Little things - woof

Woof! Woof woof...woof.

Today I woke up painting. Indeed I went to sleep painting and watching that cool Euin McGreggor motorcycle video. The contrast was nice -me sitting on the sofa studying the tiny details of one after another of my friends daughter's tiny toys...  

Euin and friend lighting farts and braving dust storms in Africa.

I'm thinking about the haves and the have nots. I'm thinking about stuff and desire and need.

I'm thinking I like this stuff, but Im going to like collecting the remains of this stuff in the next two months at the beach and thinking about it's benefit to humanity then. Stay tuned....i've got a plan!

Oh hey - and I've just put my first things on Etsy! I have no idea how it works but am giving it a go any how.

Linkage

Bas Couture: for friends in the old cold country

I couldn't  resist this today. For my friends in Scotland who are bemoaning the dirt and cold...here I am christmas eve in California. Its hot.

This is my 'low style' sporadic spore by the way. I haven't done it for a while...Indeed it's been weeks since I've even been dressed.......

this is how it goes....this is what I say:

Getting dressed in the morning is important. I have no money. I have 4 pairs of shoes, and I love clothes.  The reuse, recycle theme continues in this daily of what i was wearing when i made that weird thing, where it came from and how very little I paid for it. Ha!

For more about Bas Couture click here.

I've REALLY got to go but want to thank the H family for the skirt (you are too kind K to think of giving me all your clothes always - which I adore), top is $2 alpha, arm things are old shirt sleeves from high school (!), sox were a total steal at F21 at something like $2 also. Total cost..maybe $4-5? Pretty good hu? Now....california barbie santa has some reindeer to fight...where's my red cape...I don't need to get gored again. 

twas the morning before the night before Christmas...

Busy busy blah blah

Christmas. 

I always actually thought I should be Jewish...I'm not sure why - I'm not particularly anything...well I'm contrary and difficult...but I'm not religious.

 I did though go to church the other day to see a little friend take part in a nativity like play.   I loved that and saw tuns of friends - which gets a person thinking. 

Razzle dazzle. Sparkle, twinkle, sickening sweet, blinding, shrill, and mounds of treats.

 I wonder if Paul McCarthy has done a Christmas piece. Ooooh - look at that, he has....front and center on his Wikipedia page.

I feel wrong now for even mentioning it - but...and...what does that have to do with my ornaments? 

Nothing really, accept that I like thinking about the flip side of things I think.

Conflict. I'm SO conflicted about christmas!

 Ambivalence. So necessary. I'm going to embrace mine now. Yes. Paper bag handle bows - you are charming and bizarre. 

Upcycled christmas  wrapping paper - you took too much time - but I kind of like you.

So - despite my seasonal ambivalence I've been making ornaments out of baking trays and felt, bows out of paper bag handles and wrapping paper out of paper bags and old potatoes (the prints are potato prints).

And - as always, I'm late with everything. Sometime, somehow, somewhere I need to re-calibrate.

 

But that's all sort of negalicious of me. What's up with the vibe Holly? Its Christmas and the world is having a consumer moment. Let it go.

I guess it's always bugged me a bit - maybe that's why I used to get complaints in a former life as retail sales person, when I would wrap presents like it was Fiesta or Day of the dead...at Christmas time.

"It's beautiful, but would you mind making it look a little more Christmas like?" Came the requests, over and over...not helping the line in the store or any other aspect of those precious last minute shopping moments.

(The thought of the banal uniformity of the tree's base with box after box wrapped in green and red was  annoying and confusing for  me)

Bring it on...that's what I'd like to say, but I'm experiencing something else.

Upcycle...think positive transformation of weird mood Holly. Maybe I need to play piano or ukelele, and make up a song about something dark. 

One of the folks I live with is always telling me I need more...is it yang? The opposite of flowers and love and hearts and pretty things. He tells me with some regularity that I need an evil christmas elf toting a machete or some such thing in my picture, or a dead thing, or some blood - things like that. 

Hmmmm...where's that keyboard...

Behind the catsup roses...

There you are, behind that minted glass, that honeycomb slab, that watermelon oyster -it is you.

And again you are there behind my sleepy head at midnight, in bed, in a car, in the middle of California nowhere...in my dreams.

There, in that booth, at that table, behind that light, in the dark as that Liberachi toothed hormone drenched 3 olives please cocktail does this "wonder twin power activate" trick in my throat right at that exact second... 

- the second I see you and walk forward and smile and put my lips to that brim and sip... the sip becomes a brick and I am left choking on large chunks of my own stupidity. 

Looser. Idiot. Reject. Duh.

