Anise Swallowtail Butterfly bonanza

It’s a banner year for anise swallowtail butterflies, at least in our garden! A few weeks ago we saw a butterfly fluttering around the fennel plant in the back garden, and sure enough we found 13 eggs. We brought them all in and they’ve started to emerge.

We’ve also had some chrysalises incubating for a year or more, and some of them finally decided to emerge as well. Three of the butterflies came out yesterday and four today.

We check the fennel periodically for eggs and babies, and usually find them when they’re small, but this caterpillar eluded us until he had gotten quite large.

This is an extreme closeup, he’s actually a bit over an inch long. Anise swallowtail butterflies, in our area, mostly use fennel for their larval host. It’s plentiful and grows much more easily than the native host, yampah. The problem is that people often cut it down because it gets so large and rangy. Now that you know the beautiful butterflies that rely on the plant, please don’t cut it down until the end of the summer! Want to learn how to raise the butterflies yourself? Drop me an email and I’ll explain how-  HeidiRand@gmail.com

Garden Delights Arts & Crafts Workshops

Do you have a preferred learning style when you’re starting out with a new art technique? Do you like to have a printed book to refer to? Would you rather go to a hands-on workshop where you can try out the process with a teacher guiding you and other people to interact with? Are you partial to ebooks or pdf downloads because the price is lower than a workshop or printed book? What about an online workshop with diagrams and step-by-step instructions that you can download and use over and over?

People learn all sorts of different ways, and some techniques lend themselves more to one or another mode of study. As a teacher, I try to reach out to everyone by offering my workshops as books, ebooks, online classes, and in-person workshops. The workshops are thrilling because I meet so many talented people eager to find out about the techniques and materials that I’m excited about. It’s also incredibly satisfying to watch people work on their own projects and go home with, say, a piece of fabric that they printed using their own artwork.

I took a break from workshop teaching to finish my book about selling art online, but am happy to announce that I’m jumping back in, and I just found a great location in Pinole to start up again. I have the first three workshops scheduled and will be getting dates for the others. To make sure that everyone gets lots of attention, I limit the number of people in each workshop, so pre-registration is required. Please email me at HeidiRand@gmail.com with your questions or to pre-register for any of the workshops scheduled in June, July, and August. When you pre-register I’ll give you the address and more information about each workshop. You can see the list of my other workshops at my website.  If you’re interested in any of them email me and I’ll let you know when they’re scheduled.

Sunday June 24, 2012
INKJET PRINTING ON FABRIC
Learn to print your artwork, images & designs on cotton and silk with an inkjet printer. This exciting technique opens the door to many possibilities for creating original fabric to use in gifts, quilts, art pieces, and much more…. You will go home with at least one sheet of treated fabric printed with your images, and with the knowledge to begin printing fabric on your home inkjet printer.
11 am to 3 pm / $40 plus supplies

Saturday July 14, 2012
PHOTO ART : ALTERED IMAGERY
Learn to transform your photographs into works of art with software programs and techniques. We will explore how to enhance your original photos to achieve unique and artistic effects. We will use Adobe Photoshop Elements at the workshop, but will explore techniques that other image processing programs use.
11 am to 2:30 pm / $50

Saturday August 11, 2012
INTRODUCTION TO SELLING YOUR ARTWORK ONLINE
Overview class designed to teach you about the many different options to market and sell your artwork and/or crafts on the internet. You will learn the pros and cons of having your own website, selling through print-on-demand websites, selling your handmade work on Etsy or similar sites, using blogs and other social marketing tools, and much more. This information will save you much time in doing the research on your own, and save you from wasting time and money on the wrong kind of venue for your situation.
11 am to 2:30 pm / $60

If you’re not local, or you prefer book learning, check out my website for links to my three books:

• Sell Your Artwork & Crafts Online
• Inkjet Printing on Fabric
• Inkjet Printing on Lutradur

This is link to my online classes at CraftArtEdu.

Brian’s Bees

Is there anything more special than friends who share a passionate interest? George’s friend Brian is a twofer – they first met and bonded over their common love of orchids, spiced with a shared cynical smart sense of humor. More lately, Brian discovered that he wanted to keep bees. He had a beautiful hive all ready and waiting for some honeybees to move in, so when George and our friend Alan rescued a swarm, there was no question that they were meant to be Brian’s bees. The swarm settled on a tree limb just above a garden shed.

George and Alan clambered onto the shed. I held the ladder and worried that they’d fall through the roof (they didn’t). When bees are swarming they’re very calm, so George easily brushed most of them into a box. The critical thing is to try to get the queen. If you do, the rest will follow her, because their main imperative is to protect her.

As you’d expect from an orchid and nature lover, Brian has an amazing garden. Here’s George delivering the bees to their new home.

