Bear's Jail Break

I finished the five dolls I've been working on...made hats and finished clothes with buttons and hooks, etc.  Then it was time to take pictures.

 

Mary Jo (my lovely mum-in-law) gave me the COOLEST folding table that rolls.  Perfect for the portable photo studio!  I set up my foam-core board, drape it with fabric...but I digress.

Anyway.  Taking pictures of the dolls.  So it seems, after getting to know him, that this little street urchin we call Joseph, is animal crazy.  The animals all seem to like him too--cats, birds, mice, dogs, you name it, he has a way with them.

One day he was traveling around and looking for marks--er, ways to earn his next meal--when he came across a traveling side show.  He wandered around, seeing what there was to see, picking likely contributors, until he heard the most horrible, plaintive cries.  Following the noise, he came around to the back of the big show tent.  There, parked in the shadows between side show trailers, was an iron cage with the saddest little bear cub Joe had ever seen!  Lonely, cold, clearly confused as to what he'd done wrong.  The tiny cub was apparently too small to impress anyone with his ferocity, since all the show-gawkers had gathered around the lion's cage.

 Little Joe was so moved by the bear's plight, he couldn't stand it.  Having come from a cold dark place himself, he'd gotten on the wrong side of the law a few times--and narrowly escaped the snatching hands of the policeman who'd spied him.  He understood what a horrible thing it is to be locked up.

So he climbed up near the cage door, determined to comfort the wee bruin with company and soothing words, while he tried to figure out how to get enough money to buy the bear away from the side show.  But the bear had a different idea.

"Can you pick this lock and get me out of here?" asked the bear.  "I don't like oatmeal, and that's all they feed me here.  They call it 'porrich" or something, but I know oatmeal when I taste it."

Well, Joseph's skills lie more in the direction of picking pockets, not locks, but he decided this little bear needed rescuing in the worst way.  Really--oatmeal?  Yuck!  So he went to work, using a tiny pocket knife he'd lifted off of a...never mind.  He was able to pick the lock, and get the little bear out of that dreadful iron cage.  Bear was shivering with cold, so Joe loaned him his coat, and they sat for a while, deciding whether their Boy and Bear act would make more money performing at the London Street Fair...or the Traveling Circus.  Either way, there would be no more cages, and no more oatmeal.

Boys and big cats.

Okay, he's not a boy, he'll be 28 this summer.  

But he's my boy, who is stationed in England and whom I miss.  A lot.  His wife posted this picture on her facebook page.  It was so typical of my boy that I had to post it.  That's their cat Barnes, grown from an adorable bit of apricot fluff to this hairy monster.  

Apparently a tame monster that doesn't mind being hoisted up for the camera.  :~)

Goodbye, Tiny Dancer.

Thanks to a lovely lady in Fort Wayne, Indiana, this little dreamy ballerina is off to find a new home.  I will miss her...and the bears will miss their dancing lessons.

More Doll Clothes!

The dolls I've been posting lately were made in December, got unders over the holiday vacation, and clothes in the last couple of weeks.  You met Bethany and Emily Rose--the two most recent, and these are the remainders.  I'll finish them (a hat for Joseph, some beads for Kate, maybe?) and then list the five of them in Etsy for now.  Then off to the doll show in February.

A ginormous Thank You to those who posted encouraging comments...you helped.

The Doll Shelves

Joseph

Olivia (loves to garden)

Kate and friend.

Doll Clothes!

Having spent the last week pretending I don't care about Emily's Ebay auction results, I finally had to admit yesterday that her not selling has been hard to take.  So many questions I asked myself: what do I need to do differently?  Should I list any more dolls there?  What's the use?  I'm not sure I'm brave enough to fail that spectacularly--and publicly--again.

But in the meantime, I've been working on dresses for several of the other dolls, finishing two and almost finishing the third.  Yesterday was tough, I was distracted, and made rookie mistakes on the dress causing me to have to undo/redo/undo and redo again!  Oh well.

Here's one dress finished--to those of you on MAIDA, it's not new, since I posted pics there.  But here she is, and I'm happy to have discovered I actually DID make a pattern of the dress before sewing it, which is a hugely rare bit of forward thinking for me.

Bethany in her For Best dress.

I'll post pictures of the second finished dress tomorrow.
Cheers.
Jan

The Couple Next Door.

This morning we have 60 degrees, humid clouds and still air.  But the weekend started out pretty frosty.  I don't mind, because I love Saturday morning reading with coffee and wooly jammies.  But this Saturday...not so much.  Where were we at 8 a.m. on this 30 degree Saturday morning?

Outside, on a ladder, taping white tissue paper over my studio window.

It seems that each year, when some feathered friend (last two years it's been a little brown House Wren) decides the Big Brother Live Oak outside my window is THE place to nest, he then decides he must defend said Live Oak from the Invading Bird.  Yeah, the one he sees in my window.  So for hours, and then days of hours, he flings himself at this Invader, determined to make him go away.

The little brown House Wren so far has either found another place to nest, or has decided the Invader is not so invasive, and given up.  To which I said "whew!" and got on with my painting and sculpting and sewing.  This year, however, a lovely pair of Cardinals has claimed Big Brother.

