Five Days Since...

Hello Readers!

As the post title suggests, it has been five days since I was here. I slept for 18 hours straight of those five days. That happened four days ago. I've averaged 12 hours a day on the other four. 

Sometimes it does appear that all I get done is sitting on my backside making things. Somedays that is all that gets done! Other days though, I get a few other things accomplished as well. I've been to town twice in the last five days. I've cooked more than a few times. Helped do the dishes on Monday. Ma washes, I put away. Standing in front of that sink does me in! I am attempting to get the dishes done alone today. Haven't seen Ma. I saw her truck pull out of her driveway early this morning. Sammy said she was headed to Phillipsburg to see sister Elaine. So she's nowhere around to initiate doing the dishes. She'll be happy to see I've at least made an attempt to do them. I've had water issues all week so the dishes haven't been done since Monday. I stand there and plod along till my back or legs give out and then I have got to find a seat before I fall down! Another two, maybe three sessions in front of the sink and all the dishes will be clean again. I'm just hoping the water holds out this time! It quit working on Monday night. Sammy, my brother, fixed it on Tuesday and before Tuesday was gone, there was no water again. Today was the first time he could get over here to do something about it. We aren't sure what the trouble is. Something to do with the contacts on the switch on the well pump. Sammy said he thought he had it worked out. We shall see. So far, so good.

I have once again changed my nights and days around. I'm on daylight hours at the moment! Being normal for a change, apparently. I got up around 8 this morning after having gone to sleep just before 10 last night. I truly wish the sleep mode would smooth out to an even keel instead of this back and forth, sleep too much or not at all business! I guess I'll be happy to be awake when the sun's shining as long as the old body wants to play it this way! It is a beautiful day out there!

The soybean field still looks the same. I was hoping for cows, but none materialized. I suspect cows don't eat dried up soybean plants. They will probably plow this under soon. Wheat won't be growing there this year. If they wanted wheat they'd have planted it in the fall. I've no clue what will happen in that field. We'll keep an eye on it.

I have a new windsock. Ma brought me this one a few days ago. The fish flew away in a big wind a few weeks ago, never to be seen again! I suspect it's across the highway tangled up in the ditch or on the old train track bed. There are no train tracks now. They took them out a couple summer's ago. 

Used to be that grain was shipped out of Stockton by rail. Apparently it wasn't profitable. Now they truck it out.

I haven't had to wait on a train in years! Haven't even heard a train since January when I was down at my son's house in Nickerson. 

At any rate, a new windsock is in the near future. I've made a date with my mother to sit down and make some fish windsocks. One for her and one for me! 

Handmade books are hot and heavy on the muse's radar this year! I know I said that before but it is true. I have made a LOT of little books since I was here last. 

This little book is 3 inches square with about 50 sheets of orchard paper. The covers are felt with the front cover only being embroidered. I didn't have a design in mind, really, when I started to embroidery. It was pretty much mindless meandering with the needle and thread. It's sewn together in the japanese stab binding with embroidery thread.

This 4 x 6 inch rhinoceros book is made out of trash. I drew the rhino on a scrap of chipboard, painted him with acrylics and acrylic ink, cut him out and glued him to the chipboard backings from packaging some 25 feet phone cords came in. I painted the chipboard with acrylic ink. It's sewn together in the coptic stitch with black nylon cord. The nylon cord was originally white. I ran it under my big fat black sharpie a few times and turned it black.

It has six signatures of white copy paper. I painted the inside of the covers with the same blue I used on the outside of them. It doesn't cover up the instructions for using the phone cords. I like how it all turned out.

I have a few more of these chipboard pieces that will end up as books as well. And the phone cord will show up on this blog sooner or later. I just have to figure out what the devil I'm going to make out of it. I'm thinking a basket of some sort but nothing has come of the thinking yet.

