Currently in my DP proofreading queue:

The Book of Cheese
The Story of the Zulu Campaign [1880]
Comrade Kropotkin
Great Pirate Stories
The Post-Girl

Those who know me well will know that these indicate quite a lot about me.

One title I am not proofreading, but find hilarious is "Nervous Breakdowns and How To Avoid Them". I for one am avoiding them by not proofreading that book!

I've been experimenting with making seed paper lately, and decided that something involving seed paper would be a fun spring freebie. Now, I also have all these odd-sized strips of paper left from various projects that I can't bring myself to throw away. (The ones leftover from making cards out of 8 1/2 x 11 ,for example). Turns out that leftover strips of paper + seed paper + a little bit of linen thread= cute little plantable matchbooks. I'll put a bowl of them out at the Luna Festival on Saturday if I manage to get enough of them made in time.

Happy Easter!

When I was a kid, the standard Easter routine was this: we would dye eggs with the PAAS dyes; I would draw on them with crayon and do the old half-yellow-half blue number on them. I never had any use for the stickers, plastic bands, or marbling doohickeys that they kept trying to market us. Anyway, the smell of white vinegar still makes me think of Easter.

On Easter morning, I would wake up and find the eggs (usually 6-8 of them) my mom had hidden, plus my Easter basket, which was always the hardest thing to find. Now, so far this probably sounds pretty standard, but remember that we lived on a sailboat till I was 17. You probably do not know what this is like, but even though it was a largish sailboat (45 feet), and we had ample living space by sailboat standards (three cabins plus a galley), by house standards it's, um, small. The garage in my current house has more square footage.

Nowadays my mind is sort of boggled at how she managed to hide all those eggs, some of which were always in my tiny cabin, without waking me up. And how she found new places to hide them every year. Every year I would remember where they had been before and check there first, but nope, they were never there twice. This goes double for the basket, which was not a small basket-- it was the wide and shallow model-- my memory puts it at a foot across, but that could just be the big eyes of childhood remembering it that way. I think I'm not too far off, though.

The basket always contained jelly beans (scattered among the plastic Easter grass), more of our colored boiled eggs, foil-covered chocolate eggs, Cadbury Eggs, Peeps, white chocolate coconut nests with jellybean eggs (which my mom made; again, I have no idea when she managed to do this; there were never any signs of her preparations), and my favorite, Reese's peanut butter eggs. Sometimes a chocolate bunny, too.

She never really stopped doing this for me, until I moved out. If I were there today, she'd probably do it this year, too. I am a giant spoiled kid.

I should also note that in addition to making candy, hiding eggs and baskets in tricky places without me ever being aware of all that went into this tradition, I also was never able to find the leftover candy. In fact, it didn't occur to me until adulthood that there had been leftover candy. Magic.

Lucky for me I have a tolerant husband who is willing to humor me in most things (certainly most things involving chocolate), so while I did not color eggs this year, he did surprise me by hiding a basket (well, a small platter) of chocolate for me to find. It has jellybeans, and cadbury eggs (the small ones, not the big ones with the filling), and designer truffles from the fancy chocolate shop in town, and of course, Reese's peanut butter eggs.

Am I spoiled, or what? :)

Friday Cat Blogging.

I have been mighty, mighty lax with the blog this week. I'm only hurting myself, I know. To make up for it, I once again bring you...cute kitty pictures! This is the scene that unfolds most evenings after dinner...you see, I have a kitty who is sitting on my feet. Please don't make fun of my pajamas.

Other times, she just sits on the floor and stares up at me (or in this case, us, Ballyhoo having made himself at home in my lap already), looking as though she's planning on jumping up at any moment, but never actually doing it. It's very frustrating. Usually her eyes aren't glowing, though.

In other news, I'm happy to announce that my art show dance card is beginning to fill for the year-- the first is the Luna festival here in town, March 29th, 11-4pm (in the Showers building, for you locals); the next is the first annual Spring Blossom Festival in Nashville, Indiana, May 10th and 11th. Spring will hopefully have commenced with the out-all-over-busting by then and it promises to be right pleasant.

