Vivre le papier!
Never Underestimate the Possibilities of Paper: Part four!
The garden is almost always playing some sort of role in my inspiration. I haven’t yet mentioned what is going on the garden the past few days and is thus inspiring my pursuits with white paper. Here it is:
This is not a black and white photo.
When you love gardening, you really appreciate every season. Winter is the time for reflecting, planning and lusting over seed catalogs. Sometimes it is a time for bundling up and going out to dig in the cold damp earth. And sometimes it is a time to be warm and cozy inside by the fire and make things out of white paper inspired by a paper white sky. I love winter. I don’t get forlorn over frozen plants or offended by a dreary sky. It cleans the garden slate. Well, sort of, there are the perennials. But for the most part winter is a white canvas on which to imagine a thousand possibilities in plants. Where will I plant the cucumbers? Should I try potatoes? How about the purple ones? What varieties of tomatoes should I chose?
Bits of the garden have come inside. Mostly seeds. These Thai Red Roselle cuttings have been in this jar for over a month:
I’ve been keeping a little bit of water at the bottom. Changing it often. Hoping they’d root. And..
WOO HOO. The root is out of focus, but it’s a root!
So many plants can be grown from cuttings. I’m excited about the roselle because it took a long time to get going in the garden (grown from seeds). If I can keep these cuttings alive through the winter, I should have much larger roselle plants next year! But back to the paper…
My enthusiasm for origami waned after my successful pterodactyl (yesterday). The Spy however, was still at it this evening. He mastered the bird base and then created these expressive free-form figures:
Sparring
Praying? A cobra? A penguin?
The Spy says cobra.
The rest of these aren’t new creations, but are more ideas of things to make with paper. Perhaps inspired by the roselle (or Pierre Papier!), colors are now appearing in the series!
Lone Zebra. Stamped by Baby. She’s a big fan of a minimalist aesthetic.
Tiny rocks glued to paper. Put in a regular 4″ x 6″ frame (just remove the glass)
If you don’t have tiny rocks you could do something similar with string.
Design a t-shirt. Make a target.
Love the Spy’s scoring system on this target. And obviously the Thin Lizzy shirt is awesome.
I’m also inspired by this:
AMAZING! The World’s Largest collection of heirloom seeds. Look how thick it is! 353 pages! You can get it (along with their annual seed catalogue) here.
There’s the roselle!
I don’t care for even numbers, so the fifth installment will wrap up the Possibilities of Paper series tomorrow!
Though the possibilities of paper are endless.
If it wasn’t so early “I” would be hooting with joy over those Roselle cuttings as well. I love a good communal rootenani :). I have the cutting bug myself. I headed off on my walk yesterday armed with a camera and a pair of secateurs and came back with a bag full of angelica seed and 4 little loquat japonica seedlings that were growing in a steep bank. I already have 3 larger seedlings (from the same bank last year) and a property can’t have too many loquats. Prime kid and bird food and the scent of the flowers is like a hive of bees on steroids :). I adore winter. Mostly because I am a lazy bollocks who loves her creature comforts and sitting inside swaddled in blankets, reading, sipping hot (buckets) mugs of tea and eating lots of fresh baked creations is my idea of sheer unmitigated bliss. Can’t get my head around the Northerners who whinge solid about “I HATE winter!” It’s beautiful and stark and a true reminder that we have to slow down sometimes and become a bit more cerebral in the process.
I agree with The Spy…definitely cobra. Spoken like a true horticulturalist…when faced with the conundrum of numbers…ALWAYS go with the uneven. There is a wild beauty in prime numbers especially :)
your description of winter is perfect!
The thing is that we seem to still “be” in winter so it wasn’t hard to remember it ;)
another great post – love reading your stuff – I keep wondering what will happen after day 100? I need my daily smile fix, so you’ll have to keep it up! ;-)
I will definitely keep it up but probably scale back on the word count!
I will continue! Though the word count will probably decrease!!