What's in Your Fridge and What We had for Dinner

Artists for the Evening :

Joan, Donna, Rita, Jen, Robin, Melanie, Lauren, Gina, Naty
 

Menu :

Joan made pasta and roasted vegetables, escarole & beans, and glazed carrots.  Delicious!

Donna brought homemade gnocchi with pesto and sautéed tomatoes.  Scrumptious!

And for dessert … Greek cookies shaped like faces … one of Joan’s amazing creations.

While Joan bustled around her great vintage kitchen, the Wine Art Girls were treated to an electronic tour of Dubai and the Philippines.  Jen having just returned from there had cool pictures and fun stories about a smelly fruit called durian.  There were a few present that had had the fruit before and the descriptions ranged from: it smells like rotting flesh … no, it just smells like rotting garbage … to … oh, it doesn’t smell THAT bad!   And besides, once you get beyond the smell, it tastes really good.  I dunno.

During dinner Lauren talked about a great website: supercook.com where you can enter the ingredients you have on hand and it will suggest recipes that include just those ingredients

We also talked about Pinterest - brilliant for making mood boards and general imagery collections.  Careful, it will affect your shopping habits – as you become much more picky and expect everything to look just as beautiful.  (Oh, and also great for recipes, DIY tricks, and clever household/beauty fixes!)  Here's a few screenshots from Alex:

(new posts from people she is following)

(one of her boards; "Adventurage")

(a few of her boards...see, addicting)

Then Gina breezed in – having battled parkway traffic from Stamford to Cheshire – and she was sporting a gorgeous pair of dangly pearl earrings made by our favorite local jewelry designer “Lita Designs”.  Check out her shop on Etsy: LitaDesigns.

The conversation swung from classy earrings to squirrel problems.  As Joan as had one living in her basement for almost a week and just today Naty and her wielded brooms and rubber boots to try to scare it out (well, really Joan had to cook for WAW and needed to get to the basement fridge – Naty, you truly are a great friend!)…I digress.  After screaming for five minutes and running around the basement, they soon realized that it was actually just in the have-a-heart trap trying to get out – hahaha.  Joan’s husband was going to release it in a park the next morning.  Mission accomplished!

We discussed what to do with old brushes.  

Source: google.com via Lillygrace on Pinterest

All artists have them – they are mangy, hard, nasty, scruffy looking things and what are we supposed to do with them??  You can’t just throw them away.  Well…you should make little sculptures out of them.  Construct a face out of a molding material and affix it to the ferrule so that the bristles become the hair of the figure.

Jen did a painting of a durian and then kidded about how fun it would be to have a scratch & sniff painting.

We talked a lot about the business end of WAW … how we can keep this phenomenal concept going and still get the little jobs done that are required to run an Etsy shop and Blog, plus all the backend administration like shipping and budgeting.  It’s easy to cook great food, get together with terrific friends, and then spend the evening painting, talking, figuring out life, and laughing together.  But there are the little behind-the-scenes jobs that keep the heart of WAW beating and we’re trying to work out the bugs so that we can bring delightful paintings and a fun blog to our faithful followers.

I talked about a wonderful, life-changing book (yes, worth it!) which has been published by one of WAW’s most generous supporters.  The book is called “The Game of Life and How To Play It”.

Its underlying theme is maintaining a positive outlook on life and believing that the “good” in life will happen.  Truly a gem of a book.

So we finished the evening with a number of successful paintings, a bit of wine missing from each bottle, laughter, conversation, and a sense of well being.  Food, Art & Friends … now how great is that?

<3 Rita