My 65th Birthday and a new doll

I've owed this doll in a swap for a few weeks. The theme was announced as "art doll" with instructions to "embellish, embellish, embellish" on any chosen base--not exactly my definition, but I can run with it.

My partner asked for "winter" colors, and I had an idea & even assembled materials, but the doll refused to cooperate--don't you hate it when that happens?

Then Seth was in the hospital with pneumonia, which of course made everything else secondary--he's home now, and recovering, but we're staying pretty quiet.

Which brings me to my birthday. 65 years ago, at about 3am, I entered this lifetime. It's been an interesting and often enjoyable one, which I hope will continue for quite some time. As is often my practice, I set a few goals: by summer I want to have the garage, a big part of the reason we bought the house, turned back from storage to usable workspace--I've had an industrial serger out there for over 5 years and never been able to use it because it's inaccessible! Likewise a folding sewing table, which is now coming in for the winter. And my big kiln is just buried! So you can see why this makes sense.

After that, we need to decide whether to keep living here or rent or sell and move somewhere with public transit and/or warmer and possibly even cheaper--if we decide to do that, I'd like to be out by my next birthday.

But what I'm giving myself as a birthday present is permission to take time off from my stores and everything else & do something creative. It may not be dramatic--I have a couple of very minor projects waiting--but I started with this swap doll and know that the more I create the more ideas I'll have--not to mention the happier & less restless I'll be.

The doll is made of a piece of a recycled sweater with great beading--I'd also thought about a star doll, so it's kind of that too, but more a snowflake. The legs are a bit of some fabulous beaded trim I bought from somewhere in Eastern Europe or possibly Turkiye. The head is one of my own polyclay mixes made in a mold, then rubbed across a pearly ink pad, and the hands are from a lot of Tierra Cast pieces I recently bought for my store. My original plan was to wire or sew up the bottom of the sweater piece, but then I decided I liked its puppet-like quality, as well as its ability to de-institutionalize a cough-syrup bottle , or top off a glue bottle (or slide onto a branch, or......) so I left it open. Mary, the recipient, is free to change that, of course. Anyway, here are a few pics--I think it's both wintry and cheerful.

Post-Christmas bliss

Seth was in the hospital with pneumonia for a week right after my last post: he's been home but still pretty wiped out since the 23rd.
We were invited to visit daughters in Tacoma on Christmas day, but he was still too exhausted to be up for that long, I was still stiff from all the driving back & forth to hospital in Xmas shopper traffic. Things seemed a little bleak.

But yesterday the whole Tacoma crew came to visit us, bringing parts of Xmas dinner, gifts---but mostly their company! I was too busy playing with my darling grandbaby & talking to everyone else to even take a photo! Sure made my holiday brighter!

Happy Chanukah

This should have been posted on the 14th, but I was fighting a very bad cold and am just starting to recover, so it's a bit late--but I think just as wonderful.

Tonight we celebrated night 4 of Chanukah at the home 2 of our daughters share, along with baby granddaughter and her father, youngest daughter's fiance, and our younger son, who still lives at home.Our youngest daughter has been coming over to help make latkes for the last few years, and even has her own Kitchen Magician (a non-electric gadget with various cutting and grating wheels without which I would probably never make anything requiring grating--I don't like the texdture produced by a food processor, and between arthritis, carpal tunnel, & fibromyalgia I can't do it by hand.So tonight her sister made sort of soupy chicken and she made perfect crispy latkes, and we used the menorah (very similar to my grandfather's) that she'd asked for a few Chanukahs ago. When I light my menorah I feel connected to my mother and her mother and so on back beyond counting, and tonight I had the naches of seeing that connection moving onward to a new generation. I am truly blessed. Leslie

Marlaine's doll class (continued)

Just because I haven't mastered getting the photos where I want them, here are the pics of my finished doll.

If you're familiar with James Thurber's The Thirteen Clocks you may (or may not) recognize him as as Prince Zorn of Zorna in disguise--"a wandering minstrel I, a thing of rags and tatters..." So here he is: note that those rather unfortunate teeth are gone.

More on that doll class

Marlaine Verhelst's doll class was a major factor in when we chose to go to Paris. I wanted to take it because Marlaine, in addition to being a fabulous doll maker, is a talented and skilled sculptor, and I wanted to improve my ability to sculpt realistic figures.

Anyone who knows me or has seen my work knows that this is not what I usually do, and, in fact, it's not something I want to do often, but I was feeling that I needed to have a better grounding, a more solid jumping-off place, if you will, to do what interests me. Look at Picasso--one of the things seeing a lot of his work in Paris made me remember that he was a consummate draftsman. So I thought doing something a bit more structured would ultimately give me more freedom. I don't know if that's true, but I enjoyed the class (and the week at the chateau, and the other participants and thier families) immensely, and I'm happy with my doll, too.

I told Marlaine before I signed up for the class that, much as I love her dolls, I'm not interested in making them, but wanted to learn some technique and refresh my basic knowledge of anatomy, which was fine with her.

Knowing that, can you guess which of the heads in this basket is mine?

Nikki de Saint Phalle (continued)

Last October we were in and around Paris.One week I was taking a doll sculpting class with Marlaine Verhelst at a chateau outside the city, and we had only Wednesday afternoon free for exploring. Seth and I went into Paris, spent a little time at the Pompidou Museum (which looks as though it was constructed by a giant with a Lego set), including a tour of Brancusi's studio in the basement, and went looking for a place to sit and have coffee before meeting a friend for a night of Parisian Arabic jazz (for lack of a better term--very exciting music). We came around a corner and there was the fountain pictured in my last post.
Designed by Jean Tinguely, master of the rusted mechanized kinetic sculpture, and Nikki de Saint Phalle, creator of the colorful happy figures, some of which are also kinetic (the mermaid revolves and water gushes from her breast) it absolutely stopped us in our tracks.
We sat down at a table near it and ordered coffee, which, in the Parisian fashion, came with delicious little chocolate wafers, and just looked--and took pictures, although, as you can probably see, it was getting dark.

We returned a few days later, when we were actually staying in Paris, and I bought a couple of books about Nikki and her work--one about her Tarot garden for an older friend who is a painter and also a Tarot reader, and one about her life and work in general for me.

I learned that she had been diagnosed with depression and given several courses of shock therapy, after which she did a series of paintings that apparently gained her quite a bit of notoriety--mostly white, very large, with bags of red paint hung behind them, and designed to be shot with real bullets so that the red would spurt out and add "blood" to the painting.

After that her work (and I assume her life) seems to have taken a much more positive turn, evident in this fountain among other things, and maybe especially in the Dancing Nanas series, of which there are small reproductions (no, I didn't buy one) in virtually every souvenir shop in Paris.

As you may have gathered, Nikki is my current favorite, and I just had to share.

Nikki de Saint Phalle