Killing time by the Genesee River

We have open house at school tonight. I had 2 hours to kill, so, I thought I would spend some time by the river looking at my favorite bridge in Rochester.

Dry ice experiments in room 35A

Optimist

ESOL in Room35A

The students made Instagram selfies! Then we painted paper backgrounds and paper hands to decorate the covers of our composition notebooks. We match the paint color to the color of our skin. We are cinnamon color, we are the color of chocolate ice cream, we are caramel cinnamon, and caramel peach. We think our skin is beautiful.

A Science Experiment

You need 3 quarts of water in a gallon container, 4 oz. of root beer syrup and some dry ice. (And some rags and towels to clean up the mess when the lab assistant puts in too much dry ice.)

Click here to watch on youtube.

Click here to watch on youtube.

Road trip

At home

Pretty colors

I like yummy colors. I just finished knitting a Xenia cowl, here it is soaking in the sink.
The yarn is from Wonderland Yarns, it's called Mad Hatter, and the color is Melon-Jolly. Yeah, I need a job naming yarns and colorways.

Did you see them??

The Perseid Meteors

 This is a map of local light pollution. I was able to drive out toward Canandaigua, into a yellow area. It was partly cloudy between 1-2am.

I saw about 20 big ones in an hour, with dozens of teeny tinys in between. Some of the big ones had red and green tails, and I saw 2 at once, too! It was better than fireworks: all natural, organic, and no crowds.

Yep, that about says it all...

Mr. Blue Heron

Posing on a pier.

We saw LOTS of these cormorants sitting in a dead tree on one of the islands in Irondequoit Bay.

Working on a ceramic mural with Annemarie Zwack

Patrice, Mame, and I went to Richford, New York, and got to work with this wonderful artist. We helped finish tiling a wall on an outdoor park pavilion. We worked mostly on the top right corner (that's Patrice on the ladder and Annemarie Zwack on the left), and Mame built the railroad tracks in the lower right corner.

This project was planned by the artist and the community, and used children's drawings and ideas. The kids and others made tiles of animals, local plants, fish, the river, and a large tree with a tire swing. They started this mural in April, 2016, and as of Sunday, some of the grouting was in.

It's a very special piece of art, and I feel privileged to have helped a bit.

A new sketchbook journal in the making

While Joe was here, I cut off some black jeans of his so he could wear them as shorts. The black denim pants leg formed the beginning of the cover of the new journal. The inside cover is a pile of scraps I sewed together.

Sasha says

Look mommy! I'm a bunny! See! Don't I look just like a bunny? Come on, a bunny! Really!

Summer goodness!

Kayaking on the bay

Looking for my painting mojo...

I cleaned and rearranged my art table, so now it's too tidy and I don't want to mess it up. This is a problem.

My sister inherited the family green thumb. I gave her that violet almost 10 years ago and it's still alive and flourishing.

Lost without Pinterest

I'm practicing painting and copying things I like from Pinterest. This Swedish designer, Stig Lindberg, made pottery in the mid 20th century. I thought this would be easy to paint. Ha ha Ha ha ha!  Later: I agree with Wise Woman Emie, if you want perfect, take a photograph.
(Still crawling up the ladder of recovering from perfectionism....)

Messing around with paint

I just cannot stick to painting real things. This was inspired by a fabric quilt I saw on, you guessed it, Pinterest.