An Artists Palette

An artist develops her (I will use the feminine pronoun in this piece not to be exclusive, but to be brief) palette by mixing colors. She uses the paint either sparingly or liberaly to create the exact boldness or subtlty that
the creation dictates. A little touch of red, a smudge of blue, dull it with some black or ochre, and you get the look that you want.

A fiber artist has a more challenging road to develop palette. For one thing, she cannot (or most do not) create her own fabric colors. She relies on retailers to sell the fabric that meets her needs. For most fiber creations, getting something in the correct color range is adequate to creating as she wants. I think this works well for clothing. Quilters get much more particular when they are creating their quilts. If one goes into any store that caters to quilters, you will see quadruple the amount of fabric to choose from, because quilters use color matching as their key to what they purchase.

So in creating my Joseph coat of many colors, I needed to have a broad palette! Here is some of it as raw materials.



Creating the coat has been a challenge, because sometimes concepts and actual fabric choices are elusive in putting them together. One of my palette days required 100 miles of travel to 7 different fabric stores to complete the quest for just the right fabric. Last summer, I had a concept for Oklahoma. I wanted purple gingham for the dress for Laurey, and a sheer purple gingham for Dream Laurey's dress. I was so lucky, because as soon as I walked into the fabric store 1 mile from my house, there my fabrics were, right on the first table! This year, I've had to travel far and wide to put together my palette.

And then there is the expense of the palette. What if it doesn't work out? Then someone is out the money for the purchase of the fabric that doesn't turn out to work. This last palette choice was like that, it cost me $80 to purchase what I needed. I sure hope this one works out. Here is the concept.

I made the basic coat part last week, and have been conceptualizing (mostly at night when I'm trying to get to sleep) what the rest of the coat will look like. I purchased the lame pieces this week, mainly because they had all the colors together on one table (not on sale, darn it!) I'm going to make this concept somehow work. I'll show you the results when it gets finished.

Evolve Disolve

I had my new Evolve exactly one week. It sewed very nicely. The lure of the exotic stitches it would do got to me on Friday night, after a day of sewing peasant blouses for the play. I needed to play!

In the play Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, the coat is the main object of affection throughout the whole show. It starts off as a gift from father to favorite son. It causes green hideous envy among the brothers, who rip it off their brother and sell him into slavery. Joseph finally emerges at the end of the play, victorious, loved by all, and resplendent in the coat of many colors.

This is why I wanted to costume this play, just so I could make the coat! So, I was working on it Friday night, making the sleeves of many colors. The cover stitch that the Evolve does worked perfectly. I bought some very pricey multicolored serger thread, and sewed lines of rainbow colors across the sleeve parts, which are made of three colors and patches of contrasting colors. The sleeves were working out very well, and looked good.

On my second sleeve, the Evolve disolved!

It just wouldn't move. Something was causing the mechanism to just lock up, and nothing moved. I panicked! I have only about 30 days to go on my costuming, about 100 pieces to sew, and my new serger won't move!

So, I tried to remain cool, glancing at the forlorn 17 year old Eclipse sitting on the table for the helper. Well, I guess I could use that one.

Took the broken Evolve back to the dealer the next day, and they very nicely offered to let me have a loaner while mine went to the shop. The saleslady was very meticulous in off-loading all my tools out of the tool bin in my Evolve, and also doing the same with the loaner.

Here lies the rub. The needles go in the Evolve using a very specific set screw, with a very specific allen wrench provided to tighten the screw. The saleslady was so careful to get that out of my machine. However, she was also very careful to FORGET TO GIVE IT TO ME! So I got home with a loaner machine which has no needles and no way to put them in.

Thank heaven for that old machine. I sewed 10 peasant skirts today, and it worked great. Maybe even better than the Evolve.

It is forlorn no more! Saved the day. Sews great after its tune up 2 months ago? Why did I bother buying a new machine?
Relegated to the floor, no place of honor for this piece of useless junk!