In this compromised state I imagine the never to manifest elegance of these repelled advances as one bead after another flits across the icy surface of your taught body like a broken string of pearls  

all then wrapped in foils, coveted - and devoured later by some imaginary audience who compete for trophies of this poignant tale when that leaded velvet curtain drops

And then back. There you are again, that toothy moment has let go of your jugular, the drama and the oysters and the pearls have receded along with the expectation that this story will ever have a red velvet curtain at all.

So we sit, and I photograph you through the frosty water jug and fall in love with this new portrait as together we make tiny catsup roses in the bottom of a silver cup.

Upcycled Christmas tree - an ode

Oh sweet cardboard – ubiquitous friend

With your thirsty soft skin

And a core you can bend

Oh handsome cardboard – you don't make a fuss

When I puncture your ruffles

Or poke through your truss

But when it rains you collapse

And in the claws of a cat

Your integrity is compromised

Compromised

Your integrity is compromised

Though...

No mater cat or rain,

Stomping foot,  or oil stain

I cant get enough of your stuff,

(you're so buff)

and I'll use you again and again

Final Elevator speech...I'm terrified

Practice makes The ridiculous even more so...don't you think? 

(Go through the fire Holly, through the fire.)

Hey man! I gave BIRTH! Gotta remember that because if I could do that...I can do anything. I mean - I don't have to get up on that stage tonight in a hospital robe grunting. Oh no, I don't. I just have to say that (up there) for 20 SECONDS!

It's not like loosing my voice COMPLETELY that time at the arts symposium when I had to lead a discussion in front of 25 people really hurt me. No - because Nancy Davis was there to shout what I whispered to her. I survived that!

And that time in college I had to lead a seminar...(my topic? Chaos Theory...) and I couldn't even remember what the butterfly effect was (like me tripping on this side of the planet and causing a tsunami on the other side all be it completely unintentionally)  let alone speak for large chunks of time...well......... truthfully that still feels like a giant festering sore. So does the other one, and every time I've run out of a room, or crawled under a table when faced with public speaking...feels awful. Like when you're 50 floors up in a building and you look out a window that you could easily fall out of....and you swoon for a second. It's like that.

It all SUCKS! And now because of some class, I have to do it again. This is SERIOUS! 

How do I get out of this?????

Oh my goodness. I just remembered the time I got laryngitis on the opening of a painting show I had in Arcata. I couldn't speak again! That was the night the White Stripes played in a chip shop 2 blocks away from our house in a tiny tiny room and I didn't go because I was tired. I D I O T!  But that goes without saying.

I think I also remember getting a giant vitamin lodged in my throat that morning.  

Zute Alhors...MERDE! Only two or 3 more hours.

Merde. 

Upcycled Christmas Ornaments

 "Snip snip snip" went the scissors above the glitter strewn floor of one house, fireplace going, cats and coziness radiating around the pointy silver slivers - shards from the aluminum baking tray I was slowly turning into...spring flowers for my Christmas tree...

Then at another house, I made more, on someones soft yoga mat which saved my knees, but did nothing for my back and the street light position I repetitively find myself in. "Straight back, straighter straighter" I say constantly with a resounding minute at best of physical memory connected to that command.

 With an aluminum baking tray, colored sharpies and some scissors (toe nail scissors are great to use for detail if you have them) I venture out into the night later. 3 men ahead of me filled with burbon, find their way no problem to the disheveled peace of the man cave.  Snip snip...shiver shiver......snip...go my little scissors clenched in my frozen hands as a set of spring bugs are birthed from the humble tray to go with my spring flowers on my tree. We go from adam and the ants Pandora to a discussion about the potential satisfaction to be had if there were to be a "I'm just sayin" button between the up and downward pointing "like" thumbs.  

I also used felt, glitter, enamel pens and tiny brads which I got at Michaels. All you really need though are scissors and aluminum and a sharpie or two. That's it. And when the boys went home, and 2am found me, i was there in bed making a ladybug to go on the tree...and now I realize that Im tired...but as soon as i stop rambling on here - I'm going to make some more.

Oh yeah - and you can emboss them with a fork, or pointy thing of some sort. 

Easy for kids to make too! 

Upcycled Advent Calendar

Yesterday my boyfriend told me that he had looked - but that all the stores were out of advent calendars.

 He hadn't ever really used them growing up but he wanted one for his daughter.

 So I went down in his basement and made one out of the first box I found.

 These are it.  

Super simple. get two pieces of cardboard and cut however many holes you want out (this calendar has 31...) and then put the other cardboard underneath, open the wee doors, mark where they are and paint away.

Watercolor with a white is good for cardboard and I used a sharpie EVEN though I know they fade with time.