A creative confluence
Tuesday Tumbleweed finds inspiration from nature, art, design and innovation
Tibora Bea Girczyc-Blum was set to start a new job in the marketing department of an international company this spring. Then, the coronavirus pandemic hit and that business put a hiring freeze in place, which happened to start the same day she was supposed to show up for work.
Instead of letting the anxiety of being out of a job take hold, GirczycBlum decided to pour her energy into bringing some of her ideas to fruition. She founded Tuesday Tumbleweed, a creative confluence focusing on collaborations, events and project development inspired by design, art, the natural world and innovation.
The idea for Tuesday Tumbleweed had been “marinating on the back burner of my mind for a while,” said Girczyc-Blum, who co-founded SCRAP Humboldt back in 2012.
“Bad timing can still mean good things and, after years of developing these ideas and collaborating on projects, I decided to officially branch out and develop some of these notions further,” Girczyc-Blum said in an email interview with the Times-Standard.
“The name,” she said, “came from the fact that tumbleweeds are designed to roll about with the wind as a way to sew their seeds. … I find nature to be the ultimate and most inspiring designer. I also think of the projects and ideas that are happening under Tuesday Tumbleweed as also being little seeds that may tumble through the world via the internet or the real world that might stumble across someone and stick and start to grow.”
Tuesday Tumbleweed — whose mission is to use creativity as the lens and approach to problems, ideas and projects — recently was named an artist in residence at Arcata Playhouse. Currently, it has several projects underway, including the Togetherness Project, Poetry in Public and Craft in Place.
The Togetherness Project — which aims to unite the community by sharing a message of unification through art — is a collaboration between artist Anna Oneglia, Arcata Playhouse and Tuesday Tumbleweed. Through this project, people are invited to display a postcard designed by Oneglia in the front window of their home or business as a symbol of connection. The postcard features California imagery of the state bird (quail) and state flower (poppy) and says, “Alone Together.” To participate, visit www.arcataplayhouse.org/ togetherness-project, donate $3 and Arcata Playhouse will mail out two postcards — one for you and one for a friend. Proceeds from postcard sales benefit Arcata House Partnership. Posters can also be downloaded for free at https:// tuesdaytumbleweed.com.
“The Togetherness Project was born from the shelter-in-place order,” GirczycBlum said. “All of the things I love had come to a grinding halt and I was in shock and in need to find a way to connect. … I had seen people putting teddy bears or rainbow hearts in windows, and decided to create a postcard that could be hung in people’s windows as a symbolic act of solidarity, connection. Anna was selected as the artist, because through this SIP (shelter-inplace) order, we met and realized we were neighbors. I love her work and was so excited to collaborate with her.”
Poetry in Public began as a way to take over empty storefront windows of vacant or closed businesses, Girczyc-Blum said.
“Local poet Jacqueline Suskin volunteered her poems to be installed in the new Shipwreck on the Arcata Plaza before they opened,” Girczyc-Blum said. “The poems were selected to be uplifting and inspiring. I also approached the Co-op in Arcata, and we installed poems curated by Eureka’s poet Laureate David Holper on their events board, which was also left empty by the pandemic. There are now poems hung up at Movewell, Dead Reckoning Tavern, Arcata Liquors, Blondies Food & Drink, Foodwise and All Under Heaven. Some poems are written by local writers, some are by famous ones.”
A third project, Craft in Place, is a collaborative effort between SCRAP Humboldt, Tuesday Tumbleweed and Pen+Pine. It offers a variety of projects online designed to inspire people to make things with simple materials and explore their imaginations.
“As the founder of SCRAP Humboldt, of which I now sit on the board of the national organization, we received a check in the mail from Humboldt Sponsors for the summer camps that were just canceled,” GirczycBlum said. “I saw an opportunity to develop an online educational programming for at-home students/parents/teachers that utilized materials that people didn’t have to go out and buy, but could make while sheltering in place. I called Jenna of Pen+Pine and we created CIP. All of the lesson plans are available online for free, and all of the materials needed are ones that could be found in your home recycling bin. The idea was that we wanted people to get creative and engage with everyday materials in a simple and fun way.”
To learn more about Tuesday Tumbleweed and its projects, go to https:// tuesdaytumbleweed.com. For more information about Pen+Pine, visit https://www. penandpine.com. For more information about Arcata Playhouse, go to https:// www.arcataplayhouse.org. For more information about SCRAP Humboldt, visit https://humboldt.scrapcreativereuse.org.
“I find nature to be the ultimate and most inspiring designer. I also think of the projects and ideas that are happening under Tuesday Tumbleweed as also being little seeds that may tumble through the world via the internet or the real world that might stumble across someone and stick and start to grow.” — Tibora Bea Girczyc-Blum, founder of Tuesday Tumbleweed