Life with Molly and Moxie is so good! They are now ten weeks old and very capably dashing about like lunatics whenever they are not sleeping like angels.
They play “Queen of the Box” and “Kill the Ribbon” , as well as the old favorite, “Ambush Humans on the Stairs.” We are having to keep an eye out all the time.
Their latest fascination is the television. Molly discovered it last week during a Big Cats special on PBS, watching with concern as a male lion seemed to be stalking a small cub.
She kept a sharp eye out until the cub made its way to the safety of a high, thin branch and stayed put until the male went away.
It is very entertaining, like having two shows on at once! And now Moxie has gotten into the television habit, too. Last night they helped us watch David Suchet’s Poirot as he solved a murder,
and helped us celebrate 75 years of Peanuts with The Great Pumpkin.
I’m sure to have more kittens adventures to tell you about, as their skills and mischief evolve.
I finally got the finishing touches on the haunted house-lantern thingee!
The windows looked so much better once the paper was put in. I used the thin paper that comes as wrapping in IKEA kits, but any tissue or deli paper would work.
It helps to cut a piece a bit bigger than the window hole, brush glue around the edges and mullions on the inside, and lay the paper down.
To make the tower, I re-purposed a toilet paper roll and cut a little window in it. A few swipes of brown and white paint and a tiny bits of paper for the window got it ready.
The fiddly bit was gluing the tower onto the roof. I had cut a hole already, and used the glue-soaked yarn to give it more adhesion. It worked!
I put a flat roof on the tower and, as a final touch, put some tiny lights inside. Photographed in a dark room, it looks great!
The fun thing about this project was making it all from junk mail and bits of leftover paint and yarn. Even the lights are re-purposed from a glowing jellyfish costume.
If I was to do it again, I’d make it prettier… matching windows, window frames, more careful siding and painting, and maybe even a proper gabled roof.
But as a proof-of-concept, this was very satisfying.
I needed to make a cover for my new Journal, and I wanted a collage. It’s a good size, 9x 12, so I had plenty of room to play with. I found a heavy tag backing from an old watercolor tablet to use as my base.
First, I pulled tons of colors and images from my collage boxes and Jennifer Coile’s gift of museum calendars. I trimmed them and laid them down, seeing who played nicely and who didn’t.
This is always a long process with lots of internal dialogue. I will make a decision to include a piece… in this case, that impressionist woman, and it takes a long time before I admit that it’s just not working. She was both getting lost and cluttering up the picture.
So, in goes the Egyptian hippo. Better, clearer, more focused. Still too many images. Pull them out. But where do the flowers go? Up, down? More discussion.
Every piece is chosen, placed, stared at, accused, forgiven, moved and shifted.
The last bit to be decided was the sun ( or moon). I wanted the blue to balance the bright hippo, but it looked too heavy. The circle cut from a rejected paper worked well, and the blue triangle set it off.
When I had stared more, had lunch, looked again and still liked it, it was time to glue it down. I went in sections, the top stripes together first, but not to the base paper.
I glued the hippo and flowers together, but not down yet. This makes placing the focal points less nerve-wracking.
When I was finally willing to commit, it all went together quickly. UHU glue stick, tweezers (so my fingers don’t get so gluey) and voila! Done!
After dinner I came back to admire it, and realized it wasn’t done yet. It felt stagnant. I decided to sleep on it.
By morning, I realized it needed a bit of movement. Again reaching for papers that had been put aside, I punched small dots and used a piece of string to figure out the line I wanted, and glued them down.
Now it was done. A coat of Mod Podge for a top coat and all was ready! Once it was dry I used Mod Podge to give a good adhesion between the heavy tagboard and the original, floppy journal cover. Under heavy books for a few hours, then out to finish drying, and it will be ready by the time I need it.
And this concludes our tour of the creative process.
When the exterior walls were dry, I realized there was too much space between the ‘stones’. I tried coloring the space black, but it looked terrible. I made more streaky-looking bits and glued them over the gaps.
It looks haphazard, and I’m okay with that.
The walls seemed strong enough, so I made some folded paper L- brackets and joined up all the walls. It’s certainly more house-like!
Then it was time to add the roof. I painted some postcards to match the house, and cut them a bit bigger than the house itself. Rather than use tabs, I turned the house upside down and laid down bits of glue-soaked yarn where the walls meet the roof, to give better adhesion. If you look closely, you can see the yarn right there.
I’m going to let it dry overnight and see how it’s holding together in the morning.
As Sister Corita Kent said, “everything is an experiment.”
Looking at all the Halloween decorations for sale in the markets, I got inspired to build an illuminated haunted house. I started with old postcards, junk mail, Mod Podge, and a UHU glue stick.
Using pieces of other projects for templates, I cut a door and windows with an Xacto blade.
When they were cut, I put mullions in the windows and joined four of the five sides together, I wanted to keep it flat to work on, so I didn’t close up the ‘house’. To make the walls stronger, I gave the interior walls a coat of white paper applied with Mod Podge.
I wanted the look of old stones for my exterior walls, so I gave some junk mail a streaky coat of acrylic, then cut them into irregular pieces. While you and I were on our ZOOM call, I used the UHU to apply the stones. They needed a brayer rolled over them to make them stick, because the postcard walls still had some flex.