The bees quickly realized they had arrived at nectar heaven. The workers happily began to forage, build comb and make honey, and the queen zealously performed her queenly duties and began laying brood. We went back to do a hive inspection, and this is what we found:

That’s her majesty, surrounded and protected by workers. She’s much larger than the other bees, and is a gorgeous deep golden color. Here’s more of a closeup photograph.

Much of the white you can see filling the comb is larvae or brood. As George finished the inspection, I walked around the garden to see what the workers were up to. They favored a magnificent Spanish Lavender plant.

The intoxicatingly fragrant orange tree was another favorite.

We even got a bit of honey from some extra comb the bees had built on the lid of the hive, so Brian could taste his bees’ honey. Your own bees’ honey is always the sweetest. And here’s to honey and friendship, ever sweetly intertwined.

Super Moon 2012

We were lucky to have a clear sky for the amazing super moon last night. We’re halfway down a hill, so had to wait for the moon to clear the trees above us. The largest aspect was supposed to be just past 8:30, but we only started seeing the glow at 9 p.m.

It had cleared most of the trees a few minutes later.

And then, by 9:05, there it was!

Five minutes later, less of a close-up:

Did you see the moon last night?

The Owl and the Pocket Watch

When I’m having a creative block, one thing that gets me moving is a deadline. An art group I’m in issued a challenge: create a design using a pocket watch. Deadline: one month. Scouring the house turned up no less than three pocket watches! I chose the oldest, a broken one that I bought at a garage sale with the intent to take it apart to use in my mixed media artwork. Here’s the base photo:

I took out the background and drew on the watch to make it a little less clean-looking.

Since my favorite thing to do is design fabric, I used elements of the cutout image to make some kaleidoscope designs, which often produce great fabrics. Here’s one:

That was okay, but I wasn’t satisfied. I decided to switch gears (no pun intended) to make a blended collage. What image would work with the watch face? I have a folder on my computer of what I consider to be my best photos, and when I opened it, look who jumped out at me:

Now we’re talking! I was very happy with a few of the different blended images I came up with. I liked this one best:

I printed variations of the collage onto heat transfer paper and decorated a wooden box, but will leave photos of that for another day.

Have you used the pressure of a deadline to make yourself get to work? I’d love to hear how that went and what you created.

Never enough poetry

Reading the poems on Toni Wynn’s website for my last post here inspired me to pull out an old binder of my typewritten poems (yes, I did say old). Before I discovered photography, my main creative outlet was writing poetry. Here’s a scan of one of them that I’m not too embarrassed to share.

Do you have a poem to share in the comments here? I’d love to read it – whether it’s your original writing or your favorite from another writer. Happy national Poem in Your Pocket Day!

Profile of Poet Toni Wynn

Today, in honor of national Poem In Your Pocket Day, I take great pleasure in introducing you to poet Toni Wynn.

Color Voices Place

Poetry of California’s Central Coast.

Toni Wynn, Carla Martinez and the late John Sousa.

Sea Moon and Mille Grazie Presses.

A few months back in these pages you met Kayla Garelick, a wonderful abstract photographer and mixed media artist profiled in my new book about selling artwork and crafts online. Including a profile of Toni, who’s also a writer, arts educator and museum consultant, helped me broaden the scope of the book beyond the usual list of suspects: fine artists, photographers, craftspeople, etc. Many people don’t realize the vast opportunities to market and publish writing online, including on venues often seen as limited to the visual arts.

Toni places her poetry and other writing online in a few different ways, with more in the works as time permits. (Can you relate to that?) When the Shakespeare Press Museum (SPM), which published Toni’s book Ground, a hand-bound, letterpress, limited edition of original poetry about the earth, stopped selling the book online, she realized that she needed more control over selling her work. SPM was selling Ground on Etsy, and Toni plans to open her own Etsy shop to sell it and other limited-edition broadsides (single sheets of original poems paired with visual art).

Toni has all the basics down. She designed her own website (above shows part of the home page), which she maintains through Squarespace. The site includes a list of her publications and a page of her poems.

Her blog, “Call Your Mother,” is both on Blogspot and hosted directly through her website. She writes on the blog with great heart and humor about a range of topics, including her amazingly talented and adventurous children.

Toni also hosts a blog and runs a Facebook page for an arts + STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) project called “Jam: Jazz and Visual Art in Engineering.” “Jam” is a collaboration between the Hampton University Museum and HU’s School of Science, Engineering and Technology.

Toni enjoys dipping into others’ work and thoughts online, and even at this early stage, likes being a part of what she poetically calls “borderless communities.” She has a profile on Goodreads, and she frequently posts comments and reviews on the site.

