Luna's Baublebilities

We really are about to move.  Really.  All the good new photos are on the camera, hanging on a nail over at the Beorningstead.  But here are a couple of shots of the progress on my studio sink area and a breif overview of what we've accomplished in the past few days.

The upstairs bedrooms are ready to prime and paint.  (Molly and Meemo primed her room last week!)  There are lights in each bedroom, though none in the hall or stairway yet.  (Again, thanks goes to Bry's mom for her patience and skill in wiring lights and decoding those jumbles of wire in junction boxes.)

I set up my brand new computer desk yesterday (it took nearly all stinking day).

Bryan finished installing my studio sink last night.  (Thanks go to Greg who helped with a few minor issues and consulted with us about the roof over the back of the house.)  Hot and cold water come in and go out of my new studio without leaks!  We can now wash dishes and scrub paintbrushes (and eventually dye scarves and threads and fabulous fiber!)

The shower and Potty have been operable for some time now - no door on the bathroom, just a sliding board for privacy.  That causes Molly a great deal of anxiety but she can cope for a little while until we figure out the door solution.

Things are still very rustic.  It will feel like camping - in my own bed! - for a while.  Which is fine.  Even nice.  I spent a good part of my childhood living in the basement of my parent's home while the log house was being built.  My grandfather ran a saw mill.  I really don't mind the sound of power tools and I actually like the smells associated with construction.  Dust, though.  There will be lots of that.  Have to remember to cover the computer and furniture all the time.

Maxx is having a blast.  And not watching TV when we are there.  Another bonus - he plays with his little cousin, Truman, daily.  They are becoming good friends, which is something Maxx needs.  Truman loves to run and play with him - they have squirt gun fights with lots of hilarious laughter, play Star Wars using big bubble wands as light sabers and just generally run amok.  Truman is no longer afraid to tell Max where to get off, he holds his own and is very straightforward about what he does and doesn't like. 

Goblin's Market and Luna's Baublebilities are very much on hold right now.  I fulfilled two wholesale orders this week.  One was for a bunch of dragonflies to New Zeland and one for a handful of gorgeous earrings to a customer who makes her own jewelry but also does several trunk shows a summer and fills out her inventory with work from other artists, like me.  Other wise things have been quiet, allowing me to focus on construction.   The break is nice but I've really been itching to be playing at something creative - especially since my old studio is clean for walk throughs.  That empty table makes my fingers itch.

Hopefully, this will help with that itch.  I just got a copy of India Flint's Ecocolor in the mail.  Velma brought some gorgeous fabric into the Arts Council a couple of weeks ago and I was just smitten with what she was doing.   I've played with rust dyeing before and have seen several of Velma's earlier experiments with composted cloth but never felt compelled to try anything this slow before.  The work she brought in on silk was just incredible - whole leaves and plant parts bundled in cloth and steeped for weeks left rich impressions reminiscent of solarized photography or x rays of flowers.  I hope to bundle up a few things myself later this week.  I have a nice sunny spot on my studio floor for batching bundles of slow cloth.  The timing is good for such an experiment, too.  I can't really do any other dyeing the way things are right now and this will drive me outdoors with the beast and the children to collect some goodies and walk away from the construction for a few minutes now and then. 

It's time to get ready for work.  I'm exhausted from insomnia and I'm hoping that I make it through the day happily.  I'll try to put up some new photos this weekend.

But I still had to build a fire yesterday. June 1st and it was only 54 degrees in my house. I don't function well below 65 or so, the urge to curl up with a blankie and take a nap is just too great. I hate the fact that the Summer Solstice is upon us every year before school is even out. Other school districts in the country are finishing up (or are finished) right now but we have to go straight through the third week of June. Of course that is all related to the weather. We can't even reliably plant gardens here until after Memorial day, unless we have tons of mulch and plastic coverings to keep baby plants alive, so Upstate NY has a later end of school year date than warmer areas because there was not much need to let the farmers' kids out any earlier than this and those last few weeks of August are so precious for our growing season.

Etsy Bloggers carnival theme this week is to write about our summer plans. - Boy do we have a big summer ahead of us. We are anxiously awaiting a lending decision from the bank about our new place and as soon as we have a go ahead, we have got to start working. We are currently boxing up all non-essentials in our house to be put away in storage so we can start listing this home for sale. Once we close on the new pace, we have got to do a few cosmetic repairs, put in all new wiring and plumbing (because the Amish ripped everything electrical and almost all the plumbing out) remove the outhouse, build an entirely new bathroom in the upstairs attic, replace several windows, wash and paint all the walls, sand and re-finish several floors, install appliances, counters and cupboards in the kitchen, bath and my studio(!!) and maybe we'll be able to move in before the Winter Solstice!

