Art expressions...

In a building where about 13 artists work and live, you can imagine that the public spaces get "decorated" very creatively.

Most noticeable is that the hallway is painted very bright colors, usually chosen by the person inhabiting their particular section. There are stripes, solids, collages, ornaments hanging from the ceiling, and of course no shortage of trinkets and pictures on top of the lockers. Stringed lights are popular too -- not just for the holidays, but year-round.

One of my favorite new pieces of "art" is the former "shrine" by the front door, now turned into a miniature theater stage. Every day a new scene appears and transforms ever so subtly. I should have started taking pictures from day 1, but I couldn't anticipate how quickly things would get updated -- so we all missed a hilarious series of various little plastic and rubber animals having a campfire with matches and sleeping in little rolled-up felt sleeping bags. Now we've moved on to Act 2: Dinner.

At first the pig was just worshiping the bust, but today silverware and napkins have changed the plot.

Stay tuned for how the pig escapes its fate...

But on the other end of the spectrum, I still can't figure out the origin of or reason for this piece of "art" that showed up in the laundry room:


She's been there for two weeks now. Why?? Why does Linda Evans care how many loads I did today, or whose laundry is waiting all week to be picked up?

(Btw, the yellow arrow says, "Please put in dryer." That way if I'm late transferring my laundry myself, the next person can go ahead with their load. We're a helpful community -- more than once did I put in a load to wash, and found it dried and waiting for me two hours later. Thanks, neighbors!)

Happy New Year from the Principal's Office!

What a year it's been for us!
Aside from getting some snow time in Spokane over Thankgiving, here's what we were celebrating last night as 2010 clocked out:

• Rusty completing his training as a cabinetmaker/woodworker through Seattle Central Community College (you can admire his finished projects here -- they sure make the rest of our IKEA furnishings look shabby!)
• Dina starting school to become a German-English translator
• We both became first-time aunt & uncle as Dina's brother had his first son in December -- baby Kai John Trageser. (We'll meet him in person in March, when we travel to Germany for a visit.)
• We had lovely visits to Spokane, Eugene, Newport OR, Port Townsend, and Berkeley/San Francisco to visit with family and friends or just to relax
• And still, home is best. We continue to feel very lucky to live in this little community of artists, in a funky little space that feels more and more like home as we continue to tinker with it.
  

We don't have a fireplace, but appeased Saint Nick as follows:


Other tinkering accomplishments:

• We have a functioning toilet! It's small, but it works! (I'll spare you the photo...)
  
• Rusty figured out how to fit the entire sectional sofa into the narrow living room in one piece:

(Hi, mom!)

• More light for the dining area:

Note the daybed under the window -- made by the new craftsman in the house. All we need is a fitting mattress to make it functional!

Happy New Year, one and all! May it be a year full of creative accomplishment!

On the road again

There are boxes piling up in the hallway. This means one of our neighbors is about to take her art on the road.

I should have featured her much sooner: Meg Hannan, owner and artist of Fabric Jewels. She creates beautiful jewelry from rolled-up fabric. That's a simplistic description -- the process is much more involved than that. And the results are varied and stunning:

Aside from an inspiring, inspired, and very hard-working artist, Meg is also the "good spirit" of the school. That's my unofficial assessment. Her living space and studio are in the center of the main hallway, and she frequently moves between the two (each a full-sized classroom) (check out her studio here!), so she's in touch with residents from the north and south of her. (You'd laugh, since the school is not that large, but we really rarely see the people on the south end. We wave from afar, but that's mostly it.) If I don't run into Meg every other day or so, something is just missing.

Well, I'm about to miss her a bunch, as she's taking her wares on the road for art shows in Houston and San Francisco. Bye, Meg!! Bring home lots of cash and empty bins!

Lights!

At the risk of making our living room look like a skating rink... those golden pipes just beg to have strings of lights wrapped around them.