Snuggle time at Grandma's

As a grandmother, there is no finer moment than when a sleepy grandchild is snuggled in your arms, drowsy and quiet, who finally falls asleep, and you see the cares of the world drop away as they fall deeper and deeper into sleep. When they are babies, and are all warm and snuggly, sweet smelling of baby powder and warm milk, it is nothing short of heaven. But then they grow, and those times get fewer and farther between.

My M & M's are almost 4 and just turned 5. The incredible energy that those little bodies have in them is breath-taking, literally, when one wants you to play with them in the bed room, and the other wants you downstairs! Try to make that work without an aerobic stairstep workout--it is really a workout! So the "sleepy snuggle time" at Grandma's hasn't happened much lately.

Last night, they came over for a visit. We had our favorite Chinese take out (mom states that it was the third time in as many days, but they still went for it). After dinner, the evening's activities were planned. It was "everybody downstairs" for a play session with building materials. It worked out rather well. Lincoln Logs and a trip down memory lane for little boy M and grandma, and the new Magnetix (now that they are old enough) for little girl M and mom. And peace rather reigned for about 20 minutes, because little girl M was content to build, and could do it. Her usualy mode up to this time has been to get frustrated easily, and then just break whatever was being built apart. (They called her M the destroyer when she was a little toddler, because she always destroyed the brother's buildings, and with great delight as she did it! Luckily, he is patient with her, most of the time.)

Then it was snuggle time. Grandma had just completed new snuggle blankets for them both, with new themes. Gone are Dora the Explorer, and now we are in love with the princesses. Banished to the back of the closet is Lightning McQueen, and one of the new superhero characters is now #1. So Spiderman and Cinderella will cuddle them for a while!

Little Girl M dragged out the Wizard of Oz movie for us to watch while under our snuggle blankets. She lasted until Dorothy "followed the yellow brick road" then her eyelids drooped and she fell into that sweet sleep of a young child. Little Boy M lasted through the entire movie, asking "why" at every turn of events. This is hard to explain why they did that back in 1939 when they made the movie. It was probably the first time I watched absolutely every moment of the movie, and had to rationalize every action, so now I know the movie very well. I even know the lines, like "I'll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too!" He laughed when I did the Wicked Witch of the West imitation so very well!

He wanted to snuggle, too, along with jumping on the couch as he watched. As he gets older, his times of closeness get fewer and farther between. But he still wanted to hold my hand, loved to have his back rubbed, and let Grandma have one more snuggle time with him, as he was cuddled by Spiderman.

Joyful, Joyful....it lifts my heart for these special moments!

Evolution

I have evolved!

You see the name on this machine it is called "Evolve". It is the top of the line Baby Lock serger, now sitting on my sewing table downstairs. You can say I've evolved, from my first Baby Lock serger purchased about 20 years ago. This is my fourth one.

It all started back in the early 90's when I started making jackets from those ubiquitous throws that every one was buying. The jackets were warm, cute, easy to make, and once I wore one to my place of employment, every one wanted one, or two, or 5. I made them at night and sold every one of them before the bell rang the next day. I counted all the jackets I made in that year, and it was 175! That's a lot of jackets.

The first one took me five hours to do on a regular sewing machine. I didn't try many more before I purchased my first serger. Then they took me about 45 minutes to make! I could make 5 in an evening!

I wore that serger out, and one day in a frenzy of pre-Christmas sewing, I broke something vital on it. It would be two weeks before it could be fixed, and I was desperate. So I traded the broken one in OVER THE PHONE, got half the money back that it cost me new towards a used Baby Lock, which ECLIPSED the old one by having many more desirable features!

The ECLIPSE was so wonderful because of two features--one, it had a remarkable "air delivery" system for threading the two lower loopers (sergers use 3-4 sources of thread to do their stitch), because threading sergers without this system is a royal pain in the A_ _ ! So this was so superior of a feature I was totally in love. And this serger sewed a very fine narrow rolled hem, and with a flick of a switch!

