Skip to main content

New Studio

Bit of trivia you may not know about me: when I graduated high school, I won both the English and Art awards for the senior class. Came with medals and everything. These were selected by our teachers, many of whom weren't my biggest fans, so I didn't think I'd win anything. When you spend as much time as I did in the dean's office, you generally don't expect to get any medals.

Much much later (after I got out of the military and came home) I met my old English teacher, who among other things told me that nearly all the teachers agreed that I was the best writer and the best artist of that class (not shabby when you consider I graduated with 3500 other seniors.) My favorite part: I was the only senior to win two major awards that year, which really pissed off all the suck ups. :)

My daughter, aka the little apple that didn't fall too far off this tree, is making a little money on the side by picking up art commissions, and she accepted a major one to do a custom painting for the mother of one of her friends. Since she needs room to work, I gave her the sewing room to work in:

Here's the preliminary sketch for her painting:

I'll sneak in and take more pics as it progresses.

Labels:

Comments

Maria Zannini said…
You in the Dean's office?! What the heck did you do, woman? I only got into trouble once because of a bully. God help bullies. I may look like a shy mouse, but I don't back down. LOL.

Your little apple does great work! Looks like the makings of a Norman Rockwell scene.
November 25, 2020 at 4:22 AM
nightsmusic said…
I can't wait to see how it progresses. So much talent but then, I'd expect no less. I wish I could do more than 2D, but I have no perception on paper.

I can't imagine you were anything but wonderful in school! It had to all be a mistake.
November 25, 2020 at 6:31 AM
the author said…
Oh, you would not believe how much trouble I was as a teenager. I skipped school, slept in class, turned in scathing book reports that read more like satirical anachronistic manifestos (I tore Joseph Conrad and the school system to pieces), drew caricatures of teachers and passed them around in notebooks, and impersonated other kids' parents on the phone to get them out of tardies and absences (that I only got caught for once.) Also, horror of horrors, I was friends with several black students, which in those days made white teachers think you were on drugs (nope.)I would also challenge teachers when they were teaching crap about something.

My favorite clash was when I almost got expelled when I threw down on a PhD Literature teacher who was spouting nonsense about Canterbury Tales and called her an idiot. The dean decided to move me into another class when she discovered that I was right and PhD was wrong about Chaucer. :)

I can totally see you going toe to toe with a bully. Good for you.

Kat is really way more talented than I was. Can't wait to see how this turns out. :)
November 25, 2020 at 7:05 AM
the author said…
I was a very smart kid in a very big, dumb high school. They literally didn't know what to do with gifted kids back then, so they shuffled me around a lot. I also embarrassed them by doing things that only the smartest of suck-ups did, like getting a perfect SAT score and winning important writing competitions. By the time I was a sophomore I was working at night 35 hours a week to help support my family and going to school at the same time (which is why I would fall asleep in class.)

I had a lot of hostility toward authority and nothing to lose, so I considered school a joke. My mother was too busy trying to hold the family together after her divorce to properly parent me. The military worked most of that bad attitude out of me, but as a teen I was like a feral cat.
November 25, 2020 at 7:18 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

In Progress

I promised myself I would show you the good, bad and ugly of my cleaning this year. This is what it looks like when you dump thirty years' worth of stashed fabric on the floor -- and oy, what a pain in the butt to pick up again! This is what it looks like after it's been sorted, folded and placed in containers, which took me about a week. Now the hard part is to downsize my stash by at least half, I think (that's my goal, anyway.) I've already e-mailed the president of the local quilting guild, a local friend who is a quilter, and a public school art teacher I know to see if I can donate some of the excess to them. The rest will go to Goodwill. Already I've reduced my vintage textiles from two bins to one, and my scraps from three bins to one. It's probably the hardest clean-out I've done, which is why I saved it until last. I know I have too much fabric, more than I can use in my lifetime -- but at the same time, I love it. So I have to
Post a Comment
Read more

Downsizing

This was my fabric stash once I sorted everything -- 22 full bins. I spent a day taking out and boxing up what I could part with, with the goal of trying to reduce it by half, so I'd have 11 bins. I was very strict with myself, and removed everything that for one reason or another I was sure I wouldn't be able to use. This is what I ended up with -- 12 bins of fabric that I'm keeping. It's not quite half, but close enough. Half of what I took out went to a local quilter friend, a school and Goodwill. These four tightly-packed bins will be going to the local quilting guild once I make arrangements with them for a drop-off place. I am relieved and a little sad and now determined to control my impulses to thrift more fabric. I don't want to do this again, so until I use up six bins, I can't for any reason bring any new fabric into the house.
Post a Comment
Read more

Other Stashes

Along with clearing out the spare bedroom and tidying my office and our guest bedroom, I decided to reorganize some of my stashes. This is all the yarn I have on hand, sorted by color. It looks like a lot, but lately I've been using up a minimum of half a bin every month, so this is approximately a year's supply. All of my solid color cotton perle thread. I go through a lot of this every year, too. I need a container in which I can fit all of it together, but I haven't found the right one yet. I won't show you all of my fabric -- I'm still reorganizing this stash -- but I went through everything and donated two bins of fabric I won't need to the local quilter's guild.
Post a Comment
Read more