Tessandore Creative

Maui No Ka 'Oi

Why-oh-why do I go on vacation in November?!  Less than 10 hours ago this was my view.  Now I'm home and just waded through several inches of fresh snow to get to my front door.  The abrupt change in temperature and weather aren't such a big deal actually.  It's when I realize that I still have several more months of the snow that I start to think my timing wasn't the best.  Shoulda gone in January.  :)  But it was a great vacation so I can't actually complain at all.  Here are some of the things we saw and did...
That's the fun jeep we rented to explore Maui.  If you look straight out from the guard rail toward the water you'll see a faint rainbow out there.  Love the very red dirt too.
You'll probably just have to take my word for it because it was almost impossible to get photos of things just under the surface of the water - but there were a lot of turtles!  This was right outside of our condo.  Fun to see them every day...there must have been about 15 turtles that lived right in that area.
The flowers and plants are so beautiful and different from what I'm used to seeing too.
I almost brought this piece of coral back with me, but decided that wasn't a very good plan.  Better to leave it for others to enjoy...
We played in the sand at a beach that was pretty near where we were staying...
And happened to see this little guy carrying part of some kind of seed...
Finally, sorry to jump from a bug photo to a food photo...but having a condo while we were there was nice because we had a kitchen to cook dinner.  Honestly, at home I don't normally cook so I was pretty proud of this meal...
Ok, time to wind down and get some sleep.  I am glad to be home, but I'll be missing Maui until I can visit again.

xo ~ k

Happy Thanksgiving

Looking at the weather report this morning I realized we'd be flying back from the state with the warmest temps today to the state with the coldest.  I really do love Alaska, but I dream of finding a way to live in Maui someday...even for part of the year.  When I opened the curtains this morning there were about a dozen people paddle surfing out in the ocean.  Going to have to try that the next time I'm here.  :)

Aloha!

From the zero degree temps and tons of snow at home...we've escaped to Maui!  :)
Having been here several times now over the last couple years I feel less compelled to "go go go" and see everything.  This trip is just about relaxing and having warm toes.
Ok, warm toes and my Starbucks Gingerbread Latte.  It may be 80 degrees, but hey...it's still nearly Thanksgiving so I'm enjoying the available holiday perks.  We also did some shopping and found the Sanrio store which equals Hello Kitty purchases.  This little hula kitty is now the mascot of our trip.

~ k

Officially Winter

We had our first big snow of the season last night.  I think this is my puppy dog's favorite time of year!  He had been out in the backyard for quite awhile this evening so I decided to check and see what he was doing.  Turns out he was just chillin' in a snow drift.  :)  Funny pup. 

~ k

Crazy Chickens

While I was digging through my photos from the fair, I found these couple of chickens I wanted to show you.  This poor girl...she looks like an unfortunate combination of some sort of prehistoric animals.  I'm not sure what breed she is and she was the only one there.  I'm just fascinated by that face!

Then there was this fluff ball...
Quite a hair style, don't ya think?  :)  There was a little white fluff ball in there with her.  I wonder if they were named Salt & Pepper?

~ k

Mandolin Girl

An idea I'm working on for a painting.  Sketched her during a staff meeting at work.  :)

~ k

Self Care

Ok, it might be a stretch to call getting a henna tattoo at the state fair "self care".  :)  But it was something I'd always wanted to do and it felt like a bit of an extravagance and a treat.  I loved the look so much that I was sad when it started fading, so I decided to re-trace the design.
Henna (had to look this up) is a flowering plant from which a dye can be created.  In this case it's prepared as kind of a "mud" that's piped onto your skin just like you would pipe icing details onto a cake.
It takes awhile (maybe 1/2 hour?) to dry.  I used my craft heat gun to speed up the process a bit, being way careful not to burn myself.  But there was still a lot of waiting around...
After it's totally dry, you just brush of all the crumbles of mud into the garbage can.  It will be kind of a light orange, but by the next morning it will have darkened to a nice deep brown.  By re-doing it a couple times it lasted for about a month. 

Also under the heading of treating yourself...
If you've never had a pedicure, try it!  Honestly, I'd always had a bit of an issue being "served" in that way.  It just felt too...I don't know...too Dynasty.  Remember that show from the 80's with Joan Collins?  I always associated pedicures with rich old white women wearing shoulder pads and diamonds being served by women working for less than minimum wage.  Kind of a class disparity thing, and if there were sides to take in that drama in my head I wanted to be in solidarity with the workers.  Power to the people and all that.  But after visiting a professional salon, seeing all the different kinds of women who were the clients and talking with the woman who did my pedicure I felt better.  She had gone to school specifically to do this job and she was great at it.  Anyway, I'm off to Maui soon and am really thinking it might be time to have another pedicure! 

