The man with the hollow tooth or Dr Ma mit em hohle Zahn

Too much time has passed since I blogged here. Rather than a great catch up I shall just jump right in and pretend I never missed a day (let alone months):

I have been working in a journal in our Australian Art Journal Round Robin.

Nicole's journal is not really a journal but a gorgeous box that opens up in half much like a book. The theme is "Out of the box". This theme was so freeing and "out of the box" for me that it took me a while to find what I'd be doing as my entry. Normally when working to a theme I try to push the boundaries and think outside the box.

With the theme of "Out of the box" it was more the opposite for me: a working "into a box" if that makes any sense.

I based my entry on a story my Grandpa used to tell me when I was little. Here the original in Swissgerman:

Es isch emau e Ma gsy dä het e hohle Zahn gha,

im hohle Zahn isch es Chischtli gsy,

im Chischtli isch es Briefli gsy,

im Briefli isch gstande:

Es isch emau e Ma gsy dä het e hohle Zahn gha,

im hohle Zahn isch es Chischtli gsy,

im Chischtli isch es Briefli gsy,

im Briefli isch gstande:

It is one of those never ending  stories that loop. The sparse reference I could find on the net implied it was a Swiss story as it was apparently not known in Germany. The story goes like this (translated from Swissgerman:)

There once was a man who had a hollow tooth,

inside the tooth was a little box,

inside the little box was a letter,

inside the letter was written:

There once was a man who had a hollow tooth,

inside the tooth was a little box,

inside the little box was a letter,

inside the letter was written:

etc. etc.  you get the idea.

 

Somehow as a kid I could not get enough of this story and I must have driven my ever patient Grandpa nuts with urging him to go on and on and on.

In my mind I could see it clearly; the man with the hollow tooth who's tooth housed increasingly smaller versions of himself (like a Russian nesting doll) and at the same time I was still curious as to what the next "little box" might contain. But of course it always was another letter with the same story in the box but that did not dim my fascination with it.

It was a bit like holding both mirrored bathroom cabinet doors to my face as a child and seeing an infinite and ever smaller version of myself. Or like going for a walk not knowing what the next bend in the path might reveal. 

As an adult I ask myself who this man with the hollow tooth is: A trickster? A magician? A teacher of infinity for children? A side show freak displaying his hollow tooth for all to see or a holy man at peace with his disfigurement, using it as a teaching tool for others? Whatever he symbolises he has been able to mesmerise me and make me wonder.

 

My entry in Nicole's "journal" became itself a little box as this is a hollow double layer about 1cm thickness. Inside the hollow tooth sits a little box with a wee letter stuck in it and with a wee drop of sealing wax which landed partially on my finger. I have a blister to prove it. (Note to self: When working with sealing wax on tiny areas it is safer to use a toothpick or similar to hold down the piece.) I used a Pitt pen and water soluble pencils for the front and acrylic interference paint for the tooth.

On the back I wrote the story as many times as it would fit onto the paper and then used an aqua brush to paint a man's face with water and the soluble ink from my writing pen as the only paint.

I enjoyed working in this box of a journal and it brought back many memories from my childhood.

Until next time!

A journal's journey begins here

I am taking part in an art Journal Round Robin organised by the lovely Louise. Thirteen ladies from all around Australia are taking part in this exciting new adventure.

I chose the theme Grimoire for my journal. It is made from salvaged materials and filled with sturdy watercolour paper.

I bound it in leather from a hideous 80s leather jacket from a thrift store.

Into the Coptic binding I included some stitched paper/fabric leaves.

The inside cover has wallpaper from a sample book.

One of my favourite Roald Dahl quotes on the last page and I stitched a paper pocket for notes and messages on to the inside cover.

On the back cover I made an Abracadabra triangle.

I based my own journal entry on the Russian witch and wise woman Babayaga (apologies for the blurry image above, it is the only one I took in haste before sending the journal off).

Babayaga lives deep in the forest in a hut that stands on chicken feet surrounded by a fence topped with human skulls that have glowing eyes. In the fairy tales she is usually depicted as a most fearsome witch with iron teeth. She flies around in a mortar and steering it with a pestle and wipes all traces of herself with a Birch broom. But Babayaga can also be the wise woman that grants wisdom and riches to the pure of heart. She is said to be the guardian over the fountain of the Waters of Life and Death.

And here is Babayaga stirring her cauldron while sharing her healthy recipe for Bone Broth for Supple Joints and Limber Body. 

 I have added a charm made from a couple of chicken feathers, a wee bone and a heart charm.

