Guilty as charged - PaolaPrints

The skunk cabbages have sprung and I’m in love. I spent most of the day outside Saturday, after dutifully planning to stay inside to work on my High Point pillow booth. Instead, I raked the garden, loaded in wood and cleaned the pellet stove. Oh, the guilt I had to beat back. The sun came out today and melted most of the last (?) Spring snow.

“Come into my kazbah’, said the skunk cabbage. I’ll keep you insects warm so you can pollinate us.”

While outside, I noticed a proliferation of skunk cabbages demanding a 2016 photo shoot. Last year’s blog post will give you their story. Here it is this year in photos. What’s not to love-they are so funky!

Skunk cabbage lives in the midst of the detritus of winter past, and still looks great.

Got the shoot done and returned to the slave job at my desk. Why was I given a brain? The truth is I’m happiest when I’m outside clearing stuff in the garden. Checking things out. Noticing the return of plants marching up through the soil.

We spent the better part of Friday and Sunday driving around scavenging for pillow shelves for the booth. The booth is a 10’ x 10’ x10’ box with no windows. Scary. I got in some large photos from last year’s garden I had printed to fabric today. Maybe we’ll be fooled into thinking we’re outdoors? This is where I am today. Looking for flowering plants for decorating. The hardest part by far is pillow shelving. The standard of displaying pillows jammed together side by side isn’t cutting it. Paola Pillows like to preen. We’re searching out new ways to show them. Found a great plexiglass place in Bridgeport as one possible. Craig’s List seems also to have some metal and glass options. Forget IKEA! We tried hard but the dimensions for the display we were striving for just wasn’t available. The search continues.

Today, most of my day was spent laboring over a sign I have to get out to production tomorrow. Have you see the green masthead at the top of each page? I designed it for the web so it’s tiny relative to the large size you need to print. I had to go back to the original yellow sunflower photo and work forward to get to the look we’re doing right now. Yes, the green one is abstract. I wanted to create flat continuous color. I love blue and green together in this way.