There is still a lot to do. I will continue tomorrow and show you what I’ve got.
Our project for Ruthie Inman’s ZOOM art group this week was a door. Not any old door, but a fine, majestic entryway to someplace special. Ruthie was putting hers on the first page of a new art journal.
Mine will be further into my Journal, but that’s okay. As we chatted, I started rifling through my collage box looking for appropriate DOOR bits.
My first harvest wasn’t promising, but as I dug some more, images started to fit together. The stairs from a New Yorker cover would lead to the door, a pair of painted screens could the pillars by the door, a playing card the actual door, and a ridiculously huge bluebird is a suitable decoration.
The thing I love about collage, besides it’s almost random nature, is that if you don’t like a bit, you can peel it off or cover it up. Bridgett pointed out that the bright red door felt out of place with the softer colors of the other bits. She was right.
I found some crinkly Gelli prints that were soft enough to use as the background… not quite sky, not quite landscape.
I found an image of an abalone shell and used it for a new door, and a bit of foil for the door knob. A few images from Jennifer Coile’s art calendar, trimmed and fitted, became the statue beside the door and a castle in the distance.
It doesn’t feel quite done yet, but that’s all the art energy I have for now.
Rescued by Northwest Animal Companions, reared by Enid Traisman, and introduced to us by Clody Cates at Gifty Kitty, Moxie ( the faded calico) and her sister Molly ( the grey tiger) have come to live with us!
As they got to know the house, Moxie lived up to her name by going everywhere all at once., stopping for just a moment to say hello to our resident stufftie, Harold.
On the other hand, Molly found the third floor first, passing Paris on the way.
And once we were all in the master bedroom (known for now as Kitten Central) Grandpa Nelson discovered the joys of Cat Fishing! It’s nice to see Mouse’s favorite toys being played with again.
And it wasn’t long before they wore themselves out, and us, too. Total cuteness overload as they fell asleep in an adorable kitten curlicue.
I will keep you posted on all the Kitten Adventures as they play out.
A while back I told you about art cards, small pieces of art that you can send to friends or give away to strangers. I’m building mine on old baseball cards.
This past weekend, I got an inspiration of another way to share them. I was at the No Kings March downtown, walking with thousands of other folks to protest the current administration’s unconstitutional and illegal takeover of our country.
When we got home from the March, I went into my art closet to make more art cards. Before, I liked leaving the back untouched so you could see that it had started life as a baseball card. Now, I wanted to use it for a rebellious purpose.
I tried a few ways of treating the photos… flat acrylic looked streaky, but an impression from a sheet of shelf liner made a nice surface so you can still see the player.
I pulled letters from my box of words to spell out a simple message.
I like the ransom-note effect.
Now my art has a purpose. I can hand these cards to folks at future protests, a small piece of art to give encouragement. I even punched a hole in the corner and strung some ribbon through, so they can be tied to a backpack or belt loop and not get lost.
I have a hook in my art closet for my growing collection.
Fall is on the way. During our last weeks of hot weather, I got into the habit of going for walks early in the day to avoid the shingle-irritating bright sun and heat.
I noticed that Laurelhurst Park is very different early in the day. The cool damp of night is still in the air. Tai chi groups perform their slow dance among the trees.
Firwood Lake is a perfect mirror… until the ducks wake up! Then, somehow, the ripples make the mirror even more beautiful.
And passing the Blair Community Garden, I see the raspberries getting ripe.
I am happily awaiting the day when I will need a second layer to be comfortable. J’aime sweater weather!
Sometimes I need to make a few tries at a project before I get it right. At our last ZOOM art group, Ruthie Inman had us start this vase of flowers, made with the windows from business envelopes. Mine turned out really tiny, about three inches high, and I wasn’t crazy about it.
The other members of the group used bigger windows from bigger envelopes, and therefore, bigger flowers. I liked theirs better, so I found just such an envelope and gave the project a second chance.
Ruthie also suggested creating surroundings for the vase, to ‘give it a place to be’. So I started building my scene. I started with the inside of that same envelope, which had a striped pattern. I gave it a thin coat of a really pale lavender so it would fade into the background.
It took a few days to draw, cut, and watercolor the flowers, long stemmed yellow and orange daisies. To go with that bright yellow, I found an abstract blue page out of an art magazine for the billowing curtains. It was starting to look like a picture.
I remembered that Shirley, from the ZOOM group, had used blue paper to make the water in her vase. I wanted mine to be transparent, so I mixed some aquamarine acrylic paint with some glue and painted it on the plastic. It stuck!
Then I used the same color for the sky through the window, a soft yellow paper made the window frame, and graph paper made a nice tablecloth.
I now had all the pieces for my picture, but I wasn’t ready to glue anything down yet, because I didn’t like where they were. It felt static, even with the curtains billowing in the wind. So I walked away and thought about it overnight.
The next day I moved the window a bit to the right and the vase a bit to the left, loved it, and glued it down. Finally, I glued the stems into the vase, but left the flowers loose, so they can flop a bit.
Dear Liza 