Thirty years ago, I traveled to San Diego to participate in a cross country meet at Balboa Park as a member of the University of Hawaii cross country team. It wasn’t my best race but that’s neither here nor there. The point of telling this is that during our short stay in San Diego, the team went across the border to Tijuana for an afternoon of shopping. 

While at the Tijuana market, the one thing I wanted to find was a brown leather purse…..which I did….which is also incidentally the most perfect small purse ever invented by man. Mine is also 30 years old, and time is taking its toll on my old formerly perfect small purse.

For whatever reason, probably because of being perpetually broke, because I’m a sucker for punishment,  I’ve
made it a practice to make gifts for loved ones, especially at Christmas
time. This year the gift was determined by the perfect leather purse and an outgrown pair of black
leather pants. With the clock ticking, I cut the patterns out for five purses and straps by closely matching the design of the 30 year old leather purse from Tijuana. But honestly, time kept getting the best of me, and even though I made small baby steps of progress, it wasn’t going to be enough to get everything done by Christmas morning. Plus, I couldn’t even figure out how to thread the sewing machine and doing everything by hand would have taken  way too long. Enter the Amazing Reese. Reese saw my dilemma and offered to help. First he threaded the machine God bless him which I couldn’t figure out for the life of me. Then he threaded the bobbin. Then he proceeded to sew the front, back, and zipper together.

With daughters out of the house on Christmas eve, and grocery shopping
and cooking prep for Christmas dinner completed, I had enough time to hand sew the straps to the body of the purse. Whew.

Now, over the years, Reese and I have gotten mixed reviews from our homemade gifts. Not everyone appreciates the thought, time, and effort that goes into something handcrafted.  I guess some of those negative vibes were floating around in my head and therefore I had very low expectations about how they would be received.

To our delight and my surprise, all four daughters love their new purses!

And remember, we made one for me, too, which I also love and which was used today while taking Tilly (the wonder dog) to do her volunteer work at Methodist Hospital. It really is the perfect purse.

The weather was perfect today for putting on the final clear protective coating of the art heart I created for the American Heart Association’s Go Red for Women.

It has taken over two months to get to this point.  It’s a huge honor to be asked to participate as an artist on behalf of heart health in women, but it’s also extremely nice to be finished with the project. It’s going to a new home tomorrow! Yay!

Tilly is so smart that she was accepted to Rice University! Well, she IS smart, but not that smart. At the request of the school librarian, Tilly went to the library on campus to help students de-stress during finals. Her main “job” is to let everyone pet her, but she also performed almost all of her tricks for the students and faculty who were there.

The librarian gave Tilly an authentic Rice scarf so she’s totally legit wherever she goes on campus.

We’ve gone three times over the past four days and we’re leaving soon for one more library visit before Christmas break. It’s been a blast.

Last week I worked on finishing up this art heart for the American Heart Association’s Go Red for Women movement. It’s for a particular patron in the Circle of Red Society. She donates money and enthusiasm toward promoting heart health for women, and I donate artistic creativity (and enthusiasm) making this art heart specifically for her, specifically because of her sizable monetary donation. For the edges of the heart, I made my own simple peony leaf design stencil out of thick stiff paper, in this case grocery sacks. Because I wanted to alternate the direction of the leaf without waiting for the oil paint to dry in between painting, I went ahead and made two stencils, orienting them left and right.

Here’s what it looks like with the peony leaf stencils painted around the edge — not too busy but not too plain, either. I quite like it. It’s my first time using stencils in one of my paintings. In his later years, Henri Matisse used paper cut outs and stencils extensively in his work, so I’m in good company using this process. Plus, Matisse is one of the favorite artists of the lady who will eventually get this heart. So there’s that.

When our daughters were small, one of my favorite things about being their mommy was reading books aloud while they snuggled up to me on the sofa. The Little House books were a family favorite. The books are full of wonderful stories about the beauty and harshness of early American frontier life. They are also chock full of lessons if one is inclined toward that sort of thing. That’s how we found the Little House Cookbook, because we were looking for supplemental materials to go along with what we were already reading. The pound cake recipe on page 204 is by far my favorite recipe in the whole book. It’s based on the following excerpt from Farmer Boy.

That day they made ice cream again, and ate the last cake. Alice said she knew how to make a pound cake. She said she’d make one, and then she was going to go sit in the parlor.
Almanzo thought that wouldn’t be any fun….
That afternoon he came into the kitchen to see if the pound cake was done. Alice was taking it out of the oven. It smelled so good that he broke a little piece off the corner. Then Alice cut a slice to hide the broken place, and then they ate two more slices with the last of the ice cream.

