May 31 work in progress

Yeah, you might want to cue the Mission Impossible music, but I'm not giving up yet!

I only had about 4 hours to work on art today, as I spent much of the day visiting my former roommate K. That was fun, I enjoyed catching up and photographing her cats. Perhaps not a wise thing to do when under pressure to finish art but these invitations don't come around too often (tee hee, I am poking fun at her because I know she reads one of these blogs...) ;-)

So tomorrow it'll be all scrimshaw all the time. Staples, duct tape, rope, staying up all night, whatever it takes to keep me in that chair.

May 30 work in progress

My car is back with several new hoses.

Y'all ready for that I-5 closure? That's practically all they talk about on the news and in the paper lately. It's gonna be a mess. I'm glad I don't have to go through there much, but it'll bugger up the airport trips a bit.

We've been trying to remove tarweed from the pastures. This seems an exercise in futility, there's just SO much of it. It ought to be disced and replanted, or at least scraped, but that's just not fea$ible. Hence two people with shovels, and acres of tarweed. A lot of things seem futile right now. Bleh. :-(

I was left with instructions this morning to make a pie. Cripes. I'm all about baking but I'm soooo rushed right now it wasn't real high on my list of things to be thrilled about today. I did it anyway. You know what one of my favorite things is about pie? The leftover dough from the crust. Not that pie crust dough tastes good (it's kinda gross on its own I think) but it makes lovely mini cinnamon rolls. These things are highly addictive, like it's tempting to make a HUGE batch of them out of a whole recipe of pie crust dough (actually that's not a half bad idea if I ever need to make finger food sweets for a big crowd, hmm).


And then the artwork (here we go on the futile subject again). Obviously I hadn't worked on the scrim at all recently. It's slow going, more so than some others because this is a very hard piece of ivory. It's interesting to me how variable the ivory is, but I guess that's like some people have hard fingernails and others don't. So this has to be done by Monday afternoon if I'm going to enter it. A few hours tomorrow, all day Sunday, can I finish Monday? I really don't know but I'm sure going to try!


"Sunday Morning"
scrimshaw on pre-ban ivory piano key
7/8 by 1-7/8 inches

stuck in Lodi again

*SIGH*

There were two alternate titles for this post. One was "it's always something" and the other was "@#$&!!!" And though I've never been stuck in Lodi before, I couldn't resist the chosen title.

So tonight was dance class as always, but we had to be there in full costume tonight (the outfit, the hair, the flowers, the makeup, you name it) because a professional photographer was there to shoot some stuff for publicity shots. (Normally I don't get too dressed up for class, maybe a skirt and t-shirt).

Anyway, "A+" and I were about a mile from our destination when I simultaneously caught a whiff of coolant, noticed my car running hot, and heard the fan working extra hard. Oh dread, this is familiar. Made it to class, popped the hood, and sure enough there's coolant sprayed everywhere. Great. I guess the nice thing is I manage to stay pretty calm and collected about these cars things now, it's like "here we go again."

I called my mechanic and asked for some suggestions and he said it would be pretty risky to drive back home even if I filled the radiator with water and stopped along the way. And after the car cooled off a little bit a husband of one of the other dancers took a look and found a gaping hole in one hose, so yeah that wouldn't hold liquid anyway. *sigh*

So I called and arranged to get towed back to Wilton.

And remember how last time I got towed I said I was thankful I wasn't in costume? Yeah well this time I was. That was a little embarrassing, but at least I can thank goodness we made it to class and weren't stranded by the side of the road. It could always be a lot worse.

Anyway, I missed a lot of class while outside on the phone but I got in some of the pictures. I'm sure I look pretty grumpy though. I am. Nothing like the second time seeing my car get towed.

Maybe it's time to start buying lottery tickets.

Did I mention I have a lot of art at greatly reduced prices for a limited time? ;-)

I could get pretty sappy mopey here right now, so I'll just leave it at that. The Chicken Lady needs a hug. *sigh*

Big drawing done!

"Thankful"
19 by 27 inches
graphite and charcoal on velour paper
to be entered in the Draft Horse Classic art show (price TBD)

:-)!

May 27 work in progress

This is pretty much done. I'll see if I agree with that statement tomorrow, and sign it, and take a good photograph in daylight that's not distorted by me having to stand on tiptoes and hold the camera up high to get the whole thing in the frame. I'm *REALLY* happy with it! :-) I think I said this when I did the Jessie portrait in graphite but dang I've missed working in graphite. And velour, yummy, love this paper! It wouldn't be good for everything, but for this it's perfect. It does function just like velvet when it comes to picking up cat hair though. Geez, I can see that I'm going to have to go at it with a tweezers before I frame it! And that's just from Olin sitting in my drafting chair next to it! More people need to commission graphite work, I'm diggin it. There must be some people out there with neutral colored animals that need portraits. ;-)


And just to give you an idea of the size:

So I was trying to figure out exactly when I need to mail the entries (this piece is going to be entered in Draft Horse Classic) and I noticed the entry form doesn't say received June 2, it says postmarked June 2. Sweet cupcakes, that made my day!! They normally have a "due" date and not a postmarked day, so that's super duper. That gives me a couple days to duct tape myself to the microscope and bust my butt to get that scrimshaw done. Oh that would be so nice to enter both, I'd really have both ends of the spectrum in terms of size of artwork. It's going to be a very busy week. Actually, pretty much the whole month is going to be nuts. As soon as I get this stuff done, hmm, well I need to get the second rooster portrait done! And if there's any way I can pull it off I need to finish (and start!) both the elk tooth scrim and the bear cub scrim ASAP.

Must. Focus.

strawberry jam!

Okay, there are 29 jars of jam in the kitchen! Whew! That fills the orders thus far and leaves a few extra for immediate shipment or pick-up if anyone's interested. And I'm happy to make more, it's kinda fun. :-) I know the shipping is a lot, but they're heavy! There's really no way around that. So whether you want one jar or six, it's all the same, I'm shipping them priority flat rate.

$6 per half-pint jar
$12 shipping for up to 6 jars (this is how many I can fit in a box, feel free to order more than one shipment)

May 25 work in progress

Art for Sale! Don't miss your chance!

UPDATE JULY 2008: The sale is done now, thanks to those who participated! Maybe I'll do it again next year. :-)

May 23 work in progress

Why was I thinking it's May 24th? Hmm, I think I mis-dated a few items today, like the filenames of my images. Oops.

Anyway, here's the big drawing as of tonight. Just needs the background (eek!) and maybe a little tweaking of some shadows.



If you're wondering about the little horse scrimshaw, I have not been working on it. I need to mail off my entries by the middle of next week and decided it would be better to really focus on doing the best I can do with one, rather than giving two of them not enough attention. (Is that profound or what). If I can I will still do the scrim but it's not looking too certain.

It was a real Betty Crocker day here. I started the ice cream cake this morning, then made one batch of strawberry jam (probably going to take two more to fill all the orders so far, hey keep em coming if you want jam!). And then I had a couple baskets of strawberries leftover so I made strawberry kuchen for dessert. Took forever and a day to bake but it's quite good. :-)

Slaving over the hot stove... :-)

As yummy as it is pretty. You know you want some. ;-)

May 21 work in progress

Happy Birthday LP (yesterday) and Happy Birthday LP (today)! Good thing you both want the same kind of cake. ;-)

I'm really happy with how this drawing is coming along. Velour paper is so interesting.