I am so behind on my blogging...we have been so busy and had an Artgirlz At Home class, a Memorial Day party to watch the Charlestown parade that goes right by the girlz house, sent out product, worked on the website, on and on, and then there is the garden...The Charlestown Garden Tour is June 17th, with tickets available at the Cross Mills Library...so, we are going from one project to the other. We would be doing that anyway, but there is a focus...Here is Sue dividing the lotus for the pond. Projects are moving along, but there is still lots of compost and mulch to hump!

Al and I taught a class in the studio to work out some kinks in a class that we are offering at Quilt Festival in Houston in November. We decided to make shrines, and actually managed to pull off a Fun Friday a couple of weeks ago....worked on structure and materials. Our "students", who have said that they will help us work out kinks anytime, were great, teaching us as much as we taught them...as it should be!!










We are very excited about our new charms! I think that they will do very well, and we have a few more up our sleeve...am working on getting them out into the world...pdf's for reps, and putting our first newsletter together to send to the lucky people in our address book. Waiting for the new website to be done before we send that out!
We are getting samples together for classes that we will be doing in Connecticut and Boston and will put info and links in tomorrow. I guess I'll go and have some breakfast and get ready for another day at Artgirlz World Headquarters. My goal is to get back here tomorrow morning and add links to some other spots!

Well, it has been raining for days and the good news is that the plants will be happy, and I am grateful to say that our basements etc are dry. There is bad news further north. We...Al, Midge, Sue and I did some damage at the North Stonington Plant Sale on Saturday...it was misty but there was a great selection of goodies and lovely, helpful people to help. We managed to load up the back of the truck and make a stop at Stonington Gardens. We gathered a few things from there. They are also very knowledgeable...The photo above is a tree peony that Sue and I snatched up. Below is a shot of the back of the truck upon our return!


I puttered around in the green house on Sunday morning...Mother's Day...working in the rain for a couple of hours. It was great to be out and know that it was too wet to haul soil or mulch!
#2 son Pete came over in the afternoon and we all had soup...had a call from Don....Heard from Norma, who has been working on our new shopping cart and some changes to the website. I can't wait for them to be done!



Back to building Artgirlz nation today. Taking care of emails, trying to get product for our CHA Summer Class...things that seem like they should only take a couple of hours, and then it is 5 o'clock and there you are asking yourself what did you really do today? Al spent some time this afternoon working on a couple of pieces for Cloth Paper Scissors. We have a full blackboard wall that is filled with things to be done. I guess I'll go watch bad TV...catch up on the Sopranos
and see what trouble Jack Bauer gets into...

Friday evening, just before Sue's 3rd birthday celebration, I did a tour of Midge and Al's botanical paradise...on the way were our first year crab apple trees...

The bunnies should be the first to be introduced...they are sisters, and came to live on the compound last summer. They were tiny little things and have grown up and seem to be very happy!

Now there is a mother robin living in the newly stained wood shed. She has been sitting on her 4 lovely blue eggs for a couple of weeks....will keep you posted on that situation. The birdhouses seen above will go back onto the shed...

Yesterday was an all day graduation extravaganza for Sue's niece. We had a great day driving around, cleaning out ascary dorm room, driving some back roads of Conn and finding some new garden shopping spots....and then a great dinner! Sue is doing a couple of hours of work this morning and then it will be out to shovel compost etc. It is a beautiful day and am looking forward to heading outside...just had a red winged blackbird fly by the window.

Yesterday was Sue's 49th birthday and she got to do her favorite thing for part of the beautiful spring day. We got these pictures from the studio window. She was planting cosmos seeds that had sprung up happily in the greenhouse! We then had another spectacular Artgirlz Birthday Bash with BLT's, potatoe salad and JoAnn's most excellent Whacky Cake with white frosting...

This is my third attemp to post some Artgirlz news today. My other two were lost in cyberspace, much to my dismay. So with new energy, I will try again. Above is the current state of Midges' shed. With a bit of early help from Don, she was off, creating a 2nd story deck on the back, side garden and rocky front patio. With the Charlestown Garden Tour (to raise money for the library) only 6 weeks away, the four of us have been shoveling dirt, mulch, moving plants and rocks, buying and sharing plants, painting, staining on and on...Sue and I finished a bench mosaic project that we wanted to do 5 years ago


We finally got our fancy press kits off to Starr Hall. We have been trying to get those out the door for a couple of months and just couldn't get to it. Now we are having our shopping cart overhauled and the website tweeked, working on new charm designs, fabric designs, making samples for distributor sales people, projects for a couple of magazines, and hoping that we can get it together for Summer and Winter CHA before chaos sets in. We are also looking forward to going to Houston for Quilt Festival and perhaps the Market portion of the program.

We are going to NYC in June to check out the Licensing Show and to take a couple of classes to get us thinking.

We have been trying to have Artgirlz Fun Friday's for about 2 years, and can never get to it for one reason or another. Consequently, we never have any new work, or learn new tricks, and scramble to get models made for shows. So, two weeks ago we grabbed about an hour and a half to spray some Ranger products onto water color paper. It was very windy so the paper kept flopping over, so we now have some very fancy rocks in the pile...got about 5 minutes in last week and maybe this Friday will be filled with many exciting creative moments for all!!