We have finally settled into a groove here at our house now that our kids are back in school and I have some time to myself. I do have to drive each kid to school separately since they start at different times but I like it because I get to be with each of them, one on one, which is always a plus.
Everyone is learning a language. My daughter is in Spanish 2, my son is just beginning to learn Spanish and my husband is at his computer learning French. Why you ask? Well, next year for my (you know which but I’m not going to say it) birthday (Yes, the big one, to which you say “Oh Catherine, you don’t look __! and I say “thank you”.) he is taking me to London, Amsterdam and Paris. It is all very exciting! He is a person who appreciates a good time and loves food and wine so he has been planning and emailing and making reservations for the last month. It is his first time going. When we are in Paris, we are staying near the Eiffel Tower and so I have bookmarked an Eiffel Tower webcam and have been looking at it at all hours of the day. I have a Paris folder on my desktop and am saving pictures and links of things I must do. I have a site that has all the flea market locations in Paris and I am hoping that in March, when we are there, that it will be clear so that I can go and see and get some mementos there. Here are photos from the Paris webcam at 8:20 and 8:50 pm. Cool huh?
If anyone knows of anything I should go do and see, please email me and tell me. I haven’t even started thinking about the other two cities yet. Although, I do love London. I was there in my 20’s for about a month. I took a two week intensive haircutting/stying class at a very mod school in London called “Jingles”. All us girls had hair “one finger width from the scalp” and colored in outrageous combinations of reds and blacks and blondes. I had my brown, really short but with long “fringe” (that’s what the english call bangs) in front colored 3 shades of red so if I pushed it back it all showed bright and orangey. I’m going to dig up a photo of me when I was all punky in the 80’s. Hold on for that in my next post.
Anyway, as I was saying, things are back to what my husband and I call the “Club Med lifestyle”. We get to do all the activities for grown-ups while the kids are at the “kid’s club”. Ha, ha. Sorry kids. Next week we are going to the “Cafe Gratitude” in Berkeley. This week we had lunch at the Thai restaurant nearby. We are starting out slow.
But it has really been an action packed month already. Among other things, I have been making more ATC’s to trade and give away at Art & Soul. So far now I have 109. Here are some of my favorites from this batch.
I made a little label for the back that has a spot where I can write a number in because each one is an original. It is a scribbler pattern with text from photoshop.
While I am talking about photoshop, here is a photo I took at the mall while we were getting clothes and shoes for school. When I took out my camera to take the picture my daughter says “oh no, not another pattern!” My son says, “let’s just wait over here”. Now you know why I like some time to myself. We have reached the years where I, the parent, have begun to embarrass my kids. Oh well, I try to torture them back a little. It’s all fair play after all.
back to the pattern:
This is what I did to it in photoshop:
here it is as the beginning of an art stamp
and here it is taken just a little bit too far!
FUN!
Oh my! Here is a little dog I got when Karen O’Brien put her latest creations on sale. I waited until the right time (noon) on the day she said they would be up and decided at lightning speed which one I wanted and emailed her at once. I got my first choice! (Yes, I AM greedy, because I really didn’t need this darling little pup, but I sure wanted one of Karen’s animals.)
I also bought, this time on etsy, a beautiful necklace made by a woman named KariBeth who makes jewelry from many pieces she’s found and reassembled.
I love this daisy. It is so “me”. Check out her shop, she has some nice jewelry there.
This is one of the last things my daughter and I made this summer. I call them “ghoulies”.
They were inspired by Marcia and Ty Schultz who made little one-eyed ghoulie pins as trades at Artfest the year Liz McGrath taught her “Creepy Crafts” the first time. I was crazy about the pins. You might even say I was stalking Ty and Marcia to get a pin. But I didn’t know who Marcia and Ty were until after all their pins were gone. So... I decided I needed to make some of my own. I asked Marcia when I finally met her where she got the little dollies an she said Sunshine Crafts which is in Florida. So, I got about 30 and well, here are 3. My daughter’s is the one with the bones drawn on it. We used real taxidermy eyes and each one is a pin. Goofy, I know.
I’m working on new designs with PMC (I’ll post those when they are finished), making things for vendor night at Artfest, and making samples for class too.
Later this month I am taking a class from Yehuda Tassa on “Silver Granulation”. It is the technique of fusing tiny little balls of silver onto a silver base like the Bali craftspeople do.
I am getting ready, slowly but surely for my first ever trip to an Art & Soul adventure in Portland from October 3 - 8. I am really looking forward to meeting Denise in person for the first time. She and a good friend of hers and I are sharing a hotel room there. The suspense is building and I can hardly wait. 21 days to go!
Then I REALLY have to buckle down and work because I can’t show up at Artfest without the proper amount of stuff now, can I?
I hope you all got your first class choices.
