bannersbyricki.com

Budding_© was the first pictorial banner I made. Next to Spinnaker_© it has been the most popular. One client bought one of these and then wanted three more to go with it and a series was born.

I decided to carry over some of the colors from banner to banner, and stick with the abstracted floral imagery. This one, I call FloraFly_©.

Upsy Daisy_© introduces yellow to the mix. I think I will also offer it with pink replacing the yellow. What do you think?

If you got here through my home page, you have already seen Pistil_©, but I will include it here just in case.

When I started making banners, I did so with the intent of getting as far away as possible from the bunny and duckie genre of garden banners. The early pieces were very geometrical, with the exception of the occasional wavy edge. The sewing techniques I developed early on have been adapted here, and play a role in how the images evolve. As a gardening nut, I had a great time dreaming up flowers suggested by nature, but never found there.

By and large, we take a live and let-live attitude toward the deer. They provide endless entertainment from our dining room windows, and in return, they are allowed to browse at will. I will buy strawberries at the Farmers’ Market because the deer nibble the flowers before they can begin to develop into anything humans deem edible. Trees are a different matter. After the deer stripped a young eucalyptus of every trace of foliage (who knew that they would go for something so aromatic?) a remedy became necessary. Richard drove metal pipe into the ground to support deer netting that would surround each tender young tree. It proved effective and not especially unsightly. Still, those poles seemed to be begging for adornment.

This picture shows a hose guard made by a local ceramicist. I bought three of them several years ago because I fell hard for them. I don’t know about you, but try as I might, I just can’t make hose guards work for me. These beauties sat around waiting for the deer fence epiphany. The stake, meant to go into the ground, fits snugly into the top end of the metal pipe. Cute, huh? The first picture (above) features glass electrical insulators (hope I got that right) slipped over the tops of the pipes. These things always appealed to me, so whenever they popped up at garage sales, I would buy them. Never had a clue as to their fate until now.

I ran out of stashed goodies before the corralled trees ran out, so off to the local craft store for me. These 3″ wooden balls were intended to become dolls’ heads. With the application of red spray paint and a big long screw to slide into the top of the pipe, they become a variation on my post cap theme.

Visiting gardens and nurseries is a sure way to fill one’s memory banks with ideas . They might mingle in there for years before they pop out disguised as your own brilliant brainstorms. One garden owner (wish I could remember, so as to give full credit) had taken a paint pot to some poppy pods left standing after the petals fell. The result was a surreal parade of sculptural unflowers in an array of colors alien to most gardens. At Dancing Oaks Nursery they had crafted special stakes to hold their collection of electrical insulators, which spring, flower-like, from various beds. In other words, truly original ideas are few and far between, but out of the stew of influences we can often pluck a tasty morsel or two…and, in this case, deprive the deer of a few tasty morsels until the trees get big enough to fend for themselves.

My totem project got me to looking at cast-off household items through new eyes. Back when I had an art deco-ish black and silver bathroom, my kids gave me this black ceramic hand, which attaches to the wall and becomes a soap dish. I have gone through several bathrooms since then, but could never bring myself to discard the hand, even though it broke into several pieces in removing it from its original place of honor. After careful gluing, it is still missing a finger…but the violets cover any defects, and I love the rather macabre impression of a lost soul reaching through a sea of violets to the light of day.

I go to art fairs and shows every now and then, where I find myself admiring garden ornaments like totems and towers by ceramic artists. Alas, my budget, after plants, simply will not stretch to include original works of art. But wait! What about all of those odds and ends…lids to jars that have broken, saucers and/or pots with no mates, the wobbly pot that I threw in college (too weird to use, but too significant to throw away). I gathered a bunch of this detritus and began stacking it up. Perhaps not so oddly, since my taste tends to run to celadons and naturals, there were plenty of pieces that harmonized as if it were planned from the start.

Glue is always a stumbling block in projects of this kind. I had recently graduated from Gorilla glue to an industrial strength craft adhesive called E6000, so I proceeded with all confidence in its ability to hold things together. I gave my finished tower a couple of days to cure in my workroom before moving it outside. After a night in which we had a light freeze, the join where my wobbly, hand-thrown pot met with a smooth, commercial saucer gave way. I thought it was simply a result of the uneven surface, so silicone caulk was pressed into service to fill in and cushion that point of contact. Great! It held! Then all of the other glue joints began to fail. Richard found me some clear silicone caulk (the first one was white) and I went to work cleaning surfaces and reassembling the whole thing using the new method. At this writing, the tower/totem is standing up to the job. You see it here, placed among cardoons and Stachys ‘Helon von Styne’ , which echo the tones in the ceramics perfectly (as does the dirt…oh,well…).

The cardoons were raised from seed from HPSO, and fill me with a mother’s pride. When I went out there to place my tower, you can imagine my consternation when I found that one of my lovely cardoons had been sucked down into the ground by whatever creature has been excavating tunnels around our grounds. Only a few wilty leaves and a deep hole about 4 inches in diameter testified to the crime. We have moles aplenty, which I do not mind, but this is another kettle of critter. Are there gophers in these parts? Any thoughts, fellow sufferers, will be greatly appreciated.