I worked this little thing to it's near death. I sewed more jackets, fleece of every sort, and garments, garments, garments. It got a little out of whack after about 10 years of hard use, so I decided it needed a replacement. But, I kept it as a back up, just in case things got hot and heavy in the sewing room! They weren't going to be so generous in trade ins with this, so I just kept it.

I purchased my third serger, a Baby Lock of course, it was called IMAGINE. It was a floor model. I was in the process of moving from the country to the city when I purchased this, and as a result,it sat in the box for about 5 months before I actually started using it. Bad move, because it needed some tweaking and sending back to the factory to be tweaked, and then I only had half a year to get this all accomplished. This one seemed to be star-crossed, because I never could feel confident that it would do what it was supposed to do. In a blog in April, I told about how it just locked up and wouldn't move after a particularly heavy bout of usage. Good thing for me I kept the old one, because I needed it.

I got the IMAGINE serviced, and it continued with its wayward ways. With the big sewing jobs I had ahead of me, I needed something sturdy, and dependable. So, as a result, I EVOLVED! I traded the IMAGINE and got half my money back AGAIN. Now I'm happy, this one will do everything but make the day longer so I can sew on it more!

Wish me luck! As you can see, it uses up to 8 sources of thread. That will be a learning curve that I'll have to deal with at a later date! Until then, I'll give it a mighty whirl, and hope this one brings me to "serger Nirvana!"

The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat takes shape

The coat of many colors is taking shape.


This is for the play Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. The main reason I wanted to costume this play is because I wanted a chance to design the dreamcoat. This is the beginning of the project. This took me 4 days to complete, with several days spent in their entirety down in the sewing room.

As you can see, it is far from finished. But I took it to the practice last night, let "Joseph" try it on (it fit him spectacularly). And it seemed to energize both the cast and the crew to see what the final piece-de-resistance might be.

I have to make a second coat, one that will be "torn apart" on stage. I took all of the squares I had left over from the patchwork on this coat and made rainbow strips of cloth out of them, then connected them together to make a piece of fabric for the bodice of this.

I'm using a Elizabethan doublet pattern for the basic pattern. It was made longer for the decorated coat, now I have to figure out what I can cut off to put the bottom on it. I hate to cut any of it! More figuring, and brainstorming! It is a lot of fun to creat this!

Keep watching, more pictures will be coming soon!

The BOX

Here it is, soon to become an international traveler. The UPS man will take it tomorrow and send it on its way to Korea.


This is the leftovers from my roommate of the last 4 months' stay in St. Louis. She was a Youth for Understanding student at my college, and in February, she suddenly was in need of a host family. I'm a poor excuse for a family, but I did have an extra bed or two.

We got to know each other. In many ways, we were opposite in our life styles. She like to stay up late and sleep late, and I needed to go to bed early because I got up early. She liked to cook and eat in, and I hate to cook and like to eat out. She liked raw fish, and I wasn't so sure about that. When we went shopping, she came out of the stores with a little tiny bag or nothing, and I was overloaded with packages. But we both like shoes!

She was visiting here for a complete school year. So, she had been away from home for a long time. Her mom had mailed some care packages from home with things she liked that she could only get in Korea. When she came to my house in February, she had 2 big suitcases and three (or more) boxes full of personal items, plus a book bag, drawing implements for her drawing class, a computer and more treasures! I wondered how it all got here, and how it was all going to get back to Korea.

That is what is in the BOX!

She packed and repacked that box. She started on it weeks ago. She got most of it packed, using Space Bags (they are fabulous), trashing some things, leaving some things for me, and packing and repacking. The biggest issue is that overweight bags going on International flights are terribly expensive, so sometimes it's better to trash it here, and rebuy it in Korea than to pay to have it shipped home.

She went to New York, Boston and DC for a couple of weeks to visit with family. That box sat in the room for three weeks, and I wondered if it would ever make the weight limit, size limit and if ordinary tape would hold it all in. I went to the UPS store on the day she returned from NY for a couple more rolls of heavy duty tape. The original plan was for someone to pick it up on the afternoon she returned from NY. This left a very narrow window of opportunity for her to pack it all up. So the man is coming tomorrow.

