Drunken Hummers

I think this is what happens if you let the stuff in the hummingbird feeder get fermented....

Time to Make Dennis Miller Proud

In response to a comment on the QA List< As if our current leadership is any less morally bankrupt. I'm a firm believer in survival of the fittest and anyone who mistook the likes of Timothy Leary as a leader deserved whatever snake eyes they rolled. I stand by that statement for today's youth. If you are too ignorant to take care of yourself, please don't breed and please don't come whining to me with your hand out. The strength, vitality and leadership of the baby boomers who came through the test of being Hippies, intact and better for the experience, is a testament to the fact that there were many more people who had a strong sense of self-preservation, self-respect and self-determination than there were victims. And since the notion of taking personal responsibility for one's actions has become a thing of the past, there will be no shortage of victims in the future. I give full props for the survival strengths in my character to to my parents who came from that Greatest Generation, through the hardship of the Depression and the conflict of World War II. They raised us Boomers like weeds, wild free and full of life, how could we NOT have become Hippies at play in the world they made for us with their sweat and blood. Thanks Mom & Dad for letting me have the fun you never had time or imagination for. I still look both ways before I cross. I wish I could have done as well for my own next generation but theirs is a very different world that is going to suffer for our greed and selfishness unless folks wake up and start making changes and once again take personal responsibility for everything they do.

the sandwich shop

Apart from taking a break to see (hear) the Mets sweep the Braves and have a migraine headache (is there a relationship here?) , I've been busy building backs from scraps and getting these dye-painted tops sandwiched and ready for stitching. I've really enjoyed the "Mob Scene" series and don't yet know if I am finished with it . I don't want to start another set of dyed pieces until I've seen all of these (and a few more) through to completion.

Going to the Show!

whoop:whoop "3 to 5 for Mopery" has been juried into Art Quilts XII: Current at the Chandler Center for the Arts, Chandler, AZ. Yesterday, Jim asked me if I had gotten over the concern (I won't call it angst) of selling off my "babies". I scoffed and assured him that was not the case but in this case there's still a pang over the thought that each time I send it off I may never see it again. Try as I might, the reality of this piece continues to elude my camera. If the sun ever comes back out, I'll take it outside and try again before I have to ship it.

New on the Wall

I spent nine innings with this one last night - building a back from scraps and hacking into a King-sized W&N batt. Please don't let me buy those pre-bagged things anymore. Even if I do have a 50% off coupon. There's something wrong with it...thin and nasty compared with the kind you buy off the roll. No wonder it was on sale. This is 43x55. Now that's it's up where I have to look at it, it's just as disturbing as it was when I first painted it. Yep, blood & bullets.

Ding Dong - the Queen of Mean is dead

What a miserable wretch she must have been. I'm only surprised that she didn't have her dog killed now so she wouldn't have to wait to be buried with it. When Leona Helmsley was sentenced to the Bedford Hills Women's Correctional Facility in 1989 for tax evasion she, and other celebrity prisoners, were at my mercy. Bedford, NY is right in the heart of celebrity ridden Westchester County. Martha Stewart could deliver hot pies to the prison. Hilary & Bill could drive 10 minutes up the Saw Mill Parkway to help eat them and probably do. If you are lucky, you could get run down (and not killed) by a celebrity in any number of small towns. James Coburn almost got me with a Jeep as I crossed (With the light!) in front of the Reed Library in my hometown, Carmel. But I digress. I was back working at my first full time job since my kids were born - a telephone operator for AT&T. The Carmel office handled a huge volume of collect calls from the inmates of the dozens of state and federal prisons that dot the landscape in the largely agrarian communities in the counties that lie north of the richer bedroom communities serving Manhattan. Unlike of old-fashioned switchboards (which I also operated back in '71) we had no control over what calls we received. The collect call from prisoners flowed into our headsets endlessly but were always interesting to me. Prisoners would often try to engage us in conversation outside of the scope of our handling the call - frowned on by management of course. There were perverts galore and no shortage of cranky bastards looking to verbally abuse whoever they could find - telephone operators were always handy. Dealing with miscreants appropriately was always a challenge. Many operators suffered from job-related stress. I thrived on it but it always saddened me when requests to accept charges were denied. Leona was another matter. She never seemed to get the hang of what was required of her and being a prisoner bound by the rules of the facility must have been extremely difficult for her. All she had to do was pick up the phone and say "collect call" at a minimum. Invariably, she had to be prompted to make this request like she was mentally deficient. Some operators took it as an act of defiance on her part and would hang up on her after the required prompt and 15 seconds wait. I was intrigued. If a call came in, and there was silence on the line I would intone "What is it you wish, Madam?"in my best Masterpiece Theater butler's voice, and she would mutter "Collect call." in a venomous hiss. My next obligation was to ask the identity of the caller even though I knew who it was. "May I have your name, please?" Her response was always eerie. As if she was announcing the Second Coming and I was a pagan idiot, she gave one imperious response "HELMsley". Of course, they always accepted the charges.