This is a very little book. 2 x 3 inches. It's made out of an orange juice container. I wanted to see if markers would play nicely with the waxed paperboard. Worked like a charm! I did a quick sketch of a flower for the cover of this one. It's sewn in the japanese stab binding with nylon cord. It has about 30 copy paper pages.

This little book had been sitting in the livingroom on the table by the chair for weeks! I had to cut down the blue and green writing paper pages before I could bind it. They stuck out too far from the covers. I do not know the name of the stitch used to bind this one. The threads are wrapped around the signatures and tied on the outside of the spine. No sewing involved. It has 10 signatures. It's 2 x 4 inches and about an inch thick. If memory serves me correctly this cover was once a pudding box.

Here's the spine. My sister gave me the map I used to cover the pudding box. I bound it with different colors of embroidery thread and left the little knots ragged at the top of the spine.

Here's the tree that took me four days of work to complete. An hour or two a day. This is another of the series of felt books. This one is 5 x 7 inches, sewn with embroidery thread in the japanese stab binding. It has about 50 pages of orchard paper. I lined the inside of the front cover with purple cardstock. 

The felt book series continues...there will be more.

This is a terrible picture! The book is one of those painted covers I spent an afternoon making. It is 4x6 inches and has writing paper pages. I know you can't see the binding in the picture, but it is done in the long stitch with blue embroidery thread.

Another of the playing with paints covers. I like how colorful this one is! It too is 4 x 6 inches with writing paper pages and sewn a little differently but still in the long stitch. 

This series hasn't ended either.

This one is 6x6 inches. I drew the zentangle patterns with a black sharpie on some kind of paper board. I have no clue what this stuff is. I'm pretty sure it wasn't intended as art fodder, but it's lovely stuff for a book cover. I had about 10 12 inch square sheets of this stuff at one time. It's an ivory color with red and green strings running through it. Kinda like the way money has the thin strings of color if you look closely. 

I zentangled on both covers of it. I drew a bunch of circles with my circle template, colored around them all with the marker and then did the zens.

I sewed it together with black embroidery thread in the coptic stitch. It has white copy paper pages. Somewhere around 140 pages.

And yet another OJ container book. This one is 3 x 4 inches. Japanese stab binding with embroidery thread.

I also made these four little books. Each one is 2 x 3 inches and about half an inch thick.

They have blue legal pad paper for their pages. They don't all have the same number of pages. Some have more signatures than others. That's because I can't count early in the morning apparently! I covered little chipboard candy boxes with painted newspaper for the covers and used that lazy stitch I don't know the name of to tie them together. These are Easter gifts.

These are the little boxes that became books. I had a devil of time getting that bottom flap of the box to come loose of its glue. I don't know why they glued them shut so tightly! At any rate, they made perfect little books!

Here are the Easter baskets to put the little books into! I made these little guys out of some thin chipboard that came from packaging of DIY flooring. My brother and his buddy laid some flooring of some unknown to me type in someone's house over in Hays a couple weeks ago. The packaging for said flooring ended up in my trash bins. Ma brought it in the house for me! It was four feet long and seven inches wide. She brought me over 20 sheets of it! Perfect art fodder!

I dragged out the needle felting supplies the other day. OK, I didn't really have to drag anything out, it's always right there by the chair in the livingroom. 

I made a cute little bunny! His ears need some work and his legs aren't quite right, but he's definitely a bunny! I embroidered his eyes, nose and mouth. I don't know why I decided I needed to make a bunny other than I hadn't needled felted anything in a long time and it felt like the thing to do for a few hours. This little bunny is about 2.5 inches tall.

I showed you all this silk lantern in the last post. 

I've made progress on it. Not a lot of progress, but some. I'm afraid I will run out of purple petals before I am done covering the whole thing. When those purple petals are gone, there will be no getting more. I do not know what I will if that happens. Guess I'll cross that bridge if it comes. 

That's about it for me this time.

Thanks for hanging in there!

Remember....

Be good to one another!

It matters!

Peace

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