This morning, I sadly took her to the airport for her journey home. I know she has been looking forward to going back to Korea for a while. This morning, she told me she had been looking forward to this day for a long time.

I've never done international travel, unless you consider a trip to Tiajuana for dinner international travel. Oh, I've been to Canada a few times, but never overseas. I can just imagine how lonely one must get for home after being gone for months. You make friends while you are here, meet interesting people, but, my darling Korean friend, as Dorothy said in the Wizard of Oz, "There's no place like home, there's no place like home...."

I will miss you my dear. I know your mom and dad missed you while you were gone. Good luck in the future, and write to me!

P.S. Your favorite slippers and your alarm clock are still in the room. That means you'll be coming back! Whenever you leave something important at someone's house, that means you intend to return. They will be my reminder of our 4 months together, which were very enjoyable indeed.

Updates

Update #1--we had over 2" of rain this morning. While I was at work, getting ready to teach my 10 a.m. class, I swore I was working at night school, it was SOOOOOOOO dark outside. It looked like you were underwater when you looked out the window.

So, naturally my thoughts went to THE WINDOW-WELL! There wasn't a thing I could do about it, just hope the new work that we had done really was our solution. When I came home, I checked things in the room down below, and everything was dry as a bone. So, it seems that our solution to the drainage problem has been effective

Update #2--things came crashing down in the middle of the night AGAIN last night. At least this time I knew it was the klutzy cat knocking the glass into the sink again--thanks, Al, for the 2 a.m. wake up call.

Update #3--one of the noisy neighbors was on top of the telephone pole again this evening, dining! This time, through the binoculars, I spotted a bird foot as it was being consumed--yuck! So now I know what was for dinner! Not hassenpfeffer, but fowl.

Plan B for vegetables, Plan XYZ for drainage problems

One little tomato plant and one ever growing, full of flowers yellow squash plant. Plus some flowers that I hope some day will be lush and overflowing the garden.

As I said in a previous blog, I'm not putting vegetable plants in the middle of my back yard. It would be the perfect place to grow them, because it would get sun all day long. My neighbor has a huge vegetable garden in his yard, but his yard is the length of 8 of our yards, so he has room to spare. His is thriving, getting all the sun a plant could want.

I am trying to see if this space on the side of my house will possibly get enough sun to grow a few vegetables. It is on the east side of the house, and now in high summer, it will get at least 4-5 hours of sun a day. My next door neighbors' big two story house is only 12 feet from mine, so there isn't much space for sun to enter. Especially not later on in the summer, I'm afraid it will be shady all day long.

I put the little squash plant out about 3 weeks ago, and it seems exquisitely happy, it must have 15 little and big blossoms on it. I bought two tomatoes to try to put into my Topsy Turvy, but they were too big to fit two of them into it, so I'm experiementing with this space to see if a tomato will grow here.

This bed was built to try to solve a very hard to manage problem with drainage around my house. In heavy storms (like one that drops about an inch every 10 minutes, the water collects in my window well leading to my basement egress window, and comes into the finished basement. The first through 4th time this happened, the room was carpeted, and a very expensive drying process had to be done to get it cleaned up. After the 4th time, I just gave up, and had the carpet removed and ceramic tile put into the room where this window is located. Now, I put towels on the window well, and once when it started to come in, I just swished the towels around, and the mess was cleaned up.

But, this did not solve the problem of the drainage situation. Because the times when the window well filled up and I averted disaster, I WAS AT HOME! I had my sump pump, extension cords, rain gear and bailing buckets all ready for the occasion. I could pump it out as quickly as I spotted it, and then no water came into the basement. But I worried about what would happen if the leak occurred and I weren't home?

