make a grid, break the grid

i have a good friend who is a stylist. once, i was watching her style a bookshelf for a photoshoot, and i asked her “how do you do that? it seems so obvious to you, but i could have never pulled those items together like that to look both casual and elevated at the same time.” she replied, “oh, it’s easy. make a grid. then break the grid.” elevated, and causal. boom.

dried pampas grass leaves

five’s a crowd

a crowd of swirling pine needle galaxies? or a top-down view of the rotating car wash heads? or sea anemone on the bottom of a tide pool?  i see multitudes. what do you see?

austrian pine pine needles (pinus nigra)

three’s company

look who sidled up to each other on my specimen table. it’s as if they knew what a striking trio they made. isn’t diversity magnificent? trial and error over 150 million years. it reminds me of a quote i heard recently from rick rubin: “Nature. The only truth”.

three feathers: turkey, woodpecker, and rooster hackle feather

small wins and big victories

march is so fickle. yesterday i talked about celebrating small victories when that is all you have. and this morning we woke up to our sandhill cranes in our backyard. OUR cranes!! the ones who spent the whole summer with us last year. those gentle giants from another time who have chosen to make our cattail bed their home. my husband actually teared up he was so happy to see them. i had read last year that cranes have “high nest fidelity”, and so it was likely we would get them back. still, what a thrill! yesterday small wins, today big victories. it’s definiteley march.

on my bookshelf i have an empty starbuck’s cup with my feathers (all found last summer and fall) sticking out of it (the starbucks’s cup is symbolic, which i will explain some other day). anyway, because feathers don’t last forever, these feathers will be returned to the woods as soon as the snow melts. so, today, in honor of our returned charges, in which i  mean our sandhill cranes, i did a flat-lay of my starbuck’s cup contents. several of the feathers in this composition are from our cranes when they were molting last august. such sweet memories.

found feathers of minnesota

celebrate the small wins

my house sits on a gently sloping hill down to a very large cattail bed on the edge of a small but picturesque metro lake. the slope is north facing. for artists, north facing light is often ideal. it is soft and diffuse. i love my north facing light and make good use of it. without your probably realizing it, my north-facing 45th parallel light is one of the signatures of STILL. but for three weeks of every year, i curse my north facing exposure. spring arrives at my house two weeks later than the rest of the twin cities, which is already three weeks behind 95% of the rest of the country. it hurts. i still have two feet of snow, no patchy bald spots of lawn poking through. heck, i don’t even have tree circles yet. so, to say that i am craving a little color is an understatement. the truth is, i am getting a little coo-coo. i literally considered hooking up a hose to the kitchen sink so i could run hot water over the deck to try and melt the snow and ice so at least the deck would be clear and sorta-kinda look like spring. see? i’m going a little batty. luckily, steve brought the potted geraniums we had on the dock into the house last fall, and we have been enjoying geranium blooms for the past month. it’s a small win. but all i got are small wins right now.

geranium leaves and buds