Painting away

Life with an artist is exhausting when it's painting the new closet.

In the process of making a truly livable home out of our sometimes-livable house, we are in the final stages of making an office without a vanity and sink and making a guest bathroom with a sink. What a concept. A sink in the guest bath instead of the office. Our formerly-strange house had a "jack and jill" bath with entrances from two "bedrooms". What a very strange design was our newly remodeled house. How strange we must have been to purchase it like that. But, after all, it's half a block from the beach...sometimes you can put up with a lot of things when location, location, location is involved. But not forever.

How wonderful it is to have a rectangular room with bare walls. How wonderful it is to have a closet in the office. Which brings us to painting our wonderful closet. This weekend I painted our wonderful, new, 3x9 1/2 closet. Then we moved bookcases and stacks of books into it. The artist and I are exhausted. But we are very happy.

Now we can put more of his stringed instruments on the walls and we can put some of the artist's great drawings that I love so much into frames and hang them on bare walls. Bare walls. Oh, no. First we have to paint the office. Can it wait for a three day weekend?

By the way, yesterday was the 100th anniversary of my grandparents' marriage. They were not artists.

Easter Sunday

Beautiful day. This is the earliest Easter in over 100 years. Our house is a mess, since we are redoing the guest bath. So, no Easter dinner. I just can't handle it. But, like my husband the artist said, "This is what you wanted." I know, I know. Only about two more weeks. Then, full Spring housecleaning.

Ranunculus in the Garden

In the meantime, we have cases of musical instruments all over the house, chairs in the wrong places, guitars in the bedroom. The office is 1/3 blocked with plastic tarp, the gallery is full of contractor's tools, my office/art studio has piles of junk. I know that this, too, will pass, but I feel like the only sane place is sitting on the couch knitting or reading, facing out the front window. It's still a little chilly to sit outside.

A month ago, my husband the artist/luthier/craftman and I went to NYC for vacation and to see friends and then on to Baltimore to participate in The American Craft Show, the annual fine craft show sponsored by the American Craft Council. Such a great show. Wearables, glass, ceramics, metal, wood, fiber. Incredible artists. Wonderful experience, probably our best ever at a show. We try to make that feeling last. I wish we had started doing this years ago. We took a class on blogging at the show, which is the impetus for creating this journal.

I'm working on a fiber art entry for a local show with my fiber art group. Each of us is doing an individual piece and then we'll put them together to show as one. I had such a hard time getting going, but I think I've started now.