I Missed the Blog Party...!

Goodness!
I have received many comments from new people this week (THANK YOU!) and it only today came to me that I had signed up for Two Bags Full Blog Party!

How could I forget? I had a whole post in mind and whoops! A Senior Moment? A sudden trip to Paris? A new Love?

No, hardly--I had knee replacement surgery on January 10th. I was home on 1/13 and got sick from the pain pills and got better and exercised 3 times a day and had a VNA nurse in every day and a hospital person twice a week for blood draws, and suddenly, it's January 22nd! Well, excuses aside~

Welcome to Sherry's Rustique Gallery! I started blogging about 3 years ago and made many lovely friends around the world! Friends who have inspired me with their stories, their arts and crafts, their homes, their pictures and their wonderful attitudes!

I had no idea when I started blogging that I would find an art colony of my own. I am a bit of a rebel in my area, I don't paint scenery like so many people here do, but I call myself an artist. Several years ago I received a couple of old family albums. I didn't know who most of the people were, and the ones that were identified were very distant, mostly from the late 1800's. The smaller album was made by Aunt Hallie, in the early 1900's, with my Grandma and her sisters and brother and their friends in it. What fun that one was! They had lots of fun with their friends, camping, hiking, mugging for the camera, dressing up and down--all the things I never would have imagined. They had fun like us!

I started to make up stories about them and if I didn't know their names, I made them up. I collected old pictures at yard sales and antique shops. Pretty soon I had a line of cheeky, slightly twisted greeting cards. I digitally enhanced them or made them big and put them on backgrounds and told their stories, as I imagined. I've had a lot of fun with that and have morphed into what I call my "Slightly Twisted" collage art. I am dreaming up bigger and more original ones now. I hope to have a body of gallery-ready pieces in the next 6 months to a year.

About the same time as the collage discovery, I started taking digital pictures. My friend Trisha and I took a trip out west and we each took over 1200 pictures. I finally got up the guts to enlarge and print some of them on my large format Epson, and WOW! Many of them were really good. How fun it is to actually make big prints that you can frame, not just stick in an album and forget about! Most of my pictures in the past were boring and dull. With digital, I came into my own. I started bringing my camera everywhere. It is so beautiful in and around my little town in Western Massachusetts and everywhere I go I see beauty! I show my photos in local venues and sell them and their corresponding note cards at craft fairs.

So, you see, we are all artists! Whether we stitch up something sweet, grow a kitchen garden, design a room or put a pretty bottle in a sunny window, recycle tee shirts into rugs, take pictures or paint them, we are creative!

I remember my Aunt E. telling me she wasn't at all creative and she decorated her little house so cute I just loved it. My Mom made pretty flowered curtains in our unfinished house even though the walls were ugly old gray wall board. My Grandma's quilt scraps and button jars are as beautiful to me as any fine art.

Circle of friends

And this is what blogging is about for me, sharing the beauty that is around us. Opening ourselves up to new friends and new experiences. Telling stories we might otherwise just forget. Meeting and getting to know YOU!

Remember, it's a wonderful world!

Hugs,

Sherry