simple.green.organic.happy.

Green living, playful parenting and the pursuit of happiness

Indian Summer

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indian summer grasshopper

A queer fellow and a jolly fellow is the grasshopper…

Braver, heartier, keener, care-free enjoyment of life
I have never seen or heard
in any creature great or small.

The life of this comic, the mountain’s merriest child,
seems to be made up of pure, condensed gaiety…

Nature in him seems to be snapping her fingers
in the face of all earthly dejection and melancholy
with a boyish hip-hip-hurrah.

-John Muir

Two-Striped Grasshopper, Melanoplus bivittatus. Big guy. Found in most of the US in meadowy locales.

Easy-peasy grasshopper identification guide here.

I’m spending as many moments as possible in the perfection going on outside.

Actual posting will happen later: when tired, dirty, happy, the quickening darkness forces me back inside.

Winter will be here before you know it…

Get out and play today!

_______________________________

 

Raw Color = Nature’s Colors

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raw color exhibition

Great art picks up where nature ends.

-Marc Chagall

vegetable color palette

With innovation and technology,
seems we have forgotten to cherish the true beauty
the world has to offer.

-A.C. Van Cherub

vegetable dyed textiles

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

vegetable color palette liquid

Nature is my medicine.  –

Sara Moss-Wolfe

Love this artistic exploration into the colors created by vegetables, distilled into different mediums like soap, Zout, alcohol. (Media, I guess is more correct, but I think something entirely different when I use that word. Invoking the ‘it’s my blog and I’ll write what I want to’ rule.)

The first two belong to an exhibit named RAW COLOR:

Vegetables are dismantled and purified to their visual essence ‘RAW COLOR’. The harvested color is captured by a new process preserving their intensity on color cards.

The third is the colors applied to textiles; the last an exhibit featuring the liquid palette.

I love how the colors all seem to be complementary and I can’t help but wonder if painting your house in these hues would create a sort of medicinal color therapy. The health and mood boosting effects of time spent in nature are well-documented; to what extent are those effects drawn from nature’s soothing yet energizing color palette?

Interesting ideas, and really I could get lost forever in all the different exhibits. Rather than me listing them all I suggest you go check them out for yourself (but please don’t miss the Sight Unseen Photos, they are awesome).

I need to paint my kitchen. And dining room. And… the whole house, really.

Where did you draw the inspiration for the colors of your home?

{via The Kitchn}