All posts by Sylvia

My own damned opinion., Paper Crafts

Shadowboxes and Paintings

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My shadow box swaps of Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz are nearly done. I still need to make labels. I’m thinking of using cuts pieces from aluminum cans to make embossed title tags which will be attached to the top faces of the frames.

Alice in Oz
Dorothy in Wonderland

These were just a wacky idea I had for using leftover papers from two cardstock bundles. I’ve already done tunnels books using these papers. I sold the Wizard of Oz tunnel book at my last sale as well as a smaller Alice tunnel book. I still have the larger Alice tunnel book.

I’m 2 days behind already with my new painting project. This week has been more busy than usual with two different mechanics to deal with a car problem, a doctor appointment, a lab appointment, and temporarily not being able to use my main arm due to straining my rotator cuff while prepping fresh veggies for the week.

The shoulder is less painful now. But I haven’t been as careful of that shoulder as I should be. I most likely should have had the surgery when I was diagnosed with a torn rotator cuff. Instead, I settled for 4 years of on and off physical therapy on the university’s dime because my boss wouldn’t believe me when I told her I couldn’t do certain motions during the move to our new space. I can be petty.

I hadn’t had too much trouble with that shoulder until recently. I’ve lifted more than I should trying to get my craft room back in order. I moved the guest bed back to its corner in an attempt to encourage the boomerang child out of the house.

He still can’t find a job. My thought is that in spite of a population of a quarter million residents, we still live in a place that’s more like a series of small towns where people in my son’s field know him as unreliable. I don’t think he’s worked more than a year at any of his jobs. There could also be the matter of his alcoholic past. The only reason he’s not drinking is he has no income except for selling plasma. That barely supports his smoking habit.

There’s not a lot I can do to help him, except maybe to trade him for my oldest grandson who’s not doing that well either. He lives in a town with two gas stations and a Walmart. Not much opportunity there. There used to be three grocery stores and some small shops, but nobody has any money, so no jobs. What a great time to be alive! /s

My own damned opinion.

My car is back.

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It looks almost new. The yellow paint from our road trip to my oldest granddaughter’s wedding was scrubbed off and the dent pulled out. That was the souvenir dent and scrape from our stop in Scranton to see the museum of the show “The Office.”

I finished both of my Lego succulent sets. They’ll last longer than most of my plants although I do have a plant that is over 30 years. I have no idea what it was except practically unkillable. It’s moved cross-country twice, moved from three rentals and two cities in the early part of this century and has been in this house for 19 years. It now seems to be in its last year. I have two others that were cuttings from this plant so it will still live on.

I’m almost finished putting my craft room back together. I brought the table I had in my studio back so I could set up my work area. I’m still sorting things back into their proper places. I’ll start bring things back from my studio for the paper crafting that I do and will keep the studio as a place to paint. At least for now, I’ll keep it. It may turn out that I may not have enough income to continue if the mess that we call a government keeps proceeding as it is.

Some of our more maga (I will not capitalize it) state representatives want to make criticism of Israel a hate crime. I’m already sent my “no way” to the Governor to reject this as a violation of the First Amendment protecting free speech.

My opinion is that Israel’s government as well as our government are not right to attack Iran or any other country that disagrees with our actions. Our Senators and Representatives needs to get their collective heads out of Tangerine Twittler’s ass and do their jobs.

Crafting

Another 100 Painting project.

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I’m going to do it again — 100 tiny paintings in a year. I might make them a little bigger, 3-1/2 inches by 3 inches instead of 3-1/2 by 2-1/2 inches . I’ll start next week and have set the timing for every third day for the next 52 weeks.

I’ll make storage books like the ones I made for the last set, but I’ll make them all at the same time. This time I’ll make the pockets out of transparency film. I still have the roll that came from an old photocopier that used rolls of paper or transparencies for copies. That was in the mid ‘80’s or as my youngest granddaughter used to say “the olden days.”

I’m also in the process of getting my craft room back in order. The Boomerang Child is spending a lot more time with the Not-Wife who is undergoing chemo for cancer. I moved the bed and dresser out of my room and am getting it set back up. One of my craft room tables is in my studio, but I think I will swap it with a different table.

Once I get the room set back up, I can bring back some of the supplies I have at the makerspace and devote the studio to painting and class development. so watch this space for pictures of paintings and projects. Once I’m re-organized, I’ll have more to post about.

