Tar Pits & textiles

I am now back home and want to continue to share some of my experiences and photos of my L.A. vist with you.

Last tuesday after visiting the LACA museum to see the Renoir exhibition we wandered over to the La Brea Tar Pits which are just across the street. The tar pit looks like a large pond with a bit of a oil slick floating on the top. The tar pit has yielded up a vast quantity of fossils from saber tooth tigers to elephants as you can see in my photo. I find it somewhat magical that it is still here. I also included a photo of graffiti that was written with the tar that bubbles up through the path.

Our next stop was the Craft and Folk Art Museum which is nearby. What a treat was in store for us, there was a exhibition of Tarot cards called The Fool's Journey. No photos were allow so I am not able to show you the interesting cards that were on display. The second exhibition was of textiles from central Asia & Iran. On display were coats, hats, and rugs of the nomads of Central Asia. The design and colours used in their work was spectacular.

Strange tree

While driving today in Los Angeles I spotted these trees growing in the center of a roadway. The have green lichen on the trunk and huge thorns. Wonderful texture, but you would not want to lean against one! After some research on the net I found that they are Silk Floss trees, Cebia Speciosa. I wish I could be here to see them in flower. If you click on the photo's you can see a magnified view.

Photo's of LA

The top photo is of the mountains nearby they were topped with snow on the day I arrived. A very unusual occurrence here. The second photo is of Santa Monica Beach at sunset. We actually saw some dolphins swimming by that evening

California Dreaming

It's the fourth day of my visit here in LA. The weather has been wonderful. Warm, sunny, and 30c above Eastern Canada's temperatures. On Thurs. I had a visit to the Getty Museum. Fantastic building which perches high above LA. The architecture and gardens are amazing. Well worth a visit if you are lucky enough to get out this way. On the same trip to the Getty we drove into downtown LA and visited the fabric district. Temptations galore. I ended up with buying several yards of trims and ribbons. The button selection was overwhelming as you can see in the photo above and I am sorry now I did not buy any.

We also drove through Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, along Sunset Blvd. and Rodeo Drive. All these names out of movies and books so exciting. The beach at Santa Monica was beautiful and sunset when we were there. I will add some photo in my next post for some reason I can't do it now, most frustrating!

Getting Ready

I made two handbags as gifts for my friend Nola and her daughter when I vist LA this week. Packing has started, always so difficult when traveling from one climate to another. I am always sure I am packing the wrong things . Journals packed as well as various "stuff" to embellish the journal as I travel. I found a little set of coloured pencils to use they are about 2" tall and have a small traveling box which should be useful for some drawing and colouring . We have lots planned for my trip , a flea market isit, vintage paper show, Renior exhibit, and the Surface Artist Design meeting. Two more sleeps to go!

LA Journal

LA Journal from Diane Smith on Vimeo.

After several tries I have finally managed to upload the video of my travel journal. In a previous post I showed the photo of the cover for the journal from the class Remains of the Day. The theme of the class is scrappy and reuse. Trying to keep to that I used old magazine pages, envelops and scraps of previous projects and machine stitched to make the pages. I'll be using my Pogo printer while traveling to add photos to the journal as well as bring a small box of "stuff" to add and embellish as I go. Using scraps forced me to work out of a box of neat and tidy to work more intuitively and less perfect.

LA Journal

http://vimeo.com/9172228