Folking Fruits, Folking Flowers

It is amazing what you can do with a sense of humor, a few flowers, greens, fruits and junk in your cupboards.  The pictures below are arrangements I made just using a bouquet of flowers and STUFF.

Go for it.  Have fun.  Change it out.  Make a bouquet of flowers stretch throughout your house, or better yet, get things from your garden and cheer yourself up in your humble abode. 

My Folking Wine Cork Art

I love wine corks.  I love the wine that the corks cork.  I love doing my folking art while drinking wine.  And I love repurposing the corks into works of art.  Here are are a few of the resulting projects.  

I had a huge garbage bag full of wine corks when we sold our house.  They rode around in the RV with us for about 6 months, taking up the shower stall in the RV.

I had been collecting them for years (really, not just a month or two, hee hee).  Friends and even restaurants employees had been saving them for me.

But I finally gave them to a friend from Kansas City who visited me while in Iowa, my first overnight guest in our RV.

She is part of a group of friends who do what they call "Bead Night" once a month.  It started as a group of girlfriends making jewelry, being taught by one of the group who took classes in the craft.  Then it morphed to all kinds of projects like painting wine glasses, and even a yoga night.  Like we used to say about Baltimore, that it was a drinking town with a baseball problem, my Kansas City girlfriend is part of a drinking group with a crafting problem.

 I was fortunate to join my friend and her friends on a couple of Bead Nights while visiting Kansas City over the years.  I got in on the Yoga Bead Night.

I'd forgotten that I'd ever taken a yoga class until last Saturday when I took my first formal class in Connecticut while visiting family.  Towards the end of the class, when the instructor told us to scooch up close to the wall with our backs on the floor and butts right against the wall, legs straight up along the wall, I started giggling, remembering having done that with my girlfriend, drunk, at Yoga Bead Night.   And I remember her friend, the yoga instructor, having chastised us for giggling, for not taking it seriously.

We were probably more drunk than the others.

Anyway, I know my friend is keeping those wine corks in Kansas City, just waiting for me to join her and her friends for another Bead Night - one featuring wine corks.  

Old Metal Lawn Chairs

There is something so fulfilling in painting old furniture.  My sister had three old metal lawn chairs that she had sanded down and prepared for painting, as gifts for her adult daughter.  I got all excited and wanted to do the painting, using a cat theme since I knew her daughter liked cats. My sister agreed and let me pick out colors, so as you can see, I got a bright yellow, a lime green, and tangerine.  I spray painted each chair.  

Then I went on Pinterest for ideas on folk art cat themes.  

The cat on the seat of the chair is a Picasso-inspired cat, bright with energy.  The top one, the blue dude, well, he's a bit more chill.  

My husband executed the cat with balloon theme on the chair, below.  This chair had a pattern in the metal and my sister wanted us to work with that pattern.

My husband is a fast painter.  I watched him paint a bouquet of flowers on the front of a refrigerator we had in our rowhouse in Baltimore.  That was cool.  So he did the same quick job here and pronounced it done.  I continued on, doing the little details along the edges, just to keep it a little busier, matching the energy of the one I'd done above.

This tangerine chair below is the palette, to be finished by my sister.

Working on this project made me so folking happy!