Tag Archives: bulletin board

Welcome Quack

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It’s that time once again!

You might be thinking it’s too soon! It can’t possibly be that time. But here in Tucson, school starts in August. To be completely accurate, it begins tomorrow, August 1.

I didn’t have any inspiration when I walked in the building, but I noticed that someone had chucked a perfectly good bit of fancy paper in the recycling bin. I am forever pulling things out of recycling, sometimes because they are not recyclable, and sometimes because they are reusable by me.

So I got started with the background and the lettering and this pretty foiled paper was just winking at me. Water…ducks…rain…pun. Voila! Plus we’re still inside the monsoon.

Took about 5½ hours total but I stopped for a lot of conversation. Also the air conditioning has been broken since last May and it was 84° in there, which slows you down. I had a lot of conversations about that.

Feeling Good

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Originally, I planned to create this bulletin board in January, as a tribute to the new year. I also planned for it to not be cold and cloudy all year. I also planned to make the letters very fancy and musical. As they say, life is what happens when you’re making other plans. We haven’t got much sun, but I did my best to summon it.

I didn’t put an attribution on this quote. I knew that neither Muse nor Michael Buble was the original author. For a while I thought it was Nina Simone, but it turns out that some people I never heard of wrote it in 1964, the year before Ms. Simone made her recording, and frankly their names (Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse) were long and I wanted to go home.

The whole thing is kind of slapdash but I’ve learned that if I try to make things perfect, I fail, but it I start out making things wabi-sabi, the finished product LOOKS perfect.

A Little Spark Bulletin Board

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Well I messed up the line spacing but otherwise this is fun and different.

Letters are hand cut based on the Holiday font. I think I might have actually used this one before. Simple shapes, easy to work with. The big spark is also hand cut, and the rest are drawn with metallic markers.

Always trying to find some light in the darkness.

Another Giant Sugar Skull

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I sort of want to keep working on this but it’s Friday and I like to leave school by 5….

This isn’t my first calavera bulletin board but this one is way better than the first one and after 12 years I guess it’s OK to repeat myself a little. But I really wish I could cover the whole thing with roses. And more dots and hearts on the skull. But sometimes you have to just say when.

It Is a Tree of Life

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I made this cute tree with 3-dimensional books for in interior bulletin board, so it should last a while. I’ve done a similar design in the past, but this time I cut the leaves out individually with the decorative scissors. The Girl (now 18, so a woman) was in town that week (she left town early in the pandemic) and she came and helped me make the books, which are just folded paper scraps and staples.

Back to School 108° Edition

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It’s a bit pared down but my hands are still in recovery mode from the feigned glass windows (ultimately a ~30-hour job) and also it was 108° outside, the breezeway, where this bulletin board hangs. I use metallic paint pens rather than staples, because it’s easier and that cork is getting destroyed.

it’s the back of a lion. The Lineweaver Lions go back to school Thursday, and I drew a lion’s back. That is the whole gimmick.

i also knocked together another simple design so there wouldn’t be an empty bulletin board right at the beginning of the tour on parents’ night, which I’ll put in a separate post.

Summer Starts NOW

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In all the world, there is no time or place like the Sonoran Desert in Summer.

I’m still slowly coming back from my COVID deficits, and haven’t been as productive as I like, but today was the last day of school, and I managed to put this one in in record time, probably only about 3 hours, mostly because the cactus and the bat are the only pieces I cut out of paper, and everything, including the spines on the cactus and all the details on the bat, are drawn with metallic markers, which really look pretty stunning against the black background.

The cactus, is, of course, a saguaro. The bat is a Mexican free-tailed bat, which summers here and gobbles up our local mosquitoes before heading back to Mexico when the temperature drops in the fall.

In hindsight, I realize I didn’t want to put stars in the part that is supposed to be the shadowed bit of the moon. Oh well. It’s not a scientific illustration, although I did make the bat look pretty true to form.

I have one other cool and timely thing to share, but I’m going to make a separate post for it.

How Do You Like to Go up in a Spring Bulletin Board?

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cut paper little girl swinging on a swing with Robert Louis Stevenson quote
I like it!

COVID knocked me down, but I am slowly getting up again. It took me a lot of weeks to make this bulletin board, because I got the long COVID and it slows me down. One week I cut out all the flowers, but it was a while before I got to the lettering, which took 2 days, and then the girl also took 2 days. And I still forgot to give her a second leg. In this picture I also forgot to glue her hair down. If it was, you would see that her hair beads are rainbow.I know I’ve done 2 Robert Louis Stevenson poems in a row, but they spoke to me.

Happy Halloween Season!

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The “G” in Gila is pronounced like an “H” in case you were wondering.

Hooray! Halloween! I’m definitely one of those people who believes the entire month of October is intended to build up to Halloween. In fact, I made this one at the end of September, and I think I did an excellent job of creating something that suited the entire autumn and can stick around until after All Souls’. I love how the entire design came out (even though I made mistakes with my own font) and may try to preserve it when I swap it out for my holiday design. I was thinking about making it all summer! If only I had also been thinking about all my fancy, patterned scissors, I could have save myself a lot of time cutting it out.

Gila monsters are venomous lizards, one of two venomous lizards that live in the region. They are not super interested in biting humans. In fact, The Man and I once attended a lecture about venomous reptiles of the Sonoran Desert, and the herpetologist delivering it asserted that there is a profile of the sort of person who gets bit by a Gila monster, and that nobody who doesn’t fit this profile ever turns up at the ER looking for help for Gila monster bites. The profile is thus: a young man, between the ages of 20 and 40, heavily tattooed, under the influence of alcohol. This tells you a lot about how dangerous Gila monsters are: not at all, unless you are the kind of idiot who gets drunk and harasses native fauna.

They literally have “monster” in the name. Why would you pick it up?

At any rate, their bite is only mildly neurotoxic and there are no recorded cases of death by Gila monster, although I gather it’s not exactly a fun experience either. I’ve lived here 17 years and never seen one in the wild.