Tag Archives: homemaking

November 25, 2013

Move In Day

Well, we started moving in today. I wouldn’t say it was awful, it could’ve been worse, but it did seem rather daunting- SO MUCH STUFF!

It was so cold today, the high was supposed to be 35 but I don’t think we ever reached it and it was SO windy! When we finished up around 6:15 tonight, the bank sign down the street from our new home was saying it was only 19 degrees. You really find out who your friends are when they’re willing to come out in the cold to help you move!

We got a lot of furniture gently used off craigslist and for free from friends. I’ve only spent about $200 to furnish our house. We got the dining room squared away, as well as the kitchen. We started on the living room but couldn’t do too much, there’s no light in the living room, and it was getting dark and a lot of our furniture for the living room required a bit of assembly.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that the coffee table and end table sets I ordered offline were delivered a few days ago. The shipping notice said they’d be delivered sometime next weekend, which was supposed to be our original move in date, but it was nice to have them early. Next weekend we will begin moving in the bedroom furniture and our personal affects but it’s nice to be able to do it gradually, so I don’t have endless stacks of boxes strewn about the house!

I feel like a huge weight is being lifted off my shoulders, getting my own place and starting my own life. My family life is so stressful, it was definitely my time to move on, and start my own life with my future husband. We’ve still got a lot to do before we’re completely settled in our own house but we’re getting there and I love all the domestic stuff, like cooking and decorating, homemaking, so I’m looking forward to keeping my own house.

I started setting up my studio today too. I’ve got a long way to go before it’ll be ready for me to work in there but I’m looking forward to having an actual work space, not just a pillow on the floor in the living room, and I’m sure my fiance will appreciate the craft-bomb being contained in a separate room as well.

Leave a comment | tags: homemaking, moving, our first christmas, our house | posted in Miscellaneous Musings

Take a Look
Stay in the Know

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Email Address:

Join 424 other subscribers
I May Not Know Art But I Know What I Like

a gift for a friend

spiders. . . eesh. . .

a zombie girl character I drew for a friend

In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, in the “weighing of the heart” scene, the deceased stands on trial before Osiris and the rest of the gods while Thoth (the Ibis-headed god) pleads his case before the court while his heart is weighed against Ma’at’s Feather of Truth. If his heart weighs less than the feather then he was a good man and is allowed to pass into the afterlife. If his heart is heavy w/sin, then it is tossed to the Devourer, a Chimera-like creature and eaten and he’s doomed to an eternity in darkness, unable to pass on. Similarly, the butterflies represent how fleeting beauty is, how everyone’s doomed to wrinkles and grey hair and, following the ancient Greek tradition, a representation of the soul (“eyes are the window to the soul”), or the true person hidden behind the make up/plastic surgery. Long story short, I used the idea of the mirror, Ma’at, and cracks in the facade to represent admitting one’s faults and embracing your little quirks and imperfections while the butterflies represent a person’s true self and how fleeting beauty is.

dry point etching illustration from a hand bound book of poetry

still a work in progress

rough sketch for a commission that didn’t work out

dry point etching diptych

European corseting, which was designed to enhance a woman’s overall figure but the effects were just as physically disabling. The corsets, under the rule of Britain’s Queen Victoria became a way of protecting a woman’s virtue (she was very strict in her code of decency), and along w/the heavy weighted skirts and restrictive sleeves of the victorian era gowns, were quite cumbersome and there are many documented cases of women fainting from cinching the corsets so tight and also causes displacement of the internal organs through the restriction of the rib cage.

“Nirvana” Work in Progress

ritual scarification which occurs in many African Tribes as well as in Papua New Guinea among the Sepik River tribes. The reasons for such body modifications vary. In the New Guinea tribes, the boys (and some men), fast for a period of days in preparation before being cut along their backs, the cuts are then anointed w/special goopy stuff that makes it scar and when the scars heal into keloids, they resemble the backs of a crocodile. However, in order to pass the initiation, they have to lay there silently, w/o crying out, during the whole process, in order to be welcomed into the tribe as men. Alternatively, tribes in Africa cut up their new born babies faces in ritual scarification as a way to safeguard them against blindness and other eye diseases while still others use them to prove the strength of a tribes men to endure pain and the ability of a tribes women to endure childbirth. And still others consider them a mark of beauty, like the lip plates worn by other tribes.

This one’s about neck stretching, which is still practiced among various African tribes as well as the Padaung Kayan tribe of Burma (refugees to Thailand). They start adding coils to a young girls neck when she’s about 4 or 5 and gradually increase it w/age to create the long necked appearance that the older women command. While it seems extreme though, it’s actually an optical illusion. The purpose of it is to obtain a graceful swan-like neck. However, the coils actually act to compress the collar bones and spine, which end up growing at a lower 45 degree angle then an average human but the coils cause no lasting physical effects and can be removed and often are when the Kayan aren’t acting as a tourist attraction or aren’t participating in any tribal traditions.

This is actually a jewelry display board, she clenches my jewelry in her mouth!

Work in Progress

rough sketch of a commission that didn’t work out

tattoo flash work in progess

Chinese foot binding The tradition has it’s roots in the Sung Dynasty, around 1100 AD when women at the emperors court believed to be beautiful they needed tiny feet so they began binding the feet of their children starting around age 2 or 3. The bindings were so tight that they would break the bones in the feet forcing the toes to curl under and thus they would walk on their broken feet. Often, not able to walk very far, they would result in crawling. One of the earliest “Cinderella” stories comes out of 13th century China w/the moral of the story being the prince loved her b/c she had the smallest feet in the kingdom so only the slipper would fit her.

In Egyptian mythology, the scarab was a self-creating god Kephri or “one who comes from the earth”. In mythology, Kephri, the scarab, was responsible for rolling the sun across the sky every day and thus was also seen as a version of Ra, the sun god.

it was believed that you could put people under a spell by burning a candle made from the mummified hand of a theif

I did this as a gift for a friend last year
On the Last Episode. . .
On the Last Episode. . .
Bonefish Designs

Bonefish Designs