School Daze

My youngest daughter started high school today, while her older brother already a pro at the sport and a senior starts tomorrow at another HS clear across town. Open enrollment, oh no it couldn't be that easy,then they would be at the same HS. You see we had to move in December do to problems with the house we were leasing. We tried to find a house in the school district but to no avail. So now here I am with two HS students in two different HS. NOT FAIR!! Different days off, different starting times and ending times and my son no longer qualifies for bus service so we have to take and pick him up everyday. ARGH To top it off my daughter knows a whopping 4 people at the HS. It is a good thing that she is a flamboyant red head who is outgoing. It may prove to be what pulls her through. I on the other hand need chocolate.

What's in a name?

Changed the name of my blog today... I don't know what that means just yet, but it felt good so I did it.

I am an artist

It is a beautiful morning here in north-western Virginia, the early morning rain has left the lush green fresh and vibrant.
I am astounded that over the last month or so i have explored more fibre art forms than i have in the past several years. Silk, alpaca, purses and grocery bags. It felt good. My studio bulged with fabric, fibre and frustration as I realized that it all can't fit in my studio as it exists now. I also realized that in throwing my energy and time into fibre i have not explored jewelry or silver at all. This has led to reflective thinking on my part. I need balance. Knowing this, i have decided to be more haphazard in my flow of creativity, today silver lids for vintage glass bottles, tomorrow... spinning? I am empowered that I have choices, I can be creative every day!

50 Things to do before I'm 50

For the record i am not a day over 29, but i thought this might be fun. Anywho, I learned some important things about this little exercise.
a) It was really hard coming up with 50 things.
b) I am very conservative. (Yes, I would like to put going to Ireland on my list but lets face it, financially it's not going to happen and i want only things on my list that are doable.)
c) 52 weeks is not a lot of time to do 50 things...I might have to double up.

Here is a sampling; five of my 50.

1. Try 50 new recipes that are not all deserts.
2. Learn how to make a hinge on a piece of jewelry.
3. Create a dragon mask.
4. Learn 10 words in Gaelic. (i am hoping Breezyboo will help me with this!.)
5. Wear something pink for a day. (you have no idea how hard this is for me!)

So, there you have a sampling of my list. I still have four more to come up with and with any luck I will be successful!

Goat pee

I dyed last week. No, i did not misspell nor am I speaking from the grave. You see in my alternate life i am a fibre artist. (Yes, i prefer the European spelling, as in theatre and fairie) I bought some fresh mohair from Tralfarm and anxiously brought it home. Stuck at home do to transportation constraints I decided to dye. I had never dyed mohair before, and given the freedom to save time and dye "in the grease" (not washing first) I dove in. Here are several things i learned :
1. Do not dye fresh mohair on a rainy day when you can't open the windows.
2. No number of candles can cover the ripeness of goat in your house.
3. Watching your 17 yr old son run from the house holding his nose while screaming "what smells like goat pee?"...priceless!
Now i have beautiful colored mohair, ready to spin and a house thankfully that has been aired out.

Blog with fail sauce

Blog with fail sauce...
Or, fail sauce on my biscuit as my son Kabob would say.
I have been meaning to write something epic since January. I am not a writer, daughter Breezy Boo is. But, now that she is in Happy Valley going to college I have no one to edit my atrocious grammar. So, I have to do this all on my own. Spell check I love you!
We had to move in December, not my favorite thing to do, or to do in a snow storm… make that blizzard. The upside is I have a bigger space for my studio; the down side is it is in the basement and is a throw-back from the 70’s, I guess for that matter so am I.
So, I have begun the gutting of the studio. Ripping out the grungy carpet, plastering the brown paneled walls and giving the 1960’s asphalt tile found under the said grungy carpet a face-lift. Slow process given that I have a quick start personality. If I can’t complete a project in short amount of time I lose focus and interest. (My husband hates this; he is a one project at a time guy.) I find I have this same problem in jewelry making. I usually have no less than five projects going at one time. With so many projects going at once, I can work on any piece I choose whenever it suits my fancy. It all works out until I have non-jewelry projects like fixing the studio, spinning, felting and sewing taking over my studio space. Alpaca flying, beads and paint everywhere. When all this chaos hits in the very thick of things, what happens? You guessed it… I usually get an idea for a new jewelry piece.

I was checking out from Barnes and Noble last week, when I noticed some magnets hanging on a rack and started reading them. One caught my eye that I had never seen before.

“Do something scary everyday” Eleanor Roosevelt.

I don’t think it meant looking in the mirror; however that did cross my mind. Walking through the halls at my son’s high school? No? ok, I get it.

Today I did something scary, I soldered a difficult part to pin that I have been putting off for a very long time. I hate to fail, or worse waste materials. This is not good I am told, as an artist I need to take chances and try new things if I want to be creative.

So, I had this cool idea for a pin. Take apart a less than stellar (I refuse to call it failed) piece of jewelry, add a freshwater disk pearl encircled with 14K gold and wind a wire around like a safety pin. Easier –said- than -done. I have a habit of not drawing things out first, instead liking to create as I go. This can be problematic if you accidentally do an irreversible step before a more functional one. I drew a basic idea, and thought, and pondered and, it….sat, for weeks. The simple step of soldering a 14K gold bezel onto a base was excruciating, but I did it! And then the piece sat again. I didn’t know how to make the catch on the back. Several reference books later, the make do part of me took over. I came up with the idea of two tubular pieces soldered to the back, one of them would be joined to the bottom stationary wire and the other, with a piece cut away, would hold the pin part. I have no idea why I agonized soldering those two tubes in place, in the end it wasn’t very hard and “bless my soul” it works!!

I recently read a bio of artist Michael Boyd in the September 2009 issue of Art Jewelry magazine who said” if he went out to dinner and spent $50, he gave himself the same permission to trash $50 worth of material.” He went on to say, “If you can’t take that $50 pearl and cut it in half, you will never expand beyond.” I am expanding, “ to infinity and beyond” I think if I did do something scary everyday, then perhaps it might just get a little easier and maybe I wouldn’t be afraid of ruining a wad of silver… Maybe