The Best Medicine

If you drop by even occasionally to check my blog, you've no doubt thought I had abandoned ship, but no, I got some sort of stomach virusy-bacteria-creeping-crud-thing, and I'm just now feeling normal again. Some folks press onward when they get ill, but not me. I prefer to withdraw in order to savor fully just how sorry I feel for myself.....and I'm finding that when I'm sick, a fuzzy, happy puppy is the very best medicine of all.

Anyway, even when I'm not blogging, there's a tiny brain cell or two dedicated to scavenging ideas for the blog. This time, I was planning to show you how I've been organizing everything from my art room to my clothes closets and took pics of the Kia stuffed to the rafters with things to donate to Goodwill, including an Imelda Marcos-like box of shoes, some dating back to my teaching/counseling days. I've also been experimenting with painted canvases for another project I've got in mind, as well as a gelatin plate monotype technique, and I took tons of photos for a mini-tutorial, but I somehow managed to delete them when I was transferring some photos for Jim (Oops! I forgot he says I can't talk about him in my blog anymore. Forget I said that.)
These are some after shots of my closet. After all these years it finally occurred to me to separate dresses, shirts and blouses by color. When you're about to get dressed, what do you think of? I'm going to wear my new jeans and the pale blue blouse. Voila! No more searching for the pale blue blouse.
(This photo was in my other camera.) The gelatin plate monotype wasn't as messy as you might think, and I plan to try it again. The recipe is all over the net and on YouTube, using plain gelatin and water; just mix it up and let it chill in a flat pan overnight. Paint on acrylics or block printing ink and then apply sheets of paper. I used handmade paper and got some interesting patterns that I may use to make artsy envelopes.
The most fun painting I've done lately were these pieces of canvas (below). Earlier, I had used grape leaves and acrylic paints to stamp impressions on them, and then soaked the fabric with water and loosely painted Pebeo Seta Color fabric paint on the wet cloth and placed leaves and other found objects on them and set them out in the sun to let it do its magic. It develops in about 15 minutes, and when they were completely dry, I splashed Jacquard Lumiere metallic paints on them.



When I was taking these photos, Marley came in and said that's enough pictures of cloth; it's time to focus on me.

So I did. Follow your bliss everyday; mine happens to be all kinds of art. It's what keeps me going, along with my li'l fluffy shadow........ See you later.