Treasure Gathering

This is a handmade broom.  The folks who make these brooms also have a very cool hazel nut tree that is frequented by blue jays.  I have seen them.  They are the first Jays I’ve ever seen in the valley, and now I want one of those trees myself.  These people have brooms in art museums and all over the place – some double brooms, called wedding brooms, that are totally cool and bizarre.  They made one broom they call David’s lyre, because that’s what it looks like (and not like a broom, actually), and another out of a piece of wood that looks like a peacock – with a knot for an eye, and the swelling shape of the body – all natural.  I guess you would say that they truck in “found” art, working with wood they have collected all over the country, and letting the natural shape of the wood dictate the thing that comes our of their hands.  My favorite part of this broom is the neck, where the bunch of reeds is trimmed on the diagonal.

This broom hangs in my kitchen on the wall.  It is a working broom.  They say it will last ten years.  I hope it does.

This is an antique milk can, messed with by Bartlett Art, a family up in Twin Falls that has the MOST FUN BUSINESS EVER.  They find antique metal stuff – old farm implements and lanterns and all kinds of things and then make things.   They have this huge wall thing made of the curved blades of an ancient windrower that I want badly.  And weathervane like things that are perfectly magical – and pretty darned expensive, but not for what they are.  And underneath it all, they are this great family.  If they lived down here, I’d adopt them.

I didn’t do well with these shots.  Depth of field problems.  But this is a hummingbird made by the lovely and brilliant Jeanne Gomm.  His tail is beautifully cupped, though I didn’t catch it the way I wanted to.  He’s hanging in the front window with a bunch of snowflakes.  I was kind of running wildly around the house, trying to shoot all this stuff before something more grown up and responsible could occur to me and make me feel guilty.

YOu can kind of see his tail here.  Dang.  Wish I’d done better.

This is actually a gourd.  The woman I met at the Annual Country Fair does these fabulous gourd/bowl things.  She cuts them, and then binds the edges with pine needles and horse hair and beads – and they’re gorgeous.  And expensive.  And they also end up in art galleries and museums.  I couldn’t resist this one because of the leaf motif.  And I could afford it.  She uses hard shell gourds, and I know where she lives and she gives classes.

This is the candle we found at Swiss Days – sold to us by rocket scientists in Lederhosen.  I’m not sure whether everyone considers something like this art, but certainly it is craft.  The candles are dipped over and over, and you can see the variations in layer color.  When the candle is still warm, the artists makes slices in the wax, each carefully controlled, cutting through the color over and over.  Each section is then manipulated – curled, twisted, laid carefully to the side, so that the color play and resultant movement in the layered shapes keeps the eye moving from one point to another as you look at the candle.  I bought it as a Thanksgiving decoration, to remind us that life is layered, and that the color of life is sometimes hidden, sometimes gloriously revealed.  The resultant complexity makes life interesting and challenging – and really quite beautiful, perhaps best when the knife is sharp and the shaping hand is sure.

A gift of the Gomm’s.  They’ll teach you how to make one if you want.  They give lessons.

I found this at a funky little place – used to be one of the great grain mills in pioneer Utah.  Now the mill itself is a good restaurant and specialty store, specializing in rustic decor and furniture.  The rest of the property has been made into a little village, built around the mill stream.  The buildings are all historic cabins, moved onto the property years ago, now charming little shops.  There’s a huge holiday place in a new but harmonizing building – and they have pretty much everything there.  This witch’s hat full of goofy ornaments was handmade by somebody, and from the look of it, probably not somebody in China.  But who knows.  I’m bending my parameters by including it, but I liked it, and now I have it, so I put it here.

Another Bartlett creation.  The hooks are old electrical insulators.  I remember seeing them on the side of the road when we (my folks and we kids) took long car trips to places like Lake Arrowhead.

This cat was made by a women’s knitting consortium in Nepal, I think.  Or Peru.  Somewhere like that.  The designers are two sisters (I think) who design crazy, out of the box knitted stuff and call themselves Tara Handknits and  Hot Knots.  In the spirit of Free Market, they started working with this consortium, giving these women an opportunity to make their way in the world with dignity.  I found this cat while I was surfing around, looking for some Tara knit things that wouldn’t break my bank.  I found a girl who was closing out things, and I fell in love with this little cat – felt and hand knit.

I’ve shown you Lindy’s Red Dog Sleeping.  I love the detail, and the feeling of moonlight –

Not handmade, but hand grown.  One of these is a hard shell gourd that i’m going to dry and paint.

