Making Changes – Easier Than I Thought

Posted on by Sandy Webster

Just a quick note here at the beginning to say thank you to those who read this and contact me via my website or private message or facebook. It is a way for me to just talk to myself and articulate where and who I am at the moment. Nice to know that someone else is listening. Thank you.

This is not a change. It is a constant every day. Lee feeds the deer and they arrive for a feast on corn and bird seed. Every morning. The ever so slight change is that once in awhile now I have to remind him that they are waiting. Another small change.

We are cleaning house. Closets filled with things we have not seen in years. Only looked at long enough to see which closet to hide it in until….later. Now it is later and we wonder why it is still here. What is not thrown out or pawned off on friends and relatives goes to the trash or lady at the trash that is happy to receive goods for free. She is nice to Lee and we are happy she can find a way to use what we and others no longer want.

When we figure out her hours at the dump site we will be able to give her bits and pieces more often. Until then the boxes and bags ride around in Lee’s back seat of the truck. He can still drive, but only to the dump because it is such an automatic constant in his life. But each time he leaves without a phone (that he quit using months and months ago) I wait just a bit anxiously until he returns the truck to the garage.

The small journals for the likely last artwork about my times in Australia are all bound in leather.

I cut the covers and straps all the same size and then caught the coptic binding on the first and last sections of each journal (top and bottom) by going through four holes in the leather at the spine section. There is a square knot on the outside of the bottom spine. So from the back there is a stitched rectangle that holds the pages close to the leather and I do not lose the first and last image of each book. Here they are with the pigment pages coptic book.  And now all I have to do is figure out how to make the map that will fit with the journals and pigments into a satchel of sorts. Something that represents travel. I have put them aside until there is more time to think on this.

I have cleaned up my extremely messy watercolor box/palette and ordered more of the lovely Daniel Smith Extra Fine Watercolors. They are very nice and “slur” across the page. Some are quite expensive but for small works like I do, they are fine and will last quite a while. It hurts to take a wet paper towel to the porcelain palette inside the paint box. I keep thinking that all those colors caught on the wet towel could have been used and am tempted to not clean them up. But actually they are all a bit muddy by the time I finish a session painting, so better they get tossed. More colors have been added since this picture and there will be only the blending section and one row of tiny wells not filled with paint by the time my new watercolors arrive.

My studio is getting cleaned out. The works done for one gallery show have been given to the John C Campbell Craft Shop for arrangement and sale in the near future. Here are some of them.

They are varying sizes and part of a series titled, “Mixed Messages”. I will probably not make this work any more. It is the framing that gets tedious because it must be framed and framed in deep frames with shaped back grounds to house the added elements. I love doing them but they end up in my studio waiting for some place else to go. And I am tidying up. When the burn pile gets going later this year, some will end up there. Others will be given away to good homes.

One of my favorite giveaways was this piece to a progressive school in South Carolina. Young students came into the class from summer recess a few years ago to find it on the wall. They were asked to write about what they thought the painting was “saying”.

The school also got the boat that is in the 48″ x 48″ painting. Their responses were wonderful and I hope the school continues to use this work to inspire thought and story telling.

And I suppose that is what my work is largely about – story telling. I remember many years ago when teaching at Arrowmont and having to give a talk about our work as images filled the screen. A fellow instructor asked to present before me because he said, “Sandy always has a good story with her pieces and my work is just the work.” His work was and is masterful wood turning – no story but tools, a great eye and beautiful design.

Bags of trash went out of the studio this week. Why do we think we are going to use this scrap of something some day. Most of us aren’t going to and should have given it away long ago when it might have done some good for somebody before it gets crammed in a corner and rendered unusable.

One thing I did find tacked to my wall is this enlargement of the only drawing I did on my iphone. I had turned it into postcards and mailed it along with the word “WRONG” to every Republican member of Congress when this pathetic man took office. I used it for a pattern to make pincushions that give great satisfaction to those of us who made them and keep them full of jabbing pins.

But now I look at this and think how I can use it in a book form. Maybe a flip book where he finally, FINALLY disappears. Maybe make his mouth blather on like he does….maybe the word, “lies” continually coming out of his mouth.  If the pincushion gives me so much relief from the pressure of having the despicable man in office, the artist book could be just as rewarding.

I suppose that does it for now. The dump lady has two boxes of books waiting in the studio for Lee’s next delivery. I have a box of weaving/textiles books for the folk school. Later this week I will cull through all the others and box them up as well. Why did I think that I needed to own these books? It was excusable when I was teaching, but not now as I pull away from the classroom teaching and work more with students who do not need the inspiration of others’ works.

Anyway, I will be back later.

Til then.

Another Week of Doing

Posted on by Sandy Webster

I am still at the gym five days a week and love walking in and seeing the painting I gave them a few years ago. It is across from the blood pressure machine and gives me something to look at and remember while the pressure on the arm gets tighter.

