Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! May 2011 be a great year for all of us. Tonight I am in downtown Snohomish, Washington at a friend's house. This morning at dawn the roads were just a tad frosty and icy.

But Jynx didn't seem to mind. She slept right through it.

Yesterday Chris, Linda and I drove over to Port Townsend. On the way we stopped at Fort Flagler - Here's Linda scouring the beach

Here's Chris examining a b-i-g- g-u-n

And here are some deer we came across at Fort Worden which is in Port Townsend.

Corn Snow

I've been busy creating wire knit bracelets for my online store on ArtFire;

I knit beads and wire together on a spool:

My brother Chris, his wife Linda and I went over to the peninsula yesterday to take a look at Port Townsend. On the way we stopped at Fort Flagler where we found the ground peppered with what Chris calls 'corn snow' - that is, snow pellets the size of corn kernels.

Finger Monkeys!

In case you were wondering what to get me for Christmas, may I suggest...
a finger monkey! Oh, okay. It's probably illegal to own them in the States, but still...Finger Monkeys

Party Time!

My first term of graduate school is finished - now just waiting to see what grades I've gotten...
I've opened up a store on ArtFire, too. Here's one of my new seed beads and knitted wire bracelets which I think could also make a mask...

OMG! A Play Reading!

It has been two months since my last entry here mainly because I have been consumed by writing papers and creating PowerPoint presentations on things like Cardenio - Shakespeare's Lost Play, The History of Tanztheater in Germany, creating a Regie Buch/Dramaturg's Protocol for a Steampunk version of The Tempest and 14 one-page papers on various Shakespeare plays - Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, King Lear, the Merchant of Venice, Henry the Fourth, part 1, and one other play, but I can't remember which one...
Sheesh! Such is the life of a graduate student.
Tomorrow night is the first public reading of a portion of a play I wrote for my playwrighting class - we're just going to get through Act one and a tiny bit into Act Two, but I'm happy that I've written that much!
I am exhaust-a-pated!

So here's a collection of images from the past and present.
Can you spot my high school yearbook picture from 1976?

This is the reflection of the writing on the back of my monitor in the morning sunlight:

Here are two photos from the beach a few miles away; I love how the water carved rivulets in the sand.

This last photo is my little basement studio apartment's window looking out onto the garden in the backyard. Note the bat-winged pumpkins!

Some Frou Frou Ideas

Here are a couple of ideas I have been toying with. I just took all of my glitzy junk rhinestone jewelry bits and placed them on the back of an old hand mirror and the top of a glass jewelry box. These two pieces are visual mish-mashes of sparkly kitsch. I haven't glued the jewelry bits in place yet - I'm still playing!

Whaddaya think?

College Life

Sorry for the bloggery hiatus. I think perhaps I've been recovering from the shell shock of moving cross country in the sweltering heat of early August to find a place to live close to campus and lately, settling into college life. Whew! What a transition! But a much needed one. I can't say I've fallen in love with Long Island yet, but I am adjusting to the rhythm of life meted out in semesters and the weekly workload expected of a first year grad student of dramaturgy.
After a summer of inactivity creative-wise, I've also managed to work on a few smallish projects this past month. I FINALLY finished the Sami bracelet kit Karin sent me from Sweden:

I had a cold last weekend and worked on a cross-stitch pattern of a medievallish gryphon I found on an Italian embroidery site - I'll post a picture of it later.

My Apologies

I have been away from this blog far too long. But at least I have been busy elsewhere; so many little projects begun and in varied stages of completion, including a cape








made of the most silky soft houndstooth with a silk charmeuse lining. I think I found the houndstooth suiting at Pacific Fabric last summer; the silk charmeuse was (let's all chime in together) A Find at Goodwill.










Last month or so I joined a Mini Cooper club and went on my first rally.


I was to go on another Mini event this weekend, which was held at Maryhill's Stonehenge on the Columbia Gorge, but last week I broke a toe and it is really painful trying to shift gears for more than a short trip at a time. So I missed out on the photo op here:







Sigh. I did finish my next pair of socks, a lovely soft bamboo wool blend in purple stripes They're a bit big, but my poor abused toe is quite happy and warm. I also dyed a couple of skeins of wool with Kool Aid and am waiting to knit it up and then felt it into some elf slippers...

My Hero...

I was perusing DudeCraft's blog just now and came across a photo of my beloved Hero robot...oh how I miss him! I received a Heathkit Hero Robot kit as a Christmas gift sometime in the mid-80's (Thanks, John! You always gave me the coolest stuff!) and set about putting him together immediately. I think it took me 3 or 4 days to get him finished to the point where he could roll down the hallway and sing "Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do..." My cats hated him with feline fury and swatted angrily every time he came within range.

I finally let him go one day in early 1999 when I took him to Goodwill's to drop him off with a couple of bags of old clothes. One of the attendants was so thrilled by the prospect of owning his very own robot I said to him "Oh hey, this guy is for you -I'm giving him to you, not Goodwill."
My final memory of Hero is looking back in the car mirror and seeing that excited kid clutching him as I drove away...Miss you, little guy...

Still Up to No Good, As Usual

My apologies if you are put out by my lack of blogging these past two months. I have been busy but unsettled, trying to figure out where my life is going to go next. I'm employed once again which is always good for the ego.
Recently I got crazy busy and knotted up several bracelets to put on Etsy but nary a one has sold yet. I'm not all that surprized; I think Etsy is besotted with jewelry already.
I finally got around to skeining up a big uhhh wad of single ply wool I bought off a guy from New Zealand. It took me three nights but I now have 24 skeins of lovely yarn to play with.

It took me another week to wash the skeins because they were lanolin sheep sweat stinky. But now they smell fresh as cheap shampoo!









I also knit a pair of plain old socks for myself. I like the southwest colors especially on dark dreary rainy winter days.











Two weeks ago I had the great good fortune to see the Firesign Theatre perform live at the Kirkland Performance Center. I am still absolutely smitten by those crazy guys after all these years.

And last week I was blown away by a broadcast of a live performance of "Nation" which was aired in a little theatre in Mount Vernon, about 40 miles north of Seattle.
The National Theatre in London has been broadcasting performances of some of their shows all over the world by satellite and the Lincoln Theatre in Mount Vernon is one of three venues in this area that participates in the live broadcasts.
So I have been out and about, making mischief and bon-vivanting around town.

Stuff Around the House

I don't have a whole lot to say right now, so I thought I'd just shoot some stuff around my house.
Narnian Lamps











Shoes I bought for $1.49!











The Avon critters who took roost on the bathtub














Some ornaments I made for Christmas that I didn't get to put up because I had such a bad cold I didn't really have Christmas this year...