This sweet couple was worse than the little house wren, because they are:
a. larger,
b. more numerous by 100%
and c. more aggressive (I think they egg each other on..."Good one, honey!!!")

You could hear their attacks from the living room.  Phil: "What is THAT?"  Jan: "You remember that Alfred Hitchcock movie called 'Birds'?  Well..."

After all day Friday, it started up again Saturday morning.  We had to do something.

Soon as we came in, after putting away the ladder, storing the tape, defrosting our frozen fingers, we heard the attacks again--in the room NEXT to my studio!  There are curtains in that window, however, so I drew them closed.  This proved my theory (which Husband had dismissed) that covering the inside of the window was sufficient.  Whaddaya know?  It worked.   

So now I have ugly white tissue paper over my studio window, on the outside, which will require a ladder again to remove.  But there's a roller blind on the To Buy list, the Cardinals are setting up house, and my studio is peaceful again (if a little darker).

Emily Rose is...up.

I gotta say it.  Etsy is fun, interesting, and has done well for me, all things considered.  (Such things as my inexperience, monster learning curves, etc.) but Ebay--or rightfully called, Feebay--is a helluva lot more fun.  I put a doll there on auction today.  This mirrors the last one, my first one, in the absolute nervous energy, fear, doubt, and hope...

But there she is, and to my mind, she's far and away better than the first Izannah Walker type dolls I made.  And it's to be hoped that she's not nearly as good as the later ones I will make.  Wish her luck! 

Emily Rose

I have new business cards on the way...

And I'm really tickled about them.  Way more foo-foo than I would have ordered even just a few years ago, but change is part of life, right?  Now I'll have them in time for the doll show in February.

We have some coming in for the real estate biz, as well...way fun to design.  Of course, no foo-foo allowed.  Not even one single foo.

On Opening a Can of Cyber Worms

Because of the hubby's recent determination to buy ten houses this year
(no comment from THIS amen pew) I am spending a great deal of time online:

a. creating new email addresses for my biz and the household biz,

b. figuring out Google mail after almost ten years of Yahoo mail,

c. sending out notifications to the respective contact lists,

d. changing account info for an insane number of accounts,

e. designing and ordering new business cards,

f. typing & filing the meeting minutes for our Official Meeting of LLC Partners,
(he wouldn't let me title them "Red Earth Properties, LLC. 2012 Beer Summit.)

g. Re-aligning the domino effect of changing an email address connected to a paypal account connected to Etsy, Artfire and Ebay,

h. finalizing accounting for upcoming tax season...(not because of his 2012 resolutions, but still had to be done, and it must be said: he really rocks an excel spreadsheet),

and

i. trying to figure out how to move this blog from the new household email I'd accidentally added it to, and re-connecting it to MY new email.

This is not easy, but I guess we don't want our blogs hijacked, so maybe that's a good thing. If you EVER need to change the email address you use to log in to your Blogger account, just ask me. It's not technically difficult, but it is a little time consuming and takes a few steps.

I still have cyber-miles to go before I sleep, but I can see the end from here. (It's very tiny, and rather dim, but it's there.)

After all the online time, I actually look forward to a little housework today, just to get out of this chair.

How sick is that?

What I learned on Vacation.

Back less than a week, hubs went back to work yesterday, and life has mostly resumed its normal pace.  But as I un-decorated the house yesterday, I thought of a few things I've learned...

1. Life really IS too short to drink bad coffee.  Thanks a lot, Gabe.  Now the cheapo Hills Brothers is awful and I had to get the good stuff.

2. You really do eat more salad when you chop up all the veggies and store them for instant use.  Thanks a lot, Mary Jo.  Before, I could just turn a blind eye to the produce molding in the bottom drawer.

3. No matter how much laundry you wash while on vacation, somehow it multiplies on the drive home, to become--like magic!--four loads upon unpacking. 

4. Get the camera out and take pictures!  Living in the moment is part and parcel of a vacation, and part of that concept is to get those pictures of the moment, a least some of them.  You can't go back and get them later.

5. Weeds in the garden do NOT wait until you're back.  I'd swear I already knew this, but must have forgotten.

6. Memories made on vacation with family are priceless.  I knew this too, but it just seemed important to mention.  I really didn't think I could like those people any more than I already did...but I do.

Love you too, Annie.

We're baaaaack!

Home from our trip to Arizona, (Hi and Thank You, Mary Jo!) and while I didn't leave the house a total wreck before we left, I did leave lots of unfinished business.  The week's mission is to Un-decorate, work off what extra Holiday adipose tissue, and get the house/bills/menu/etc. ready so next week I can finish dolls!

Schultz and his pal Annie, hanging out while the humans yabber...

Since we returned home, Schultz has been working off his I-Miss-Annie grief with the new squeaky toy he snuck out of my suitcase.  Given the decibel level and the looks I'm getting from Phil, it's probably a good thing I didn't give these buddies their new Squeakies at Christmas.

Happy New Year everyone!