Art - September 5, 2025

I've done a lot of watercolor painting during the past few weeks - mostly small vignettes that will fit on 5 x 7 greeting cards.  They are all over my house, in various stages of completion.  Last week, I gathered them up and sorted them into piles on my sewing table.  Animals here, flowers there, people over yonder.  Then I re-sorted them into finished and "needs work."  (The finished pile was a LOT smaller than the others.)  I decided to go ahead and affix the finished paintings to blank greeting cards and put them away.  I was halfway through this process when my daughter-in-law called to ask if she could use my t-shirt press.  I said yes.  She said she'd be right over.

The sewing table is the only place in the house where the t-shirt press can be conveniently used.

I stacked up all the paintings and cards at one end of the table to make room for the t-shirt press.  And there they still sit.  Once my forward energy gets interrupted or re-directed, it's hard to crank the project up again.

The same thing happened with the lavender quilt I started a few weeks ago.  I was in the process of appliqueing the hexagon flowers to their backgrounds; the components were stacked on the sewing table, and the ready-to-sew ones were stacked beside the sewing machine.  The machine was threaded with the right thread.  I could work on a few blocks, stop to cook or whatever, and go back to it in a spare moment.  Then someone came by with a "little" sewing project that needed doing.  The quilt blocks are now in one big stack, somewhere in the sewing room.  Before I can re-stack them and work on them, I'll have to put away the t-shirt press and the cards that still occupy the sewing table.  And re-thread the machine.  

Sounds too much like work.  

So, instead of getting back to some of these formerly in-progress projects, I took on a new one; I'm starting a chalk pastels class next week.  Two hours on Tuesday mornings for 4 weeks.  I'm stoked.  Got all my supplies, except for charcoal sticks.

When I signed up for the class, I had only the faintest recollection of having briefly tried pastels, probably in some art class 50 years ago.  I remembered only that they're messy; they smear easily, and leave your fingers coated with chalk dust.  Note to self:  pack an apron in the art bag.

Yesterday, as I was rummaging around, hoping to find a charcoal stick among my art supplies, I unearthed two ancient sets of pastels - one chalk, one oil.  I had not opened the boxes in years.  The oil pastels had barely been used, but half of the chalk pastels were missing, and the rest were in fragments.  Clearly, I'd had some experience with chalk pastels since we moved into this house 40 years ago, but I could not remember a single thing I'd painted with them.  I pondered this, off and on, all day.

Then, late in the evening, I remembered two chalk drawings - probably done on the same day, many years ago - using The Husband as a nude model.  In one pose, he was sitting with a leg draped over a chair, his "business" hidden by the arm of the chair.  The other was just a picture of his butt.  I recall it resembling a peach.  

They are still in this house, somewhere, evidently well-hidden.  I *think* I might know where they are.

I said to The Husband last night, "Should we get rid of them, so our kids and grandkids don't find them when we're dead?"

He said, "Nah...."