Molly Bryn has been wanting to learn how to blog so I'm planning to have her blog the progress of the new Beorningstead down in Burnett Hollow. I'm so exited to see the progress of our new home as we prepare to move in. I'll let everyone know when we begin that blog - Molly has a great voice and loves to take photos so I'm sure it will be a fun blog to read. I'm also excited about the prospect of boxing up all of our non-essentials for several months. I suspect that there will be lots of things I don't miss tripping over that we will not put back into our new home. As it is, I have at least one huge box of orphan projects that will NOT be coming to my new studio. Anyone want it?

I also hope that we get to do some hiking this summer. Bryan aspires to hike all the high peaks in the Adirondacks and 4 years ago our family climbed Mt. Marcy - the highest peak in NYS. Bryan has climbed it many times and enjoys it but it was really more of a hike than I like and my mother-in-law said that she would probably not attempt such a long hike again, either. I like a quick, easy climb with lots of time to enjoy the scenery on the way up and a pretty view when you get there. We have talked about climbing all the ADK peaks that still have fire towers, I believe that there are 17 of them. Maybe we'll get in one or two of those this summer, if I can get my body back in hiking shape.

The mixed media drawing at the top of this post (which I cannot seem to convince GIMP or Blogger to resize for me - aaaargh!) was inspired by a hike up Mt Van Hovenberg when Molly was about 7. It is titled "There Was an Orange Salamander on the Trail." We have since discovered that our salamander was actually a red eft, which has since become one of my favorite teeny crawling things. What you cannot see in this composite scan is that the clouds, water and contour lines have a lot of sparkley gel-pen accent work and there is a teeneency little eft on the trail. The scanner just seems to read the sparkley as grey and the eft is invisible. Oh well.

What a week we had last week! Bry has been working on taping the ceiling panels in our livingroom (remember that living room makeover we started last spring break?) and I've been working on scarves and inventory updates and we've both been cleaning up after a sick kid so the house is in serious disarray this morning.






I hope to get the living room clean and tidy, the laundry folded and maybe put away, Maxx's toddler toys cleaned out of his room so some of his bigger boy toys can go in, get the dishes washed and the kitchen cleaned up as well as spend at least half an hour with the treadmill, keep the fire burning and keep Molly on task with homeschool.

I'm not ambitious at all today.



But first I wanted to show off my new scarves and show you who I found lurking in the lair when I cleaned my studio a couple of weeks ago.








Here are some photos of my new scarves - they are already on their way to their new owners.







I'm in love with the purple moon scarf. I need to get my stretcher back out later this week and experiment with those funky color combinations some more.










These are among my simpler dragons and certainly are not my best ever but they are cute.

The Phoenix is wonderful. It was an exciting design challenge and I had fun blending the colors and creating the plumage. I've listed them all over at GoblinsMarket. They are not getting the attention they deserve hiding away in the mess of my studio.






I haven't worked with polymer clay for a while so these are probably over a year old. I'm torn about working with polymer anymore. I really like making dragons - I love the intricacy that I can develop with color and embellishments and I am addicted to all things fairy tale. BUT - the last time I worked with the clay, I had some very troubling reactions. . . . . .

It had been a few years since I had had time and inclination to get the stuff out - mostly because my old pasta machine was shot - it just took too long to condition the clay and get a good color blend with the old machine. There was a sale on PM's at Joanne Fabric on day so I rushed out to grab a new one and got my clay out again. I made lots of dragons and some mokumo game beads over the course of a couple of weeks and then my hormones hit me. PMS was terrifying that month - I was an emotional wreck (worse than my usual wreckage) weeping and then raging uncontrollably, close to suicidal a couple of times, horribly painful breasts and the night before my cycle began, I had bouts of shaking, chills and sweating. I was seriously considering a trip to the ER.

After decompressing for a few days, I realized that my horible hormones were probably a reaction to contact with the polymer clay. I bought some hand lotion that forms a barrier on your skin to prevent absorption of chemicals. The next month PMS was bad, but not as bad as the previous month. I quit using the Polymer Clay and my system stabilized to its normal level of insanity after a few cycles. I haven't worked with the clay since and can't decide on what course of action to take.

Do I use up what I have left? Do I chuck it all out? Do I try to continue to work with the stuff wearing gloves as much as possible? I was very frustrated to have developed a profitable and fulfilling new product line (dragons) only to discover thatthe process makes me sick. And I'm in a quandry about supporting an art form that obviously has serious health and likely environmental implications. Polymer Clay advocates and manufacturers insist that the stuff is safe, it cannot case cancer or other disease and is manufactured in an environmentally sound manner.

