Jaci Dawn

I spent most of today cleaning out and re-organizing my studio. It was a mess. It’s not a very large room, and gets rather crowded quickly. Today’s purge and cleaning was not only long over-due but the mess was not conducive to creativity.

I still have a stack of mail on my desk that needs to be looked at and a box of 2012 filing that needs to be done, but I feel like I reclaimed some of the floor space!

Of course, no matter how I do it, I have very limited wall space.

            As you can see – every available inch of vertical wall space is pretty much taken, and most of it is taken with storage.

That’s OK – I’m not complaining. You choose to live in a little house, you learn to live with the storage challenges. As it was, I purged a number of items and boldly put them into the trash (or recycle) bin or I set them aside to donate to Goodwill.

Doing this presented some challenges. I moved some furniture around. I asked myself why I keep some things. And I tried to present an interesting photo op for my blog (did you see that coming?)

For instance, I hand-picked what drawing should be on the little easel. I could just put the little easel away, but there’s an oil painting sitting on it that I really need to finish. I didn’t want to show the unfinished oil painting because it’s really, really, really in the amateur stage. I may even toss it out.

So I picked this silly pastel portrait of Lucky Dog and Teddy Bear, life-long friends. They’re actually inside a box somewhere in my attic. Lucky Dog was a promo stuffed animal for the very first release of the original Disney Movie, “101 Dalmatians”. I lost Lucky Dog for an entire year once. Then someone (I think my brother) found him in a vacant lot a couple blocks from our house, just a little worse for wear. We’ll never know what adventures he went on for that year, but I was so very happy to have him home again! And when I was 15, my mom very carefully resewed his body with new spotted faux fur. His stuffing and eyes are original.

Teddy Bear went to college with me. He also dropped out with me. He married Pinky Cat, my sister’s very favorite stuffed animal. We baked a heart-shaped cake and frosted it with pink frosting, but it turned out to be more of a pink-and-white frosting because we forgot to sift the powdered sugar. My sister, my childhood best friend, and I were in attendance as were all the stuffed animals and Breyer horses we owned. It was a big wedding.

I wonder what ever happened to Pinky Cat?

Teddy has only had one eye for several decades now. He’ll be 56 years old in a couple weeks. Lucky Dog is 51.

The little easel was hiding these terrariums. I bought them at some yard sale. I didn’t really want the terrariums, but they were a package deal with some other item at that yard sale that I really wanted, and so I had to take the whole lot. I only paid a couple dollars. The bonus to cleaning my room is that I had sudden inspirations: I have the beginnings of two glass faerie houses, complete with macramé hangers! Oh, the wheels are rolling! I’ll make the faerie houses and the resident faeries, and then I’ll sell them. They can either go as a set or individually. I’m really excited about this idea! The materials I need for the project have already been purchased and are being stored (conveniently) inside the glass terrariums.

The Dead Fly Pub was my first Faerie house. I can’t bear to part with it. Mavis is the Goblin waitress and Petrick is a regular. Baba Yaga in the background has nothing to do with the Dead Fly Pub, but she doesn’t clash.

I love shadow boxes! I have two and I don’t have any free walls to hang them both on. I collect things that I think I will eventually use in a creation (like the old glasses and sunglasses).  Some things just have sentimental value (a jar full of Arwen’s baby teeth. I don’t have a jar of Levi’s baby teeth because he swallowed them. True story). And some things are just cool, like the folding opera glasses.

Two stories here: the Japanese float belonged to my mother. She had two of them. I remember when my mom found the floats on the beach out of Seaside, Oregon. My brother has the larger one, but I liked this one which is a bluer hue.

Noah’s Ark. No, that isn’t my oil painting. That is my son’s oil painting. He painted it at a homeschool coop class nearly11 years ago.

(Those are dried hydrangea flowers hanging from the ceiling)

Did I mention I like shadow boxes? I have a collection of old Pepsi crates that I have used as shadow boxes. Now they do duty as storage for the many jars of beads and buttons that I use. The Man-in-the-Moon is a fragment of fiberglass that I found up in the woods where some contractor just dumped his trash. I hate the contractor for his dump, but I salvaged that little fragment because of the shape. I etched the Man-in-the-Moon into it. The canes came from my great-grandfather’s estate.