~ k

Baby Shower Time!

Last weekend was the first sunny weather we've had in quite awhile, which worked out perfectly for an end-of-summer party for the little girl who's on her way to my friends.  Their last name starts with Z and her first name will be a Z name too.  :)  I had fun making the 3 tiered cake, which was chocolate with lemon curd filling and lemon cream cheese frosting.  The chocolate & lemon combo was really tasty.
Love those paper straws.  The tissue paper "poufs" (poofs?) were left-over decorations from another friend's recent wedding and were perfect for making everything look festive. 
Carmel apples and, if I remember right, hibiscus tea - which was so good.   And a little pasta salad...
We had the food set up inside and room to eat & hang out set up in the yard to catch the sunny weather.
The little birds on the cake were actually photo holders from Pier One...
A really good day ~ even the puppy dog thought so...
Now we just wait for baby Z's arrival! 

xo ~ k

Majestic Elk

Yesterday, despite the pouring rain, I took the hour-long drive out to the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center.  The Wood Bison are usually my favorite animals to spend time with, but on this visit the Elk had my attention.  This buck was just so beautiful.

~ k

A Girl and Her Coffee

After a long hiatus, I finally picked up my paint brush again.  I initially stopped because I had injured my back and literally couldn't even pick up a paint brush.  Amazing to find out just how many motions are connected to our back muscles - only all of them!  After healing enough so that I could work again, I just didn't feel like it until now.  At this point in my life I've been through enough creative lulls to not worry too much when I hit a down time.  The pull to create always comes back around eventually.

Since this girl had been sitting partially done since January, it seemed like a good project to get back into the groove.  :)  She's on a 16x40" canvas.
I might add some steam coming up from her coffee cup, but for now she's done.  It was super rainy today and I made a yummy soy mocha before starting.  It felt pretty good to paint.

~ k

From Head to Toe

It all started with plans to be in L.A. this weekend.  My friend Meg and I had tickets to zip down to California for a weekend class called Exploration of Millinery:  Sculptural Straw Hats.  Meg and her husband have been waiting to adopt a baby, which is a bit of an emotional roller coaster.  Taking this short vacation seemed like a good break for her and it was also going to be a celebration for me for having successfully raised my own daughter.  Not that I'm totally done with that of course (or ever want to be), but she's 18, doing great and on her way to college this fall so it is a milestone.

Anyway...right after we made hat plans, my friends got word that they'd been selected to be parents!  With a little girl on her way, priorities changed.  We still took the day off work, but instead of hats we stayed in Anchorage & happily worked on decorating onesies.  :)
I had forgotten how tiny a newborn is - these clothes seem miniature!  It was a really nice morning...we drank mimosas while crafting  :)  Here are the results...
Most of them still needed to be run through the sewing machine, but Meg's husband had planned a little surprise for us to make up for missing the L.A. trip.  We cleaned up and he chauffeured us to a salon to get pedicures.  How fun is that!?  Pretty fancy.

Now I get to plan a baby shower - yay!  :)

~ k

Back to the Beginning

When I first started this blog, which is really when I first committed to making my creative life a priority, I was drawing girls and then coloring them in Photoshop.  On this rainy weekend I decided to mess around with that process again.
The nice thing about using Photoshop is that nothing is permanent if you make a mistake.  It was so scary the first time I tried to use paint on canvas - no erasing!  :)  On today's girl I like how the color came out, but she seemed a bit too serious.  So...
I was able to add just a hint of a smile.  Better I think.  Then I had to play with some of the PS filters...
Fun.  :) 

~ k

Polyvore

In case you don't have enough reasons to spend way too much time on the computer...have you heard of polyvore.com?  After crocheting a bit today and baking some bread, I got pulled into the polyvore website making these style pages.
So fun!  :)  These are all things I would wear, had I the money for a huge shopping spree.
Not that I could manage heels that high, but since I'm dreaming anyway.  :)
It's a fun creative exercise.
Give it a try.  :)