So, I have been on a quest for the last three years to try to fix this problem. Here's what I've done so far:
1. Had someone dig out the entire window well down to the foundation base and refill it with clean gravel--result--not a solution, the water still came in and filled the window well.
2. Call the builder--not a solution--left town, no phone, no mailing address, so sorry Charlie! (You don't know how many people advised me to do this! Easier said than done and trying to get anything accomplished.)
3. Made a cover for the window well. Not a solution--the water came under the bottom of the well, not from the top. This solution failed exactly 15 minutes after we made the cover, because it started to rain hard, and the thing filled up immediately. The cover just made it harder for me to see the water as it gushed in and then it was almost too late to divert disaster!
4. Divert the water from the downspout (5" downhill from the window well) through a drainage pipe out into the middle of the yard, --although this helped a little, the majority of water was coming from uphill, so this didn't completly solve the problem.
5. I conferred with my landscapers more than once on this (they did the previous project work.) Several of of their guys and myself put our heads together and concurred that somehow we had to block the water from coming down the hill next to the house that was coming under the bottom of window well. By this time, the rains had scoured out a huge hole upstream of the window well, which made the situation go to critical all that much faster.

So, here's what we did. We (I say we, I supervised and advised and paid, they dug and sweated and listened) dug out a place uphill from the window well for a raised garden bed that would come out from the foundation further than the window well. It is about 12 feet long. Any place where this garden wall touched the foundation or the window well, it was lined with rubber pond liner. At the base of the window well on the downhill side, a drainage pipe was cut into it, so it could drain out into the yard before it filled up high enough to come into the house.

So, now I have a planting bed for my vegetables and flowers, and I think we have the problem licked of the water draining into the house from the egress window. We've had some pretty drenching downpours during the past few weeks, and the window well never collected water in it.

It only took 3 years, lots of phone calls, lots of money and some #^($*@&! on my part to get to this stage. Perhaps the problem is solved, and I'll have a nice garden as a result. Hope springs eternal!

My noisy neighbors

Here they are all four of them. The noisy neighbors, the Red Tailed Hawks. One is swooping in, one is perched on the steeple points, and the other two are on the roof points.

Mommy and Daddy and the two Hawk kids. They are congregating on their favorite perch, the church steeple and roof that is behind my house.

I've seen the two young ones often together perched up there, watching, waiting, and swooping on and off the roof. They have been heavily harassed by the black birds, mockingbirds, and any other group of birds that take alarm at their presence. Today, two were perched up there, each with feathers from a different part of their body plucked and crumpled. One had a wing feather quite out of place, and the other had a very rumpled look on its chest. I can only imagine this was caused by a very close encounter by another feathered foe trying to drive them away.

But today, I got a real treat, because all four of them were together. One was lucky in the hunt and had an exquisite meal of tendons, muscle and guts which was eaten quicky on top of the telephone pole. I'm assuming it was one of the adults, because one of the juvies was in the nearby tree, screeching and begging for a tidbit! NO, NO, MY YOUNG PRINCE, you are now big enough to hunt for yourself, so GO FIND A RABBIT OF YOUR OWN!

The plaintive cries of the youngsters goes unheeded, but you can hear it almost constantly. They are always in the church area, which has some open space around it. Besides those points on the roof, the many appendages on the steeple make fine hawk vantage points. And my deck is a perfect place to sit and watch their antics, and watch them try to dodge the angry birds who are trying to get them to FIND ANOTHER NEIGHBORHOOD! Everybody hates noisy neighbors! Especially ones who can eat you as you sleep!

Will this really work?

My house is pretty nice now on the outside. The grass is growing green and lush, thanks to two years of scheduled fertilizer being spread and sprayed, plus umpteen gallons of water from the irrigation system, AND MOTHER NATURE. The lawn is manicured weekly by my "lawn boy with a Lawn Boy" (or maybe it's a Toro, but whatever). He comes when it gets shaggy, cuts and trims and cleans up, and is very unobtrusive about the whole thing.


Newly landscaped beds, especially around the tree, new entry way spiral spruces and rock replaced mulch in the planting beds.


