a bunch of unrelated stuff....

Water color pages for Booklace # 1...cover at top..
Booklace #2...water color pages and cover at top...used painted paper towel made in traci bautista's class at artfiberfest...
Booklaces put together....one on right is a Fiber one still to be connected...
Justin's Altered Shoe...Wingtip!
Close up of the Wingtip...

Finishing up the Booklace Samples and thought I'd show you some of the little pages that I water colored....and some works in progress...
And here is a photo of my son, Justin's, Altered Shoe that he made for his art class in Jr. High. I loved that on his information sheet for the project he wrote that his inspiration for the piece came from Michael de Meng. His teacher took the time to Google Michael! And she said as he was bringing it home before Christmas..."are you sure you want to take that home?" He wrapped it up and gave it to me as a Christmas present....and I have to confess that I did help him with it...which was allowed....he raided my art room for the wings and little doll face...but he did all the painting and most of the hammering on his "Wingtip"....I'm glad he has such cool art projects at his school and such a supportive teacher. I had great art teachers in South Pasadena where I grew up. In Jr. High, Mrs. Paden had me do all the drawings for the yearbooks, two years in a row...we were the Tigers, so I had to draw lots of little Tigers doing funny things, like dancing and playing hockey ( my favorite sport.) And in High School, we had Mr. Dalton...very creative and a painter who had studied with Raoul Dufy in Paris! I don't think I appreciated this at the time but he gave us a wonderful back ground in art history and interesting art projects to do in class.
My older son is also taking Advanced Art in his senior year in high school and the funny thing is that his teacher was an art student at UCSB while I was there...I vaguely remember seeing him down in the ceramics department where the fun stuff was going on. During Open House this year we had fun reminiscing about our art days at UCSB in the late 60's and 70's. I have always loved to draw and since there was no "drawing" major I went into Printmaking where I could "draw" with an etching needle. I still got to explore other art classes, like sculpture and ceramics and painting but, alas, there was NO fiber art at all! I guess that didn't stop me because I remember doing an embroidery of an ancient Peruvian cloth for a final project in an Anthropology class with a wild teacher, Mr. Allen, who had lived in Peru with the Indians and gave us the freedom to choose what we wanted to do for a final. He was a little too radical for the school at the time and got fired soon after....which inspired more rioting and discontent. Yep! I was still in school at UCSB when they burned down the Bank of America! I actually went down to Isla Vista to check it out and it was a crazy scene....people roaming all over the place, police and National Guard arresting students...didn't stay too long...and retreated back to my little mountain cabin in the hills. Whew! Those were strange times....but there was a lot to be concerned about...the Viet Nam war for one! That same year a group of students took over the computer center of the University and demanded that a Black Studies department be set up...I guess that somehow it worked because they did set one up and one of my neighbors teaches there to this day.
Wow! I didn't mean to get on this tangent today...but oh well....what I learned was that I would protest peacefully what I felt was wrong, but did not want to be a part of any violence as a way to change things and after graduation looked for ways to make positive changes in the world around me...which led me to meditation and helping to found a spiritual community here in Santa Barbara back in 1970. More on that later.