Rambling Thoughts

It has been a pretty long time since I have made something to sell. 

Not even sure where to begin again. 

Do I try the market on Ebay, Etsy?

Join an on line market?

Submit something to Prims or another magazine?

Do I contact my old customer base of emails? Yes

It is a daunting market and truly wonder whether it is worth starting all over again.

Plus I still will sometimes have time to do this and other times no time at all. 

Thus can I keep myself in view and in mind of potential buyers?

Do I focus on one medium? No I can't do this as I love variety and none of the mediums I work with are more interesting to me then others. I love making dolls as much as I love rug hooking.  

I have thought about just making things for myself, family and friends.

I do love to make and create art. Love playing with new mediums and growing in the arts. 

I do love to share what I create with others and it also keeps me motivated to create.

Having said all of this I am about finished with two Witches Boots. Hope to assemble them today. I have been writing the pattern for one of these boots. Not sure where I will try to sell these. 

Maybe on my own website or my blog. 

Eggless Eggnog Recipe

Around this time I start missing eggnog in my coffee.

The below recipe helps me to get by until eggnog hits the shelves again in the fall.

1/3 can sweetened condensed milk

Tbl of honey (optional as you can increase the sweetened condensed milk)

1 - 3 oz. package french vanilla instant pudding

milk 5 cups (you might need to play with the amount of milk start with 4 cups and add more as needed)

vanilla

nutmeg

cinnamon

rum flavoring

mix pudding and dry seasonings together 

mix in 2 cup milk and the sweetened condensed milk whisk for 2 minutes

allow to sit for 5 minutes

Mix in 3 cups milk, vanilla and rum flavorings

chill

Bobwhite Quail

Another new bird for us. 

Bobwhite Quail

The male has the white stripe. 

We have only seen two of these. It must be mating season as they usually are in coveys.

Want to learn more. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Bobwhite

Snowing Butterflies

There is no other way to describe the millions of butterflies that have been present in Texas for over 2 weeks. I have never seen this many butterflies in one place at one time. I could not capture them but all the specs you see in this photo are butterflies. Every where we looked were millions of butterflies. Very impressive.

Below are two close up photos of the yellow butterflies.

 

Witches Boots & Gate Keeping

Finished the punching part of my latest Witches Boot design. I like the 3 strand Valdani but I will try the size 12 perle or pearl cotton as I think I may like it better. The 3 strand was a little hard to work with for me. I contacted Valdani to ask them how the perle cotton size 12 compared to a 6 strand floss. Here is their answer. "In terms of thickness, one strand of perle 12 is comparable to 6 strands of floss." 

Now it is time to assemble this newest Witches Boot design and the Skeleton Witches boot design. Then on to writing up the directions for the pattern. Maybe I can get the first patterns out sooner then I was thinking.  It really depends on how busy the gates are in the future. The gate that we are working at right now it not a really busy one as they are winding down. Should be out of here next week some time then on to another gate. We had one day off between the Paloma gate and the Pioneer gate. Were able to get our laundry washed that day.  Our first gate job was very busy as we were opening the gate up to 240 times over a 24 hour period. David took the night shift and I did the day shift. Here we have our evenings and nights to ourselves. A much needed thing as we were both exhausted. So it is good to know that it isn't always really busy. 

Here is a little guy that comes by everyday. 

Good Bye for Now My Friend

Over the last few months my precious Cat has been slowly declining in health. This weekend I had to say good bye for know. I found a verse in scripture that helped me have hope that one day I will be able to hold my fur babies who have left this life for the next. Interesting that this verse was in my normal reading last week. God is a very present help in trouble.

Ecclesiastes 3:

“As for humans, God tests them so that they may see that they are like the animals. ¹⁹ Surely the fate of human beings is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath^[c]; humans have no advantage over animals. Everything is meaningless. ²⁰ All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return. ²¹ Who knows if the human spirit rises upward and if the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth?” 

My spirit and creative energies have been having a hard time functioning due to this happening over the last few months. I see a pillow of my buddy in the future. I already created my Cat Purse with Toby as the feature. Or maybe I will try my hand at a sculptured cat. Hmmmmmm 

Good bye for know my friend and companion. Have a great time playing with Teak, Shadow, Puddles, Jewel, Jasmine, Jeremiah and Taffy. 

These fur babies give us such joy that I know that there are more animals that we will adopt to share our lives. As hard as it is to say goodbye I want to experience sharing my life with more fur babies. It may be kind of hard on animals sharing our traveling gypsy life style but I know that many would be happy to have a human love them. 

Dancing Skeleton Needlepunch

Decided I will try to do a little needle punching today between gate openings. This should be interesting as I opened the gate probably close to 150 times yesterday during my 12 hour shift. Was a very busy day. But I really want to do some art work too. This is a new witch boot design that I have had drawn up for a while. It is a skeleton dancing. A cute design.

This summer I hope to create several witches boot patterns.

Also want to make my Jack O Lantern's into a pattern with all four styles. 

 

We hope to take the summer off from working.

So I should be able to create some of my creations into pattern form.

A Weeks Worth

We now have one week of our new gate keeper job under our belt. It has been a week of getting used to this 24 hour a day job. David has had the hardest time as he has the night shift. The ringer that is supposed to go off when a vehicle approaches the gate was not working all the time. This made it hard because we had to watch the road all the time. Jamie came and fixed the bell yesterday. Yippy!!!!! 

This is very interesting learning about the process of fracing and watching all this equipment come in.  Yesterday I got bit a several times and noticed that there is a fire ant hill just outside the gate in the grass. Fire ants are something new to us. Now that I know it is there I can avoid it. 

The catering company has come in the last few days and brought us food too. Today a smoker came through the gate the guys get barbecue for lunch. That means we do too or I hope so. He said he would try to bring us some out. I do not eat meat very often but sometimes I will eat barbecue.

Another Adventure

Here I am already working my first day on the new gate keeper job. We got here last Wednesday.

We are about 80 miles or so from Corpus Christi Texas. 

This is day five and we both got a pretty good nights sleep. Adjusting to the 24/7 hours has been challenging. But we are working it out. We have been really busy here. Logging in and out about 96 vehicles on some days. Some really large trucks and lots of equipment. There is already an oil well on this location but this last week they have been working hard to get a new well up and running. 

Every job over the last year has helped us get closer to our goal of getting a new fifth wheel trailer. It is way past time to get a larger fifth wheel. We know what we want in a fifth wheel now. When we first began this life style we were not even sure we would like it. For the most part we do like this way of life. We have been able to see a lot of the Western United States over the last seven years. The hardest part for us is being away from family. Especially our children and my parents who are not getting any younger. We hope to spend our 2012 summer on our property in Colorado and get some much needed family time in. 

Once we get settled into this new job I can begin to do some artwork again. Or that is my hopes and plans.

Until next time. 

Happenings

We are now in Texas after traveling over 1000 miles to get to the gate keepers lot. We hope to be at work by next week as gate keepers. It was good to have a month off but it is time to get back to work. 

It is totally overcast here and it only got to 66 last night. We are not used to those kind of temps at night. 

Plus it is humid also something we are not used to.

 Our cat had not been feeling very well and doesn't like to travel so this was really hard on him. I felt that he was maybe suffering from digestive issues from the antibiotics given to him.  Also UT issues as he has had this off and on his whole life. After researching I found Slippery Elm Bark and how to use it for cats. After being on this for a short time he seems to be better. Getting him to eat what he normally does is challenging. He is being really really finicky about his diet. Can't seem to tolerate the normal raw diet I was feeding him. We both feel that he also may have a sore mouth. So hope to get his teeth cleaned and checked.