rain, the queen, various art progress

It’s dark this morning with lightning flashes in the distance and thunder rumbling. The leopard frogs are barking but no rain so far. The dog is her usual mess but at least I’m not trying to sleep. I actually got a good night’s sleep last night. Only woke up once, maybe twice, and went right back to sleep.

Wednesday night my night blooming cereus, aka queen of the night, bloomed. I never get tired of photographing these.

I finally got out my watercolors again determined to paint the zucchini or move on after ignoring them for months and then put them away before the big yard and house clean up for the party. I did not think I would be able to satisfactorily render the zucchini but I’ve been working on it and it’s not so bad. I’ve been using my colored pencil drawing for a model rather than an actual zucchini of which I have two in the refrigerator because I really like the way the drawing came out and the ones in the fridge are just pretty much solid dark green. I can’t remember what I used as a model for the drawing, a picture or an actual zucchini. It’s not quite done, I’ll finish it today, so no picture yet.

Stephanie asked me at yoga last night how the note cards and prints were coming, that they have been getting a lot of people coming into the market asking if they had notecards or art. They did the final color corrections at the print shop and made up a proof set of the notecards for my approval but I haven’t seen them yet. Sarah has them and I’ll get them this weekend so we’re very close to having an actual product. I think I’ll frame the squash flower/zucchini painting and put it in the market and see if it sells. 

Well, the storm has moved directly over us now with the rain. It got darker and darker and now the lightning and thunder is just about constant.

Wednesday I made the tomato sauce. It’s pretty much a day long process. I started about 11 AM and prepared the tomatoes cutting out the stem part, peeled the garlic, coated it all with olive oil, picked the basil leaves, salt and pepper. Then they roast slowly for about 4 hours. Once the roasted tomatoes are cool enough to handle it all gets pureed/liquified and then put in small jars and vacuumed sealed bags for the freezer. I got 6 cups from about 6 pounds of tomatoes. This time I used half romas and half small regular tomatoes. 

Jade was here yesterday. She had just returned from 10 days in California nannying one of our nephew's kids. They live in Austin but have a summer house in California. They’re taking her with them on a cruise out of Greece this summer. Nice gig. She’s their part time nanny in Austin and the rest of the week she works at the animal shelter for the city. Anyway, she was here to pick up her car and spend the day yesterday. She went with me to SHARE for which I was glad as we were pretty busy and most all big orders. But her main reason for spending the day was to get my help dyeing a dress. She had a bridesmaid dress that was a dusky blue, a color I liked but she didn’t, and wanted to dye it either a dusky pink or brown. We tried the pink first with just really hot water out of the tap but it didn’t take on the synthetic fabric. So then we tried the brown on the stove using the candy thermometer to get the right temperature. The brown dye was specifically for polyester/nylon type fabric which the pink was not and it came out really nice, a sort of not quite mauve, not quite brown color. She wants to wear it to a wedding tonight so now it just needs to be ironed.

The rain is mostly stopped now though thunder is still rumbling in the distance.