Luna's Baublebilities

I can feel it.  Spring is coming.  I am crawling out my trench. 

Slowly.

I was sick again last week - but just for one day and it was such a blissfully complete sickness that I didn't even try to function which is preferable to being marginally sick and incompetent for days on end and trying not to be completely useless.  Maxx missed school because I couldn't even get him ready for the bus.  He watched movies all day and drank juice boxes & ate crackers.  I lay on the couch and slept once I dragged myself out of bed to fix the fire.  It was horrible.  And then it was done.

Saturday several men from Church came to help Bry with wallboard in the bathroom because there was some drama with the Housing Council - which is a post for another day at the Beorningstead.  I'll link there when I get it written.  It has been so wonderful to get so much help with the place.  It is so sweet to flick on a light and remember that Karl, Josh, Heather & Joan helped us with wiring last winter or to turn on the water and remember that Ken, Tom & Irene helped us get the well working again in the dead of winter.  Turn on the fireplace and feel the warmth that Meemo wants us to have and enjoy the skeleton of the hearth  nestled between the beams that Brothers Barker & Nason helped Bry & Ken build.   Not to mention hours of help from Jonathan, Cam, Dale, Greg and just about every priesthood holder in our branch and several from the larger district.  Everywhere I look in our house, I can see and touch manifestations of the love & service of others. 

That helps immensely with the long, hard crawl out of the trench.

Another thing that helps is to have projects with deadlines.  I've got a couple of wholesale orders that need to go out soon.  Good stuff.  And I'm helping sew two costumes for Molly's school production of Zombie Prom.  It is set in the 1950's and they need a couple of prom dresses.  These are Vintage Vogue - this top one is Molly's and the bottom one is for the lead girl.  I was intimidated at first, but the muslin for Molly's bodice came together pretty easily and Vogue's instructuions are pretty thorough and the patterns are well made - I think it's gonna be O.K.  If not - it just has to look good from the back row, right?

And my Sister in Law tagged me for a Stylish Blogger award.  I'll cover the details on that later this week - right now I need to go get my little (now blonde) actress and get ready to deliver her to a YW sleepover.














. . . .

I may get my studio back soon.  It is so much warmer.  20 below tonight with the windchill but up to the 40's by the end of the week.  That's according to Todd Moe - he's got good info.

Yes.  I know it is still February.  But we're half way through and just about done with the bitter cold.

Soon we'll start seeing little red nubs of birch trees and tiny green shoots in the lawn. 

I'm slowly coming out of my rut.  Turning off the computer helps.  A lot.

So did getting out of the house Saturday.  We spent 3 hours with Maxx at the Doctors to find out that he's allergic.  To everything.

Except dogs.

Then we saw the ice castle (I forgot the camera - darnit) and ate junk food and listened to The Promise on the longer than usual car ride through the blizzard.  (Vintage Bruce helped more than I expected, too.) 

It was a good day.








Here's a green collection.

Getting better.  Enjoying the new fallen snow.  Every day.

But not so much the cold tonight.

I owe you all a doodle for last week.  I'll post one tomorrow.

In the meantime, enjoy this new collection.

Ug.  I'm still so sick.  Worse today than the last few days.  Blah. 

So I made some Orange juice and  an Orange Collection to cheer myself up.





I really need to get well. 

For February, I will try to make 3 collections a week.  I also need to finish several projects each week.  My inventory is low at the SLC Arts Council gallery and in my ArtFire shop.   I'm moving all of my supplies to LunasBaublebilities on ArtFire - I know!  That's a shift.  The Baublebilities shop will hold . . .  baubles . . .  and the Goblins' Market shop will hold my finished creations and, eventually, some of Molly Bryn's work.  She's doing some pretty funky things with jeans lately.

Let's face it.  I'm depressed.  It's January.  It has been freakin' cold and a lot of the supplies I had stored in my South Studio (enamel paints for filigree, acrylics, specialized glues for jewelry and textiiles)  froze and are ruined because we had to seal off that section of the house in order to make headway in the battle against Winter.

My North Side Studio looks like this.

It is the only warm spot in the house some days and this is where everyone wants to huddle.  My dye table is covered with other people's junk and stuff from other projects that I would rather do in the South Side studio but can't.  Because it is cold.






See the plastic?  Some days it billows out like there is some enormous, liquid animal trying to push it's way through into the rest of the house. 










The kids have been hacking and snotting and puking for over a week.  I've had a low level of ongoing physical malaise for most of the month.  I've been mentally incompetent and my work ethic is just gone.  Completely.