I wish I could find more places to give work to.

Our mornings together start here at the dam. I am able to walk in comfort thanks to someone we meet here about the same time each day. I complimented her colorful shoes and she spent a good time telling me how comfortable they were and how to find them online. So I went there and the only color in the size I needed was the same as hers….a bit over the top since I was hoping for black or grey.

She was right. They are the best support and feel like walking on clouds. Hoka brand runners with hardly any weight. Nice. Patches took over the box right away.

The small Australian sketchbooks are almost complete. The fourteenth and last one is half filled with the help of Sadie.

The messy paintbox is a magnet for her hair. Here are many of the ones finished since last week.

And a nod to the wonderful hosts over the years and their baskets, pets, etc.

Jude Walker and Barbara Rowe always had the most interesting things to sketch in their houses and would get me to places for finding just the right tools.

Anne Newton’s cat Boris is even shown in part here. Such a tall tail.

Whenever I use this bottle opener I think of Mike, the pilot who took me into the outback for a splendid five days of pure Australia.

When I finish the books I would like to go through my leathers and find simple covers for each before housing them with the pigments pages book. I think I will make a map of Australia to complete the memory satchel that will hold them all. I think the pods are my favorites, pods and leaves seem to be what my sketchbooks are mostly filled with. Someone down under said years ago that I just painted dead things. I told her that those things stayed still long enough for me to get them down.

Sadie has made her choice for favorite.

It was a good week for us. The meals get easier. Lee makes his own breakfast. I make a smoothie. At lunch it is hot dogs (his favorite) or a turkey sandwich with fruit and a shared beer. Dinner is at a time when I feel a bit more stressed. Lee does too. So I like to make a meal that will last two nights. His favorite is spare ribs. I thaw Smithfield baby back ribs earlier in the day. At three o’clock they are covered tightly with foil and go into a low oven at 325 degrees. Two hours later they are unwrapped and BBQ sauce is put on his half and covered again for another hour. Easy, and lately served with fresh heirloom tomatoes from his garden. And with the oven on I can toss in a pan of asparagus and seasoned potato wedges. A glass of white wine each and we have a good meal.

Another meal that works for two dinners is taking four meaty chicken thighs and sear them on each side in a cast iron fry pan. Remove. Place a bit of olive oil in there with some chopped celery and onion. Saute a bit then pour in about 2 – 3 cups of Pepperidge Farm stuffing and about a cup or so of water that has had chicken base stirred in. Toss in some dried sage and mix together before placing the thighs on top (skin side up) and baking at 350 degrees for about an hour. I like serving this with broccoli and a bit of hollandaise sauce.

Usually once a week we will make our own pizza halves (using bought thin crusts) that rescue anything that needs to be used up from the refrigerator.

So there is the week. Not so bad. I will get back to finishing the small sketchbooks about memories from Australia and clean up the studio.

Til later.

Coping – Doing Our Best

Posted on by Sandy Webster

Light flickers a bit more for Lee now. Some times he can find the word, sometimes not. Confusion in why he went to a room, “What was I getting?” Instruction or ideas must come one at a time. I can not speak in paragraphs. A thing that would have been absolutely impossible for Marcel Proust, and I find hard to keep in mind. I get things done by doing more than one thing at a time and I get my ideas thought out by speaking them one after the other.

The one thing he does know for sure is that this thing is happening to his mind. And the one thing that I have come to realize is that it is something only we can deal with. When I read that there is a dementia support group meeting on Tuesday afternoons, I think, “And how does that happen?” Do you drag him along so he can listen to what we both are painfully aware of? No. That is not going to happen.  We stay to a routine that is familiar to him.

I have learned to accept the fact that I can no longer count on him to fix something. And it is a difficult conversation when he believes he can.  I have learned how few people there are to count on. It is me and will be me until we need to call on professionals who know what is needed and when. Until then we take it one day at a time. We find something to laugh about. We talk of what to have for dinner and what to buy from the grocery store. We try to get a walk in at the dam. We watch the news until we can’t take it any more and put in a Netflix cd of British mysteries and escape. We treat ourselves to a few pieces of Australian Darrel Lea Soft Licorice that we found we can buy by the case at a tractor supply store. And we talk. We change the subject if we get sad. We cope.

And one thing we did this week was leave the house for exactly twenty-three hours. We spent the night in Asheville at a friend’s house. Lee is familiar with them and their house. He loves their cat.

And while he napped there, I went shopping at three of my favorite clothing stores. Retail therapy they call it and I could very well have overdosed. It was great. We left their place well before dawn the following morning and were home before 8 am.  My new clothes are put away. We are back in the routine of being slower and more careful.

