dreams, painting progress, origami

I dreamed about my sister last night. There were two scenes. The first one I was walking into a space to see Pam and a woman I didn’t know was there and told me she and Pam were going to make skirts and my sister was pulling out her dresses from a closet and hanging them up on a hook. Pam said the woman thought she should make her dresses into skirts. What about the skirts you and I made (this never happened in life), I asked. (A man’s name I can’t remember) borrowed it she said and hasn’t returned it yet. That she was going to do this with someone else made me sad and I left. The second scene I was going to lunch with some people, one was a man I had just met, at a cafeteria or someplace like that and we had to get in line but I heard that my sister was outside and I went down some stairs to find her leaving the other people behind. She was there with another woman. I asked her why she was being with people I didn’t know when I hadn’t seen or heard from her in a week. The other woman gestured to Pam and pointed out that she was pregnant. You have a whole new life and new friends that don’t include me I said, to which she did not reply. Well, I have to go feed the cats, I said and walked off feeling immensely sad and then I woke up near tears.

I think I should be happy. I think maybe this dream was telling me that Pam is well and having a good life with new people and pregnant. In this life she had to have a hysterectomy after her second daughter was born premature. She wouldn’t be able to carry another baby because her uterus was not strong enough. I hope she is happy in this new life because I don’t think she was happy in this one, not really. I could elaborate on that about why but I won’t. There were good things, of course, but life just didn’t turn out for her the way she desired.

When I went back to sleep I dreamed that I went to an art gallery that was having the opening of a show but it was just a big warehouse type building filled with trestle tables and where food was being served buffet style. The ends of the tables were about 5’ from the wall with the art so that you couldn’t step back to look at it, just up close. The art was kind of modern and not very good I thought. After I had gotten to the end of the wall I turned to my left to leave when the man I had just met in the dream about Pam was coming toward me. He took my hand and said let’s find someplace to sit so we can talk and then I woke up.

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I worked on my painting more on Sunday and Monday, haven’t had any time for it since so maybe Friday I can work on it some more. Reposting the most recent version so you can see the progress more clearly.

This is the current state after working on it two more days.

Yesterday was the origami ornament workshop. We made two, a big one 6 1/2” in diameter (blue) and a small one 3 1/3” in diameter (white). Robin picked it up quickly and finished her two before I did, but then I wasted time working on the tassel on the big one. The top and bottom were made separately and then stuck together with double sided tape which was the hardest part for me.

I got my first ‘are you ready for Christmas’ question today at the dentist’s office getting my teeth cleaned. I expect to be asked that many times in the next week, especially at SHARE tomorrow. I don’t bother explaining that I don’t do Christmas, just smile with my standard answer, ‘ready as I’ll ever be’. And by that I mean avoiding as much of the christmas ads on TV for christmas movies and merchandise, the christmas music in stores, and the questions about my supposed christmas celebration as possible.

One more thing. Those two cold nights in the 30s last week finally triggered color in whatever leaves hadn’t drifted down yet. My ginkgos were bright yellow, the crepe myrtles in the area were orange torches, the tallow trees were bright red, other trees varying shades of orange and yellow. All this color has been followed by a massive leaf drop. My pecans, gingkos, oaks, tallows, and crepe myrtles are all but bare now and the yard is covered with a layer of leaves

 

shoes and shells, mostly shoes

Some women are crazy about shoes, Imelda Marcos comes to mind. I’ve never understood the fascination, preferring to go barefoot whenever possible, shoes are utilitarian to me. While I like a pair of nice flats for the few times I dress up I don’t wear heels, haven’t since my mid-30s and back then only when dressing up, and never spike heels. Despite the shoe industry’s promotion of them in advertising, four or five inch spike heels always seemed like the American form of foot binding to me. Not quite as crippling but serving the same basic purpose; small dainty wobbly steps, me at least, and no running for your life. 

The last time I bought a new pair of shoes (and by that I mean real shoes not the cheap $14 dollar sandals I have bought every year or two at Walmart that wear out quickly) was in 2017 before our trip to Hawaii that are really worn out now.