The journal is wrapped in a cloth I dyed with leaves and flowers from my garden and neighbourhood. I laid various leaves, elderberries and flowers directly onto the cloth (cotton) and folded it in half. Then I wrapped it tightly around a block of iron and immersed it into my trusted aluminium dye pot in which I had prepared an onion skin dye bath. The result is subtle but there are quite a lot of different hues and markings when one looks closely. 

 I have embroidered the cloth with a border of herringbone stitches which are called Hexenstich in German (meaning witch's stitch - appropriate for a Grimoire, don't you think?) 

Instead of the artists signing in somewhere in the journal I encourage them to write their name and date onto the cloth and either embroider it themselves or I will embroider them when the journal comes back. I can't wait to see what these creative ladies will come up with. If you'd like to follow our progress you can do so here.

SPOILER ALERT: If you are part of this art Journal Round Robin you might want to stop here (unless you don't like surprises or just simply can wait ;-)

As a little thank you for each lady working in my journal I have made tiny talismans in the shape of dream catchers. I used a pesky, weedy vine from the garden to make the  wee frames and yarn, beads and embellishments from my stash.

I have given most a "wish" or theme based on the embellishments used. I made a few too many so everybody will get a choice.

 

And so the journey has begun for our journals as they make their way around this vast land.

Bon Voyage and until we meet again.

A long overdue telling: the Gray Fox Epistles

Last April I read on Rima's blog about a mysterious project of fairy tales retold and sent by mail by a wonderful writer called Sylvia Linstead. I signed up on a whim as Rima's taste is very much my own and I have always loved myths and fairy- and folktales. What a fortuitous decision that turned out to be!

In May a beautifully stamped thick envelope arrived in my mailbox. And that was the beginning of my monthly literary magic fix ever since. Upon opening the envelope a few wild rose petals fell out much to my delight a faint rosy smell still clung to them all the way from the mountains in California so very far away from here.

Sylvia is a very gifted raconteuse; she weaves her magic with words and almost as if in meditation she guides you deeply, so very deeply into the wild of her native landscape in which most of her stories are based. There you learn about plants, animals and of humans ready to reconnect with nature on a very deep level.

By the time you come to the end of the story you will not be quite the same, your surroundings might take on a slightly different hue and your perception of nature will have deepened.

I have nine tales so far, all beautiful, all treasured greatly, all have inspired me in some way and enriched my life.

And so it has taken me nine months to share this tale with you. I hope you will go and check out Wildtalewort and give yourself a little magic in your life and subscribe to the Gray Fox Epistles - you won't regret it!

Have a wonderful, magical time!

Page 88

What I thought would be a brief hiatus from blogging has turned into a break of nearly two years.

There would have been many a tale to tell but alas it was not to be. So I shall continue at the present moment in the here and now:

After a year long break from the library I have been voraciously devouring various novels.

While reading one such book I noticed a stain on page 88. On closer inspection it looked like a tomato seed had dried on this page.

What stood out to me was the number 88:  It is a significant number in Chinese culture meaning good fortune and wealth - both of which one can never have enough.

I decided to carefully remove the tomato seed and plant it. After all tomato seeds can remain viable for many years (I have read of 13 year old seeds being coaxed into sprouting). I am hoping this will be the beginning of a wonderful tomato tradition: The Page 88 tomato. A prolific producer of tasty fruit.

I tried to imagine this careless reader so engrossed in the story that the plop of tomato juice landed unnoticed on the page. She would most likely be a woman (giving the book was a romantic novel) probably on her lunch break eating her sandwich while reading a few pages. My hope is this lady was eating a gourmet sandwich filled with an heirloom tomato rather than the flavourless supermarket variety.

Only time will tell...

88    I wish you all a Happy New Year full of abundance and good fortune.   88

xoxo

Heavenly Gardens art journal entry

These past few months landscaping has been foremost on my mind. Plans have been sketched, revised and resketched. So it was timely when Sharon's "Heavenly Gardens" themed art journal arrived.

The journal is filled with beautiful and inspiring entries from the other members of our little Art-Journal-Circle-Swap.

For my entry I imagined Sharon coming over for a  little "garden tour". At first you see the garden from afar in my rather loose interpretation of the city.

When you open the page ("gate") you get into the garden with different design elements that are important in my "heavenly garden" based on Permaculture principles. There are mandala garden beds, rainwater tanks, art, habitat, hardscaping, wood fired oven, chickens and  gift pouch.

The different garden elements open up to reveal some more information on why they are important to me.

I thoroughly enjoyed myself and hope that Sharon will like it.

Until next time...

Windows ATC Swap

The lovely Patty Clark is hosting an ATC swap over at Milliande's art community with the theme of "Windows". This theme resonated with me and so I signed up and finished the cards last week. I made window shutters that open to reveal a rugged window frame made with granular gel.