My pond, with 13 gold fish living it it, and a water lily that bloomed for the first time this year!

Deck with pergula, the canopy isn't up today, no sun.

The only thing I'm missing is a vegetable garden. I'm wondering if this will work?



Vegetable gardening was the late Mr.'s pleasure to be sure. We had 160 acres in our country place, and you could pick any place to grow whatever out there. He made a little planting bed next to the house (by the water faucet, thank you!) where he put his garden. He was a master at growing tomatoes, peppers of all sorts, the hotter the better! One year, he planed some little scragly pepper plants (this was the summer he wasn't really doing that well), and those darn plants put out a bumper crop of peppers. One habenero plant had 60 little habeneros on it! You could only eat one a week of those things, your gut would be burned out if you ate more than that! But 60--they were hanging on the plant like grapes on a vine.

But now I live in the city, on a little postage stamp size lot. In this well manicured collection of landscaping, sod, stepping stones and patios that I'm living in now, there isn't a place for a vegetable garden. I'm not putting it out in the middle of my expensively sodded back yard! No way! But I am willing to try something intriguing, to see, "Will this really work?"

What I am talking about is the Topsy Turvy vegetable planter, AS SEEN ON TV! It is a heavy duty plastic container with a hole in the bottom. You feed the vegetable plant through the hole, use their sponge with a split in it to slip over the stem to hold it in place. The leaves and stem come out of the bottom and the roots go in the bag with garden soil around them. Then you hang the whole contraption up somewhere and hope for the best.

Of course the pictures on TV show a plant with tomatoes hanging on it like my husband's pepper plant, about 60 tomatoes on one plant. I'm just wondering how this contraption will hold all of that. It is downright heavy right now with the one plant, some soil and water. I bought a plant holder to attach it to my deck, where it will get sun, but be out of the way of other activities. It is bowing over the plant holder, and I have my doubts whether this will be sufficient to hold it when it gets its 60 tomatoes on it! We'll see. The Topsy Turvy came with a mighty industrial sized hook that you could screw into some substantial wood, but I don't really have a place like that to hang it. So I'm hoping my idea with the plant holder works.

I have some other worries about this. What will I do with it when we get our terrible wind storms? I can't bring it inside, where would I put it? Will the squirrels come up to steal the tomatoes? Will there really be enough sun in the place I hung it to actually make it grow and bear tomatoes?

As I say, I'm questioning if this will really work. If it does, my vegetable gardens of the future will include one tomato plant per year in the Topsy Turvy plant holder, and perhaps I'll add some peppers next year. We'll see, I'll keep you updated!

That D*mn Cat!

So much trouble, but we love our fur friends! They talk back, nip, whine, beg, hog the bed, this one wants the water on all the time! But what would a lonely lady do without her buddy?

Cock-a-doodle-doo!

Have you seen that commercial for Ambien CR? It shows a lady tossing and turning in bed at 2 a.m. with a rooster standing on her footboard, crowing to give the wakeup call. As a person who inherited this type of sleep pattern from my parents, I find myself often with an imaginary rooster crowing in my bedroom about that time of the morning.

Not so this morning. I was dead asleep, having been lulled to slumberland by one of our daily, if not-twice daily, thunder and lightning storms last evening. I was on my way to a very good night's sleep, when CRASH! The sound of glass breaking woke me out of a sound sleep!

I bolted out of my bed, saying "what in the H-E-double hockey sticks was that?" An intruder breaking into the house? Something crashing through the window? Part of the ceiling falling down to the ground? Furniture falling over? I couldn't imagine.

With heart pounding, I raced into the main part of the house. No, no intruder--thank heavens! I got a little panicked when I realized that could have caused the noise, and here I was running to find out what it might be! Nothing seemed to have crashed through the ceiling, nor was any furniture overturned. My poorly rigged shelving in the laundry room was still up where it belonged--so what could have so rudely jarred me out of a perfectly good sleep?

