard for your secret postcard buddy, mail it off and receive another postcard from your own food blogging sender. I’ve received my recipient (not telling yet!), made my postcard this weekend, and it’s all ready to go in the mail Monday. Going to the post office and everything.

The one thing is as it’s a whole lot of acrylic paint and ink jet ink, I’ve decided to put the postcard in a vellum envelope, lest the receiver open their mailbox to a gloopy, wet mess if the postcard gets rained or snowed on en route.

I think I’m still honoring the spirit of the postcard as you can see the postcard clearly through the envelope, this way, it should just get there all intact. And cost a bit more in postage but no big deal.

The green smudgy thing is sort of the Hawthorne Bridge — eh, it’s expressionist!

The recipe on the back is for a quick pasta sauce that I make occasionally — it’s especially good with gnocchi. It’s also nice as you can add to it — feta, meatballs, sausage, more veggies, whatever you are in the mood for.

Spicy Valentine Tomato Sauce
1 tbsp olive oil
1/3 cup white onion, chopped
1/4 cup carrots, finely diced
Salt & pepper
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 1/2 cups tomatoes, seeded and chopped
1 tbsp fresh basil, chopped
1/4 cup green or black olives, chopped
1 tsp fresh oregano
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper or red pepper flakes
1 cup chicken stock
1/4 cup red wine

Heat the oil in a large saucepan over high heat. Add the onions, a little salt and black pepper and sauté until the onions are translucent. Add the garlic, carrots, tomatoes, wine, olives, basil, oregano, and cayenne. Stir in the stock and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer, stirring occasionally, for 20 minutes.

Remove from the heat and purée in a food processor or blender. Serve with pasta.

Thanks again to What’s for Lunch Honey for arranging this whole valentine postcard exchange. I hope my postcard gets to where it’s going safely and I’m also really looking forward to my postcard! Who will it be from??? Where will it be from???

Updated to add that my postcard is officially on its way! I even guessed correctly at the postage needed. Gave it to the mail man and everything. It should be there in about a week.

Stay tuned…

So, my SHF dish is done but my extra-credit materials are not. So, SHF post this weekend. Today, we bask in the glory that is my finished (!) mosaic project — see, the last post was almost a year ago.

We live in a bungalow. When you go up the stairs, there is a counter with built-in bookshelves, a bathroom and three bedrooms. When we first moved in, I knew I wanted to do something fun with this large 12 foot by 1 1/2 foot counter top space. I just didn’t know what exactly. I just wanted to add something to the house that would be here after we left. Sort of like adding a piece of mine and jwa’s history to our house.

Then it came to me. A mosaic. There’s shattering glass involved, toxic fumes, grout, it’s some-what permanent and it involves hours and hours (and hours) of tedious work! It’s perfect. It started well. I think I finished laying out half the glass tile designs in the first three months. But then…

I had longer and longer breaks between work sessions. Then, two years passed. Well, finally last week I laid the last piece of cut glass down and then I grouted the whole damn thing. (Very messy!)

But it’s done. And I feel a huuuuuge sense of accomplishment. Yay!

So, this first image is kind of weird but it gives a good overhead view of (most of) the whole mosaic.

You may remember the upstairs hallway from this post. Well, it’s changed a bit, as I started this huge-ass mosaic project over a year ago. This is not surprising, really, as it has already been established here that I can be…well, lazy. But, finally, I think the end is near. I’ve finished about 10 feet of it with about three more to go. Woo!

I don’t really have a lot to say about it, other than to help psych myself up to finish it already. For those interested, I purchased all of my vitreous glass and Italian iridescent glass tiles here. They have relatively good prices / shipping and I have been pleased with their tiles. For the adhesive, I’ve been using Acrylpro and I have a bag of sanded black grout all ready to go when I lay that last glass piece down.

Here are some more pictures:

This is the first section. There’s lots of lavender, an olive plant, a dragonfly and even some tomatoes. Since the window looks out over the backyard, there’s supposed to be a garden-like feel to the mosaic images, (even though we don’t have olive plants but they were fun to make).

It’s not exactly hard, per se but breaking the tiles can be time consuming and it does create a small hazard with any glass shards I miss picking up. So far, no major accidents except for the night I got a glass sliver stuck in the heel of my foot. Ouch! But since then, I have been very careful about wiping the counter and immediate floor area down really well when I clean up.

Here’s where I am now — more tomatoes, because I really liked how they turned out on the other panel. I have two more small panels of the repeating pattern to go and then two more panels of pictures. I’m still undecided on what to put in those but probably more lavender, olives and maybe a bee, as I have yellow and black tiles. bzzzzzzzz.

A food post tomorrow with some lemon custard cakes for Sugar High Fridays 12: Cooking Up Custard!