 

This year I have bought 3 pairs of shoes, all sandals. Since my open toed black flats for dressier wear had worn out I went shoe shopping last spring to replace them. I ended up with some black sandals because my ingrown toenail had flared up and all the closed toed flats hurt. I think I’ve worn them twice so far. Early summer I really needed new everyday sandals, tired of the cheap Walmart versions, and shopped online and bought some Earth Origins slip-on sandals which cost more than I have generally paid at a shoe store and have worn all summer. 

I like them well enough but they only have one strap with which to tighten the fit and have stretched out a bit and my left foot has started to skew at an angle on the foot bed so I started searching for new sandals and Sunday I bought a pair from Ortho online. This is the most expensive pair of shoes I have ever bought, over $100 and that was 20% off, but they have three straps with which to tighten the fit and I like the style better than the ones I have now. I was FaceTiming with Jade and dithering about buying the shoes and how much they cost and as we were ending the call, love you, she says, and buy the shoes. So I did. 

Now I’m waiting for them to arrive and hope they fit and live up to the claims on their website.

I wear sandals as long as weather permits. I even, gasp, will wear socks with sandals, but I do have some winter shoes. I have a pair of ankle length moccasin booties that I bought probably in my 40s and have worn a hole in the sole of one of them but I just put some thick insoles in and still wear them. I have a pair of Sketchers that I like that a friend gave me probably 5 years ago because they were too small for her and some gym shoes that I bought right before I stopped going to the gym about 12 years ago that I hardly ever wear. I have some hiking boots I bought years ago when I went to Scotland in 2016, also that I’ve worn only a handful of times. And of course a pair of black cowboy boots, I am after all a Texan. There’s a few other pairs of shoes lingering in the back of my closet that I don’t wear anymore like the blue suede Cole Haan sandals I wore to a wedding two years ago that I bought at a resale shop and are really a half size too big, some worn out huaraches that I loved even though the heel was narrow and tended to twist my foot if I wasn’t careful, some dressier not sandal brown leather slides that started to hurt my feet the last several times I wore them.

I should probably buy another pair of enclosed winter shows. I like the sketchers and I’ve bought adidas in the past but here’s my main complaint about shoes with laces…they won’t stay tied. That aggravates the shit out of me. How hard is it to sell shoes with laces that stay tied. I have to tie them normally with a bow and then take the loops of the bow and tie another knot and still they will come undone. Maybe I’ll check out the kind that have elastic laces you don’t tie.

Autumn was in town and spent the day with me working on a project. She’s making decorative belts, one for her and one for a friend, from chains and seashells. Mostly I just supplied tools and an idea or two. Yesterday she glued jump rings to some of the shells Pam had collected (they didn’t all get thrown back into the Gulf) and made some from wire that she could insert into the olive shells, a loop on the end of a straight section about 3/4” long, and arranged them how she wanted. She has to wait until the adhesive cures before she can flip them over and attach them to the chains with smaller jump rings.

Later we went out to see the partial eclipse of the full moon since we had a clear night but when I asked the All Knowing Oracle what percent would be eclipsed and how long it would be, 8% at the top edge and another hour, not worth the wait so we came in.

busy as a little bee was me

Yesterday I went to the fish market down the highway and got two catfish filets for a recipe I want to try on my next night to fix dinner and then I spent the rest of the day finally finishing wading through those two boxes (previously I had basically just emptied them and the stuff was scattered on the floor) one of which had small frames with pictures of family members, old old pictures. All the pictures were ruined from the flood and most of the frames. I did salvage a few of the frames like these two that had very old pictures of my grandparents as children (you can't tell from the picture but the glass in the frames is curved so I'm glad they weren't ruined)

and these little petite mosaic frames (they still need a little more cleaning)

but I'm still soaking the photos off the glass that goes with other frames salvaged to which they are securely stuck.

The other box had just a mish mash of things like a Halloween witch made from a gourd,

some glassware left over from when I was making the garden totems and flowers, some cast metal pieces that were part of a wind chime kind of thing, a turtle shell, a small ceramic bowl, the broken tea cup bird feeder, some small ceramic faces from another long ago art project,

stuff like that.

