Burying an"erosion bundle"...

Before I get to my latest art experiment, let me just say that I had a wonderful Mother's Day.  It was full of family, food, flowers, fun...and even though it doesn't start with an F...dessert!

There was Mast Brother's chocolate, a delicious vegan cheesecake from Cafe Gratitude (which I resisted the urge to sprinkle with candied bacon) and my favorite ice cream...David Lebovitz's "rum date pecan".  It's actually called "date...rum pecan"....but we're supposed to list the most plentiful ingredient in a dish first, right?  That would be rum.  Ahem.  Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!

Now, for the art.  

A friend of mine stumbled upon an artist named Carolyn Saxby who does "erosion bundles".  She collects odds and ends, stacks them up, wraps them in a cloth and deposits them in nature to let them age gracefully.   Some go in trees, some get dumped into boxes of trash, and others get buried in the compost.  Now, that's right up my alley for I believe that I have one of the gooiest, stinkiest, grub laden, worm infested compost heaps this side of Troost!  Or so I hope.

So here's what I did. 

I folded up muslin with bits of rusted metal and wire...tied it up with more wire, and trapped a piece of leather in there as well.

Around this bundle went a delicate cotton shrug that I found at a thrift store, and then more wire...more muslin, and a few sprinkles of black Assam tea.  (...and then more wire!)

The larger bundle has watercolor papers with a little wire sculpture trapped inside, a stack of papers, xeroxes of vintage ladies, book pages and other bits all wired up with an odd, square quilted piece I found at the thrift store.  The mini quilt was SO white...someone took great care of it...and then I wrapped it in steel, jumped up on down on it to make it flat and buried it in my garden!  C'est la vie.

Don't know why...felt like dunking them in the rainwater bucket before their burial.

Bye bye...have fun in that rotten straw bale...see you on July 6th, happy birthday to me...

Later bundle...hope you like rotten onions, egg shells and avocado pits...sleep tight, don't let the grubs bite.

And now I wait as my bundle gestates under 5 feet of compost...the right side awaits a friend's bundle...because this was her idea in the first place!  ;)

Poor ants...I put an extra project on their "to do list" today...

1.  Find safer place to keep 15,000 ant babies!

Mr. Nosy snail is watching them scramble...or maybe he's transporting victims of the earthquake...a friend in need is a friend indeed.