yew tree, ants, birds, and a little art

If anyone thinks it's a good idea to build a deck under a mature yew tree that shades 90% of it, let me tell you it's a bad idea. It's not just that it sheds beaucoup skinny little leaves but it also drops thousands of blue berries with the pink gooey shit on them that then stick to the deck, the ones that don't get gummed up in the spaces between the deck boards that is along with the leaves. 

Add in the baby acorns that the overhanging oak has been dropping and it's a royal mess. The leaf blower isn't very effective on the berries because they are stuck to the deck. I love the deck. I love the yew tree, just don't like them together. I'm wondering if I can hang one of those shade wings somehow to catch the berries at least.

Sunday I got out there first thing and thoroughly watered the little backyard and then I pulled the garden cart across the street and emptied it on the burn pile. I've been needing to do that for weeks but it's always in the middle of the day when I think about it. I got as far as the edge of the shade the other day, about 20' from the street on my side, took one step into the sun and nope, no, not doing that now.

I'm trying to be a little more productive so Saturday I managed to get the lower half of the house vacuumed and today, half the upper house so far. Baby steps people. Plus I fixed blueberry pecan pancakes for breakfast this morning.

I did get the rest of the upper house vacuumed on Sunday and cleaned both toilets, yay me, but I am being plagued with fire ants...again. Not inside though, well almost not inside. First the last week some of the fire ants have resurfaced but not so you can see them in the grass that's a little high (we're not mowing because it's really not growing and provides shade for the roots, any grass or weeds in the sun is already brown and crunchy) where I stand when watering the flower beds and I keep inadvertently stepping right there not noticing until they are biting me!

Second, when I opened the garage yesterday morning to let the dog out and go (three guesses) water they had invaded the garage...under the mats, under the boxes of recyclables, a trail leading all the way across the garage. Hauled out all the boxes, flipped over the outside row of mats and went after them with the orange oil spray (it's sold as an air freshener but I use it as an ant killer). No sign of them today.

Third, there were fire ants in my bed last night! Not many but what the fuck were they doing in my bed, how the fuck did they get in my freaking bed! Saw one when I was smoothing out the sheets (because laying on a wrinkle is like laying on a log) and killed it. Turned out the light and laid down and before I fell asleep I felt something crawling on my neck. Killed it and searched for more. Laid back down and one bit me on the back. Really!? Repeat and one bit me on the shoulder. Turned on the light, killed one crawling on the wall, pulled the bed away from the wall and killed three or four more traveling along the baseboard, examined the sheets and pillows, examined the whole room but didn't see anymore, laid there for another half hour with the light, looked around again and finally turned the light off and went to sleep without further mishap.

Sitting here in the mornings watching the birds at the bird feeder. Lots of pitched battles in the air. There's a flock of juvenile cardinals that hang out, 7, 8, of them. Hard to count. They're starting to get their adult coloring, the males looking downright mangy while they make the transition. The chickadees and titmice come and go with their kamikaze hits but there's another kind of little brown bird that won't tolerate others of its kind. Not sparrows I don't think, smaller heads, more slender bodies, maybe a vireo or pine siskin but I've never definitely identified either of those here.

I heard from the gallery after I sent the pictures and she's asking for this one

which is the companion piece for the one I sent in 2021. It's been hanging on my wall so once I pack it up I'll hang the three older magnolia pieces there.

As if the past 6 weeks or however long it's been hasn't bad enough, the next two weeks are going to be even hotter and still no rain.

 

done

I think it's finished. It is, it's finished, I'm not doing anything else to it. I made two minor adjustments today, one to the coral on the top, removing a small piece to create a little negative space and changed the paint on the purple coral of the inlay from gray to white to match the other two.

Straight on view.

Slightly elevated looking down.

Inside.

redesign, treason, and finally!

The days are getting away from me, I've fallen out of pocket. AWOL from reading blogs but I'll be back. Right now I'm trying to finish the box and the book I'm reading before the one next in line has to be returned to the library.