Decades ago, before even we started doing the pate de verre cast glass work, I made a lot of these, I don't know what to call them really, they aren't dolls, more like totems. Anyway, I gave some away to friends like the one done up as Carmen Miranda for a river guide friend who was hiking in the desert and had run out of water and was having mild hallucinations when he saw another guide friend mirage dressed up like Carmen. I sold some and kept these four, the last ones I made. They're about 16” tall. They got more and more elaborate as I worked through them, first ones being much simpler. Right now I have them in a glass display case but most the time past they've just been on a shelf getting dusty so they're a little worse for wear having been cleaned several times over the years and the copper wire of the decorations are now all tarnished.

So that's the art project the little faces were for.

The sorted stuff is either in a box to take to SHARE or in a box by the door to be taken over to the shop and stored over there or in the trash. Don't ask me why it all didn't go straight in the trash, I'm an artist/crafter and I might want to use it someday.

Then I consolidated my scrap fabric and leftover quilt padding in a larger plastic storage box, gathered up my colored pencils, watercolors, sketchbook, and various watercolor related stuff into the now vacated smaller plastic storage box as all that stuff had just been laying out on a shelf, rearranged some of the pictures in my bedroom and hung a couple of others, and finally swept the floor in the activity room.

Now I need to go take the hummingbird feeders down, clean them, and refill. 

another leak, a craft show, a transition

My sister texted me at 8 AM Sunday morning...I think there's a leak at the water meter. That's how my day began. This is how it went...

weeded a flower bed, dug out the wet dirt in front of the water meter over at the shop to expose the new connection which ties in the water line to Pam's house and it is indeed seeping, turned the wheelbarrow of leaf mulch into the weeded flower bed, pruned the rose back some next to the same flower bed, picked up all the debris from weeding, pruning, and the pile of sticks accumulating in the little backyard, watered the little backyard, added water to the turtle tank and cleaned the filter basket on the pump, eradicated the ants in the flower bed I want to plant the pansies in, raked out about 60% of many years of leaf accumulation in the barn, bathed and walked the dog, washed Minnie's bed and blanket, swept the floor in the studio room in the house

...and then finally called it quits. It was just such a nice day to be outside Sunday and all the work wasn't too strenuous.

Yesterday morning started out with a call to the plumber. Basically, he just completely replaced all the work he had done to splice in the water line to Pam's house. I think I got it this time, Gunnar said. Third time's the charm, right?, I said. Let's hope so, he said.

As mentioned in my last post, Pam and I went to the first Holiday Market sponsored by Hesed House at Guffy Park(ing lot) late Saturday afternoon/early evening. Everyone refers to this spot as a park but really, it's just a parking lot behind a row of building right off the town Square, left over from more prosperous days pre-Walmart. The goods on offer were small town crafts with a few highlights here and there. The first being that we ran into my daughter and son-in-law so that was fun.

Stephanie from Hesed House

I thought these puzzles were clever

   

iced cookies

plants from the local wholesale nursery

kittens! the sweetie on the left looks like my Emma only she's gray instead of brown

Mexican pastries

handmade goat's milk soap, low inventory because they had had a good morning at the Farmer's Market and another show last weekend

took me a minute to figure out what these were...bottle openers

Got home from yoga last night (yay, Abby's back!) to find out that Emily Murphy finally authorized Biden's transition after enough states certified their elections to give Biden the minimum 270 electoral votes for victory though he will get over 300 when it's all said and done. This is likely the only concession Trump will give, allowing the transition to proceed. Now we wait to see how much more damage he will do before January 20. He's pulled us from the denuclearization Open Skies treaty and plans to have the observation planes scrapped making it extremely difficult for Biden to rejoin. Treasury Secretary Mnuchin is also planning some dirty tricks to prevent Biden from using funds for a stimulus. These next two months are going to take forever but we will eventually be rid of Trump and his sycophants and their petty vindictiveness. It remains to be seen what will become of the Republican Party after his exit. Will they continue to support him as many people seem to think Trump will make good on his claims of running again in 2024 and his family's attempt to take over control of the GOP or will they drop the charade of their support as long as he was president. If the party splits like Heather Cox Richardson suggests, they may well lose their influence over national politics. We'll see. 

that fence is kicking my butt

My hands hurt. Day after day of clearing that fence. And the last three days have been hot and humid. June hot. When I came in yesterday about 1:30 after my two hours, I was soaked. Had to peel my clothes off. My sister had come over earlier while I was still waking up and having coffee (she's an early riser, I am not) and worked on the fence for almost two hours as well. Between the two of us we got another 6' done.