Farmer Boy

Just reading that small bit of Farmer Boy makes me kinda wish I had
some little ones to snuggle with on the sofa again. Those years sure
were magical, though it’s also fun watching our daughters mature into women. Our four grown daughters will be home for Thanksgiving
tomorrow – all four! My heart and house will be full.

Pound Cake

1 lb butter (2 cups)
1 lb sugar (2 cups)
1 lb eggs (8 medium eggs)
1 lb flour (4 cups)
grated nutmeg

That’s about all there is to it. Cream the butter. Add the sugar. Add eggs one by one. Add flour bit by bit but don’t over blend. Mixture will be stiff.

Spoon batter into two bread pans. Bake at 350 for 30 minutes. Reduce heat to 325 and bake another 30 minutes. Remove from pan to cool.

The house smells so good when this is baking. It tastes so much better than anything you’d buy at the grocery store.  Sometimes I add a little rum or brandy to the batter (about a cup) but it’s quite good without it. Enjoy and Happy Thanksgiving.

Almost every Friday, Tilly gets super groomed so we can go visit folks at Methodist Hospital. She is such a good dog and for the most part loves getting groomed. (The only time she pulls away is when I get to her back paws. I think she’s ticklish.) Even though it’s exhausting to do all of her grooming myself, the pay off is totally worth it. It’s amazing how just seeing a dog walk down a corridor affects people for the better.

The Methodist Hospital staff is great. Therapy dogs have been part of their program for years.  They always encourage us to see just one more patient. Just one more. I love it. So does Tilly. This might be the best volunteer job ever.

As oft happens (with me), this is the second time I’ve painted this image, the first being on the art heart in the last post, which, incidentally, is not finished, yet. Per the norm, this one  might or might not be finished, yet, also. (Is that too many commas?) It takes me a while to “see” things that need to be tweaked….if they need tweaking at all. I suppose that sometimes I just need to live with the paintings before deciding if they are properly and completely all the way finished.

For the most part, Peonies in a Glass Vase was really fun to paint. The un-fun part was that the paint dried too quickly to easily manipulate before I had time to get to the whole of it on account of not having large enough chunks of time with which to work. This took hours and hours, too many to count, so I broke it up over several days. It’s becoming more and more common for me to take several days working on things….maybe because I’m using larger canvases. (?) Consequently, some parts of this got painted over and over in order to keep blending the oil paints.

This painting is quite large, 29″ x 32″ give or take a quarter inch. Also, it’s painted on wood, which was interesting, too, because the wood grain presented its own challenges with ridges and dips and such. Plus, even though I gessoed the wood (using gesso as a verb), the paint absorbed more into the wood than what usually happens when painting on linen.

Here’s something I haven’t thought about until this very second. Duh. How on earth am I going to wire this for hanging? Hmm….that could be a problem. 

This is the beginning of the work for the art heart for the American Heart Association. It’s a peony. A peony is a very complicated flower to paint, by the way. It also happens to be the favorite flower for the lady who will receive this heart for her contribution to Go Red for Women.

This is the other side of the heart – peonies in a vase.

Next I get to decide how to complete the background and the sides of the heart, probably with leaves or something. Hopefully I’ll dream about it tonight. Solving problems in my dreams is always fun.

Even though nothing has been said about this past week, it should come as no surprise that in some regards I made more work for myself than was necessary, and in other regards, got absolutely nothing accomplished. Typical week around here that was full and wonderful, exhausting and refreshing.

The opening reception/retablo extravaganza was last Thursday night at Lawndale Art Center. Daughter Anna and I got there late-ish (on purpose). Here’s the requisite artist pose next to my pink chucks retablo while wearing the pink chucks that were the still life for the retablo. Are inanimate objects still a still life if I’m wearing them?

 This is what the front of the skeleton suit Anna painted looks like. Anna did a great job! The bones suit is for her — I was just the model — and even though my bones are shorter than hers, it looks awesome on her when she wears it.

Not one of my more brilliant ideas….in fact, it’s quite the opposite. 

First of all, this should not have been a project for indoors though it has been good to be near the bathroom sink. This
is way more of a mess and way more trouble than it was supposed to be. The plan was to mix my own colors using house paint instead of oils like I usually do. The only way I could think to economize on the cost of paints for the new big art heart project was to use house paint.

Trying to economize with art supplies has wasted my time, efforts,
sanity, and money. Not as much money as if I were using oil paints, but
the trade off in the learning curve, time, and confidence might make it
worth it to use oils. It’s just such an expensive habit to
have….being an artist. And then to fail in even a small way is such a
waste of valuable resources.

*deep sigh*