Here is my chair! I hope you like it as much as me and Asher do!
The unwelcoming bird
Asher likes it!
Another unwelcoming bird
Foxglove, one of my favorite flowers
A magnolia and that scary bird!
Spiders!
A few weeks ago, I got a very interesting email, inviting me to participate with 4 other stellar designers to design a chair for Kathy Peterson and the Cedar Store.
I was excited about the prospect and when my chair arrived, all ready to paint, I was even MORE excited! This chair is made of cypress and when my husband put it together, he was amazed at how well it was made. And it did not even need any sanding!
I thought about my design for several days ( I had so many good ideas!) and then a friend said, "you should paint what you love" That is always good advice. So of course it was going to be birds and flowers. I laid down an underpainting of red paint, on a sunny day when everyone else was building us a new deck... and then I sketched in my birds and flowers.
Here is the chair in progress:
I painted over the red with my favorite blue and left bits of it showing. On the arms, I painted two of my favorite birds... they look kind of mad, which I find funny, like my chair is saying don't sit here! Which means I will get to sit there, because I painted the birds and they don't fool me. I also added a couple of spiders, to make sure my chair is available when I want to sit in it. By the way, the birds are from an amazing Taiwanese photographer,
Sushyue Liao, I paint using his photos as reference by permission, but if you don't want to find your own amazing photographer, you could find some bird and flower images to decoupage on to your chair. You could start by using the red underpainting, then glue on your images, then paint around them with your favorite color, leaving a bit of the red showing through.Please stay tuned for the other designers chairs every tuesday for the next three weeks.
8/10 Kathy Cano-Murillo: http://thecraftychica.blogspot.com/
8/17 Julianna Hudgins: http://www.juliannaproductions.com/blog/
Here is Pat Sloan's chair from last week: http://patsloan.typepad.com/pat_sloans_corner/2010/07/im-a-design-my-adirondack-designer-.html
And here is the Cedar Store website where you can buy your own wonderful cypress chair to paint! Thank you, Kathy, for giving me this amazing opportunity. I loved every minute of it!
Verna made these amaretto cream cups and a cheese terrine with nut sauce and her famous shortbread
I made a strawberry and pistachio pavlova (foreground, below)and lemon curd tart. Sharon made the chocolate raspberry cakes, a stacked sandwich loaf, quiche and more things than I can remember.
My mom's place setting
Pre-party champs with my friends:
