Scrapbooking, pulling my hair out, and generally having a great time of it.
Class was canceled tonight due to the fact we’ve had over a foot of snow over the last few days. So I spent the day feeling a bit boxed in, and actually boxing things that I had sold from my Esty store.
Super Kitchy Duck Easter Egg
I posted a few new items too, mainly some estate sale finds from over the weekend.
Lefton Easter Egg
I have sketches, it’s a good thing, I have class tomorrow. That is, I have class if it doesn’t keep snowing for the third day in a row. We didn’t have class last week because it was snowing then too. I’m really getting tired of winter.
Anyway here are some blurry pictures of what I came up with.
I was trying to simplify the design enough that it would work for the tile and for my bathroom. I do realize that what I end up with will look nothing like this. I’m just not sure if it will end up closer to the original, or more like me.
I’ll try to file a report after class tomorrow.
I still don’t have my sketches done for my ceramics class, but I’m pretty sure the 5-9 inches of snow expected here on Thursday will cancel my class. I’ll have a bit more time and that’s good. I’m going to be busy getting a custom order for candy jar labels together today.
I really should have had those done yesterday, but I ran into problems on what should have been an easy embroidery project. The problem was, oh course, operator error. Sometimes I overcomplicate things for myself.
Actually I always overcomplicate things for myself. I’ll get to work on that.
Every year our local art teacher opens up her room to anyone with $40 to work with the ceramics equipment. You get 10 pounds of clay, the use of the glazes and equipment, and as much instruction as the teacher can offer in a room full of middle aged artsy types working individually. This may not seem like a big deal, but it is for me. I’ve taken it once before, without much success. So I’m going to try again.
Last time I was determined to master the pottery wheel, it mastered me. After 6 weeks of 2 hour classes, I ended up with a small bowl that looked like it had been made by a 6 year old in vacation bible school.
This year is going to be different. I hope. I’m going to be doing slab work. I think it will combine a slower more careful pace, along with having much less potential for my project flying across the room and hurting someone, and I’ll actually be making something I want and need. I’m making tiles for my bathtub backsplash.
I need these tiles because I still don’t have a bathtub backsplash after 5 years. I have the tile that will be used for the bulk of it, I’ve had that for, you guessed it, 5 years. I’ve just never quite got up the motivation to get started. All the mess and having my tub out of commission for the duration has just killed my ambition every time I have thought about getting started. But no more..
I want to make a tile collage based on this diego Rivera painting. So there’s my challenge, making this work, with my very limited skills. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Reblogged from According To Addie:
If it saves just one child, it will all be worth it. Nope, I'm not talking about adoption. I'm talking about an adoption ban. Because this...
After being brutally beaten by his American adoptive mother, who gave him psychotropic medication for an extended period of time, a 3-year-old Russian boy named Maksim has died in Texas, Russian diplomats have said.
Reblogged from According To Addie:
A lot of adoptees pull back from adopt for periods of time. They head back to "real life" where they are like everybody else. I do it. It makes sense, being adopted can be exhausting. All the searching, activism, and thinking about hard stuff can wear you down.
Society, adopted family, our friends, our significant others, the government tells us our adoptions are something we don't need to think about.
Reblogged from According To Addie:
This morning I got up even earlier than usual, got bundled up, and went outside to watch the stars fall. It was so worth it.
In the past most of my meteor shower watching experience have been less than stellar, I’d sit out there for hours and maybe see just one or two. This morning I saw more than I could count, and each one filled me with a kind of childlike glee that I haven’t experience for a while.
I bought a typewriter this weekend, an Underwood-Olivetti from the 1960’s. It is in working order, no sticky keys, good hard letter strikes, and it even has a good ribbon. It even looks perfect, and it’s going to stay that way.
I can’t type on the damn thing. All those months of high school typing class are wasted. Hitting the keys on the IBM Selectric as the teacher droned out, “FFF, FAD, FFFAD.” Are, and have been for nothing. I spend a good deal of my time sitting in front of a keyboard and I cannot type.
I’m the Wizard of Word, I can format like nobody’s business, heck I even know what the Review functions do. If you send me a document, I’ll probably reformat it before I read it. I’m picky that way.
Almost nothing I’ve written, or read, has been printed for years, it’s all on hard drives, and thumb drives, and somewhere up in the clouds. I can send you anything you want, anyway you want it, attachments? shared docs? .rtf? PDF? No problem. Just don’t ask me to snail mail it to you. I wouldn’t know where to start.
I used to know how to write a business letter, all the girls did, we took business classes that really weren’t about business at all. We were taught how to type, use an adding machine, and to take shorthand. This was to prepare us for the world of work. Those poor business teachers could never imagine just how quickly all of that would be obsolete.
In my case, it was my very first real job. At 19, I was a sales rep for one of the Bells, (remember phone companies?), I started out with a secretary that worked with several reps, she did all the typing. Then a monitor the size of a VW Beetle was put on my desk, and everything changed. I still had a secretary, but she didn’t type anymore, she entered. We had both been lied to.
I left that job before my secretary did, but everybody knew she didn’t have long. Technology progressed from there, along with my screen time. My environments changed, I went from big glass buildings, to small cubbies carved out to make room for the “computer stuff”, to nothing. Now, my business is contained in a device roughly the same size as the nifty leather bound notebook I used on my first job. I sit at my kitchen counter.
If my business classes were designed to keep me in a subservient role in business, and I have no doubt they were, then eliminating those skills has put me all the way back to the kitchen.
Funny how that worked out.
Anybody want to buy a typewriter?
Even though I’m a rug weaver, I never much cared for working with denim. It never quite works with the kind of rugs I like to make, So I have a lot of old blue jeans around. I think I might have found exactly what I like to do with them. Embroidered patches.