Crafting

I’m working on a project – part 1

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I”m working on the first of two shadowbox mashups. The first one is Alice in OZ. It’s images cut from cardstock from two paper sets – The Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland. It features Alice and other cutouts from one paper set mixed in with images from thee Wizard of Oz set.

First layer of Alice in Oz
Image of another attempt
Alice in Oz – yet another version

The layers are attached to transparency film so I can rearrange them to get the effect I want. Each film layer is attached at the corners with foam tape to provide depth to the finished project. The images are attached to the film with tape as well so i can re-arrange each element to get a balanced image.

The background of this one is a cropped image of the wizard in a balloon leaving Oz. The good witch, the lion, and poppies appear in different layers. The other characters are from the Alice paper set. There may be a scarecrow added in the next arrangement. A picture of the finished shadowbox will be published later.

The Dorothy in Wonderland shadowbox will have Dorothy and other characters from the Oz paper set intermixed with characters and images from the Wonderland set. I used these papers before to create tunnel books that were for sale at a craft show.

About me

Wow.

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I recently read an article on a site called Bored Panda about a woman who spent $500 on groceries for seven people. I don’t know how long she expects that to last. However, there was very little that was what most people consider healthy. At this point in time, my assumption is that the healthy food has increased too much in price. She did mention a garden which is supplementing what they eat.

All kinds of people are making comments about her choices. From my perspective, her grocery haul was not very nutritious, but I can’t judge her. She has to buy what the family will eat. She works full time, and presumably her husband also works full time. They have parents living with them as well as three growing boys. She has to make choices. The article mentions that some foods were left off the list because it wasn’t time to replace them.

I recently spent $200 at the grocery store. I was replacing items from my Covid stash which I have maintained since 2020. I’ve spent similar the last couple of months. It’s my fall-back stash. Usually it’s just for me, but my unemployed son is now occupying space and eating my food. Most of my stash is ingredients but I have a few canned soups and foods like canned hash and chili. My freezer is full with the meats I get from the mark-down bin, as well as 99 cent frozen veggies.

I make a lot soups and stews and dishes that can be eaten over a period of days. It goes back to the days when even though I was working, I could pay rent, electricity, and bus fare, but not buy enough food for a week and what I did buy got stretched to two or more.

Many of my co-workers thought I was on a diet because lunch consisted of a container of cut carrots and celery with a little blue cheese or ranch dressing. Little did they know I couldn’t afford lunches out and I wasn’t going to bring beans and rice five days in a row. My apartment included a washer and dryer so money for laundry wasn’t an issue although there have been times in the past when clothes were washed in the bathtub and hung on hangers on the shower bar.

Right now, I consider myself well-off, not like the folks with lots of money, more like someone who can put some money in savings, buy craft supplies, and pay what’s needed to maintain my house and car. So that’s why I say I’m well off. I can buy extras. It won’t last. I live on savings, retirement, and Social Security. Eventually it will all run out. That’s what the food stash is for.

Crafting

Oh Goody!

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I broke my car again. Saturday was a wet snowy afternoon. I was on my way to take my grandson home and for whatever reason decided to go through town instead of on the highway. Big mistake.

I was within a mile of the house when the car in front of me hit an icy patch and skewed sideways. Even though I was going slowly, my car also started sliding and braking was ineffectual. BANG! I slid into the driver’s side door.

I won’t bore you with the details. My car is in the shop for the next few weeks. I have a loaner to use until the car is repaired. No one was hurt as far as I know. And I did use my handy duct tape as a bandage to hold the bumper on until I could take the car in.

The good news is that I’m almost finished with my Alice in Oz shadowbox.

The next one will be Dorothy in Wonderland.

My own damned opinion.

Okay.

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Pinterest just showed me a spatula/spoonish-shaped thing for applying butt cream on a baby. My jaw fell open. Are parents these day too paranoid to touch baby butts that need cleaning? Or are they leaving diapers for longer periods of time because of cost, so that diaper rash is more common?

I admit my baby caring days are very last century with cloth diapers, diaper pails, and such. I used the disposable diapers on trips or outings, but for the most part, cloth diapers were my normal go-to. But that was just me.

I also had a neighbor that objected to my youngest’s daily summer air nap. I used to put him in a small crib in the carport on nice days, totally without clothing. I’d be there on a lounger reading a book and my neighbor who was way younger than me, would come over and complain that my baby was naked. Every single time!