Are you a writer interested in sharing your work online? What sites have you found?

If you’d like to learn more about selling your work online, check out my book Sell Your Artwork & Crafts Online: An Insider’s Guide to the Worldwide Arts Market.  And please join the facebook page I started for people to network with other artists interested in selling online, where you can post questions and comments, share your progress and frustrations, and find the free tips that I post about selling online.

Irises Short and Tall

Quickly following on the heels of wisteria-blooming season, it’s iris time! Our garden is glorious with so many varieties. First the California native Douglas Iris emerged.  Relatively small, standing a scant half foot, the flowers are a saturated purple color with brilliant yellow-gold striations.

Then the Pacific Coast hybrid irises began to open. About the same height as the Douglas Iris, this one has a much flatter broad blossom, with a complex mix of colors.

For sheer showiness, you can’t beat a bearded iris. No shorties, these. This blue bearded iris stands about 3 feet tall, and there are three or four flowers on each stalk. The “beard” is white with a dusting of brilliant yellow on top.

The bearded irises in the front garden have grown up alongside a large cactus – I love the contrast of thorned with soft, plain with dazzling, basic green with brilliant blue. George tells me the cactus is an opuntia that Luther Burbank experimented with to be thornless, although this plant has a few thorns.

Another bearded iris – this one with light brown upright petals or standards and white/light yellow downward curving petals or falls. The beards are bright yellow.

This one has several flowers blooming at once on the same stalk. Other flowers will bloom serially when these fade and curl up, so we’ll have flowers for several weeks.

Most irises don’t have much scent to them, but the large bearded irises we’ve grown, of all colors, have a faint distinctive smell that George and I describe as being like Pez candy.

Are the irises in your garden blooming? What’s your favorite?

A Celebration of Old Roses, Sunday May 20, 2012

What’s your favorite rose? Impossible to choose? Well, I have just the event for you – the 32nd Annual Celebration of Old Roses, one of the best happenings in El Cerrito, is coming up next month. Always held the Sunday after Mother’s Day, this year it’s on May 20th, from 11:00 to 3:30. Sponsored by the Heritage Roses Group, it’s at the El Cerrito Community Center, which is just a few blocks east of the main drag in El Cerrito (San Pablo Avenue), at 7007 Moeser Lane (cross street Ashbury Ave).  The event and parking are free.

The heart of the Celebration is the hundred-foot display of roses — everyone from expert cultivators to garden-fanatics to hobbyists to people who just have one rose bush in their yard bring cut roses to share and show off. They’re grouped and arranged by type, and the result is an intoxicating display of scents and colors. So pull out your shears, clip off a couple of your best roses, and bring them by! Have a rose that you can’t identify? Bring a bloom and get an expert’s opinion…

In addition to the roses (including heirloom and hard-to-find roses from specialty nurseries), an array of arts and crafts and rose-related products will tempt you — just view, or  purchase if you can’t resist! You’ll find jewelry, china, books, cards, prints, calendars, honey, and much more!

I’ve had a table with my artwork and crafts at the Celebration for the past seven years.  I’ll be there with the things I make from my original photographs, rose and flower-related, including jewelry, scarves, tiles, boxes, vases, sachets, and much more!  Go to smell the roses, then stop by to say hello…  If you have any questions about the show, please email me at HeidiRand [at] gmail.com.

Anise swallowtail butterfly in the garden

And so it begins…. You may not know that my wonderful husband George is a vastly talented actor, when he’s not being an amazing gardener and naturalist. He often works at night, doing performances or taking part in improv murder mysteries.  That’s not an ad for him (well maybe a little), but an explanation why he’s often lucky enough to be out in the garden during the day when something wonderful happens.

Like today, when he saw an anise swallowtail butterfly swoop over the fennel and lay an egg. He didn’t get a photo of her, but here is my photo of one that we raised last year – I like to think it might be her, returning to leave her babies.

He found the egg, but left it there for me to find when I got home. We really had to search, the wind had blown the fennel fronds around and it was hidden. But finally he saw the tiny jewel.

This is an extreme closeup, it’s the size of the head of a pin!

We brought it inside so it won’t fall prey to the weather or another menace. We’ll  feed the caterpillar and protect the chrysalis until the butterfly emerges, and then we’ll release it, to start the cycle over. If you haven’t yet seen my photos of the life cycle of the anise swallowtail butterfly, and of the life cycle of the monarch butterfly, click here to get to my smugmug photo gallery.  Pull down and click on the links for the two sets of photographs.

Oh, and a plea – if you have fennel in your yard, please please don’t cut it down until the fall. If you’re in the El Cerrito area and you must cut it, contact us and we’ll rescue the eggs and caterpillars that are sure to be hiding in it.