You can tell that recently we finally had a good rain after months without because the rain lilies are everywhere! I love the resiliency of these amazing wildflowers. Here is my crochet Rain Lily nestled among its real counterparts: Oh and yeah, if you look real close at this first picture, you will see my arch enemy poison ivy mere inches from the flowers I was photographing…..
These are the coolest little birds! The last time I went to the Mitchell Lake Audubon center, I saw tons of them flitting around us. I highly recommend a visit the next time you are in the San Antonio area on the weekend. Well worth the time to support a wonderful wildlife habitat.
This guy is available here in our Etsy shop:
Here is the latest pretty bird to join the flock – a Black Crested Titmouse! We get this variant down here in Austin, TX. I see them each and every day at my feeders and never get tired of their antics.
This little guy is available in our Etsy shop:
I always refer to this odd little wire bird house as the “Blair-Witch house” – it reminds me of those weird little totems made of sticks hanging in the trees in the movie. He looks quite comfortable here.
I have been working several flower designs in needlepoint and pottery. There is some kind of wonderful fascination in working the same design over and over again, especially in different mediums.
This tile is available in our Etsy shop – here:
Snowdrops is a design inspired by a recent request by a local gal who is interested in my artwork as a tattoo. I am so honored that someone would want to adorn their body with my artwork, can’t wait to see what her tattoo artists comes up with!
This tile is available in our Etsy shop – here:
Every year a pair of Carolina Wrens nest on our patio. Over the course of several days and many scouting missions, they pick just the perfect spot, which this year is in our fox fern pot. The opening is only about 2 inches across and she has 6 speckled eggs in there!
Note this seasons choice of building materials, copious amounts of Live Oak pollen and a long blue bit of my yarn, cast off from some crochet or needlepoint endeavor.
Of course, I had to make a wren to honor the day, here she is just after being hand-formed. I need her to dry up before I start to carve her down and inscribe all the little feather details. Maybe tomorrow?
This is the first wren I made – so cute!
Lately I have been working the Mexican Hat wildflower motif in clay and when I started looking back through photos for this post, I realized that I have been making Mexican Hats in some form or another for years now. Each year these amazing flowers bloom here at the house and they have apparently been more of an inspiration to my art than I had ever realized!
I have been drawing them…
I have been crocheting them…
I love Spring – the Redbud out front are amazing this year. Dean had pruned them heavily in the winter, I guess they needed it. They have never looked this amazing. I saw some bluebonnets already on my walk yesterday and the grape-smelling Mountain Laurel are also starting to bloom. The Spotted Towhee is back, we see this guy once a year for just a few days, so glad that Dean got a good pic.
In the glaze kiln this evening are 2 Mexican Hat Wildflower pottery eggs and an adorable mouse sitting on a mushroom.
New pottery songbirds glazed and ready to fire! Here is the Yellow-Rumped Warbler, also known as the Butter-butt and 2 more Black-capped Chickadees. They are firing in the kiln right now – can’t wait to see them tomorrow when they are done!
#4 in my Pottery Song Bird series – here is the American Goldfinch – sold on WolfArtGlass on Etsy
He has his own recycled bottle pressed glass stand and can be easily removed or repositioned.
I have been playing with mixed media and my crochet wildflowers by adding a needlepoint butterfly and some colored pencil Mexican Hats.
This Spring has been an amazing one for our wildflowers. Dean has been taking so many pictures and video that I was inspired to create these crochet versions of two of my favorites – the Mexican Hat and Greenthread. I have some other designs in the works!
We have had tons of Cedar Waxwings this spring, they have been hanging around waiting for our Red-Tip Photinia berries to ripen. Hope they do not get to our Agarita berries before we do, we are going to try to make jelly this year since the bushes are loaded. All thanks to some good late winter rains.
Here is my first crochet mushroom. As usual, I do not keep notes on the pattern as I crochet, so this is a one of a kind.
freshly picked from around nanny’s garden
The Beluga cam at the Vancouver Aquarium. Qila gave birth to her new calf on 6/10/08 and you can see them both with live streaming video.
The Wolf cam at Bays Mountain Park in Kingsport, TN. Not streaming, but images that you can update by refreshing. I can see a good shot of a wolf having a relaxing lay.
The Chimp cam featuring Washoe a 41 year old chimp who uses sign language. This has three static images of play areas for the chimps that update every 30 seconds.
The James Reserve bird cams. Numerous feeder and nestbox cams at the James Reserve in the San Jacinto mountains in CA.
Eagles Nest Hancock Wildlife Foundation cam. Two babies on the nest right now
E.O. Wilson – “The Diversity Life”
For the green prehuman earth is the mystery we were chosen to solve, a guide to the birthplace of our spirit, but it is slipping away. The way back seems harder every year. If there is danger in the human trajectory, it is not so much in the survival of our own species as in the fulfillment of the ultimate irony of organic evolution: that in the instant of achieving self-understanding through the mind of man, life has doomed its most beautiful creations. And thus humanity closes the door to its past.
