Kimberly A. Cook

Military Romance Author

art projects

Got Projects For The Fourth Of July?

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by Kimberly A. Cook                 (Twitter@ WarriorTales)

With the long weekend fast approaching, I love to plan projects I am going to get done with all that available time. What this means is I create a list of things to do I couldn’t complete in a month of time off, then with unrealistic high hopes if I manage to get one accomplished it’s a celebration. We all know life, laziness and must-see movies happen.

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Ahoy bark booty! A cache of hidden wood gold on the shoreline. 

 

So one project I will fess up to do next month is to actually get creative with at least one piece of bark I’ve collected. On the May trip to Suttle Lake for bark gathering the official orange bark bucket got filled to the brim.

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My Mom, bark gathering assistant extraordinaire, helped me fill the bark bucket in no time flat. Somehow the pieces seemed to get bigger as we went along. The brisk wind off the lake might have had something to do with that too. 

 

So then I had to dry the pieces out and buy a bigger glass container to store the bark, and before I am overrun, make something.

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My fancy new-fangled bark drying apparatus; paper and banker box lids on the patio table. Check out some of those amazing specimens. Living the dream!

 

In addition, I need to plant the fuchsia starts my Mom gave me since they now have roots. Bought special potting soil, have baby pots to plant them in, but need to actually put them in the dirt. So the project list grows.

But for now I wanted to share some of the latest official bark gathering photos so you can think about your coming projects for the Fourth of July. Got a holiday to do list?

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And this is where my special bark pieces come from girls and boys; tree logs fall into the lake, the bark gets soaked off and washes ashore and voila! Naked logs!

 

 

 

Got Art Projects?

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by Kimberly A. Cook                        (Twitter@  WarriorTales)

Perfection is overrated and a creativity killer. It’s a challenge to ignore all our inner and outer critics and go with our heart. This past sunny Friday I had an afternoon to squander cleaning. Garden or garage? My motto is to do what is bugging me the most and the garage was top on the list.

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Banker box tops, bark pieces and the sun. Old school supplies. Cheap too. 

 

Between the monsoon rains in December and the usual crazy, the garage had become another sad victim of the drop and go syndrome. My goal was to excavate my work bench and tidy the joint. On top of the layers of stuff on the bench were banker box tops full of bark pieces I had picked up at Suttle Lake. Took the trays out on the patio and let them have a final sun shot before bringing them inside to my jewelry workbench.

When I first started gathering these bark pieces on one our trips to Sisters, I thought they might make nice pendants. I used a plastic bag in the car to collect my bark booty. Last September I used an orange Home Depot bucket, I was prepared. Another form of treasure hunting for me.

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Have bark bucket, will travel. Bark booty!

 

Do I have enough pieces of bark now? Probably. Maybe. Do I know what I am going to do with them all? Nope. But I like them. I’ve been playing with different ideas. The first thought to be jewelry pendants is morphing into maybe little bark vignettes on tiny easels. Not sure. And that’s the best part of art projects; we don’t have to know what it will become.

I’ve also been on a glitter buying terror recently too. Combo of a half-price sale and the bark pieces. Bling bark? Whether folks color books, paint, sew, cook, sculpt, weave, woodcraft, garden or put glitter on bark, the creative process is all about not being perfect.

Because imperfect is priceless. Got art projects?