Happy Saturday! It's the Memorial Day weekend here where next Monday will be a holiday from work for me. I decided to take advantage and took yesterday off too for a 4 day weekend. Of course you would know that it has finally decided to rain a bit, so all of yesterday and today so far has been cloudy and dreary looking. It isn't ruining my joy about not working and still being paid...LOL... but I AM solar powered, so....
.... So... what nonsense will I share today?
One morning I woke up 15 minutes too early compared to the time I normally get up on work days. On a whim, I went to my art desk, opened my play journal, grabbed my crayons and did this fast ... art? ha ha... I was definitely channeling my inner child, but it was fun and the curly que on the rooftop made me smile then and several times since. When art is your serious hobby, the "doing" is what feeds the soul. If something good ever shows up in the end product, that is icing on the cake!
The bowl.
This bowl is really stark white in color, but I took this photo this morning at my stove and the lighting made it look a bit yellow, but it really isn't. It is a vintage Corningware bowl. They are the most versatile bowls and are perfect for using in the microwave with their little tab handles. I've had one for a long time, although I can't really remember how or exactly when I acquired it, but I could use it every day if I would only wash it after I used it, which I normally didn't.
Sometime since the first of this year, I was in the Goodwill thrift shop. I normally look through their small book section, then wander up and down the Home Goods isles. That day, I saw one of these treasured bowls and I quickly grabbed it up and looked around as if expecting someone else to try to fight me for it. 🤣 .... but no one did. A couple of steps later, lo and behold, there was another! Good Gracious! It was a treasure finding day!
The next time I was there, I found two more had showed up, only the second ones were a tiny bit larger. I didn't know there had been two sizes so similar, but you know already I snatched them up too as who knows if I would ever see them in the wild again.
Fast forward to a bit over a month ago. I showed up at my Mom's on Sunday and as we prepared things in the kitchen to get our lunch ready, she told me sadly that she had broken her favorite bowl. I asked her what kind of bowl her favorite bowl was and.... you guessed it again, it was this very same bowl. I told her I had a few and I would share with her, so I took one of my treasured bowls to her the next Sunday I was there. It was quite the sacrifice as I am sure you can tell, but .... she's my Mother, how could I not???
About 2 weeks later, as once again on a Sunday afternoon, we were preparing again for our lunch meal, she look at me guiltily and said, I broke my bowl again. (Really God, you jest!) I asked her how she broke it and she said she thought she broke it the same way as the first one. Like is common here, there is a double sink in her kitchen where she uses the sink on the right to wash dishes and the sink on the left to rinse. The rinse sink has long had a rubbery mat in the bottom that has holes for drainage, but she had taken it up to scrub over and under and around and had not put it back for no good reason. It turns out she had washed each bowl, went to rinse them and being wet, each time the bowl had slipped from her hand and since there was no rubber mat there for cushion, each one had hit the porcelain sink and had broken!
Sheesh! How could she do that to me??? LOL... because you know, I could not NOT offer her another? ... and so you can see that the next week, there went one more of my treasured bowls. I guess sometimes the universe gives you something you think is for you, but it's really for someone else.
Last week I went on ebay to see if by chance there was any there.... (before she breaks another!)..... and there were many there, however, the sellers all know that these are highly sought after and the prices were horrendous! I looked through many posts to try to find the lesser of the evils pricewise. On the one I chose, the price was still not good, but not as bad as the others per piece and the seller had an option to "make an offer", so I did for about 25% less than what they were asking. That would at least save me the amount of the shipping that it was going to cost. I really didn't think the seller would accept it (never stops me from trying), but pretty fast, they DID accept it and so, six more bowls were on the way.
I really liked it better when I had acquired some for practically nothing at the thrift shop, but I figured my chances of that happening again were not too good. Anyway, they came this week. I haven't told Mom and I'm not giving them all to her, but I will take her two more to go with the last one I gave her and I will put a couple in my kitchen and store the rest for when.... well... just in case. LOL!
All of that leads me to the next thing. When the bowls came this week, the box they were in was very padded to keep them safe and part of the packing was a newspaper from the town they were sent from. I haven't had an actual newspaper in my hands in years. They were always around when I was growing up as the were delivered mostly by young boys on bikes that had large baskets on the front and the boys would ride by your house and throw a rolled up paper on or at your porch.... 7 days a week. (providing you had a paid subscription of course)
Eventually that no longer happened and adults in cars delivered and then....it slowed to where not that many people got daily papers as the world changed. Now there is no local newspaper persay. Most newspaper offices died. A few were taken over by companies that were not local and some form of paper was still available, but mostly not.