~ k

Not-So-Girly Art

Since my normal subject matter consists of things like cupcakes, owls, and girls with pretty eyelashes - it poses a bit of a challenge when I have a gift to make for a man.  I was inspired to try though, for my friend Ted since he was retiring from 30 years as a police officer and range master/fire arms instructor.  This man loves his guns.  :)  So I caved a 6x10" stamp of him firing his shotgun.
It took forever to carve a stamp this large!  A couple hours, maybe a little more.  Before this I had only made 4x6" stamps so I didn't realize what a project it would be.  It was a labor of love though, and I'm so happy with how it turned out.  I think it might look good printed on a t-shirt too.
"Run that gun!" is something I've heard Ted say on the firing range.  He'll be truly missed at the department, but he's got really cool plans for life-after-retirement that sound more exciting than most people's first careers.  :)

I also made this WWII jeep as a thank you for my friend's son-in-law (coincidentally, also a cop)...
This medium seems to lend itself to a more masculine kind of art than I was otherwise capable of making.  I really enjoy it. 

~ k

Cupcakes

Tried my hand at a few polymer clay cupcake charms today.  (The penny is in the photo so you can see how tiny they are.)  They're in the oven right now.  :)

~ k

Wood Bison

Don't you love that face?  This is a wood bison at the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center.  We visited about a month ago and these were my favorite animals but I didn't get any good photos that day.  We decided to purchase a one year membership so we could go back and see how the animals and environment change over time.  Right now the bison are shedding their winter coats.
The other thing happening this time of year is...
Babies are starting to appear!
I think we counted six new babies, which is a good thing for the herd.  From the AWCC website:

"After more than 100 years of extinction in Alaska, wood bison have found their way back to the state of Alaska. The AWCC Wood Bison herd arrived in November 2003 from the Yukon Territory in Canada and is part of a wood bison recovery program designed to reintroduce the species to Alaska. AWCC is home to the only wood bison herd in the United States. Wood bison hold the distinction as the largest land animal in North America."
It was really amazing standing so close to them.  At times it felt like we were right in the herd.
At one point they were close enough to touch (although we didn't!) and they make a great sounds.  It's kind of a low pitched, rolling-growling sound.  Almost like a big cat purring or something.  Actually here's a sound file of a bison that does a better job than my description.  :) 
It will be interesting to see how big the babies have grown by next month.

~ k

Flying the Coop

For quite awhile I've wanted to try stamp carving.  My daughter's graduation from high school seemed like the perfect opportunity because we wanted something handmade for her announcements.  I started by designing the basic layout in photoshop...
The school mascot is Steller's Jay bird...both the bird, the school and the sea lion in my last post are named after George Wilhelm Steller, a German naturalist who traveled with Vitus Bering on his voyage of exploration to Alaska, in 1741.  Bit o' trivia for you there.  :)

Anyway, from there I transferred the image onto a Speedball Speedy-Carve block, which I had heard was very "beginner friendly".  To transfer it, I just printed it out and went over the image with a pencil.  Then turned it pencil-side down onto the carving surface and went over it with a warm iron.
The hard part was keeping in mind which areas I wanted in relief and which I wanted to stand out.
The whole 4x6" image didn't take long to carve. 
I really wasn't sure it was going to work, but we both loved how they turned out!  This is the first print...
After that I went into assembly line mode...
Each one came out just a tiny bit different, which was exactly what I was hoping for. 
To finish them off, I used pages from a blank book I had with thick handmade paper pages.  We used double-sided tape to stick the image to the pages.

~ k

Fish & Wildlife

Before you start to feel sorry for this eagle because he's in a cage, you should know that he only has one wing!  I don't think he'd still be around if he was left on his own so now he lives at the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center about an hour outside of Anchorage.   Last weekend was a road-trip to Homer, this weekend it was a trip down to Seward with a stop at the Conservation Center along the way.

Part of the Conservation Center has what they call a "ghost forrest".  I always wondered why the trees in this area looked this way.
But mostly what they have (of course) are lots of animals.  Bears, moose, caribou, musk ox, elk and wood bison.  I'd heard of bison but never wood bison -- they're beautiful, but unfortunately my camera didn't quite do them justice.  You can see great photos of them and get some information about them here.

After our visit with the woolly animals, we headed down the road another hour to Seward to visit the Alaska SeaLife Center.  One of the exhibits is a "touch pool" with a lot of sea anemones and starfish.
The starfish can move around surprisingly fast when they want to.
One of my favorite exhibits though is the Steller Sea Lion...
That's the 2000 pound male gliding through the water.  He's pretty amazing to watch.

~ k