Well, here at the end I'm completely changing my mind about the top to the coral reef box. I've never been completely happy with the small corals on the top. I think it's the difference in scale that bothers me so much especially now that the feet are attached and still don't like the rock bases I built them on. So now that my coral pieces have come I'm reverting to my original vision which was coral pieces on the top. So what am I going to do with the little glass pieces I made? I could put them inside. I can arrange the five corals to fit snugly on the bottom inside. I could glue them in place but then no one would ever see them unless they took the top off and looked. Or I could not glue them in and if there is a buyer, they can decide whether to leave them in the box or take them out. Or I could just keep them for some future project. The little crab may or may not still be nestled among the broken coral pieces on the top. Also not real happy with the inlay, I should have done some shading with the colors, and the feet are so stark, may have to employ some oil paint. At any rate, the next picture I post is going to be very different.

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“Presidential Alert”, “Urgent Alert”, “Action Needed”, “News Alert”, “Poll Update”, “Breaking News”, etc. I'm being inundated with political emails asking for money which have been increasing the closer we get to the mid-terms. I've been getting 12 - 15 a day, maybe more, via two email accounts and text messages lately. I've gotten on these lists because I will occasionally sign a petition even though I know those things don't really do any good or a request to answer a survey or do you support President Biden and his agenda, etc. If you reply to any of these emails or texts it sends you to a site requesting a donation. Just $5! Just $3, can you give $3? Being on a limited income, we don't send money to politicians, when we donate money it's to organizations like the ACLU or Planned Parenthood. If I was to give even $3 to everyone that asked on a particular day, say 10, that's $30 a day, $210 a week. Now I'm getting emails to 'activate' my membership in the Democratic party. Apparently someone noticed I'm not registered as a Democrat. My affiliation is as an Independent and I plan to keep it that way even though I don't vote Republican.

The good news is that the media and pundits are no longer assuming a GOP takeover of the House and Senate. The demise of Roe, the J6 hearings, and now the revelations that Trump is being investigated for espionage if not treason and has undermined our national security, very possibly being the reason so many of our spies and covert agents have been killed or captured or compromised in the months during which Trump had possession of those confidential and top secret documents that he kept unsecured and, we know now, that boxes of those documents traveled with him to other nations, even those of our adversaries. How many copies has he made and sold? How many copies does he still have hidden away? And he may very well have been sharing them as president. Still the GOP, the MAGA Republicans, support him. Add to that the Biden administration's success in passing legislation that benefits the country and middle and working class Americans instead of the 2% and corporations, legislation that the majority of Americans are in favor of, and Republicans voted against nearly 100% and are still blocking legislation that Americans want. Perhaps the majority has had enough.

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If you've been following me for anytime at all you know I have a Dresden porcelain chandelier. It was in my parent's bedroom growing up and I claimed it after my dad died and my mother moved to Washington state to live with my brother. I hung it above my dining room table in the Houston house with its 10' ceilings. We sold that house 8 years ago and it's been hanging under a 6' ladder for all that time. I only have 8' ceilings here and I was afraid that it would hang too low over the table here. Well, believe it or not I finally got it hung. I had Rocky hang it in the dark corner of the big workroom/studio in the house. Now I have to remember where I put the little flame shaped light bulbs for safe keeping. If I can't find them then I have to go to a light bulb store because the base needed is the same as for those little night light bulbs.

I think today I'm going to have to take the trimmer for a spin. The little backyard is woefully overgrown, it was overgrown before but just shot up after all that rain, as well as the edges of all the flower beds. The tall grass and weeds are excellent cover for the mosquitoes that also liked all that rain.

 

getting there

That rain Friday and a short burst on Saturday brought us some cooler temperatures, a few days in the low 90s and this week highs in the high 80s! Still humid though and more rain predicted. One thing about the no rain and high temps, we haven't had mosquitoes at all this summer. That may be about to change though since we got more rain last night and this morning.

