End of summer and changing seasons

We’re in the last weeks of summer, trying to ignore the drumbeat of fall and school starting up again.

We can only ignore it for so long, and this coming week is a major reality check for us, with three different school orientations (one of them being for our very first HIGH SCHOOL student. Hold me.).

We’ve been trying to squeeze out every last drop of summer so of course we had to incorporate a couple excursions.

One was a trip to the zoo, where they had a big art installment of sculptures, all made from materials that had washed up on the Pacific Ocean shore. It might have been depressing, except that the sculptures were so playful. Here’s just one to give you an idea…

I mean, come on! How great is that??

We took one other excursion recently…

The State Fair. (View from the Skyride.) We HAD to do the State Fair.

We’ll head to the cabin again and also probably do some more swimming since the children don’t even care if it’s hot enough to swim. They’re die-hards. They also don’t care if there’s a breeze to break up the humidity that makes their mother’s skin prickle and hair poof. It’s good that we’re coming to the end of summer because I’m running low on sunscreen and the kids’ swimsuits are starting to lose their elasticity.

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With Get Messy, my very favorite art journaling community, the last three weeks have been kicking off the Season of Seasons. The challenge is to use a found journal, which is what you call it when you use for a journal something which is not a journal. Here’s what I came up with:

(I couldn’t resist working on that front one before I thought to take this pic.)

I’ve had these appliance manuals sitting in a drawer in the laundry room. They’ve moved with us from other houses, some going back almost 20 years, and never once have I referenced any of them. Why the heck do I still have them in the first place??? Apparently it’s so I can use them as found journals this season.

Recently I got a pad of this crazy material called Duralar. It’s similar to a plastic transparency from back in the day when teachers used overhead projectors rather than smart boards. Each sheet is really thin and apparently they can accept wet media? What is this magic?? It’s especially good for alcohol inks and markers, or so they say. I’m still figuring it out, but in the meantime I’m having so much fun allowing water and watercolors or inks to play and interact.