The "window pane" is made from a sheet of mica through which you can see a fair maiden waiting at the window for her love.

I used gesso, acrylics, gel pens, stamps and mica.

Let me go to the window
Watch there the day-shapes of dusk
And wait and know
The coming of a little love.

                              Carl Sandburg

The Banana Murderer and new beginnings

For a couple of years now we had been lamenting the fact that our majestic big trees in the backyard had to go due to the fact that they had become unstable and dangerous. Tree loppers were asked for quotes, and more than a year passed without any action on our part.  Finally it was agreed that we would go ahead but we were hit with devastating floods and heavy rain for months on end. Then it turned into a waiting game for the ground to dry enough for the tree lopper's trucks to drive on.

Tipuanas in May 2011

In the meantime precious plants were moved, garden gates and termite traps dug up, brick edgings removed, juvenile banana trees dug up and transplanted and still the rains would return every time we thought the ground was firm enough to call the tree loppers.

Finally the ground was dry enough towards the middle of July and we gave the tree loppers the go ahead to remove the trees.

My partner gave clear instructions to the tree loppers of leaving our precious banana tree standing (we finally have fruit after 5 years!) and asked them to avoid damaging the tree. We could not believe our eyes when a minute later, yes, 60 seconds later, one of the guys (aka the "Banana Murderer") was half hanging, half wrestling with the same tree until it lay flat on the ground. Too late to save the tree, we hurried outside and quickly removed the precious, unripe bunch of bananas and hung them under the house in the hope the fruit might still ripen (which it did not), before the truck moved in and work began in earnest.

It always amazes me that people are able to cut down a tree in a couple of hours when it took decades for it to reach maturity. The crew took a day and a half to chop eleven trees down.

We went from this last year:

before

To this:

after

We saved some pieces from the trees' long thick logs for my partner's future woodworking projects and five slabs for me to paint on.

The Tipuana trees (Tipuana tipu) bled red sap. A beautiful deep red, like blood. The next day we collected as much as we could of this sap, some was still liquid and some had dried to a crumbly texture. Hopefully we will get to use it as a paint of some sorts.

The native bee nest in the stump of one of the Tipuanas was saved and the bees stayed on. We have capped the stump with an old metal sheet and the bees now have an overhang to shelter them from the weather.

We are now faced with a "brown desert".  It is depressing to look at but at the same time full of new possibilities. In the meantime there are weeds to contend with, it seems our backyard is host to the worst obnoxious weeds. There's Madeira Vine (Anredera cordifolia), Onion weed (Nothoscordum inodorum), Nutgrass (Cyperus rotundus), Cobbler's Pegs (Bidens pilosa ), Chinese Elm seedlings (Ulmus parvifolia), Oxalis, the list goes on, you name it - chances are we've got it.

I will end on a positive note: The Banana Murderer did not succeed in totally getting rid of our banana tree.
Imagine my joy when I noticed five little side shoots coming off the cut trunk of the old tree. Now we will let them grow a bit taller before we'll carefully separate them into five new banana trees and a couple of years down the track we might finally enjoy our banana crop.

young banana shoots

Until next time... I wish you every success dealing with your weeds!

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil ATC swap part 14

I thought it was time to finally share my own creations I made for this swap.

My initial plan was for cards that incorporated and focused on the Yin Yang symbol to show that good and evil are in balance but I did not get any further with this idea.

I based my interpretation of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil instead around the Greek god Pan.
The nature god Pan was depicted with the back legs and horns of a goat. While some see Pan as the god of the wild, nature and shepherds other will see in him the Devil. Because of this I called my cards Pan's Duality (good and evil).

Pan's Duality by Monika Schmid

The background is a needle felted and freehand machine embroidered landscape in blues, purples, greys and greens. I took a photo of my Pan statue, photoshopped it and printed it out on fabric. The leaves I made by sandwiching an old page from a Greek old testament page between sheer fabric and freehand machine embroidered leave shapes that were then cut out. The cards were embellished with beads, little stars and an embroidered fence.

Monika's cards

This will be the last of my posts about this swap as I am getting ready to swap the cards and mail them back to the four corners of the world.

Until next time... xoxo

Mother Earth ATCs

The lovely Louise is hosting an ATC swap with the theme "Mother Earth" over at Milliande's, so despite my best intentions to ease off the swaps and instead focus on my art I could not resist signing up.

My Mother Earth is surrounded by a rainbow written with her names from different cultures and the symbols within the brown circles are symbols for Earth  also from different cultures. I have used acrylics, Twinkling H2Os and gel and black pen.

