object #12, more progress, caterpillars,

Another installment in My Life in 100 Objects. At some point in my childhood, our parents gave my sister and me soft bodied clown dolls. Mine was in red, Pam’s in black. I don’t remember how old I was and I don’t remember being overly attached to it, I don’t remember dragging it around with me wherever I went but for some reason, I still have it. Of all the stuffed animals that lived on my bed, only the clown survived. Here he is, object #12, a little tattered having lost his felt hands and feet but still with me.

I’ve been working on the heron shadow box. I’ve glued the spacers to the backs of the heron and cattail pieces, I trimmed the background and glued it to a piece of foam core the same size and then to the cardboard that fits the entire opening in the back to hold the background in place but inside the box. Next is to glue the individual elements to the water background and when that dries slide the whole mess into the shadow box from the back and if my spacing worked out, the heron should be 1/4” from the glass.

I spent about an hour Wednesday futzing around with a piece of stainless steel wire. There was no way to support one of the cattails with a foam core spacer and even though the paintings are on a double thickness of watercolor paper, I was afraid that with time it might sag so I cut a length of wire, straightened it making sure it would lay flat (one tiny micro bend at a time and eventually a hammer). When I was satisfied with that I stuck one end of the wire in the foam core and glued the wire to the paper (on the right).

Now we’re going to play a game called ‘what color is that?’. Back in my river guide days two of the other guides would play this game, one would point at something and ask what color is that. Just plain red, blue, yellow, green, orange, purple would not suffice since there are many different variations of the six main colors of the color wheel. Forest green, aqua, burnt orange, fuschia, pink, marigold, etc. When I bought my new sheets I described the color as a soft sage green but now that the sheets are on my bed they don’t look that color at all. So what color is this? I know what color I think but I thought I’d throw it out there and see what the peeps think.

My sister had planted some pipevine and every year the pipevine swallowtail butterflies would lay eggs and the caterpillars would decimate it. I’d been seeing an occasional pipevine swallowtail over the summer

image from Florida Butterflies group on FB

and keeping my eye on the pipevine which to my dismay seemed to be completely ignored. Until yesterday when Paisleigh freaked out about some weird bugs. Turned out to be pipevine swallowtail caterpillars, must have been 30 or more swarming what was left of the pipevine. Very happy to see them.