sewing, arting, remembering, and more October skies

It’s been a busy few days starting with Thursday when I have to get up early, have my coffee and breakfast, showered and dressed and out the door before 9 am to get to SHARE. And busy at SHARE, not overwhelming but steadily refilling baskets with the appropriate amounts of an assortment of canned goods (meat, vegetables, beans, fruit, soup, ravioli, pasta sauce, tomato sauce), raman, crackers, mac and cheese, juice, spaghetti noodles, instant mashed potatoes, snack bars, and instant oatmeal. And that’s just part of what they get. The guys that fill the orders add rice, dried beans, snacks, drinks, cereal, milk, eggs, desserts, bread, fresh produce (depending on what gets donated that day), coffee (if we have it), meat, and other miscellaneous things. There is a shelf where people can select three items that has things like ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, peanut butter, salsa, cooking oil, flour, sugar, cake or pancake mix, miscellaneous donated canned goods, etc. Another shelf of personal hygiene items like soap, toothpaste, toothbrushes, shampoo, deodorant, etc, where they can select two things. The families we serve can only get the full complement of food once every three months but by law anyone who asks for food gets food from the very limited USDA list. We also provide clothing, sheets, blankets, pillows, appliances (one a year), and miscellaneous household goods like dinnerware, glasses, anything and everything that gets donated when people are clearing out a house.

Friday I finally started on making Paisleigh’s long skirt that she wanted because her Granny and her Gramma both wear long skirts sometimes, a simple gathered skirt with pockets. 

I got it gathered with the waistband sewn on and one pocket pinned on so when she and her dad dropped by that late afternoon I held it up to her to check the placement of the pockets which was fine except even though I measured her waist and added two inches, I wasn’t sure the waistband was big enough. Damn. So Saturday afternoon, I undid everything I had done Friday and sewed the pockets on (easier before gathering), regathered the skirt, and cut another longer by another two inches waistband and sewed it on, ran the elastic and finished except for hemming for which I need Paisleigh to get the length right.

Saturday morning I also had to be up early fed, dressed, and out the door before 9 am for the art journal workshop I had signed up for at Hesed House. The woman who was putting it on provided the mixed media sketchbook, paints, markers, glue, magazines, stencils, stickers, etc. She planned for us to do three pages each using different techniques. The first page was picking out an affirmation from a set of cards she had or some other thing like a favorite scripture and write it down with black permanent marker. Then we wet the page and just splotched watercolor on it letting it spread however. My first page:

The second page was going through the magazines and cutting out a word or words and pictures and doing a sort of collage in a horizontal format using the things cut out and decorative tape, stickers, colored markers, whatever. My second page:

The third page was picking out a stencil and using a sponge brush with acrylic paint (one color), picking a watercolor  color and painting a repeating shape (circle, square, rectangle), then use markers to draw on it, then pick out a smashed bottle cap (the point being to show how to include bits of trash) and glue that on (I didn’t want a bottle cap so I used a sticker), and finally to spritz diluted paint in spray bottles over the whole thing (I used a brown that was so diluted it’s hard to see). My third page:

Since we still had time, she showed us a fourth technique for making a background. Water soluble markers colored on a piece of foil, wet the page with water from a spray bottle, place the foil color side down onto the wet page and press it down transferring the color to the page. I intend to draw over it but time was up.

Sunday, we drove into the city for our friend Dick’s memorial gathering held in the event room in Kathy’s residential building. So many people we haven’t seen since the covid lockdown and the last open house, since Dick’s health started to fail and they worked in the studio less and less; the other artists who participated, other artists who worked in other media who always came, collectors who came every year to see what was new and to maybe buy, those who came who were neither artists nor collectors but friends and familiar faces. So many people we hadn’t seen in nearly six years and likely will never see again, too many other deaths reported of spouses and in one case a daughter, the community we had been a part of for 25 years. Dick and Kathy were the magnet that drew us all together.

And once again, more October skies, 13th - 15th, blue sky days.