Since this is all in preparation for getting a house there on that corner for her (beside the fact that it just desperately needs to be done) she's helping but because we live on completely different schedules, we work on it at different times of the day. I put in another hour today late morning. An hour was all I could do as sweat was rolling off me almost from the beginning. It was too hot for Minnie who stayed with me for about half an hour and finally tired of me slinging vines and branches her way and crept off to the house. I didn't blame her a bit. I quit when I started feeling a bit faint. Did I go in? No. Since I had on my jeans I climbed down in the ditch and picked dewberries. I've only been picking every other day so this is my third time (though I didn't pick the ditch last time). They're really starting to come on now. Today's haul.

I wasn't as wet as yesterday but an hour after I came in, even after my almost cold shower, I felt like I was still radiating heat. We're supposed to get rain and some cooler temps starting tonight or tomorrow.

So my birthday is the end of this month. Marc was going to throw a birthday party but that's been postponed. I always buy my own birthday present, usually a piece of art. Last year I bought this engraving by British artist Nancy Sutcliffe.

3 1/2” dia.

This year I bought a mosaic piece from Texas artist Aly Winningham. I'd seen her work at the Rockport Art Festival the last two years and planned on buying a piece this year but now all the art shows have been canceled. She updated her website with her inventory and sent out an e-blast to people on her mailing list. It arrived yesterday.

Bird in the Hand

6 1/2” x 18”

I have daylilies. In April. It seems early but five different varieties are either blooming or putting on buds. I even had one plant blooming in February.

And the walking iris is blooming.

I finally pruned back the four knockout roses in the front yesterday evening. They were scraggly with almost zero foliage. I should have done it in February but I wasn't sure I was going to prune them back this year but they looked so bad, I did.

I need to get in the kitchen and do the dishes. Apparently all the elves are in quarantine too since they continue to fail to show up.

over for another year

We sold nothing but snowflakes after the first two days. I'm disappointed that none of the feathers sold even though they got a lot of attention. I surely thought I would sell one or two. No matter, this was still our best open house ever if not in number of items sold, in total sales amount due to the sale of the heron box whose proper title is River Stories: The Blue Heron and in fact I still have to print out the little story and mount it and send it to the collector who bought it.

These open house weekends have periods when there are a decent amount of people coming in interspersed with periods where no one is there. Our friend Gene, the fused and stained glass artist, brought two silly card games...Spot-it and Moose in the House...which we would play during the slow periods. Late in the afternoon last Saturday Gene and Marc and I were playing Spot-it, a deck of round cards with pictures in which every card has one match to every other card. 

There are several ways you can play with these cards but we mostly played the version where each player starts with one card with the goal being to end up with the least amount of cards in your stack. The rest of the cards are in a stack and players call out a match when they see it and snatch the top card up and put it on the appropriate opposing player's stack. Anyway, it's fast and it's silly and competitive and Gene and I at least were laughing so much, each of us determined to beat the other, and so loud during this one game (I won) and when we finished and looked up everyone else had gathered around to see what all the unrestrained laughter was about.

On Sunday friends Bill and Larry came by and Larry told us a story we had not heard before. Bill and Larry were my very first commission job, a window with a victorian style mandala straight out of one of the Dover design books when I was just starting out with my etched glass business after my divorce from the rat bastard and I had moved back in with my parents, before even I met Marc. At this time in their lives my parents were upper middle class and had built a Mexican villa type house after they sold the house us kids grew up in, a three sided stucco around a courtyard in the back and wrought iron gates across the front of the small entry/front door. The front door opened onto a large dining room with the stairs to the second floor bedrooms and activity room, my dad's study/library and kitchen and garage in the left wing and the living room and master suite in the right wing of the house, Saltillo tile floors and oriental rugs.

