Summer is a-comin' in and winter's gone away-o

The title line is from an English folk song called "Hal-an-Tow."  It was part of a wonderful album I discovered in the early 1970s, called Frost and Fire: a calendar of ceremonial folk songs.  A family of Yorkshire singers called The Watersons recorded it in a London flat, with their raw, tight harmonies and little accompaniment... just as people had been singing those songs to mark the seasons for decades.  This particular song actually welcomes in the month of May, but I am welcoming (and I use the term loosely) the warmth of summer.

After dallying through a long and temperate springtime, Minneapolis has wandered into the sultry upper 80s, and is said to be flirting with the 90s. The house's AC doesn't really make its way to Studio E (the arts & crafts room upstairs... Winter has definitely "gone away-o.")

One solution this evening was to make a couple of cool and refreshing cards for OWH.  I imagine they'll look just as delightful when they arrive in Iraq or Afghanistan as they do to me tonight. 

I think I prefer the one with the simpler green background,  which is glossy card stock stamped and then "scrubbed" with a dye ink. The subtleties don't come through on this scan.

At the Minneapolis Home & Garden Expo this past weekend, John and I met a wonderful mosaic artist named Deirdre Hjelle, who does decorative floors, back splashes, table tops and many other delights with inlaid stone mosaic.  She showed us several places in her art where she had found the perfect use for a piece of stone or tile with particular charm or markings... for 7 or 8 years.  I knew exactly what she meant.  I save paper scraps like that, and the green stamped/scrubbed panel has probably been in my "stash" for 7 years.  I'm trusting that this daily creation routine will finally use some of those scraps to good advantage!