 The other day I took some time to thumb through some old journals because I wanted to revisit some favorite doodles.  And because I was too lazy to get up and do any actual work.  I discovered a few things;

First,  I was a much more interesting person before I became Maxx's Mommy.  I think that I might become more interesting again in the future - I remember feeling pretty burdened and lame when MB was small, too.  (So - if you have a friend who used to be lots of fun, deeply intellectual, insightful, creative and generally good to talk to and she now has kids and is a total bore - be nice to her, O.K?  It sort of sucks sometimes to have that part of yourself forced to the back burner or into total hibernation so that you can manage your kids and house and etc...)


Second, I found a great doodle I made during a talk by Pres. Monson during the April 2006 general conference.  Isn't he adorable?  Don't you feel bad for him?

Third, I found a good prose poem that applies pretty well to my state of mind this month.  I scribbled it sometime between 8/2000 and 5/2001 - certainly it is a winter poem and was written before we had to put our old Springer, Roxanne, down.  I miss her.

I know that what I need is to get the house clean, get some exercise and banish everything but fabric and dye from my North Studio & give myself permission to drag some beads and findings from the frozen tundra to the livingroom.  Emmeth encourages this.  He would like to help build a necklace.  Or take one apart. 



Anyway - here's the poem.  Careful.  It's ugly.








Welcome to my BioRythmic Trench

a trench = a ditch; a place to channel unpleasant/unwanted stuff from one place to its disposal; a place for smelly men with guns to lie in while they reload and to crouch in while they fire at the enemy; a long hole in the dirt; a place where people piss;

an entrenchment = a thing that soldiers dig and build to keep people out - to keep the enemy on the other side.

Who's the enemy??? 
Surely it is this old dog.

Blind, deaf, lazy, fat, stubborn, inconvenient.

I could just kick her.
But I don't
I know how she feels.

When I was a kid, this would have been a snow day.   If the school Superintendent didn't make the right call on that, my mom would have kept us home anyway.  She would have made oatmeal for breakfast (with cinnamon and lots of sugar) and would have sent us outside to skate on the thaw pond or slide in the clearing.  She would have made hot cocoa when we came back in.



 Sadly, there's no good place to slide or skate nearby so I sent my kids to school today.  Meemo was much cooler than I am, I'm afraid.

My Grandpa Weston called this kind of snow "sugar snow" because he said that it makes the sap run.  Grandpa was a master syrup maker.  While I've had lots of good maple syrup in the last couple of decades, I've not found any that compares to his.  Maybe someday I'll build myself a sugar house and give it a try.












 I find myself wishing I had a pair of snowshoes and a good outdoor camera today.  It is pretty outside but also very wet and the Konica is the only camera that works.  That's my studio camera and it is such a baby that even the thought of humidity breaks it.  All of these photos are taken from inside the house, porch or woodshed - can't let it get dribbled or snowed on AT ALL.  We're pinching pennies to save for a Cannon Powershot for the family- they are small & portable, supposed to be waterproof, rugged and work in extreme temperatures but they are pricey.  It seems unreasonable to buy one on our current austerity budget until we have a day like this when I would like to go out and get pics of Maxx and Ziggy playing in the snow.


A couple more orders for custom velvet scarves would cover it!   I'll have to put an option for custom velvet luxury scarves in my shops.  They are a bit pricey but they make such wonderful gifts for a significant occasion and I am willing to barter.  The last two that I've made have been happy bartering deals.

Here are the promised pictures of the one I've been working on this week.  A very lucky young lady will be getting this tonight.  I'm loving it.

The purple is highly variegated and really simmers when it moves.  I started the beaded edging in a soft, sliver lined pink but that didn't feel dramatic enough to me.  The young woman this is intended for is classy, extremely talented, well mannered and has a lot of spunk.  She loves lime green.  I felt like the scarf needed a bit more playful drama to suit her personality and then I remembered these lime green window cuts.

I left the pink edging and gradually changed to some very pretty purple silver lined AB beads.  The dangles have the pink seed beads, a 4mm fire polished purple seed bead and a yummy lime green picasso lined window cut.  The fringe is a bit heavier than most of my fringes because the window cuts are quite substantial but the velvet itself is heavy and rich enough to carry it.  The windows also rattle or clatter a bit when the scarf is shaken, which I think is cool.  Interestingly, the combination of purple and lime green makes the pink beads look almost golden.

Yummy!  And the colors are wonderful for a late February birthday - rich and warm with the promise of a greening spring.

















Time to go do that other edge!

. . . . .