Archeological Dig

Part of the fun (?) of renovating is going through the storage to see just what was stowed away. Now the question is why some things were kept. I made myself a little gallery of things on the design wall and find that only one or two of these still speak to me at all. I foresee a useful life for a lot of this stuff. Art Potholders for everyone this Christmas! This little thing goes back to one of my first adventures in discharging (02/05) and it's lines and shapes are still with me. This fired clay mask watches over the studio. Jake made it while he was still in school. I think I'm going to buy him a big box of clay and see what happens.

Beastie in the Works

Ack! I ran out of the YLI machine quilting thread that I picked for much of the machine quilting in the foreground of this piece and rather than make a poor substitute, I've put on the brakes and gone shopping. I bought several spools when I was up in NY in February. Do you think I could find anyone on the internet willing to sell me only one 500 yard spool of "Foliage"? NO! but the nice folks at Country Quilter in Somers, NY (a total Eye Candy emporium!) were willing to pluck one off their shelves and send it to me posthaste. Until then, I have made the possibly insane commitment of freckling this beasts hide with French knots. LOTS of French knots.

Pool Face

It was a beautiful day. Cranky pants Debra Roby has inspired me to show you what poaching for four hours in the pool under the Georgia sun will do for you. Oh, I stay in the shade once the cleaning is done. Why encourage wrinkles at my age? A full day of R&R, dinner prepared by Chef James. His new specialty is sauteed spinach, garlic and pasta. There's a game on now and I'll watch it from the studio. Life is good.

Rain Dance in the Studio

That's us in Lawrenceville right over the weatherman's shoulder and he's saying "Y'all putcher heads between yer knees and kiss yo asses goodbye. Y'all". I don't think we have had any sustained rainfall in over six weeks. Eh. It wasn't as bad as it looked on the screen. Besides I was busy going through the stash. This is my flibbertygibbets container. Handy when postcard fever strikes. This is the part of restocking the studio that I have been dreading. All the folding and sorting. At first I was going to put everything out on open shelves so I could see it. Now I realize that I get sensory overload from that kind of visual over-stimulation. It's all going into the closet as soon as I can get some of those hanging compartment thingys from JoAnns. I had no idea how much fabric I had in those tubs and boxes and baskets. It's beyond ridiculous and I have to decide just how to convert this excess to something useful. This stack is just whole cloth dye-painted pieces and NOT the five I have lined up to work on . One of the cool side effects of this kind of in-depth inventory is finding things that have been lost. And then doing a little decorating.

beadmajik

Check out the polymer clay beads that I made at Jan Thompson's studio last week. I was fascinated with the bits and pieces that were in her scrap bucket and rolled bits of this and that into this strange little grouping. Great garbage, Jan. I'm afraid my Magpie brain went quite over the edge when I got a look at all the Shiny things there are to play with and all I could come up with was a little "pill rolling" activity like they do in mental wards. They make me smile though.