I have avoided reading the book titled, “The 36 Hour Day”. A friend thought it would help. If it helps, it will be later. Not now. Now I am just keeping things “normal”. I do not want to read other peoples’ experiences. We are busy living our own and keeping the cd movies, licorice and a cool glass of white wine close by. Cat videos on Facebook are something so silly and yet so good to brighten a mood. He likes those and soon forgets the ones he has seen so they can be seen over and over. I think our, or I should say my favorite is the cat in a shark suit riding a rumba machine around and around the kitchen. I identify with that cat in a lot of ways, not least of which is her shark suit.

There is still time in the day to work on those little books. Now I have only three of the fourteen left to fill with memories of all things Australian.

We have had our weekly breakfast out this morning. Lee is going in out the door upstairs, so I will need to see if he needs something. Maybe we will just sit on the porch for a while and talk about things. He will ask a question. I will answer. And he will ask it again. I will answer again and again until I change the subject to something else.

What would he like for dinner? That is a good place to start.

Til next time.

Completing Something

Posted on by Sandy Webster

Sadie is such a helper when it comes to whatever I am doing on this table. Here she is all over my unfinished carry all bag and sorting the bits to make my own needles and pins case.

I wanted to make one using some cloth from friends in Australia. Aujke Boonstra had some lovely eco dyed wool blanket bits that I got several years ago. Scraps from Beautiful Silks looked promising. The inspiration for this little needle book was the ones made for me by Australians who seem to have a knack for putting things together with stitch and practicality. Jude Walker was the first one who said, “You can’t put your needles in that! I will make you a proper book for them.” And she did from an old blanket. Then there is the inspiring stitchwork and patching of Nonie Sudcliffe that I bought a small sample of years ago and used on the cover of a sketchbook. Another inspiring needle case I bought from Anne Newton to give as a gift but then couldn’t part with. Mine is pitiful by comparison…..but I like it.

Here it is closed.

First page opened to show pins and tapestry needles.

Some sharper needles and smaller tapestry ones.

Pocket sewn in to the back cover.

Sadie’s approval.

The scraps of heavy cotton canvas type material is what I used to make the outside of the carry all. That was really not such a good choice as it was so heavy. Then after I sewed all the zippers in I realized they were to heavy and long. They stuck out of the ends of what I thought was the right size bag. So I added more length to keep them inside more.

Here you can see that I did not follow the step that clearly states that the bag must be pinned in the center as well as the zipper so that things come out evenly. Also note that the longer zipper I was waiting for is olive green…..not the khaki of the ones inside. My excuse is the picture looked the same color so I ordered it.

I must say that refusing to go to Walmart for ethical reasons comes at a cost. And that is constant ordering from Amazon and taking what I can see on a computer screen.

Also when I added the extra length with these new ends I thought it should be “puffy”. My solution was to use some of the white felt from the trump pincushions and place a panel between the two layers of the outer bag and fold strips in half to shove into these added end panels. Looked like a great idea until I tried to shove it all under a zipper foot for this final stage of closing the whole thing off with the new zipper.

It was an amazing amount of work for something that looks pedestrian at best, don’t you think?

So I filled up  all the pockets with bits and pieces that I might just need to have handy. Today the UPS man brought the fading marker for cloth that I learned about watching those you tubes instructions over and over. And also the really clever little “wonder clips”…..tiny plastic clips for holding wads of cloth, felt, zipper and binding  all in one place while you locate the pins. I stuffed a bunch in that cane toad case.

Remember how I wanted to make this one bigger than the pattern because then I could put a 12 inch ruler inside? By the time I shoved seams into seams it became only 11” long at best. So I am using one of my favorite folding wooden rulers bought at a market in St. Andrews near Baldessin Press north of Melbourne.

Here is everything outside the carry all.

That’s a lot of things and I can still put a pair of scissors in as soon as I get a new medium size one from Amazon. I made those canvas tabs  to add to the zipper pulls because they frankly cover the section where the zipper does not make it to the end of the pocket….something to do with making the pockets fit into the end pieces used up more length. But it is a handy little thing.

And other than finishing this carry all I started back to work on the little Australian journals. Here is a few of the pages, etc.

I love this possum, goanna, kangaroo paw and yellow tailed cockatoo. I even sketched my latest sketchbook.

And some more urban things like gelato, the pedestrian walk sign of men’s legs and the sign for the “ladies” toilet. The hot pad is what I look for at the airports for Lee. He always wants kangaroos on brown backgrounds. They are not so easy to find any more. Mostly now it is oven mitts. Who uses those??!!

Enough for now….so glad that bag is finished. If you ever try to make one read the instructions very carefully, then go on you tube to watch the many, many episodes to get to the finish. Buy practical material and zippers and keep spare sewing machine needles handy along with very strong thread for hand sewing. You might want to make sure you have a zipper foot. Without that, there is no bag.

Til later.