That’s right ~ I went again.  Captain Hubby & I ran over to Sarasota for a quick family visit this weekend and of course, we had to hit the Sarasota Architectural Salvage.  I have an idea about building a table for my back porch and thought SAS might be a good place to find a set of legs.  And yes! Indeed it was ~ I found a set immediately.  I’ll show them to you in a future post that will hopefully show you a passable table.

But for now, let’s see what else I snagged and what I coveted…

I have no idea what I am going to do with these candle sticks, but I was sorry I’d left them behind on my last visit, so I had to snap them up this time. If you know me & my house, you’ll say “I can’t believe you left them the first time!”

This hunk of old teak came home with us too.  I am thinking maybe over the front door… It is very, very heavy….

And here, below, was something I would loved to have taken home.  Not that I have a place for them or that blue works in my house or that I have an extra $499 … But here’s my vision for them… They weren’t quite the size of full sized doors, but they did open properly and easily.  They were also about 5 inches deep.  You could either mount them on the wall or sink them into the wall of your bedroom and inside put hooks & such for jewelry.  What a cool jewelry “box”, eh?  There was a woman near us looking at them as well talking to her friend about cutting off the bottom so she could get a lawn mower through it… I was mortified!  Luckily she found something that suited her destruction better down the line….

I also adored this post and wondered where it had come from. And those big pots!

This iron bird looked like it had nested in the Spanish moss that had fallen on her…

And lastly, I loved the way the rusty ironwork contrasted with the purple wall…

Last week, one of my favorite art buddies ~ the über-talented Miz Joyce Shelton (that’s her below) ~ and I finally, after months of made & canceled dates, met up for lunch.

We live an hour apart and with both our schedules, it is always an event and a joy to manage to get a couple hours together.  We met up in an artsy little community just south of here, New Smyrna Beach.  After strolling through one of our favorite galleries and putting our names on the email list for an upcoming encaustic workshop, we stopped in this cute, cute little gallery/shop that had a working potter’s studio behind it.

Darling courtyard and neat bar where they host parties once a month.  We got on that email list too :-)

Here’s a pic Joyce snapped of me…

….sitting on this fun bench ~ it looks like it should be bumpy, but it’s smooth as glass.

It was such a beautiful spring day, that after a chatty catch-up lunch, we decided to hit some thrift stores.  I pondered, should I get this book?

“Hey, Beej, look at this cute jacket!!!!”

“OH!  Never mind!!!!!”

Don’tcha just love a girlie day like that?  Wish we lived closer, my friend :-)

Last weekend, I spent a blissful 2 hours in Barnes & Noble drinking coffee and reading a stack of art magazines I had no intention of buying (probably at least $100 worth ~ don’t you love it that they let you do that??).  In one of the magazines I read something that just stood out to me about how sometimes we get stuck on a project and because we can’t figure out how to move forward we create a dread of the project, then don’t start new ones because we feel we have to finish that one, and before you know it, we’re avoiding the studio all together.  I could so relate to this.

I have learned to work through it with my professional artwork because I have to or I wouldn’t be working!  However, with personal projects….I can still get bogged down.  The solution offered in the article was to make a list of every single step you could think of, no matter how small, that you would have to do in order to complete the project ~ even if it were just take the painting (project, whatever) out of the closet.  If that was all you did that day, it was at least a step.  Then perhaps it was to evaluate the color scheme, etc.  The idea was to draw you into flow rather than inertia.

So it got me thinking about my piles of books, catalogs, magazines, sketches, tear sheets, files, notes, ideas, lists, etc. that are all over the place in my office part of my studio and that have begun to overwhelm me, and truly, slow me down because I feel cluttered and find it hard to work with all this hanging around.

How did I let this happen…?  Simply because when you get into very busy and productive periods, you lay things here and there in stacks with the idea that you will take care of them as soon as you get the time.  Hmm.  I find this very hard to admit because I have been a rather organized worker for most of my life, and indeed did take care of those things when I slowed down.  Now it seems like there are too many other thing vying for my attention.

I had been avoiding doing anything about this alarming growth of clutter because every time I thought about it, it just seemed overwhelming.  (can anybody relate??)  SO!  I decided rather than taking the time to make a list of every thing I felt needed to be done, I was just going to take one pile at a time and DO SOMETHING with it until all the piles were dealt with.

Monday night I cleaned out a filing cabinet that was so full I couldn’t get one more piece of paper in ~ or out.  Mentally satisfying, but I couldn’t see the inside of that cabinet, so not visually satisfying.

Last night I cleaned off a shelf of product catalogs that was so packed I couldn’t put one more catalog there and I had a stack of new ones that needed to be filed so I could actually find what I was looking for.  Once I started doing this, I realized I had catalogs that were more than a few years old – when’s the last time I purged that shelf anyway???  Not sure what I will tackle tonight, but I am committed to spending some time, no matter how little, each day until it is DONE.

Look at these lovelies!  A gift from my backyard neighbor who has a wonderful garden.  Thanks, neighbor!

And for my reader friends, here are a few books I’ve read recently that you might enjoy…  Has anyone read any of these?  What did you think?

…than a handmade card?  I think not.  You may recall I introduced you to my fellow artist friend, Devin in a previous post.  You can’t imagine how tickled pink I was to receive this special surprise Easter card in the mail!

I think Ms. Devin has great potential in this business. I love the attention to detail ~ look at the bow on the carrot that the bunny is dreaming about.

I adore that she made the inside of the card a fun activity as well ~ note the “color this cut-out of an egg”….and I really love that she made it about friendship ~ isn’t this just the sweetest?  A born copywriter, I say.   Thank you, Ms. Devin!  Have a creative day, my friend!  You certainly made my whole week!

Captain Hubby & I were up early this morning, grabbing our coffee & tea in a rush to get to the river park to watch the 6:21 a.m. shuttle launch.  There are three more launches left in the program, but this was the last one that would be in darkness.

Just the slightest glow on the horizon….

Then there she was…always such a cool, cool sight…I feel so lucky to be able to see these launches…

All the shots in this post were taken by Captain Hubby on a long-exposure…

And this was really neat ~ I’d never seen it before even when I’d seen previous dark launches.  Guess the rising sun was catching it just right.  After the SRBs drop away (the big red fuel tank and 2 smaller white ones you see on the shuttle when it is on the launch pad, and what makes that fire tail as it lifts off), the shuttle’s main engines are running and making this water-vapor trail behind it.  I think C.H. played with the exposure here to highlight it more…