I headed over to the shop Sunday after our late morning breakfast/brunch. We skip lunch on Sundays since we eat our first meal so late and then have an early dinner. What that means is that I have a large block of uninterrupted time to work. My goal for the day was to fit the inlay of coral on the front of the box. It took about 4 hours but I got it done faster than I thought it would take with that curvy undulating edge. I eventually had to go get a lamp and my 200% magnifier glasses to get the last bit of fine tuning done switching out to smaller and smaller diamond grinding bits. Look close to see where it's hanging up, grind the spot for a second, check the fit, pick another spot, grind for a second, check the fit, over and over. Now I have to pare down the sides and bottom of the inlay so it's flush with the sides and bottom of the box. You might remember I made it a little larger to ensure that it would be the right size. I probably didn't need to do that, just made more work for myself. Once that's done then I can fit the feet, polish the box and whatever else needs it. Really getting close now.

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I didn't get over there at all on Monday. Since I had to get cat food I went ahead and did the week's grocery run instead. Yesterday I did a little more fine tuning on the inlay and pared down the sides and bottom so they are now flush with the sides and bottom of the box and started on fitting the feet starting with the two in the back. One is done, the second perhaps is acceptable. I've decided I'm not quite happy with the top, I'd like to see some extending over the side edges so with that in mind, too late to make a wax model of something I don't have a clear image of and cast it so I'm going to sort through my bag of coral pieces when it gets here and see if I can incorporate some of those. If not, well, then it will be as is.

I think these will be the last pictures until it's completely finished.

 

what I do with my days, the stray, and pink things

Well, it's been 6 days since I last posted but nothing is happening, nothing changes. I spend the time between breakfast and lunch over at the studio filling molds except for Tuesdays and Thursdays when I'm either doing the week's grocery shop or I'm at SHARE. After lunch we spend the hot afternoons binge watching streaming shows. Then it's walk the dog, though we skipped three days in a row because even at 6:30 it was just too hot still to go out, and fix dinner.

Currently we're watching The Boys. We're enjoying it but I don't recommend it if you are sensitive to gore. Almost the very first scene in the very first episode a body explodes into meat grinder mush raining down. They really like this CGI effect and use it a lot. I guess it helps that our TV is small, only 32”. Anyway, it's about a group of people who were 'born' super, 'supes', though it turns out they were made as babies. All their powers are different and/or similar, some dangerous, some just dumb and not really useful, backed by a giant wealthy sinister corporation that manages them, their PR, sends them on missions only there's a lot of collateral damage. They're not all bad but really there's no way to control the most powerful ones and Homelander (think Superman) is the most powerful, mentally unstable, and dangerous of them all. And then there's an underground group of regular humans, if you consider criminals regular, that has pledged to take them out, to undo them with or without government help. Anyway, the plot lines and characters are really good if you can get past the gore. We started season 3 yesterday.

So far I've filled the 6 coral molds, the five I'll use and the extra. The last one I did though I may empty out and redo the volume measure because I'm not sure it's correct for boring reasons I won't go into here.

What else. We've gotten three little rain showers the past week, probably less than an inch all told or just over so not nearly enough. I thought I had found the owner of the little calico or 'tortie' as they are calling her. I posted her picture on a lost and found pet page on FB for the area and a woman responded that it was her cat, they had moved to Houston, had been back a couple of times to find her. I asked where she had lived and she replied with a street that is at least three miles away and here is a woman you can check with to verify. So I had a mutual friend check with the woman who says it's not the same cat. There's more to the story that I'm not going to post here that convinces me beside the fact that I don't think this little cat traveled three miles to my house. I had another lead on a possible owner from the woman who claimed the kitty as hers, saying that the only other cat like this was at a house at an intersection of two streets much nearer to me. So today I stopped there, picked one of the four houses at random and knocked on the door. Are you missing a cat, this cat, and showed them a picture. And yes they were missing this cat but it had run off twice (got it back the first time) and so if I wanted her that was OK because the woman felt like the cat didn't want to stay with them. We talked at length, yes it had on a collar but she couldn't remember what color it was and yes, no tag, yes it is young, less than a year. I'm convinced this is the owner. I gave her my phone number and address if she wanted to come by and have a look. The kitty's name is Lily. So I guess she's mine if I want.

