My first blog entry on Blogger!

This picture is the last sketch I made of my granddaughter Eva this last weekend, while I stayed at GEM's house ... Gretchen, Eva, and Mike's house। Eva's going to be four and a half already, on Earth Day! She's pretty good at posing, if there's a good movie to watch. :) So this is my first sharing on my first genuine blog!
Well, since my last Turtle Trax Diary post on my site, turtlemoon.com, I've had a lot of time to consider blogging. That last diary post was in July, 2007. On January 17, 09, I began a Facebook page, and found out that I like the added interest of people posting comment reactions to my work. So that kinda nudged me toward blogging. I also like that you can search a blog for keywords, which you can't do on my big, old-fashioned site. It's not that I'm going to stop working on my site, but my plan is to do my diary work here, and have a link to access it from my site's diary index page, which has my entries back to August, 1997 still on it. I don't know if I'll write more often here than once a month, but it could be better than that, if it's really easy. And if people really come look at it.


Here's Eva with the Daisy Dress we brought her, to help convince us all that Spring is on the way! This weekend, Jimmy took me up to Lakewood and stayed for a nice supper at everyone's favorite Chinese restaurant, Oriental Palace Buffet. Mike gave us his band's new CD!!! Then Jimmy went home and I stayed two nights, getting to attend Eva's ballet lesson with GEM, at the Beck Center in Lakewood. That place is rockin' with tons of kids and their folks, lots of classes! Next I went to the West End Textile tArts' meeting at Praline's house, also in Lakewood, and enjoyed immensely the show and tell of all seven of us tArts' work in Prali's livingroom. That night we watched Peter Pan: Return to Neverland, which Eva had from the library. And in the morning, we watched Barbie: The Nutcracker. This kid LOVES movies, and as you saw, she holds still for them, so I can draw her. Oh, and a lot of drawings of princesses in big puffy gowns were made for Eva, too, and then we'd color them together. Yesterday afternoon, GEM and I went to Oberlin, to the reception of Mike's brother Frank's first photography show, a group show well attended by many of the artists and their entourages, at FAVA. Frank's been a photographer all his life, but had never entered a show before. So this was very cool. Frank and Kristi, Mike and Gretchen, Eva and I were joined by my Jimmy, who then took me back home to Wooster and our cats. I only get to see GEM about once a month, so this long weekend was especially wonderful.


Here's GEM at the Beck Center, before ballet class. The hallways were full of parents and kids, all excited about their classes in so many of the arts. The Beck is only a few blocks from GEM's house. What a wonderful town Lakewood, Ohio is!


This is Eva working on coloring in the fancy dress drawing I made for her of herself as a princess. Right now, she mainly wants drawings of princesses in "belted out" dresses, meaning big, even gigantic ballroom skirts. She's developing a pretty good drawing style of her own, which fascinates me to no end! :)


Mike's band Mike St Jude and the Valentines, released their new album "Here's to Your Black and Blue Heart" last week, and it'll be on iTunes soon! Jimmy and I are really psyched about how good it is, and I made a little funky photoshoot with two of Eva's dolls, to show you what the album looks like. All the graphics were done by Frank, who's the drummer on the album. Mike wrote all the songs, sings lead, and plays guitar. There are five musicians in the band, and they play out in Cleveland.


This is Quatty and me, during my show and tell time at the tArts meeting. This piece is the start of my "First Lady: Queen of Paring Knives" piece, with all the airbrush and the start of the airpen work done. I love our tArts meetings, and how everyone has time to tell all about what they're doing. We have: Praline, Key Lime, Kumquat, Coco, Cherry (Bomb), Raspberry, and me, Pomme (Apple).


Here are Kristi and Frank, in front of one of Frank's pieces in the show at FAVA Sunday, March 1, 2009. The show is the Six State Photography Show, and it runs through April 10.


This is Frank and his fanclub at the show: Kristi, Jimmy, Frank, Gretchen with Eva, and Mike.


"Pot Pies over Arrowmont." This is a painting I made in 2004 at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg, TN, when Jimmy and I were still teaching together. It was made as both a class demo and an auction donation. It sold to Mary Ann Hruska, of Walnut Creek, CA, and this last Fall she had me quilt it for her. Now it's got a big border with more diary writing around it, and is 17.5"h x 21.5"w. OK, that's it.


This is our cat Tulip, who died on Feb 23, after fighting cancer since last Summer. Tulip waas the cat here that all the Turtle Art Camp students enjoyed so much, because she always welcomed them and loved to sit on their suitcases. She'd also sleep on top of the students who allowed her into their bedrooms! We still have three cats: Marigold, Otis, and Ome, but we really miss sassy little Tulipetra MayFly HoneyPie Shie.


One more thing, and then I'll end this first blog entry. This is my "Obamaland #1: The Inauguration" piece that I finished Feb 9, 09. It's 48.5"h x 32.5"w. You can see a very large full image, a very large detail image, and its full statement on my site in the 2009 gallery. I put Obama's full inaugural address into it, along with lots of my own diary thoughts and commentary. I took this piece along, when I went to Washington DC for the artists' reception of "President Obama: A Celebration in Art Quilts" at the Cafritz Art Center in Silver Spring. But this was not one of my pieces in the show. Too bad I wasn't doing a blog then.


This is me with my "First Lady" piece, after my airbrush drawing and painting and before I started the tiny airpen writing. Its subtitle is "Queen of Paring Knives," as it's my second Minor Arcana card quilt in the Kitchen Tarot. For the 56 minor cards, I'm drawing each one from a deck at random, to decide which one to do next. Hay House is publishing my 22 Major Arcana cards of the Kitchen Tarot, with a guidebook by my friend Dennis Fairchild, this Fall. Hurray!!!!

I hope to make another entry soon, since I was so bad and didn't make personal diaries for so very long. But I'll be adding to the gallery on my turtlemoon.com site, each time I finish a major piece, and will keep my classes out and Turtle Art Camps in schedules there, along with all the other pages of resume, etc, etc. And I'll keep working on my Facebook page. Hope this looks ok!

Peace, love, and art -- Lucky