The overhead lights are much too bright and make a buzzing sound. We mostly leave them off, unless we're cleaning and need a reality check on just how much cat hair is covering the couch and rugs.

We've had the colored lights up for a while, but recently added our new light covers from Bella Luz. Bella Luz (a.k.a. Joline El Hai) had her studio in the school for years, but recently moved out. We scored some of her artwork, including these light covers, at her going-away sale.

Each one has a different image on each side -- and there are far too many to show here.

You'll have to check out her artwork on Bellaluz.com yourself!

Office organization

I recently made a big push and organized our office. You know those cubby shelves that everyone has from Ikea? Yeah, it was getting out of hand with clutter. I finally straightened it out. Even emptied out my inbox. But you know how that goes... within minutes, the inbox was full again.
But that item on top is easy. It just wants some petting, and done.

The Principal's Office

Confession: I keep wanting to blog more about our space. But very little of it is in a state that I feel comfortable taking a picture of and sharing publicly.

Oh, it's not a pigsty. It's ok. But you know, it's not *neat.* Cat toys everywhere. Laundry piles, dirty and clean. Stuff. We have stuff. Our desk is shared by a laptop and a desktop, and all the accoutrements for each -- how attractive is that?

Well, one room passes muster, without too much prep: the bedroom. That's because we recently moved the dressers and a clothing rack into our dressing room, which is now too messy to take a picture of... ha! But the bedroom (formerly the actual principal's office) is *just* a bedroom, which is great.

I painted the room "sailor's eye" blue when we moved in. The heating pipes (on the left) had been painted gold by a previous resident, which works great with the blue. Striped curtains from Ikea, with gold chains from... Home Depot? Rusty rigged up a kitty-proof screen for one of the windows, which is held in place by some intensely strong magnets.

Perhaps someday we'll have lovely bedside cubbies made by Rusty, but now it's cheapo canvas bins. At least they match. :-)

Through the window you can see evidence of our light challenge: We face east, and trees and shrubs allow for minimal daylight to come in directly. (These pictures were taking in the early evening of a sunny day, and I had to use flash.) But it also gives us a lot of privacy, which we love.

We wrapped white string lights around the gold pipes, which looks lovely at night, and the paper lamp is so much better than the school-issue overheads.

And it seems like every bedroom has to have its requisite naked girl art, so this is the new home of my Maxfield Parrish print that I've had since college.

Overall, a very calm bedroom, until the ceiling tiles fall down at night (I think this happened to Rusty once). Just another reminder that this is no ordinary living space.

Summertime!

My, but summer is reluctant this year in Seattle!

But it's here nonetheless. Suddenly we have to think about watering our little garden. Hm, and the hose is where...? Too far away. The best solution would be to attach one to the kitchen sink and hoist it through the livingroom window... or walk with a bucket back and forth and back and forth. Hm. Well, there may or may not be vegetables this year!

Catching up on other news: We've done some rearranging. Remember my agony about not having a closet? I had a clothes rack in the bedroom, as well as two dressers, which made the bedroom kind of cramped and blocked the door into the hallway. I had two racks in the "back corner room" -- remember this room?
We'd never really fully organized or designated it for anything, but since it's adjoining the music studio, we made it the office, and moved the piano in there. Of course the office is still too messy to post a real photo, but here's a snapshot taken from the desk:
Hi, Gavin! Oh, what's that you're sitting on?


A filing cabinet made by Rusty. Wow!

The previous office (formerly the conference room) is now the "dressing room." Yay! Not only a closet, but a whole room just for clothes. We moved the dressers in there too, so now our bedroom is so much more spacious and relaxed -- no clutter. Just a bed. Nice.

We've been here just over a year now! We couldn't be happier. The music studio is being put to good use with rehearsals once or twice a week, our neighbors are all terrific (and wonderful cat sitters when we're out of town), and the courtyard is so great on warm summer evenings. Happy anniversary to us!