When I looked back at when I last wrote a blog, I was shocked to see if was in the early Spring! Clearly, I was completely immersed in preparing for the July 6th Garden Tour. The local tour, put on by the Generous Gardeners is not your average Garden Tour. It aims high in both purpose and results. The funds raised from this tour (tickets and sponsorships) plus special events put on several times a year (Dahlia sales, plant sales, etc.) are to raise money to beautify many of the public spaces in Gloucester from the traffic “islands” to the grand swath of land along Stacy Boulevard home to our precious fisherman and fisherman’s wives statues. The group has nearly 100 volunteers that actually do all the work.
When I was asked a year ago to be on the 2024 tour, I knew the gardening preparation would dominate my Spring. I also knew I had to so some special things to combine the art of gardening with my sea glass art. The result was a series of sea glass steppingstones that I plan to sell at the event and in my studio. Beyond this, I also used this new “direction” to create a piece for the Cape Ann Museum’s Cape Ann Blossoms show. Working with fellow Cape Ann Artisan, Deb Gonet, we made a non-organic sculptural piece for the show inspired by Fitz Henry Lane’s painting “Rough Seas.” If I hadn’t followed the steppingstone path, I would have never been able to do this. Fast forward, the piece was entered into the Marblehead Arts Festival and accepted by the jury into the sculpture exhibit. It is now in its 3rd home as part of the Wenham Museum’s “Art Grows Here” exhibit in a raised bed in front of the museum and it’s for sale with a percentage going to the Museum if it sells. Who knows where it will next land!
Getting back to the Garden Tour, after all the hard work, the experience itself was simply gratifying and joyful. The group is totally professional and well organized with excellent communications. The week before the official tour, I had a chance to view the gardens of the other people on the tour – many are neighbors. I was SO impressed with all the work everyone had put in and the wonderful surprises in their gardens. And it has to be noted that many adjacent neighbors who were not officially on the tour upgraded their gardens too. As we had shared many stories while preparing and afterward, the experience brought us all closer together. At the “after-party” to thank the volunteers, many of us continued sharing our stories. Among the favorites was the incredibly successful lemonade stand run by the grandchildren of one of the neighbors on the tour. If you missed the tour, there’s a wonderful video created by the North Shore Horticultural Society.
My studio was open during the tour. I had steppingstones downstairs with two lovely friends who volunteered and sent people upstairs where I shared my work and space. I so enjoyed meeting new people from all over and also seeing community friends who had never been to my studio. I can’t wait to see some of these faces back again when they have more time. I was truly grateful to those who left with a piece from my collection, and I donated 20% of my sales to the Generous Gardeners.
I cannot express enough how honored I was to be part of all of these community events and programs. The Cape Ann Museum’s Cape Ann Blossoms is so elegant and thoughtful. The Generous Gardeners Tour is intimate and engaging – opening up visits to neighborhoods in Gloucester that no one even knows about. The volunteers in Marblehead were incredibly welcoming. The Wenham Museum is a delightful and very important cultural asset on the North Shore and so inventive in all it does. What I’ve experienced is that community drives art and art drives community. The two are inseparable and equally important. On Cape Ann and the north shore, we have both in abundance!
This is the ultimate way to share creativity. If you have a strong creative bent, offer to coach friends, family, and colleagues who want to explore their creative side. Once they choose the path, and start something, stay in touch and offer feedback, examples of others who have done something in their genre, articles that might be of help. Just pointing out to someone, hey, you always coordinate colors so well, did you ever think of putting them together on paper? Your voice is beautiful, have you ever recorded anything? Cooking is a great form of creativity. My 83 year old father has taken to using “
Having only 24 hours to identify the topic and a few days to complete the essay forced me to quickly think about what has impacted me the most in life. The author (Dr. Sharon Freeman) wanted me to focus on my creative endeavor, 
I can’t give any more away because I really do want you to buy the book. My essay aside, it’s the other essayists that opened my eyes and quite frankly humbled me in their accomplishments told in the most honest, and intimate manner. As a society we have debated issues of diversity, socio-economic challenges, education, immigration, fiscal responsibility, health care, politics, regional, national, and international cultural issues, immigration, etc. Through personal storytelling from people of highly diverse backgrounds, these and many other topics are addressed in ways that really hit home.
There’s nothing like an artistic challenge from a fellow artist to get the creative juices flowing. With a fall full of tying up loose ends for the 
The result is a theme piece called “The Rains of Summer; Tears of Joy.” This thought directly aligned with the first “rain” that hit my garden and the shape of a raindrop and a tear-drop – both of which are soothing in their own special way! The piece is actually a series of five tear-drop shaped pendants uniquely tied together in one piece to fully cover the neckline of the model below the neckline. After the show, this piece can be taken apart with each piece of it, its own pendant unless of course, it sells as one piece. Along with this, earrings that mimic the pair I made for the 2011 runway show that often get significant attention when I wear them – long and slender with one large bead or pear at the end – inspiring a “runway collection” of similarly constructed earrings! Since I cannot reveal the pieces until after September 27th, I can only tease you with the pieces that I mention here that were the precedents to the final product and of course, the garden that I look at from my studio! Here's a "Summer Sail" piece in the teardrop shape.