I finally asked her why she was looking. It was because she could see his “private parts.” So I asked her again why she was looking. She had no good answer. She never complained again. I still don’t know why a naked baby in a carport 30 feet from her house triggered her.

I did find out later that she was from the Wisconsin version of Pennsyltucky, so that might have been the reason. There are a lot of small towns up north that are just like the insular towns in other rural areas of the country.

But back to the butt spatula/spoon thing — they come in colors and multiple sizes. There’s what looks like a suction cup on the handle end so the thing stands upright on a flat surface. You can buy sets. It’s the future of baby care where infants are handled by machines and left in “pods” until they’re large enough to be put in creches with other pod children wearing headsets wired to their brains for “education.”

The way things are going with the current government, this might happen. 1984, Brave New World, and The Handmaids Tale were not meant to be blueprints for the future. But here we are.

Painting & Drawing, Watercolor painting

I finished my 100 paintings before my end date.

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Some are better than others mostly due to my physical and mental states changing during the year. Sometimes I was unable to paint what I had envisioned. Or my hands could not coordinate with my eyes, so what I painted didn’t look like the image I was using as a reference. I actually painted more than a hundred but some were torn up and tossed. Others were used to test colors.

Paintings 1 through 15

Some of the earlier paintings are based on images from an old daily calendar that had around 300 images of artworks by various artists. A few were based on local photos like the hydrant and the pizza oven above.

Paintings 16 through 31

There are a lot of cat paintings because I’m the cat lady of the family. Some plants, lots of wonky houses make up the rest. I started adding people toward the end. Maybe for the next paintings, I could do more people.

Paintings 32 through 47
Paintings 48 through 63
Paintings 64 through 79
Paintings 80 through 95
Paintings 96 through 101

I haven’t decided what my next project will be. I was thinking larger paintings – maybe one a month. Or mixed media collages. I’ve given myself a week to figure it out. I may schedule a show at the makerspace for September. I do have a lot of watercolors and mixed media pieces I could display.

Mostly me, Stuff

House of depression.

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I need to start making lists again so I can accomplish more than just sitting around listening to podcasts and sci-fi stories on YouTube. I’m barely accomplishing the daily minimum of washing dishes and making my bed. I’m sleeping more than usual.

I haven’t been working on my paintings although I don’t have that many more to do to reach 100. I haven’t been using my studio lately except to hang my coat which makes it a very expensive coat room. So what’s my excuse? I actually have anti-depressants, but I think I need to get a different prescription. They do become ineffective after a couple of years.

The other thing I need to do is to get the Boomerang Child out of my space. He needs to find work and get out of my space. I’d sell my house to get rid of him, but I can’t afford an apartment in this city. Well, not a two bedroom which is what I would need for my crafting, weaving, and bookbinding.

The Boomerang Child needs therapy, medication and a job. Especially a job. He spends most of his time upstairs sleeping with the lights on and the tv going. He’s made himself a little space in the garage where he can sit out of the weather and smoke. He gets money by donating plasma twice a week so he can afford cigarettes.

He’s not really looking for a job. He used to be a cook, but almost everyone in the food business in town has been burned by him not showing up because he feels bad or got stupid drunk.

He seems to have given up drinking which is a good thing. I no longer find beer cans in the recycle bin. The Not-Wife cut off his phone again. So even if there’s a job offer out there, he won’t get it. Their relationship is more toxic than my former marriage to his drunken sperm donor.

Oh well, new year, old crap.

Stuff

Great! Just great!

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I got an email from the water utility Friday, saying I’ve been using 92 gallons an hour for the last week. I can’t wait to see that bill. We tried turning off the water. It seemed to work. I sent an email back to the utility. Monday I got a new email saying it was flowing at 59 gallons an hour. Back to the basement.

I tried clamping off the outlet hose and made my own water park in the basement, complete with fountain. D’uh! So I fiddled with the controller until I got the water stopped. However, that stopped the water from flowing into sinks and things. Fortunately, I was able to get a plumber out in an hour. I now have water, just not soft water.

I can deal with that for the short-term. My next project is to drain the water heater, but that can wait until I get the new softener — next year, which is like tomorrow. What a great start to the year.

Hopefully, 2026 will be survivable. Happy New Year!