Art, photography, marketing, and more from Carol Logan Newbill
When last we left our project-in-progress, I had just applied the glue resist in a freehand labyrinth pattern. After it dried overnight, it shrank and puckered a little because I had not taped it down thoroughly. No matter — I was just going to splash some more color on there and it didn’t matter if it were flat.
I’m not sure what I did today, but I damn sure don’t think it was creative.
::shakes calendar::
Somewhere in here, there’s got to be a creative day real soon…
Right?
Okay, so I got a late start. Like 10 pm.
The beginning of Labyrinth. More to come tomorrow. :)
Most of my day today has been taken up with left-brained creativity the HTML way – I’ve been updating web sites. But since that won’t really count for the 365 Days, I sorta-kinda cheated and finished a piece I’d started a couple of months ago:
Click on the image to bring up a larger version.
Something completely new, tomorrow. Meanwhile, back to the website coding.
I remember reading somewhere that INTPs have the remarkable ability to walk around something for years and simply not see it. Put an item down on a flat surface, and there it stays unremarked, unnoticed, and invisible until the owner has some occasion to notice it again.
This is true.
The occasion is that I need to rearrange furniture in my studio to make room for a new piece of equipment, which means I need to get rid of some stuff and find more efficient ways to store other stuff. All of which is fair notice: I’m going to post some of the stuff-going-out-the-door in the next few days and hope that you, Gentle Reader, will decide that my stuff just has to come snuggle up with your stuff.
You’ve been warned. Check back.
I made French onion soup last night, and I had a fire. Unfortunately, the fire was in the kitchen.
Nothing serious — I took the croutons out of the oven and set them down on a back burner to cool, forgetting that I’d used that same burner a bit earlier and had forgotten to turn it off. Six minutes later, the residual oil on the cookie sheet went “poof†and I had a lovely little stovetop fire.
I dumped the whole mess into the sink and put it out right away, so all I had to clean up was some soot on the backsplash.
The soup was delicious, though, even without the croutons.
(Another quick soup recipe and some textile art on the flipside.)
Last weekend I received a panicky email from the rep in Nevada who has been selling lots of my work, may the Universe bless her. She was almost out and would I please send her some more stuff to sell, pronto? She’d send me a check in return…
So I’ve been nose down since then. I also had a sewing machine crisis on Thursday which exacerbated the problem. (I do have a backup machine or three so it didn’t shut me down, but I lost a couple hours dinking with it before finally deciding that I couldn’t fix it.)
Sadie asked if the background piece I posted on the 14th has a foreground yet? Not yet, but I made a smaller version to send away to Nevada:
After I pieced the strips for this one, it reminded me of a midsummer hike along the Continental Divide from the top of Wolf Creek Pass in Colorado. You start from the parking lot through a meadow of wildflowers at 10,000 feet, and then climb another 1000 feet vertically into the pine forest. (The pictures don’t seem to be on this computer; I’ll see if I can dig them out later.)
So I called it High Summer. (I should have called it There Isn’t Any Air Up That High and What Was I Even Thinking of to Try This?. But I doubt anyone would have got the joke.)
I’ve promised Bronwyn another six pieces this coming week, so I’ll continue to be busy for a while. Now that I have some new work, I promise to post a bit more frequently.
This is the background piece that I put together yesterday. My original intent was to trim the top and bottom edges to make a neat rectangle, but I really like it all jaggedy like this.
I still have a lot to do with this, so don’t think I’m anywhere near done. I just put this up to prove that I really do still have a sewing machine and the inclination to put it to use.
In between deep-cleaning the kitchen (fruit flies rode in on some bananas a couple days ago — die, fruit flies! die!), cooking, and doing the grocery shopping, I managed to get some butt time in the studio this afternoon. The background for State of Grace is finally pieced, and it’s perfect for what I wanted. Don’t you love it when that happens? I’m going to post pics when this thing is farther along. I’ve had so many distractions that it’s really taking a while to complete, and I’d hate to post something today and not have any progress to show for another week. You’ll have to wait. I think it will be worth it.
I got a nice check today, too, the first installment on a commissioned piece, plus an inquiry on another small commission.
And my birthday present to me arrived this afternoon. I gave myself the new Richard Elliot CD metro blue, plus an obscure 1985 movie soundtrack by Pat Metheny, The Falcon and the Snowman, which contains an absolutely stunning track with David Bowie called “This is Not America.” Highly recommended.
My ears are in a state of bliss this evening.
Today’s title comes from Dorothy Parker, by way of my wonderful friend using the wholly inappropriate moniker “savage.” It also ties in very nicely with Gabrielle’s repeated exhortations to get the work done and damn the consequences.
So — ass to seat, and since I have nothing in a state yet to show, I’ll offer some short bits of catch-up from the past couple of weeks.
• My car’s been in the shop since Monday, the victim of a very low-speed parking lot collision. I wasn’t injured at all; the nice grandmotherly lady was most apologetic; and her insurance company is paying for the repairs and for a rental car. She hit my driver’s door with the front right corner of her bumper at about 2 miles an hour, and the repair estimate including car rental exceeded $1,500.00. I’d hate to think how much damage there would have been at regular speed.
I’m supposed to get my baby back today, which will make me very happy. The tiny little low-down rental sedan is horribly uncomfortable for a six-foot-tall person with middle-aged back and knee problems. Good thing I haven’t needed to do a great deal of driving this week.
Oh, and the radio doesn’t work in the rental. I’ve been music-less all week.
• Three weeks ago we had a new vinyl floor installed in the kitchen. The installers didn’t have any seam sealant with them, so they duct-taped the seam together and promised to return on the following Tuesday to finish the job. After two weeks of walking around duct tape, my husband finally called the flooring company to ask quite politely when we could expect to have the installers return. They were astounded to find out that it had not been completed, explained that those installers “were no longer with the company,” and scheduled a different team of installers to come finish the sealing.
This is not comforting.
The second team showed up yesterday. The head guy got down on his belly to inspect the seam, muttered strong invective under his breath, asked rhetorically if “those guys” even possessed a straightedge, asked me if there were any vinyl left over (there wasn’t), muttered some more, and finally used a kind of filler to seal the gap prior to placing the seam sealant. It looks okay to me, but now I am wondering how well this job is going to hold up. What else did they do wrong that doesn’t show?
• Tomorrow the painter shows up. He’s going to be here for a week or so, repainting all the exterior wood siding and trim. He seems like a nice enough man, but just having a strange someone in and around my house for that length of time is going to drive me nuts.
• All of these things are happening at a time when all I want to do is plant my butt in the studio and work. I have three pieces in a series that are begging to be made, plus a new small piece I’d like to get done for Fine Focus. I know just what I want to do with them and I haven’t been able to get in there and get cracking. I tried fusing one of them in order to speed up the construction process, but (no offense to Melody) it simply didn’t look or feel right. Toss that and go back to the techniques that feel appropriate for what I want to do.
I’ll be glad when all the distractions have run their course and I can apply ass to seat and get stuff done.
Well.
You know, it’s very odd. When I write every day, I can always find things to talk about. But when I let it slide for a couple of weeks, suddenly I’m at a loss for words. Why is that?
I won’t try to catch up on all the things that have happened; I’ll just mention that the sale of artwork at www.relief.Art2Mail.com continues to be a great success. Yesterday we posted ten new pieces and sold them all within 24 hours. We’ve now raised more than $1,000 for disaster relief, and I’m deeply happy.
More artwork up soon.
Art- and quilt-related posts. For other business-related topics, please visit my other blog.