Lots of pink things are blooming...the begonia, the plumerias, the rock rose, the phlox...

 

the newest work

Thank you all for all the kind words about my little show off. Looking at all that past work I feel like I had a better grasp of color and the technique in general then than I do now. Or maybe it's that nearly two year break I took.

I'm just not happy with the Luna moth piece. Beside that big clear spot behind the caterpillar that I managed to only partially allay by using a diamond bit to rough it up on the back and then spot paint with white, the only color I think I got right was the pink in the wings. The moth is just too blue. It was a combination of juniper blue and spruce green equal parts when I should have used maybe 1 part blue to 2 parts green. And it's too pale, needed a much thicker layer of color. And I'm not that happy about the color of the leaves either. I used a mix of a lot of different greens, leftover frit from previous castings that I label 'miscellaneous green'. The intensity of the color is good, just too speckled. I'm unhappy enough that I'm thinking I might try it again which would entail making the model again. We'll see how I feel after I do the next two models in the queue.

Anyway, here's a quick snapshot I took and it looks fine I guess except for all the things I don't like about it. Glass only approx. 7"w x  8"h.

And I decided not to try and take a new round of pictures of the trumpet flower pieces. I just don't have a good setup for wall work and these are good enough for my purposes, to document the work, though probably not for professional use. I've only had a few pieces professionally photographed with the right lights and backgrounds because it's expensive. They take awesome photos but just not in my budget. So here they are framed and I'm not completely happy with that though my brother made them to my specifications. Too much black, should have only had about ⅛" of space around the glass instead of ¾" between the glass and the frame. Guess I'm feeling very critical today. I'll start packing them tomorrow to send to the gallery. Glass only approx. 5"w x 8"h.

Now comes the hard part which is trying to determine a price. Calculate the cost of materials, guess at the number of hours and come up with an amount I'd like to get for it, come up with the least amount I'll take for it and double those numbers (remember, I only get half what the gallery sells it for), get input from the gallery and try to find a happy medium. Most people don't know this technique and have no idea how much time and skill is involved to justify the price but I'm not willing to low ball my work just for a quick sale, not right away anyway.

I'm staying out of the shop today, planning on seeing the baby whom I haven't seen in at least 3 weeks. 

a few favorites

Robin of The New Dharma Bums asked if I had any favorites of all the work I've done and the answer is yes so I thought I'd do a post of some of my favorites. There's quite a few actually. Most of my boxes, several of the cups, several small sculptures. I was planning on finishing the luna moth piece today, well, the cold work as I intend to use some oil paint to add a few tiny details I couldn't do in the glass, but it turned cold again Thursday night and thankfully it stayed above freezing but it never got out of the 40˚s out there and no heat in the shop so I worked on this post instead.

Here's a general overview of the evolution of my work in this technique. I started out doing small sculpted bowls 6”w x 3”h x 6”d. We made a reproduction mold of each design so I could pull duplicate waxes. By the time I tired of doing them I had 11 different designs with the intention of doing 25 of each but in different color palettes. Some only had a few made as they didn't prove to be good sellers, some I got about halfway through, and some I completed before I put them all aside to do different, one of a kind work. Next came the tall vases and larger bowls but after a few successes the failure rate finally made me abandon vessels. After that I did the cups until I ran out of ideas for that series. Then I started on the boxes completing the last one in 2019 and those may have run their course as well as I don't have an idea for a new one right now, well, I do but we'll see if I pursue it. I also started doing small botanical sculptures during this time eventually moving to framed pieces for the wall or in stands which is where I am now. Those include the Botanica Erotica series and the Drowned Feather series neither of which has resulted in any sales save two. These bodies of work were not necessarily sequential as I would work on one series or another as I was inspired and then there are the individual pieces that don't fit into any series.

