garden games

a million flowers for Dior

ISN'T THAT INCREDIBLY BEAUTIFUL?

the forest spirit

on inspiration

design and photo by my daughter

❝

The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.

— Chuck Close
(Source : nirvikalpa)

in the footsteps of Viktoria

I took most of the pictures  at the exhibition "American Dreamers/Reality and Imagination in ContemporaryArt", Strozzina CCC, Florence.

soaking up the sunshine

Mint and figs

simple lunch

lazy-cloudy-grey Saturday

Flowers for the Royal's hats?

When I heard that British hatters had ordered thousands and thousands of artificial flowers from the Sebnitz manufactory, I decided that it was high time to pay a visit to this tiny village at the Czech border.  50 km from Dresden, the perfect destination for a weekend trip.

Already on the staircase, where I took the photograph above, I got some slight doubts about the lifelike appearance of these works of art. Moving along to the wedding room I was happy for being already married... (Funny enough that I actually wore a wreath of white and pink flowers on my wedding.)
Next we visited the creepy iron cellar where all the moulds were stored. Thereafter we were shown a film about the artificial flower production in Sebnitz before World War II. At that time Sebnitz produced 3/4 of the world demand.

Endless rows of workers, men and women, doing one single movement the whole day, cutting flowers, pressing, dying, making stems. In the factory and in home work- pictures from the industrial revolution!

After this disturbing impression we were guided to the today's manufactury. We could watch a woman pressing veins into green cotton leaves (2000 kg pressure at 120°C!), another one fixing marigolds on stems, and a third one colouring poppies.
AND: finally we had the possibility to ask questions.

NO, there is no big production anymore. Artificial flowers now come from the Far East. We only produce for the shop downstairs. NO, we didn't deliver to English hatters on occasion of the royal wedding. Those flowers came from Wallroda (also nearby), from a manufacturer with better  connections to the WEST.

Finally we were guided to the shop. Hard to believe, but there were only a few lifelike flowers, the bigger part had exchanged the natural look for stage potential (easy to be seen from the last row...)

excursion into the wild to harvest the best elderflowers

Once the elderflowers bloom, go out and find a place far from traffic to pick about 20 heads of elderflowers. (You know, the eldertree is magic! Besides protection it also gives beauty and love..)

Picking during daytime is ok, it's not necessary to wait for moonlight.

Now the most important step: the extraction and conservation of the magical essence.

Put the heads into 2l of boiled water, add 50g of citric acid and 3 finely sliced lemons. Let it rest for one day and one night.

Once the essence of the elderflowers has merged with the liquid, strain it into a pot and add 2 kg of sugar. Heat and dissolve. Then strain the syrup into clean bottles.

You can store it in the fridge until Christmas - or enjoy it right now. It's amazing with water, champagne or gin.

Italy street peek

Ballerinas

This is a photo I posted 2 years ago in flickr. Yesterday I remembered it and how perfectly it describes my state of mind in the moment. Longing for colours, warmth, sun and blue sky. I finally want to put my winter boots away and wear these Ballerinas!

Please Spring, will you come