Orange tree love mug, inspired by this mug and this pencil holder.

Funky orange dotty bowl, inspired partly by this bowl.

These were both painted for Carole Axium, jewelry designer extraordinaire. I love Carole’s earrings (the pair in the bowl were made by her, actually) and was very flattered that she asked me to paint a mug and a bowl for her. Carole, they’re both in my shop when you’re ready to buy them!

Remember this tree mug I just blogged about recently? I painted it for Kerri, but wasn’t 100% happy with it because I didn’t think it was exactly what she wanted. So I tried again, and offered Kerri the choice. She chose my second attempt. The bottom of this mug says “for Kerri” on it, so I marked the price down. It’s on sale in my shop, if anyone wants it. If your name happens to be Kerri, so much the better.

I painted this colorful Gumball mug a few months ago. It’s one of my pay-it-forward gifts. I finally managed to ship it to Falwyn last week so I can post photos here without spoiling the surprise!

Falwyn, as you might know, is something of a Gumball enthusiast. And that’s an understatement. Naturally, I wanted to paint her a Gumball mug, but I wanted it to be unique. So I came up with the idea to fingerpaint a mug with all different colors, then use white puffy paint to outline a “ghost” Gumball.

I quite like how it turned out. I had a hard time letting go of it, I liked it so much! But I’m happy knowing that the mug now belongs to someone who will appreciate it.

It wasn’t until late this evening that I remembered I was supposed to pick two winners from the commenters on the previous post for the vanilla giveaway. Oops! Well, technically, it’s still May 1st. So I fired up the ol’ Random Integer Generator and asked for two integers between 1 and 58….

Ha! You didn’t think it was going to be that quick, did you? Before I tell you who won, I’ll tell you that we went to the Flower Fields yesterday with a whole bunch of friends. It was my first visit there and it was super fun for the kids and the adults. I would be writing about that and showing you all the photos, but I’m in the middle of learning how to use Photoshop on my new Mac, and it’s rather slow going. I am confident it’ll eventually be a piece of cake, much easier and better than editing in Paint Shop Pro as I’ve done for all these years. But I’d outgrown that program, and it’s not available on a Mac anyway. Which is probably half the reason I wanted a Mac, honestly, so I’d be forced to learn Photoshop. Kinda like how I wanted us to buy a stick-shift car so I would be forced to learn to drive one, which worked a treat. So I’m hopeful this will work the same way.

I’ll stop talking about computers and programs now before you nod off at your desk. Moving on to the vanilla winners!

Random.org tells me that the third and thirty-third commenters are the lucky winners. Amanda and Bekah, that means you! Congratulations, you two. I’ll get your prizes in the mail soon.

Thank you to everyone who commented! You all convinced me I should just reuse the old pots, lighten up about cleaning them, and let Annalie spray them out with the hose and maybe paint them if I’m feeling ambitious. You are a hard-working, environmentally-conscious, pro-child-labor, creative, persuasive bunch!

I’ve done a lot of container gardening over the years, mainly herbs. I have planted herbs directly in the ground a couple of times and that worked fine but I keep coming back to container gardening. I guess we are usually renting and are not at liberty to dig up part of the yard for a vegetable patch. But also, I just like it. Container gardening just seems more user-friendly, less intimidating.

I’ve been meaning to start an herb garden since the day we moved here. That was ten months ago. I’m not sure what took me so freaking long, unless it’s all that traveling we seem to keep doing. But that’s just an excuse. We have to have someone watch the cats for us when we travel anyway, while they’re here they can water the plants too.

So the other day when we went to the base exchange (which is like a big department store, or on larger bases like ours, several stores) to look at Macs, we stopped in the garden center on a whim and picked up herbs, some tomatoes, a cucumber plant, and a big ol’ bag of potting soil.

I’ve never had great luck with growing tomatoes, in pots or in the ground, but I keep trying because the only kind of tomatoes I truly love are garden-fresh ones. I still won’t eat them raw except in salsa fresca but oh what wonderful salsa fresca they make! The cucumber I bought because Annalie and I both love them. I remember when I was a kid and my dad went through his gardening years, we always seemed to have a brown paper bag full of freshly-picked cucumbers still warm from the sun sitting on the counter. They were smallish and sweet, with so few seeds I didn’t even have to cut them out like I usually do with larger store-bought cukes. Man, I could eat a dozen of those garden-fresh cucumbers in one sitting.

What I really love most, though, are the herbs. I love cooking with fresh herbs. I love being able to step outside, snip a few sprigs of thyme, then come back inside and make the most kickass salad dressing. I love being able to make a batch of fresh pesto to eat over pasta or add to soups or use as a sandwich spread. I love sending Annalie out with the scissors to get some rosemary that I can mince and add to the home-fried potatoes.

I don’t know what took me so long to get around to doing this. Now the only question is, should I be thrifty and scrub out a few of the old dirt-crusted terracotta pots we already own, or should I be lazy and go buy more cheap terracotta pots? Cast your vote in the comments. On May 1st I’ll randomly pick a commenter to win a bottle of homemade vanilla!

Edited to add: There have been 50 comments so far, way more than I was expecting! You guys have all given me some great advice—it never occurred to me to put Annalie to work, duh—so I will draw TWO names on Friday and give away TWO bottles of vanilla. Heck, if enough people comment, maybe I’ll give away three!