Category: Art

This week’s theme at Wednesday Stamper is butterflies.  I love this theme.  I have been so obsessed in my art with the idea of growing wings and flying beyond what is mundane and constraining in our lives.  This theme was a natural for me.

This is a journal page for Catherine’s round robin "journal," which is actually a heart-shaped box with pages cut from heavy watercolor paper.  The theme is non-romantic love and it is filled with immaculately beautiful art.

I really didn’t feel up to the challenge this morning.  You see, we’re setting out with our second son to look at schools in New England this week.  New England is an awfully long way away and as much as I know it is what is best for this particular child, I’m heartbroken about it.  I’m also terrified of both myself and the Judge being on the same plane and leaving the other three behind — a sort of latent mommy-fear-of-flying that is far more potent than anything the terrorists could impose. In any event, I haven’t been at my best this week and it seemed like a theme of things I love wasn’t going to be anything beyond pathetic.

Ellie and I worked on her Valentine’s this morning, so i decided to take out one of Catherine’s pages and play with texture (I gessoed tissue, a Nepalese paper, and some pieces torn from a glassine envelope onto the page).  I liked it, so I thought I would experiment with tar gel and had fun spreading some tinted tar gel onto the page with a palette knife like it was a fondant icing.

Ellie’s Valentine’s were coming along nicely and as I was helping her, I remembered that Michelle Ward’s current Street Crusade is to journal about evidence of your every day existence.  There is nothing I like better than little everyday things when I’m feeling blue.  I took a long, cold walk with Ollie this afternoon, through the alley behind our house, and that was fun.  He stomped through the leaves and stopped to look at the ferns.  I looked through my collection of vintage lace and fabric pieces, thinking I might find something to finish my "emerging violet" collage.  The little everyday things worked their magic.  I finished my piece for Catherine and wrote "hot chocolate" on the last tag before I glued it on. I’m off to make some for the kids.

I hope that long after I’m gone, they’ll remember my home-made hot chocolate in winter as evidence of the love and fun we all shared.

This is my piece for Illustration Friday’s "Sprout" theme.  I was drawn to this theme in large part because of all the little sprouts — my four children and their friends — who populate my world.

This piece was a stretch for me because the girl is a black and white image from an old postcard that I played with in Photoshop.  My friends Karen (you really need to see her new blog) and Joanne have encouraged me to play with computer graphics and nurtured me along. I haven’t mastered it yet, but I enjoyed working with this sweet little girl.

I have no knitting news or pictures because, well, i had no clue that twelve repeats in the straight section on my Clapotis were going to take so long!  I have to give a lecture tomorrow and am driving over with some friends.  I am hoping to get a few repeats done while driving.  In the meantime, I am daydreaming about starting a vest out of Peace Fleece for my baby and socks for both the Judge and myself out of hand-dyed merino.  Hopefully, I will have new knitting pictures by the weekend.

While I was doing something else in my studio (and this is the story of my life), this collage began to emerge:

It started as something else, no longer important.  The background was paper towels, painted to look almost like leather.  I had edged it with black distressed embossing powder (while it was still something else) and decided to glaze over it in purple after Miss Violet made her appearance in the picture.  I really thought it was fine and it actually looked okay in person.

But seeing the photo convinced me (as it often does — I seem to see better when I look at a photo) it was wrong.  So I carefully pulled the collage off the background.  As soon as I have a chance to dye and paint some fabric that will do what I want, I will put Violet back together and call her "Violet Emerges From Her Shell).

Much better.

This is my entry for Illustration Friday’s red theme.  It has been a red week here.

Wednesday night was my second painting class.  I’ve got to say upfront that I’m never going to be a great painter.  I don’t see shapes and light right and I can’t draw.  But I really am enjoying this and I think it’s going to expand my collage horizons in a nice way.

For class two, Jennifer gave us a palette of blue, brown, and white, and sent us off to paint.  This is my painting, which I think is going to need to have some collage additions before I’m happy with it.

In other, decidely exciting, news in my house, Ollie, who is four, has finally succumbed to the allure of pooping on the potty.  In the lexicon of our rather strange household, this requires what we so nicely in our house call the "I pooped on the potty party," which means Mama dashed home from work in the middle of the day to bake the party cake.

I’m not sure why his sword was on the kitchen counter and I didn’t notice it until I was part way done, but it seemed appropriate.  I also discovered that child number two has been using an inordinate amount of sugar in his morning tea, so I had no white sugar.  For future reference, brown sugar and Hershey’s dark chocolate powder produce a wonderful cake.

 

As interesting as it was to race home on my lunch hour to bake, I have to say it was more than worth it to finally, after four children and sixteen years of cloth diapering (with a few years of breaks in between children, notably my darling daughter who potty trained herself at the age of two) to finally be through with that stage of life.

Ollie seemed pretty pleased with the entire affair! 

I am slightly concerned that I may have scarred him for life.  You see, I really don’t potty train.  I pretty much ignore the entire deal.  But the Judge announced he wasn’t changing diapers anymore, so I decided I had to get serious this time and pulled out Robert and Teddy’s old potty video (you haven’t lived until you’ve caught yourself humming "she is a super-dooper pooper" in a staff meeting) and bought a cute little potty seat. 

In a bad mommy moment, while trying to explain to Ollie why we use a potty (not a diaper, or a litter box like his friend Harry the Maine Coon Cat), I told him it was like Violet in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and that if you didn’t poop you would swell up like she did and explode.  (I warned you it was a bad mommy moment).  He asked about it a couple of times, and I explained it was just an analogy and that her problem had been gum, but that your body would get uncomfortable if you didn’t poop.  I thought he had forgotten until he was proudly sitting on the big potty in the bathroom pooping and proudly informed me "I’m not going to blow up like Violet did!"

Thousands of dollars in therapy, right?  All in all, I have to say that I’m happy that this stage in our lives is over!