No, this isn’t a Star Wars post! Rather, I’m feeling hopeful about 2021, and since my husband got his vaccination a few days ago, the huge sense of relief and yes, hope, has sparked my creativity again.
I managed somehow to take a really good photo of Guinevere, our “quarantine” cat, a few days ago. She was standing on the side table in the foyer, which we made by attaching a door mirror to a couple of concrete pedestals.

I had become enamored of outdoor concrete statuary about 20 years ago when we visited a shop which sold all manner of landscape decorations. It was a bit of a drive, as she’s waaaay out in the country, but her prices were fantastic. Has outdoor concrete used indoors gone out of style? It may never have been in style in the first place, who knows? We were furnishing a bigger house than the one we’d moved from and had a limited budget. I was excited to bring it all inside.
Across from the table Guinevere is standing on is a concrete bench with an embossed cherub design. Our coffee table is a huge concrete planter with a design of garland and flourishes covered with a round glass tabletop. You can peek inside and see a kneeling fairy nestled among some greenery with flowers on her lap. The kitchen table is a tall concrete bird bath with grapevines and glass tabletop. Inside are faux grapevines twined around a concrete sundial. Our living room curtains are held up by plaster corbels that we transformed with faux concrete spray paint. (Yes, this exists! And looks amazing.) With our color scheme of sky blue throughout the house, there is definitely an outdoor garden vibe, though with cats around, we can’t have any real plants.
So, back to cats. I was planning to make a simple paper collage frame for Guinevere’s photo, but then while straightening out a pile of canvases, I found a random 6×8 canvas board, and it was the perfect size for the 4×6 photo. I started by gluing down a floral themed paper napkin and added – of all things – a swath of material that is normally used to cover plants to protect them from frost. It has the same texture, opacity and color as a well-used dryer sheet, but comes in enormous sizes, so you can tear off whatever you need. This material was draped and adhered with gel medium to one corner and had the effect of toning down the bright colors of the napkin. I inked the edges of the canvas with a color very similar to Guin’s beautiful blue eyes. The photo was placed on a sheet of handmade paper, which I enhanced with ink the color of orange marmalade and adhered at an angle. A strip of the same paper napkin was glued along the left edge of the photo and then many, many flowers were added. (Sometimes I have to force myself to stop adding flowers.)

It feels great to be creating again! 2021 is going to be an amazing year.