The cold is gradually receding, I'm happy to report. And I didn't let it stop me from participating in a brief visit to Nashville to visit with the philosopher's parents, visit Be Dazzled, and poke around Nashville just a little (really, just a very little. It was rainy.)

Stopped by The Arts Company, where I discovered two artists whose work I just love. The first is Javier Barbosa. Go look-- need I say more? Ok, I will. What you cannot see online is that they're also very shiny. I know, this is my technical artist's language I'm using now. But really, they are. It looks like he gives them some serious varnish. Colorful and shiny with varnish! I'm a simple person, really.

The other artist is Brother Mel. You can read an interview with him here. What bowled me over about his work was the breadth of it. A fantastic bowl made of recycled flatware. Watercolors. Scupture. A lime green deco garden bench. Everywhere we looked, there was some fantastic object from what looked like a different body of work, but by the same person. Apparently he has a new 'thing' every year, and never looks back. It really got me to thinking about what can happen when an artist ignores commercial considerations (well, really there are a couple of ways that scenario can turn out, and this is the prettier of them). But really, no 'oh, that sold, maybe I should make more' or 'I hear blue is in this year' or 'recycling is big these days, maybe I should stick with that'. Just fearless creation. Fearless creation coupled with a lot of hard work to become so good in each new medium.

Anyway, it had me fantasizing about daring new necklaces the entire drive home.

[and I don't understand why blogger won't give me paragraph breaks today]

I've had a cold this week, hence my absence. I have tried to press on in most daily matters, but it has removed some of my general enthusiasm for things.

Tuesday I went by Gallery 423 and dropped off a whole bunch of new work for spring. Saw Columbus' tree cozies-- so cute!. Failed to take pictures. Then pressed onward to Rising Sun, Indiana and then Cincinnati to do a little window shopping to locate stores that look like they might need to carry my work. The terrain between here and there is fraught with interest. I had a bit of a delayed reaction with the camera, though-- 3 minutes after we passed something, I'd say, "Oh, I should have gotten a picture of that ancient silo/falling down barn/abandoned factory. Oh, well."

I did take one of some cows, doing their best to blend in with a creek bank.

The plan for today and tomorrow was to go to Evansville and/or New Albany on another scouting outing, then onward to Nashville to visit with my philospher's parents who are up from Memphis for the day. I feel kinda cruddy, though. Not sure it is wise to go out into the world spreading my germs. *cough*

It's Friday, and the cats are sleeping

No, no cat blogging today to speak of-- the cats are as disappointed by the continued presence of winter (we have a blowing snow warning today-- they're right, the snow does blow), and are protesting the situation by sleeping.

I myself have been busily working on planning my art show booth. I got some great feedback recently from someone in the know about how my booth could be improved on (summary: ditch the tables with tablecloths, try to get some pedestals to make it more gallery-like; and giant blown up photos of my work would be a good thing, too), and am in a rush to implement some of those improvements in time for deadlines to a couple of shows I really want to get into this year.

One thing I did was order some mesh walls from Flourish. It hurt, but I'll be glad I did it, since it basically cleans the whole thing up. Hopefully by the time they arrive, the snow will have gone away and I'll actually be able to set up my booth in my driveway and get a good shot of it. I will, of course, post the photos here when that happens.

I have developed a callus that runs between the joints of my right middle finger. And I keep sanding the end off of my left thumb. From this information, you can reconstruct how I hold objects when I am sanding them.

Ow.

Also, I'm pleased to announce that my jewelry is now being carried by the Basile Studio Shop at the Indianapolis Art Center!

Sorry about the short, late entry. Tune in next time to view the fruits of my collaboration with Jennifer Mulcahy.

It was warm enough for me to venture outside yesterday-- I went for a walk around the park(still very muddy) and then, energized by all the outsideness, started mucking about with the shrubbery in front of the house. It was then that I found this singular, amazing pod, dangling from a dead vine that was snaking up my plant holder hook. The pod was a good 3-4 inches long. I have to say I neglected the yard a bit last summer, so I have no idea what sort of plant produced it, except that it was not anything I put there on purpose, I don't think. Does anyone recognize it? Anyway, it's the most beautiful seed pod I've ever seen. Just...perfect.