I went into the bathroom, and there was the culprit--Al the cat was trying to get his drink from the bathroom sink, and in his quest for water, he had overturned a glass I keep by the sink for myself. He overturned the glass trying to get to the contents, and dumped the whole thing into the marble sink.

Scared the bejabbers out of me, and now I'm awake for hours, waiting for the cock-a-doodle-doo of the rooster to wake me all too soon!

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat

The work has begun. The amazing technicolor dreamcoat is started. Joseph has his outfit to wear. Several of his brothers are also dressed. The Narrator is ready to shine in her sparkly top. Rehearsals have begun. We've replaced one narrator, one director, and a couple of brothers so far, hopefully no more cast or crew members will need replacing.

Off we go!

I have a wonderful picture to share with you, but must learn how to post something other than jpg files. It is our publicity photo, and it looks great. I made the costumes for the photo shoot last Saturday. It was a long day, but I got three complete outfits done, plus got some shirts tie-dyed. This is going to be fun to costume!

I'll give you pictures as soon as I get some to share! You'll be hearing a lot about this in the next 2 months.

Cush Ball Crush

CUSH BALLS, NOW CUSH PANCAKES

If you've seen my "signature" logo, a sewing machine with a little laughing cush ball peeking out from the center of it, you know I love these fun toys. I have quite a collection. They are fun to play with, throw and catch, I even have some with legs and arms! These are my big cush balls, the ones the grandkids like to play with.

My Little Miss M loves them, but thinks they are balloons. She can make them bulge out and she can make funny shapes with them. However, unlike balloons, cush balls cost $5-8 each, and once they are popped, that's money down the toilet.

In their pancake stage, they still do have play value. You can stretch them over your head and make a wig, or pull them up to your chin to make a beard. You can use them as a club to beat up your sibling. You can still throw and catch with them, but it's not quite the same as when they are filled by air. And you can pluck out their little appendages, as someone did at my house last week, because I found a little pile of purple rubber pieces in one corner of my room.

The yellow ball met its demise when placed in a closed container with its two fellow cush balls, and then the weight of two preschoolers was applied to the top of the container. Mr. Yellow couldn't stand up under the burden, and gave up his air for the sake of his brothers. Purple Ball found the end of a long piece of Lego applied to its bulging skin, and like all good balloons, popped nicely under the assault.

So, now we only have Orange Crush left as a regular cush ball. I'm an old lady, but I'm guarding my last precious cush ball very carefully, just like I did when I was a kid. I prefer them full of air, not flat as a pancake. And I hope Little Miss M gets the idea that Grandma likes them better that way. DON'T POP MY CUSH BALLS!

A Photographer is born

LITTLE M'S PHOTOGRAPHY STUDIO--I SPECIALIZE IN MANY TYPES OF PHOTOGRAPHY


STILL LIFE


WIDE SHOT OF STILL LIFE


PORTRAITURE


SPECIAL EVENTS


FAMILY PHOTOS


Little Miss M is Three. She has many talents. She can stir Easy Mac and not spill one drop of water. She can mix a cake and not spread the ingredients around the kitchen. She can clean Grandma's car (spit shine, that is!) And she can really take photos.

Now, she has an eye for the important detail that must be included in photos--one central aspect of her subject which must be focused on. In her portraiture, turkey waddle necks are a must! In her family shots, the center of each body must be included--who needs stinkin' heads? A wide grin is essential, so smill pretty for the camera!

She grabs the camera every time she sees it come out. Luckily, Grandma's camera is pretty easy to use, and she can get some pretty good shots! Like, she was the only one who was standing up high enough to take a picture of her brother's preschool graduation--she added an interesting tilt to make the whole long, drawn out affair more interesting! And at the end of the event, she spotted her perfect still life subject, a white cigarette butt on a red carpeted floor. It was so interesting that she took several shots of it, including her close up, just to make sure she had captured every aspect of the subject.

So, save this blog. In 10 or 20 years, these shots may be famous! Little Miss M of M & M fame may have her career laid out ahead of her right now. And you can say, "I knew her when...."