CHAIRity Auction

I was recently asked to create a children's rocking chair for a rather unique auction to benefit Adoption: Advocacy and Alternatives. Their mission statement: To serve the needs of children, birth parents and adoptive parents with professional care, kindness and compassion. I was very honored to be asked to participate and this is my chair:

Pink is my favorite color so I knew from the beginning it would be pink. The rest took a while to come together. I had some great ideas but couldn't quite execute them so in the end I gave a nod to my French heritage:

The auction will be November 14th in Fort Collins at the Center for Fine Arts Photography and I understand the chairs will do a little traveling about town beforehand. If you would like to know more about the wonderful organization go to their website: www.adoptionaa.org.

Scary "60"

I turned 60 last Friday. It seemed like such a scary number. Especially since I've had a couple of health scares the last couple of weeks so I felt as if I really was getting old. My day actually started the week before when my son Jason and his beautiful wife Alecia gave me these lovely flowers...

The big day was an absolutely gorgeous, perfect Colorado late summer day. And the flowers kept coming. These were sent by my wonderful "Circle." These are women I cannot live my life without. They are a group of caring, giving, loving, creative, artistic souls who make me a better person.
Then my youngest son, Scottie, arrived with these beauties and a sweater I had been coveting!

I spent most of the day with three beautiful art friends in my art studio. My friend Caterina blogged about the day and you can see the pictures here. I was gifted with wonderful artistic treasures to feed my artistic soul.

Cavallini and lace:

Botanical images:

A Botanical Book of Days:

And a gorgeous handmade journal full of watercolor pages:

That evening my very beautiful daughter Stacey and her boyfriend James took us out to dinner at Vesta Dipping Grill in Lodo. The food was absolutely incredible and has to be one of my very favorite places in Denver. Scottie surprised us with a bottle of champagne to toast the number "60. " My "other" daughter, Christianna was there and so was Monica, who is also "family." (See my earlier post about "family and friends"). I had so many emails, text messages, facebook posts and phone calls full of happy birthday wishes that it was truly overwhelming. I spent the day feeling loved and cherished for just being me.

60 isn't so scary after all.