April Fools

So here we are, into the month of April and this is Fools Day. Taking a tip from the tarot, the Fool is really an innocent who has everything to learn and is wide open to all possibilities.  What a great way to start a month and even every day. It is like saying: this is the first day of the rest of my life. Becasue no-one is guaranteed an eternal existence, why not decide that each day should be a celebration of this gift of life we have been given and set out on a daily journey of discovery and wonderment. Even when life is seeming drab and uneventful, that is merely because we have chosen it to be so. Becasue I take care of an elderly mother, nearly 97, who has Alzheimer's Disease, more and more time is spent at home. Rather than spend time fretting about lost mobility and freedom to be impulsive about how I spend time, I find this the perfect excuse to pursue my artisan nature and research, craft and develop skills that I knew very little of before. The number of ways I can choose to spend my time now keep getting more abundant. Instead of a narrowing life, I choose to see life with adventure and openness to more wonders yet to be. It has been a good while since my last post. ...Blame it on tax preparation. Each year, I am absorbed into the pressures of doing a mountain of paperwork and exhausting my brain on the frustrations of an amateur's experience with QuickBooks and TurboTax software. I would be lost without them, but I do hate paperwork. I would so much rather be creating anything from jewelry, knitwear, food, faux walls, ...you name it. I do manage to sneak in a few projects amid the numbers just to keep my sanity. 

This is one of the more recent jewelry pieces I finished, which I call Cinderella's Rags & Rhinestones, and it was one of those challenges that I often create for myself to give my mind exercise.  This photo, taken on my back porch, is something I am equally excited about.  I created the form from a cardboard box and using a stencil (from a Google image search), which I printed and traced onto the cardboard.  After carefully cutting the silhouette out with a razor blade, I painted it several times with Gesso.  The final coat was textured. As luck would have it, in the same box there was a smaller box with a slit in it.  I glued a paint stirring stick to the back of the bust form and inserted it into the slit, and "Voila!!!" here you see the results.  I can see from this experiment that I need to tweak the display form a little for better photos, but I am thrilled that I now have a spot that gets natural light and shows off the jewelry to better advantage.