The horse was Chrystal’s but she left it here. I haven’t decided what to do with it. Yet. But rest assured, when I am done with it, it won’t look much like that.

(Don’t you love the vintage suitcase?)

The Locker! Isn’t that a classic? We went to a yard sale put on by the local high school and came home with several treasures, one of which was this locker. It was Levi’s until he moved completely out. Not it is mine.

It is great storage space!

We used to have a stero system. We bought it “on time” through Fingerhut. Remember them? The thing died after about 15 years, but we kept the cabinet. I recently converted it into a sort of curio cabinet. My mother’s glass shoes, a vase from my mother’s china hutch; a collection of salt-and-pepper shakers that my Very Best Friend, Rosie, wanted me to have from her huge collection; and my “Painted Ponies” collection fill the interior of it.

The horse on the top of it was a gift from a neighbor girl many, many years ago. She was younger than both of my children. We all lived in a little trailer park and I had a horse in the pasture next to us. When the little girl’s parents bought a house in town and they moved away, she brought me this prized possession of hers as a “thank-you” for the few times that I gave her a ride on my horse. I truly treasure that horse.

Chrystal painted the bunny with the sun dial.

Levi painted the flower pot that holds the tiny glass float. I no longer remember where I picked up the tiny float, but it’s a genuine Japanese float.

This is an unfinished oil painting that I am actively working on. I need to finish the foreground and the highlights on the bushes. Early sunrise at Pike Creek Trail Head on Steens Mountain. It’s been a stretch for me: I did a lot of palette knife work on this. I’ve never worked with the palette knife before.

This corner is a bit of a mess. I have frames and canvases stored in the boxes that Banker’s Boxes come in. I can’t think of a neat way to store the over-sized stuff. But I did think to prop an old oil painting up on them, to sort of take away from the ugliness of the cardboard, and the crowd of tool boxes. The painting is of Don’s last dog (before Murphy): Rejoys Hannah’s Promise, better known as Sadie. She was the brown-and-white English Pointer in the center of the litter. Dumbest Dog that ever lived and I miss her so! We had her for 10 years before cancer claimed her.

I have to share this. It’s just so cool! I’ve had it for 3 decades. The little boxes are the size of matchboxes and they hold such office “essentials” as: gummed labels, paper clips, rubber bands, mending tape, gummed patches, and key tags. Tell me that isn’t the coolest (and most useless) thing! I can’t bear to part with it because it is just so fun.

This is my other shadow box. My friend, Audrey gave it to me. I still have empty slots to fill. My dad’s flag and my mom’s glass boot, a “good luck” cat (also from Audrey), some miniatures in polymer clay that I made and painted, a broken piece from an old cast iron wood stove, and the list goes on.

Something I would never buy myself: my boss gave it to me one Christmas. I appreciate that she chose unicorns (as close to horses as she could get at the Dollar Store). I keep it because the thought was so sweet.

My assistant. I put his bed out in the loft while I worked and he still came and laid down in the middle of the floor while I worked. He was quite happy when I finally moved his bed back into the studio.

And for the heck of it: my current project. I picked up this mask for $0.25 at Goodwill. The gilding had been knocked off as had some of the raised design. I used some “golden” and reapplied the design, and then I painted it. I still have to glue on the rick-rack and ribbon. I’m very pleased with how it is turning out.

Thank you for stopping by and reading. This post was a bit introspective and I’ll be thrilled to think someone actually bothered to read it all. Maybe it gives you an insight into how I think. Or how cluttered I am.

I really did throw things away.

OH! I found this when I was rearranging the locker:

That had to be circa 2002. It’s from Levi’s college Swing Dance course. Made me smile.

We won’t talk about the decapitated and mutilated plastic Army men I found in the same drawer.

I emailed my son and asked him if there was anything about his childhood that we needed to discuss…