Spring Things
Hello friends! Hope this past month has treated you well & that signs of spring are becoming more prevalent in your neighbourhood.
Since I don't have any music clips ready to share just yet, I thought I'd instead share a summary of some of the things I've been up to this past month! Here goes:
1. Easter Pysanky
Using the traditional wax-resist dyeing technique, Seán and I made 3 experimental egg designs each. Feel free to read more about the process in my blog-post here and see the full 360° of each egg in a short video here :)
2. Sign-painting commissions
I was recently commissioned to paint 8 signs of varying types and sizes for two local Metchosin businesses. Some of them were replacements for original classic signs, like this one:
Old and new
Others were made from scratch, or—like these two road signs—were spruced up with colourful flowers:
It was a good learning-curve, and nice to work with some laid-back local folks.
3. Sessions with Diane Cluck 🎵
Seán got me a very thoughtful birthday gift of a few 45-min sessions with the lovely and amazing musician/visual artist Diane Cluck, talking about and sharing musical thoughts and ideas. I may write about this more in-depth in a future post, after we've had all our seshs and and I've have had time to process things. In brief summary, so far it has been very helpful, healing, validating and inspiring to talk with her about all-things-music on my mind!
4. Native plant salvaging
Now that spring has indeed sprung, we've been spending a whole lot of time out in the garden, weeding and filling in spaces with native plants. We also recently received training to salvage native plants from a 200-acre development project nearby; hiking around the site, one feels a mixture of excitement (such an overwhelming number of beautiful native plants!) and depression (because this whole area of land/habitat is literally being blown up in order to create a “business park”). We are continuing to return on weekends to carefully dig up as many pollinator-friendly native plants as we can carry. So far, we have salvaged blue-eyed mary, broad-leaved shootingstar, sea blush, western buttercup, blackcap raspberry, baldhip rose, salal, chickweed monkey-flower (pictured above) and wild strawberry; all found growing within a very small portion of the area. We hope they'll adapt well to their new homes here!
5. Zine*-making binge
Thanks to zine-queen Kristyna Baczynski’s inspiring nudge on her Patreon post (in which she included a bunch of handmade resources for a children's zine-making workshop) I sat down for a couple of hours and made a handful of stream-of-consciousness one-sheet-wonder zines— just for the heck of it! It was a lot of fun, and I actually worked on the 3 smaller ones simultaneously, as I used paint-markers which needed drying time in between.
Pretty cool to remember that you can make your very own tiny book out of a single piece of printer/scrap paper, pencil and one cut with scissors! I highly recommend!
*In case you're new to the term “zine”, it's generally pronounced “zeen”, like in “magazine” or “fanzine” (its origin words).
Ok, that's enough for now!
Springy goodness,
Kate
~ Originally posted on my Patreon page ~