I had acquired a small air compressor and a gravity feed sand pot and I would do the blasting in the yard off the garage. I had done some simple little surface etchings and framed them for hanging in a window and I was at a small art and craft show in Galveston which is where they saw me. I had just turned 25 in the spring (so this would have been 1975) and their window was fairly large and odd shaped and so they had to get the glass cut and bring it to me to etch (I assume they came and got it and had it installed after I was done because I had no way to get it back to them in Galveston where they lived). So Larry is telling me the story of how we met the way they remember it...here was this young girl barefoot with a rope for a belt (I think it was actually a narrow rainbow striped sash on my bell bottoms being the hippie chick I was but yeah I was probably barefoot but a rope is how they remember it) trying to make a few bucks and maybe even homeless (an image of the poor little match girl comes to mind) so they commissioned me to do this window for them. Larry says they were a little surprised when they turned into this upscale neighborhood with big houses on big lots to bring me the glass and when they drove up to my parent's house they were a little flummoxed thinking I must be the daughter of one of the servants or something and should they go around to the back of the house to knock but the gate to the back was closed so the front door was the only option. So they rang the bell and this elegant woman wearing a long pink chiffon and feathery peignoir answered and they very timidly asked for me. Oh, that's my daughter, she says, she's gone to the grocery store but will be right back, and she invited them in to wait in my dad's study. They were so astounded, he said, their eyes were like saucers. I arrived soon after and we conducted our business and they left and as life would have it our paths continued to cross and we have become friends even though we don't see them very often but this was the first time they have told me the story of how we met from their perspective.

Of course, Larry told it a lot better and a lot funnier. They moved to Houston at some point and through the years Larry tried his hand at painting but abandoned it when he couldn't get any commercial success and Bill is an artist in his own right and still creates the most gorgeous delicate metalwork sculptures though he doesn't have any representation currently. He's supposed to send me some images and when he does I'll post them.

Anyway here are the other artists sans one who only did the first weekend and I didn't take pictures til this last weekend.

Kathy Poeppel and Dick Moiel, blown glass and our hosts:

Gene Hester, fused glass:

Bob Straight, fused glass, wood turning, metalwork:

Eric DePan, blown glass:

Liz Conces, fused glass:

V. Chin, ceramics:

Leslie Ravey, wood and leather work:

    

Handweavers of Houston, woven and dyed fabric:

and of course, us, cast glass:

slow progress but new gutters

Well, I thought we would do the egg and the sticks first but I decided to do a color sample for the egg before we do those so I've filled the mold for the top and have spent several hours looking at pictures of blue herons and listing the colors that I think I'll need and getting everything accumulated. And as long as I'm doing one color sample, I might as well do a few more. As mentioned, looking at all the pictures, I had thought that the inlay would be a difficult one but maybe not. Doing the hummingbird twice gave me some valuable experience that I think/hope will translate into the heron and future birds.

Also as mentioned, I led the yoga class Wednesday night. I did, in fact, jot down a list of asanas beforehand and it was much easier. I didn't have to think on the spot, just look at my list...seated, hands and knees, stomach, standing, back...and it went very well I think. Still, I'll be glad when Abby comes back but I won't be so resistant next time she asks me to cover for her.

I was planning to get the mold for the inlay of the heron head filled today but so far all I've managed is to do is grind off the points on a tiny chunk of glass for the iris of the eye and place it in the mold. 

The fact that Rocky and another son, Manny, are here to finally get my gutters replaced isn't helping. Well, if not today, then tomorrow. In the meantime I'm mentally going over how I'm going to blend the colors.

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So I did start on the heron head inlay yesterday and so much for it not being as difficult as I thought it would be since it took me several hours and lots of cursing to get this far which is not very far at all. 

Now I'm just waiting for Rocky to finish getting the downspouts in place today to get it finished. Too hard to concentrate when I get interrupted off and on.

While I'm waiting on that I went ahead and poured melted wax into the mold of the small log I've been working on. The plaster impregnated bandages arrived the other day and I had applied two layers of strips over the 12 coats of latex. I didn't want it too stiff, just enough to support the outside so that I could pop the wax replica out easily.