So here's a few of my favorites. This is the first design I did for the small bowls, 6" x 3"x 6".

There were 14 vases, 6” tall. 

I did 12 in the Cup series, about 4" x 4" x 4".

I've done 12 boxes and it was hard to pick just these two because I really like just about all of them. The heron box is the most recently completed and by far the most ambitious; 8.5" x 9" x 4.5". Bee box 5" x 5" x 4".

Small sculptures, first two images longest dimension 4"; last image about 6" x 8" excluding the stand.

For the wall, 1st picture 4 of the Botanica Erotica series (19 pieces), 4.5" x 4.5" x 1.5" and 6.5" x 6'5" x 1.5". The Robin is 6" x 6".

The Drowned Feathers (10 pieces), top 11" x 11", bottom long dimension 4".

And of course, my newest work is the trumpet flower pieces which you've seen and the luna moth which isn't finished yet. If you are interested in seeing a larger body of work after this, you can visit my Pinterest page. I have a website that is woefully out of date but the link is on my sidebar. I do need to update it soon. 

it's been a day y'all

As mentioned, the AC was repaired Friday and Saturday morning we turned it off. Our second cool almost cold front came through Friday night and it was downright chilly outside Saturday morning. It warmed up of course and we still wore our t-shirts and shorts. This morning, Sunday, at 8:30 it's 51˚ out there and the house has cooled off and I'm almost ready for a long sleeved shirt but it's going to hit the mid 70s later.

I started the finish work on the trumpet flower piece Saturday, worked on it for about an hour and a half and then we went over to meet the new baby. They came home Friday. She was asleep as new babies almost always are but I picked her up anyway and held her in my lap, petting, stroking, looking at her hands and feet, tugging her onesie down since they always want to migrate up around the neck, adjusting the blanket, cooing at her little faces because her great grandmother kept fussing with her.

Then we came home and I worked on the casting some more. When I ran out of good light I used the little electric mower that my sister gave me after she moved into the new house and has a guy come cut her part of the yard and mowed across the front of the shop.

So today, I finished the new piece and then started pulling up more dewberry brambles and cut and pulled off the virginia creeper that was engulfing the air compressor we don't use anymore and had just quit til it cooled off some when Marc came out to tell me that Sarah had called and needed a ride into the city because our son-in-law had been attacked at work and he was in the emergency room waiting to get stitched up. Mike manages a convenience store/gas station and he had to call the cops last week on the crazy homeless guy that hangs out there because the guy was waving a stick at the customers in an angry manner and today the guy came into the store and attacked Mike and a struggle ensued. The place is trashed, Mike has several cuts that need stitches along with other abrasions and bruises and he's probably going to have at least one black eye and maybe two and because he got woozy talking to the cops, the ambulance techs took him to the emergency room at the nearest hospital. So I went and picked up my daughter but before we got on the highway, their son Mikey the new father, who happened to be in the city on business of his own and was with his dad by this time, called to say he was bringing Mike home to the emergency room here because it would be about a five hour wait before he could be seen in the city. So I took Sarah back home and got more baby time til it was time to take Robin to work.

And here's the finished second trumpet flower piece. Now to get them both framed or otherwise mounted for hanging.

odds and ends

We have three wifi connections in our house via two different routers. I generally prefer to use the oldest as it's the fastest even though one of the new ones is supposedly 5G so you'd think that when I wake up my computer (it disconnects from the wifi when asleep) it would reconnect to one of those in the house. And you would be wrong. Often it connects to my sister's wifi across the street (I have her password from back when we were staying with her right after the Harvey flood), skipping our two routers in between my desktop and my sister's house. And that one is very slow.

I get notifications on my tablet. The two were Amber alerts and Severe Weather alerts. I finally turned off the Amber alerts because they always came in the middle of the night but I still get the Severe Weather alerts though at some point they segued into...