The seller had balled up the pages of the paper and used them for packing. As I smoothed out each one to fold compactly so it would take up less space in my kitchen trash can, I stopped and looked at the pages. Oh!... what memories they brought back. They were a little more narrow than the ones of my day, but other than that, they were the same.
I had already smoothed a couple of pages out without paying attention to them when I got to this one and there were the comics and the crossword and the horoscope.... just like the old days and I had to stop for a minute.
There too at the bottom was the Dear Abby column. I didn't realize that still existed. True to form, you never knew what the subject was going to be. Anyway, this random packing took me down memory lane for a few moments. I kept the page with the comics (which we used call the "funnies")... and Dear Abby thinking maybe some pieces of them might land in a collage sometime in the future.
It was a fun little mental detour.
Ok... one more little thing I just started last night. I watch a lot of art videos on YT when I can find some I haven't already watched. I get random ideas, sometimes just a snippet of something I might like to use myself.
I did not see this idea recently, but in the past and even when I saw it, it really didn't hit me that I would ever use it.
One of the creators, Jackie Bernardi showed how she had taken an old cookbook and turned it into a play journal for her painting and mixed media/collage. Fun thing is it was medium large, so she had a lot of space to play. I thought it was a neat idea for her to do and enjoyed watching her play in it.
Fast forward to more recently. My Mom is trying to clean things out slowly from her house. She has lived there more than 45 years, half her life and things have accumulated as they always do. Since she is older and having more health issues, although she is not doing it frantically, she is spending time going through things, throwing out lots and offering other things to anyone that might use it. She is not giving away her good stuff that she uses, but stuff she has no use for and that she knows when she is gone, someone else will have to go through.
With the internet and the such, most folks are not keeping loads of cookbooks like good cooks used to do. Back in the day, it was a real prize to be given, buy or find a really good cookbook. I can't tell how many hours I have gone through cookbooks in my life or how many new recipes I have tried. Such fun! So... in the cleaning out, she comes across a few books here and there. She has offered some to me and I take some once in a while if I am interested in them, but if I know I won't read them or use them, I tell her to offer them to everyone else and if no one takes them and she is going to throw them out, I will take them to use in my collage, but know, that means I would be tearing them up! So.. that's the way it goes.
Recently she had a few books and a couple were cookbooks. I love the Southern Living books. I have never tried a recipe out of them that was not good. I don't know what they do now, but they used to have a monthly magazine subscription you could get and at the end of each year, they would put out one of these Annual Recipes books that included all the recipes for that year. For a number of years, one of my Aunts would give Mom the annual recipe book so Mom has had a lot over time. Now though... time to go!
The recent pile of books she gave me had this year 2000 version. I thought it looked familiar. I've had them here a couple of weeks still in the bag I brought them home in and yesterday I went through them again to see what was there. Somewhere in the mix, I began to think about how Jackie had used an old cookbook as an art play journal and I wondered if maybe I might like to do the same. It's free afterall and ... why not? I checked last night and indeed, this looked familiar because I already have a copy in my cookbook collection (yes, I still have books, probably 2 dozen or more). That helped me make the decision to use this one to see how I liked it.
Last night I decided to try it and see how it worked. Since the pages are semi-glossy, I put a layer of white gesso on first. It is a common primer that many painters and mixed media artists use to seal pages or wooden canvases or the such to make sure whatever they paint or glue there sticks!
Then I just played with some paint colors I like and the paint went on perfectly. I believe this will be fun and if ever I come up with some neat combination or good idea of a sorts, I can then use the idea on a real canvas.
Journaling for art is not a new idea at all, but most folks, including me buy books made for journaling, a lot of which are not cheap as they have good paper for art inside them. I haven't bought but a couple myself, but when they are full, they have neat stuff and bad stuff in them and to me are no longer good for anything but making a stack. The first journal book I ever filled up, I eventually went through and any pages I liked I tore out and put in ANOTHER book (LOL)....and the rest I threw away.
I'm glad that cookbook journal idea stayed stored away in my brain, because although it never crossed my mind as something for ME to do....here I am!
I will leave you with this since I have jabbered for a good while now. The other night I was creating collage papers on my gel print plate or gelli plate.... and after I poured the yellow paint on top of the ghost of the lavender design behind it, I noticed it was smiling back at me, so I took this photo. You never know who/what will show up when you sling a little paint around.
Hope you all have been doing well and that your hearts are happy.