Really? Who do I trust? My body or those who make money selling me the stuff? How closely linked is my early Ploymer Clay use to my secondary infertility and endometriosis problems?

I will never know.

What I do know is that I have these beautiful things sitting around and stuff to make more ofthem and I don't know what to do with it all.

Saturday was a hectic day around here - but very productive! About 30 members from our congregation came out to help us get some projects done on our house. We have been feeling so overwhelmed and incapable of getting this place under control that the help was really appreciated. I am truly amazed at how much was accomplished:

The front door was removed and a wall was put in place of it, the steps to the new entry way were leveled and installed and the frame for the entry way "porch" was put up. This may sound trivial but the steps we are talking about are composed of huge sandstone slabs. They kept our neighborhood engineer busy for several hours.

The broken tree was brought down and chopped up, several other bits of small dead wood were cut down and chopped and they were stacked along with 14 other cord of wood. The twigs suitable for twig furniture projects were stored in the barn.

The side rear foundation and cellarway recieved some much needed attention and a section of wiring was finished so that I now have more than one outlet in my computer room!

One participant volunteered some tile she had purchased last year and decided she didn't want after the return date - so I'll get a new floor in the living room or kitchen. The walls in the living room were scrubbed and insulation was put up. The window and door for Bry's garden shed were repaired and installed and a new cover was made for my Brother-in-law's boat.

Several women helped me tear the weeds out of the garden and take out the potatoes and some of the beets, we even found a few viable tomatoes left in there and the zucchini is still producing. They then went on to rip and tear out an old flower bed full of small exotic trees that had outlived its loveliness before we moved in seven years ago.

Lots of other small tasks were accomplished - Bry feels that we got more done in one day with all that help than he could have finished alone in a year. Now we can spend our remaining time and energy finishing the stripping on the livingroom woodwork, putting up the wall board and finishing the new entryway prior to tearing off the old porch before it falls off!

Unfortunately, I didn't have my camera out that day. Chrissy took lots of photos so I'll have to borrow some from her.

I do have photos of a little red eft that Bry and Maxx found in the cellar on Friday. He was quite a lively little fellow - we hope he winters over well down there! (I also have to remember to reset my white balance before using the flash - these photos are eerily blue!)

Another wonderful thing that happened this weekend is that one of my dragonflies made it to the front page of Etsy. It was in a treasury by justclaying along with other beautiful minty green items. I had a great weekend selling custom orders for dragonflies and now I have to put Molly to work helping me enamel another 70 of them tonight to replenish my stock!

Lots of changes (good and bad) in the last couple of weeks around here. We were able to enjoy lots of time this week with my nephew, D, who is a year older than my little guy. They had a great time but my nephew is sad because his maternal gramma, Mary, passed away from liver cancer last Sunday. She was a vibrant and outgoing woman who had beaten cancer two or three times before this last recurrance and it has been rough for D to see her weaken so quickly. Prayers for Mary's extended family and especially my brother, sister-in-law and nephew would be appreciated. They shared a home with gramma Mary for the last several years as her health became a bit more chancy.

But then last night I got some great news - my brother-in-law and his sweet wife had their first baby yesterday. It is a beautiful little boy and I can't wait to go down to visit and get my hands on him. However, this addition severely disrupts my balance of nieces to nephews. I have only 4 nieces and now I have 7 nephews. Someone in the family had better step up and start producing more girls!







Most of you probably want to see photos of my experiments with mono-printing. Well, here they are. I mostly followed the instructions in Quilting Arts, as mentioned in an earlier post. I used Procion chartruce, bright green, brilliant blue, teal and midnight blue on both sheer organza and white cotton muslin. I wasn't really pleased with my current results but here are 2 things I intend to try next time:

- Take time to find and/or create some interesting resists. I only had string to work with because there were no leaves here last week and I was too eager to take time to cut out paper resists. I found that if string is thick enough to act as a resist, it leaves a fuzzy impression because it is not flat enough to allow good contact with the plate. Scraping some of the dye away with my fingernail left a crisp and interesting deign but my fingertips are still purple.

- Get some different sponge rollers. I ordered some from Dick Blick that I think my 3 year old will love. They have a very open texture and would be great for tempera on paper but left a very grainy texture on the printing plate. Watering down the dye paste and adding a bit of dish soap to the recipe might help with that, but I think most of it was the roller. A recent trip to Home Depot revealed a wide array of locally available paint roller thingies - including some very smooth and small foam trim rollers. I'm going to get some of those.