Mother Earth ATC's front

The cards open to a Ute prayer that I thought would go nicely with the theme. The background is a photo I have taken at the Mount Cootha Botanical Gardens in Brisbane.

On the back of the card I have written the following:

Cherokee Prayer Blessing

May the Warm Winds of Heaven
Blow softly upon your house.
May the Great Spirit
Bless all who enter there.
May your Moccasins
Make happy tracks
in many snows,
and may the Rainbow
Always touch your shoulder.

 xoxo

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil ATC swap part 13

Apologies for my long absence here I had holidays and have been sick with the flu the last couple of weeks. But today exciting mail arrived so I had to share.

After being lost in the mail somewhere for over a month the missing package arrived today from Barbara and Julka with their beautiful ATC creations. It was really exciting to open the envelop to find all these beautiful cards.

Here they are in no particular order:

Barbara's cards

Barbara's cards are made with collage and pieced paper. I am not sure how well you can see the eye of the raven but it has a tiny red (evil) jewel glued to it. Barbara's cards have wonderful titles: "Quoth the Raven Nevermore", "There stepped a stately Raven", "In the Garden - Midnight Eerie", "The gloom of Death is on the Raven's Wing" and "Blackbird singing in the Dead of Night".

Julka's ATCs

Julka's cards also have such an eerie look to them that I just love. There are angels sitting in the garden and in the front are dogs that look like they might be just about to howl at the moon. Julka used Gesso, image transfers and heat embossing.
Thank you both for participating and your beautiful cards!

There's more to show and tell, tales from the holidays and projects which I will share as I get my energy back.

Until next time... xoxo

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil ATC swap part 12

A new set of cards has arrived! This time they are from Pandora in the US.

Pandora created ingenious little cards so richly layered with card stock.

Pandora's ATCs

Thank you for taking part, Pandora! I am waiting just on a few more cards to arrive for this swap before they get traded and sent out into the big wide world.

I also received my cards from the Bluebird of Happiness swap organised by the lovely Mary who also included some lovely bird cut outs  which I suspect her magical Sizzix machine might have produced.

received from the Bluebird of Happiness ATC swap

The card on the left is made by Sonja and the card on the right is made by Trine. Both cards will be treasured additions to my ATC collection.

Until next time... xoxo

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil ATC swap part 11

Here are the latest arrivals for our Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil swap (as always in no particular order):

The first lot are from Mary Montedonico in the US. I must apologise about the poor quality of the scan it does not do Mary's beautiful creations justice. Mary based her cards on "Bloody Rosie" and used black tulle, ribbons and stick on jewels to great effect to embellish her multi layered art work. Mary's cards are intriguing and I wonder just who this victorian looking "bloody Rosie" was and what her story is.

Mary Montedonico's ATCs

The second set of cards is from Dawna in Canada who created these beautiful and spooky creations with digital collage(?) Each card has a different quote that sets the mood for the artwork.

Dawna's cards closed

Dawna's cards opened

As you can see there is a wonderful variety of artwork from all the different participants.

Until next time... xoxo

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil ATC swap part 10

Deedee's beautiful ATCs have arrived today from California. I am amazed at yet another totally different interpretation of the theme and the stories these cards tell!

Deedee's cards

Deedee used cutouts, rubber stamps and acrylics for her whimsical creations.

Thank you so much for taking part, Deedee!

Until next time... xoxo

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil ATC swap part 9

Here are the latest arrivals for my ATC swap. The first lot came from Desi in the Netherlands. Desi created wonderfully dark dutch houses with a night garden.

Desi's ATCs

The second set is from Marilyn in Canada. When I was brave enough to pull on the little ribbon I made a grizzly discovery within these amazing cards!:-)

Marilyn's ATCs

The third set arrived from Sonja from Serbia. Sonja's cards have a beautiful vintage look to them.

Sonja's ATCs

Thank you Desi, Marilyn and Sonja for taking part. It is an absolute pleasure to see what everyone created!

Until next time... xoxo

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil ATC swap part 8

Two more sets of cards have arrived today, and what stunning creations they all are! I am amazed at the different interpretations of the theme and the creativity of every participant.

The first set is by Mel-made from Australia who used inks, gel pens, ink pencils and liquid graphite for her deliciously creepy plants.

Mel-made's ATCs

The second set of cards arrived all the way from Canada from Anne Trudell.
Anne created five different and beautiful designs using black gesso, paper cutouts, acrylics and ink.

Anne Trudell's ATCs

Closeup of the card on the bottom left with the window opened

I feel very privileged to receive all these wonderful cards and being able to admire them in person before they get sent back out into the world.

Until next time... xoxo