I am settling back into my writer’s chair, having just
rediscovered my art studio and finding just enough time to write about my life
again. I delighted in an
extraordinarily packed summer wherein I traveled to art fairs, fulfilled
commissions, and created the costumes for Sounds of South’s Beauty and theBeast. I had a wonderfully
successful art fair season, including winning a ‘Best in Show’ award in Madison,
Wisconsin’s Art Fair on the Square.
It’s a huge honor, and it includes an automatic invitation to
participate in the 2016 event. I’m
already looking forward to traveling back to Madison! The real elephant in the room, though, which kept me away
from blogging, was my role in creating costumes for Beauty and the Beast. The whole project came together
wonderfully as the summer wound down.
The culmination of the process was opening night, October 17th,
when I got to sit in the audience with my hubby and watch the spectacle
unfold. The extraordinarily
talented kids, including my son Tommie, really brought the costumes to life and
the performance was simply amazing.
I couldn’t help but cry as the story unfolded. All through the show’s run and beyond the response of the
audience has been beyond words.
The entire process, from conceptual design of the costumes to putting
the costumes into storage has been incredibly gratifying and
unforgettable.
The end of the run of Beauty and the Beast coincided with
the beginning of my fall holiday show season. That meant that there was little time to regroup before
showing my art at the Convention Center.
Now I’m done with shows for the season and I can focus my December on my
family and new art creation. I can
re-enter my own little nest, surrounded by boxes and boxes of yarns and collected
materials. I see myself as ‘not
too busy’, but my loving spouse might disagree. I currently have two exhibits hanging and I’m delivering
pieces for the third on Monday.
The Bloomington Bagel Company in the Shoppes has ‘Changing Seasons’ and
the Convention Center has the group exhibit ‘A Celebration of the Arts’. The new exhibit will be the Member’s
Exhibit of the SDA, the Surface Design Association, at the Blue Line Gallery. Finally, in mid-December I’ll be
sharing my adventures into a different medium by hanging a series of my colored
pencil sketches at the Bagel Company on Dunn Street. The series is called ‘My Summer Vacation’ and features
drawings from a trip to Topsail Island in North Carolina this past May. There will be opening receptions on
December 4th for two of the exhibits, so it’s party time! I’ll give more information in the next
blog if you’re interested in attending.
My major project for November and December is to catch up on
all of my business accounting and apply for the next round of summer art
fairs. It’s not very glamorous
work, but it’s a necessary task if I want to travel next summer. I’ll also keep busy doing art during my
waiting times when the boys are doing Taekwondo, Brazilian Jiu jitsu, Hip Hop
and voice lessons. I have to keep
my hands occupied, so I’ve been needle felting small fruit slices for a new
composition. This past summer I
created a piece, ‘Fruit Platter’, that I completed the day before we left for
Madison Wisconsin. We set up the
booth and hung the piece, and the very first piece that sold was Fruit
Platter. I feel like I never got
to enjoy it, and I never got a quality image of the piece. I’ve been working on Fruit Platter II,
which is now finished and I love this one too! It is appearing in the Convention Center exhibit and in my
application portfolio for summer art fairs.
The arrival of cooler weather means its time to hunker down
and cook chili, soup and lasagna for the freezer. Everything I do, though, takes me back to art. I began to recall years passed when we
made ‘Fall Stew’ every year by collecting roots from the farmer’s market and
cooking them into family dinners.
It sounds very romantic and fulfilling, and it was for a few years. We made so much of it that it became a
bit of a family joke that no one looked forward to. I missed the nostalgia of it, so to celebrate the memory I’m
creating a weaving called ‘Fall Stew’.
It will feature sliced tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant, carrots, onions and
other roots. The vegetables will
undoubtedly be my handwork project to pass the time during boy activities over
the next month or so.
For those of you who might be concerned that I didn’t get
enough pies over the summer break in the blog, rest assured. I paused during cherry pie season, about
the time that Jim put a special pie filling in the freezer for our Mississippi
relatives when they came for the Beauty and the Beast performance. Since then we’ve had tart and sweet
cherry, blueberry, peach, rhubarb, rhubarb blueberry, and persimmon pies. The persimmon version was just a little
too intense gastrically, so we won’t be making it again. My last pie, sadly, was October 24th
when we pulled the tart cherry pie filling from the freezer for our
guests. Martha had never had a real
cherry pie—I’m sorry, the canned stuff just doesn’t count. The pie was awesome, but now it’s time
for more! I’m just going to have
to suffer through pumpkin pies at Thanksgiving until I can get back on track
with the freezer full of fruit pie filling, just waiting to have their pie
dreams fulfilled!
Until next week,
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