croque-choux

Gimme gimme

Oh my god... look! A beaded robot?! I gotta have this little book. Too late for my birthday book list; will have to go on the Christmas wishlist, unless maybe... 

Make a wish

Normally, they say to make a wish here when you eat your first strawberry of the year, so that's what we did. Yum! I had to photograph these before they disappeared at the table because the colors were so striking. Not often that I find inspiration in the middle of making dinner :o)
Oh and, Vive l'EEC, 'cause these berries came from Spain- it's still a little chilly/early in France for such beautiful strawberries!

Overdyed jeans experiment

I'm really excited about making a bag with recycled jeans and embellishments for Sharon's Bags of Fun Challenge. This is just an experiment and might not even make it into the finished bag, but it was interesting to try overdyeing the jeans fabric. I used Setacolor fabric paints, and with a little help from the sun and some hand stencils I sunprinted this piece of fabric.

Summer sunset

Sunset: Sunday July 17th.
As seen from my bedroom window. Great colors.
Today I took my son to see Tim Burton's Willy Wonka film.
Great fun! A nice way to end the weekend.

Stop and smell the flowers

Woohoo! I'm off next week- no training classes and no hustling back and forth to Paris- so I'll have time to smell the flowers I hope. I stepped out into my yard and discovered that the peonies I planted a couple of years ago finally decided to bloom this year! I had almost forgotten what color they were supposed to be, so it was a nice surprise to see these pure white flowers with a touch of blood red in the centers. They smell wonderful too. Oh yeah, and my Charles Rennie Mackintosh roses are in full bloom. I really love this shade of pink, but I doubt that my camera does it justice. If you'd really like to see some lovely flowers, check out what's blooming chez Kim this month. I love her flower photos!

Technicolor, at last

I'm experimenting with color here and in my garden! I am trying to learn a little bit of html to liven up my blog and because I love learning things. I'm also trying something new in the garden. I picked up the prettiest dahlia bulb yesterday, and I managed to plant it this afternoon before it started raining. It goes by the name "Mick's Peppermint", and looks like this or this. These are candy cane colored! I also bought some Stargazer lilies. It must be fun to name flowers. A lot of the time I am attracted to them because of the names they have- i.e. the pink English roses I have out back are Charles Rennie Mackintosh roses, and I just had to have some Labrador violets in honor of my dog. More English roses than you can shake a stick at here, along with their lovely names and perfume descriptions (check out the English rose section). I can almost smell them... and I am totally restraining myself from buying a William Morris to go along with Mackintosh :o) I hope that all this talk of flowers has me inspired now to make another fabric postcard for the Garden Fantasy exchange...

Cool, I'm Baja Blue!

In the newsletter I get from dailycandy.com there was the coolest website:
http://www.colorstrology.com is an offshoot of PANTONE's site. if you love color and are interested in astrology, you have to see this. Find out what color is associated with your sign, and more specifically with your birthday. I'm not an astrology buff nor am I an unconditional believer, but here is the weird part: my birthday color is the one I picked as a background for my "croque-choux" heart logo last week! This was supposed to be close to celadon green (my 2nd favorite color), which Pantone calls silt green. My favorite color is, you guessed it: blue, which is the color Pantone attributed to the month of September. Baja blue to be exact. The rest of Pantone's site is really worth a visit too by the way. For more fun and information on Color, you can also check out these sites:
http://www.colormatters.com
http://www.pourpre.com/index.php
http://www.colorsystem.com/index.htm