Always a fun explosion of color & texture.
A splash of Witch Hazel is always welcome after a long dark & drab Winter.

A beautiful harbinger of Spring on a nice sunny Saturday!

After last night’s 30-degree temperature drop & crazy strong winds, some plants are STILL hanging onto their Fall leaves.

Is it just me… but shouldn’t these leaves be dead and on the ground by now?! Granted I love the bright colors of my red burning bush, but it seems a little late in the season for this blaze of color??? Everything else is frozen but this one is still going strong!!!

So nice to have “real” tomatoes that actually taste like tomatoes!!!

Rain on the redbud tree. Sadly, no bike ride this morning. Mwah, mwah, mwa-wet.

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Tonight was the final class for my “Simply Soda” students. Ten weeks of classes and soda-firing fun with mixed results. They’ve enjoyed the challenge and learned a lot about the variables of soda-firing. To finish off our final class, we had a fun potluck feast along with our “Plant & Planter Trading-Exchange Game.” So each student brought in some food… and the planter they made during class with a plant they chose to coordinate with their flower pot.

So here are the plant participants in our fun little trading-exchanging-stealing game!

A beautiful orchid & flower pot by Stacey…

A charming small duo of an African violet & succulent twosome by Taylore…

A ponytail palm and ridged planter by Katie…

Some “unknown plant” in a beautiful flower pot by Jackie…

A round disc succulent and soda-fired flower pot by Ed…

A recently pruned, and soon to bloom? plant in a flower pot by Cecelia…

A sleek wall vase with a miniature mum plant inside by Emily…

A small orchid in a water-erosion-relief pattern flower pot by Patty…

And my stamped & soda-fired planter with beautiful variegated low-light plant…

And then Ryan, Taylore’s better-half, didn’t want to be left out of the fun. So even though he’s not really part of this class (he’s actually in my Tuesday night class), he decided to bring his own “plants” to trade in the game. So he worked up a batch of “dirt” for the potluck! Yummy gummy worms in chocolate pudding and chocolate cookie crumbled “dirt.”

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Tomorrow night my “Simply Soda” class is wrapping up and we’ve got a little challenge going on! For our final class this session, we decided to do a “White Elephant” trading swapping game for handmade planters. So the plan is that each student had to make a soda-fired planter during this session, bring it to the last class and trade it for another one. It was my students who went one step further and decided we should add a plant our planters BEFORE the trade!!! So I just planted mine for tomorrow’s class…

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A simple arrangement of summer blooms in a textured ikebana vase.
Thanks Kim for sharing some beauties from your garden!

We’re just a week away from ART IN THE GARDEN.
A great grassroots art fair in Glenview, Illinois. A merry band of artists & talented friends pulling together to put on their own show in the backyard of master metalsmith Amy Taylor. It’s a beautiful setting for a cozy, intimate art experience where you really get a chance to see some great artwork, talk with the artists and relax in the garden. Plus, it’s the perfect chance for some of the artists to collaborate on a few projects together!!!

Mark your calendars… next weekend September 19th & 20th, 2017.

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