So is it going to start hailing stolen children?

Learned Wednesday that the birth of my first great grandchild has been moved up from October 13 to this Sunday if the doctor, who is concerned about her feet and sugar levels, can get an appointment.

Across the road that the west end of my street ends at is a railroad track, a corn/cotton field and then a county road that parallels that road and then the highway. Yesterday evening set fire to four big piles of trees in that field that must have been cleared from somewhere nearby. They were flaming up when we drove by on the way to yoga but never really caught as they were still there coming back and smoldering smokily. When I set out to walk Minnie it was hazy and smelly from the smoke that was drifting into our end of the neighborhood. Thursday morning it was even worse so I guess they smoldered all night.

Another mostly sleepless night Thursday night but boy did I have some weird dreams in the hour or two of sleep I got before I had to get up to get ready for my day at SHARE, part of which involved people milling around my house while someone, the maid/cook was fixing breakfast that these people had been invited for. When we were called to eat, a big table had been set and another table was laid out with a big spread of different food buffet style. I fixed my plate (can't say what it all was except for scrambled eggs, some bread kind of thing, and everything else was sort of fluffy sweet stuff) and decided my place at the table was too crowded so I stood/sat? off to the side and my mouth started watering for real while I was asleep and I woke enough to to know that while I was swallowing all that saliva in my dream, I was swallowing it for real. There was another one that involved some kind of animal, a dog that turned into a tortoise kind of thing later and a swimming pool and feeding it some weird snowflake shaped crustacean like things.

Also last Wednesday, I filled in the rest of the background color even adding a little more, if it's going to turn out darker then I might as well go with it but I don't think it will really be that dark, and then started back filling for the clear layer but ran out of time.

Finally got over to the studio this morning and filled in the last of the clear and then the final white layer and now it's ready to go in the kiln.

I'm sure everyone is breathing a sigh of relief that they don't have to listen to me moan about it, at least til it's fired and I see how it came out. The gallery in Dallas has already contacted me about having these two pieces for the Botanical show in February.

Another sign of the end of summer and the somewhat cooler weather, the Philippine lilies are starting to bloom. They can get to be a good sized shrub though this one is a volunteer I put in a pot and the single stem has shot up at least three feet. I have a white version too but it's not blooming yet.

why can't I make up my mind!

Sunday, when I went over to the studio to work on the mold it didn't take me long to think that I might have used the marigold powder instead of the yellow powder when I started backfilling the large flower. The reason I thought this is because when I added more of the 10/1 ratio color, it looked lighter than what was already in there. And if so then I've totally lost control of how intense the color I was trying for will turn out. Later though I thought surely I didn't make a rookie mistake confusing one jar with another. The powders both look the same but the marigold is in a small jar and the yellow is in a bigger jar. So we'll see.

Then I had to decide on a background. I was thinking a light blue, there are blues that don't react with yellow and decided on gray blue but after filling in two sections now I'm not so sure. It would be a pain to remove it without disturbing the yellow but I could do it, well most of it, probably not where the two colors touch.

The gray blue was the color I used for the first failed body for the heron box. You might remember that disaster from late summer 2019.  Maybe I'll remove most of it and then layer in some of the indigo behind it.

Watching the bird feeder Monday morning, there's one male cardinal in particular that hangs out and chases off all the other cardinals that light on the bird feeder or the shepherd's crook it hangs from.

Coming back from our walk Sunday, I pulled up a handful of hay grass in the front and passed this plumeria to toss the grass in the garden cart and I noticed this grasshopper laying eggs in the hollow stump of a branch I had pruned back.