This bird, which Chaz can identify for you (identify it, Chaz), but I cannot, was made by a neighbor of ours who specializes in paper mache characters.  Some of them are seven feet tall.  Including unicorns.  Behind the bird is a wooden lantern that my Daddy made some years ago, a storm lantern.

I don’t know who made this window, but we’re told it came from England, from a building that was being razed.  We didn’t buy it from the artist, but it’s in my front window, so I put it in here too.

This is a sweet little balancing dragon fly, again made by Jeanne and David Gomm.

The girl who threw this pot had a booth at the Scera Family market.  I’d already spent enough money that month and didn’t buy anything, but Chaz had a couple of bucks and bought the bowl.  Now, I do not intend to give it back to her.  I love it and wish I’d bought six.  We stood around her booth saying, “Wow – these are gorgeous,” for about twenty minutes, being shills for them.  I wish I had her contact info, dang it.

From the Farmer’s Market.  I ADORE this glaze.

Farmer’s Market again.  But the carver of this ray was no farmer.  From the islands, he came – and did these amazingly life-full fishy things out of cow femurs.  I bought the ray because of a vacation we went on one hundred years ago to Sea World.  We spent hours at the Ray tank, listening to Enya and just being together. I saw this ray and started to cry.  So I thought I’d better take it home.

I bought this bowl at Swiss Days from a man I’ve shown you before – he’d set up his lathe in front of a little used book store, and was busily turning out his art all afternoon.  He likes to work with burls (knots of messed up wood, like joints where branches come out, or perhaps lumps where parasites set up housekeeping), and then seeds the natural cracks with crushed turquoise.  This one now sits on my dresser filled with odds and ends.

The lampworker I met at Swiss Days worked this necklace up for me, my little own self.  It’s infested with tiny frogs.

This lovely little leather horse’s head was cut in one piece (not counting mane and forelock), folded and bound with cord, and blessed with a smile by a very clever dude in England.  Found him on Etsy.

What I want you to see here is actually the corn stalks.  Every year, Brother Clark  grows corn and pumpkins on this little acre of land, locked in the midst of other farms and waterless (no irrigation), and when it’s harvest, he brings it all in and piles the pumpkins up along the edge of his driveway.  Last year, he gave them away free, because the dry late summer had caused all kinds of unusual and non-traditional shapes.  We couldn’t get him to take money.  I think his wife might have been sick then.  In every bundle he makes of the stalks, he includes a few purple stalks.  I should have done a close up of them, but I think you can find them in other entries – a lovely deep purple color.  Maybe I’ll find the corn on one and open it to see what color it is.  Not handmade, but certainly hand grown.

Hand made in China.  Or okay.  Probably not hand made, but really cool and charming.  Now hanging from the Vulcan Eating Tree in our front yard.  If you want to know why the tree is called that, you’re going to have to ask the kids.  I have never known.  Why, you guys?

This was a gift.  Brother Stone makes these gorgeous walking sticks out of wood he finds on his birding expeditions. This was made from Cliff Rose – the wood is made of two (or more?) little trunks that twist around each other so tightly, they grow together, some very red, some very blond.  He forms the stick, then carves it.  I still can’t believe he gave us one of them.

Various lampwork beads done by Noah Coleman.  He began making them at the Farmer’s Market this year.  The amber one is hollow.  The two on the black string are his first squishy sheep.  I have not included the rainbow birds that started our relationship.  We ordered birds, he came up with the design.  We got greedy.

Here is one of the birds.  I loved this blue.  two bottles.  One pig.  Various great beads.

I don’t know if Noah or his wife made this bowl, but we loved it, and I loved the way the light spilled through it.

He made pumpkin necklaces on Halloween.  I am wearing it, but I am not going to show you how goofy I look.

Two bowls, spilling light.

A Jeanne Gomm bee with three Coleman beads.  Pink pig, captured flowers.

And this nifty hair flower, made of seared-edge satin.  I am also wearing this, and did all Halloween day, but my hair is exhausted and terrible and limp, and I am old and I am not putting up any more of me than this.

So, there are great treasures out there – even in this economy.  Maybe especially in this economy.  People have these great ideas, and they work with materials at hand quite often.  I don’t get ideas like this: let’s take all these colors of fabric and cut circles and burn the edges so they’ll curl and then put them together into a hair flower.  Clever was left out of my equation. I copy and adapt, but I don’t invent.   It’s okay though.  As one of my good friends once said – “My gift is loving all of the great things other people do with their gifts.”  So that’s where I love to put my little bit of discretionary  money, into the hands of folks who do these things.  Love it, love it, love it.