I can see that this could become a valuable technique. If I had taken the time to create some interesting resists I could be working with some fun quilted, embroidered and embellished layers right now. Maybe next week.

Now I also want to try screen printing with dye paste. I've been intimidated to try screen printing because I was afraid that it would be very expensive and complicated. Technology is getting more user friendly, though so I may try that soon.

Oh, BTW, my samples are not ironed because I couldn't get to the ironing board. Which brings me to another issue. . . . We were just going to paint, right?

Well, we discovered that we couldn't easily scrape paint off the old woodwork without having serious lead issues. As we stood around looking at the room and worrying about what to do, my son ran through the front door and slammed it shut. It made an interesting noise, like plaster falling down inside the wall. Investigation of the noise led to the discovery that, indeed, plaster was falling down behind the door casing which was actually coming off the wall all on its own. All of the woodwork came off surprisingly easily. It is now all in the barn in the process of being chemically stripped.

Further contemplation determined that it would make the most sense to replace the two outer homasote walls and the ceiling now while the woodwork is already off. Removal of the ceiling revealed that we still have knob and tubing wiring in some parts of the house. From what is exposed, we cannot determine where the knob and tubing comes from nor where it goes. It is a great mystery.

Ceiling removal also revealed that a weight bearing wall was removed from the middle of the living room at some point and never replaced or shored up with an alternative. Also, a joist was sawn through to allow installation of a heating duct from the furnace to the upstairs. Hot air has never come from this duct in all the years we have lived here. Removal of the duct revealed that this is because the duct had a big gap between two sections, allowing the hot air to just blow around between the walls. Removal of the duct also revealed a rotting joist and planking under what is left of the original, incredibly heavy, brick chimney.

We stared at the ceiling for many long moments. We began to wish that we had just left the room alone or given the kids some cans of spray paint. We looked at each other for many long moments.

I said "It would be a lot easier to make these decisions if we were drunk." My husband laughed like Tom Hanks in The Money Pit.











Unfortunately, we don't drink. All decisions are on hold.

This is turning out to be an exciting week in our house. For the last couple of years, we have been muttering about how cold our living room feels and about the tiles that have been peeling off the floor. It has had white walls and a cobalt blue paint on the trim - very lovely, but very cold, which is not something you need more of here in Almost Canada. To top it off, we were in a hurry when we painted the blue trim and decided that it would only be temporary (6.5 years ago) so we did not properly prime the surface of the old paint. We just wanted to cover up the hideous dusty puke-rose color and thought for sure that we would have time and money to take the trim off and completely strip it before too long, as well as replace the cruddy homasote with real wall board and insulation and restore the room to something of its original beauty.

Yes, well. We were brand new homeowners back then; innocent, optimistic, clueless. Turns out we are going to add another layer of paint - but we will scrape and prime this time. The blue has steadily been peeling off since day 2.

So. Anyone who has done a paint job on an almost 200 year old house can tell you that the work is never straight forward. We took all the furniture out of the room and decided that we would remove the fake beams across the ceiling because they looked stupid and were falling apart. We had examined the room carefully and could not conceive of a good reason why the previous home owners would have put them in, besides an obvious obsession with the whole 1980's southwestern look. (Hence the hideous dusty puke-rose color on the walls and trim and the fake arches in the doorways. Why they had paired it all with a 1970's orange and brown shag carpet, I cannot fathom.) Turns out that the ceiling is comprised of homasote, too, and that the edges of the sheets are not really connected to anything. They are screwed in hither and dither along the breadth of the sheets but the edges are just sort of hanging out, begging for some sort of faux architecture to hide them.

Sigh. There's more. The previous home owners in their fit of south west obsession, plastered the walls and ceilings with that stuccoish, pebbley stuff and wrapped the ceiling and the walls all in it together. There is a nice little curve where they meet instead of a sharp corner with a bit of space for each segment of the house to wiggle around in. Of course there has been some cracking, especially in areas where the homaoste edges have sagged inside the faux beams. If we rip the ceiling out and replace it with wall board like normal homeowners would, we would also have to replace all of the walls. Our tax return $$ is gone so we will have to do a shoddy job of it and try to patch up the places where the homasote is crumbled or where the stucco stuff has cracked with spackling. This drives my husband crazy. If he had his way, he would have ripped out the stairs and several wall yesterday.

But - when it is done, it will look different and hopefully better than before. We'll be going for a paprika color on a couple of the walls paired with a buttery cream color on the others with a deep, dark aqua on the floors. That is unless someone contacts me and says they have $50,000 they want to spend on an old fixer upper with 4 acres in Fort Jackson, NY. In that case, we'll go buy a yurt and start working on building a straw bale home near grandma's!