Ah well, of course I removed the gray blue Monday morning and I got almost all of it out replacing it with the indigo which looks fairly dark in the mold but I don't think it will be that saturated after firing, at least I hope not because I don't want a dark blue (I know you're thinking that indigo is a very dark blue but this is a tint, one of the very pale colors). It's only about a 3/16” thick layer and so should only be as dark as the tip of the sample after it melts down. But of course now I'm thinking I should have stuck with the gray blue.

gray blue on the left, indigo on the right

I don't know why I'm so indecisive about this but I'll just have to forge ahead as no way can I remove the frit from around the narrow tendrils without screwing those up but probably what I'll do is try and lift out some of the indigo in an uneven manner and put in a layer of clear so it will look slightly mottled. I have no idea how this is going to turn out.

We had a full class at yoga last night, 8, about average for that but sometimes a few more. I start out with breathing and a gentle warm up getting increasingly more difficult from beginner/intermediate to intermediate/advanced as the class is mixed in skill level. I'm not sure when Abby's coming back, maybe next week, maybe not but surely the week after that. It's challenging for me and maybe even a little fun now that I'm over my nervousness.

more progress, observing nature, and clueless people

Leading the yoga class on Mondays and Wednesdays is going well enough. I lead a different class than Abby does, more intermediate to advanced as opposed to beginner to intermediate, and people are still showing up though the number varies. Wednesday was iffy for me due to the thunderstorms we've been having this week but it cleared up in time and off I went. The thunderstorms seem to have passed but we are still getting rain, raining today, gentle but steady.

I made more progress on the mold yesterday, filling in the unopened flower but just to surface level. Still need to build it up. What you can't see is the green tones that went in first before I covered it up with the light yellow. I'm heading over to the studio in a few minutes to work on it some more.

I did finally get a good night's sleep last night. I woke up twice but was able to go back to sleep quickly.

There's a lot of racket out there this morning coming from the other side of the wild space between property lines. When I drove by to go pick up Robin and take her to work I saw that the house and garage of the junk man who gathered and recycled metal was being torn down. It's been fairly deserted for over a year now with someone showing up periodically to work and for a while the year before there was an RV parked in the front that someone seemed to be living in but not for awhile. I don't think they ever repaired that house after the Harvey flood and the guy had some health issues so perhaps he died.

Saw a dragonfly laying eggs in the water filled ditch the other evening slapping her tail against the surface of the water, dip down, slap, dip down, slap, while walking Minnie, a doomed effort as two days later the water had all been absorbed. And for the last couple of weeks when I close up the garage at night there has been one or two wrens in there, one of them the same wren I'm fairly sure judging by its sparse tail feathers. The other night when I pulled down the garage door it peeked out at me from behind one of the struts and I managed to get its picture.

A stroll around the yard and the confederate rose is finally putting on some buds, late from being frozen to the ground by the arctic freeze after it had started coming back after our normal winter, I'm getting no pecans again this year and have no idea why two years in a row, the bird of paradise has sent up a bloom stalk,

and the mist flower is blooming. The bees and butterflies love it.

Speaking of bees, the guy that bought Pam's old house completely cleared the yard of all her plantings and flower beds, most of which were bee friendly, and then he set up bee hives in the back yard after removing all the food sources. 

Today's progress on the mold. I know the frit in the small flower on the right looks pink but if my color sample and the formula for it are correct it will turn an orangey yellow after firing. I had considered doing it pink at one time but changed my mind. I just hope I have enough depth to get close to the sample color.

eight drowned feathers and one drowned frond

I picked up the Z-bar hangers Thursday and attached them with silicone and screws. Now just need to sign them, hang them on the wall to photograph, and the box them up.

And here they are, photos aren't that great as all I have is my iPhone camera and I really need a tripod to keep the camera square and plumb and I had to mess around with the color some . 11" x 11" x ¾"

I might have mentioned that there are four big ones so here's the first two (not on metal)

and the five small paperweight size ones, the longest dimension is about 6".

I'm taking a few days off from the studio to take care of some stuff around here that I've been neglecting, yard work mostly, though today Pam and I are going to two estate sales (no treasures were found today and nothing even worth taking pictures of) and I'm making enchiladas for dinner so that will pretty much be my whole day. I'll probably start packing up the pieces early next week after I try for better pictures.