Finally, On a Roll! Sort Of.

It's been a hard week to make any progress in the studio.  Now that the weather is warmer, I have the back walk-through door to the garage open, and the front roll up door open about halfway, with a fan blasting cooler outside air into the too-warm garage space.  Alas, having a studio kitty and open doors means having studio bugs, the most annoying of which are the stupid flies.  Insects in a house are fairly rare here, something I've jokingly chalked up to the smog killing them.  Last night there was a June bug zooming around.  I consider June bugs to be flying kitty croutons.  If one sneaks into the house, I can toss a cat in the general direction of said flying crouton shrieking, "Get it!  Get the kitty courton!" and eventually it is consumed.  Shudder.  Alas, that doesn't work with a blind studio cat.

The flies (this is disgusting, so avert your eyes if you have a queesy tummy) must be in the midst of a frantic breeding season.  They light on Tabitha's "squishy food" (the canned nastiness) and start laying eggs like a caboose with a machine gun.  Disgusting!  So I curse, smack at them, and fan the bowl while Tabitha gets her fill.  I feel a bit like a cabana boy, missing only the large palm frond for waving.  My sister suggested one of those fly traps that comes in the form of a plastic bag and bait to which you add warm water and, supposedly, wait for the creepy crawlers to slip in and meet their maker.  Alas, the stupid flies continue zooming in figure eights, mocking me and dive bombing for cat food.  Worse, that stupid bait thing smelled like a freaking cadaver.  UGH!  It's now hanging from my steel easel in the back yard and the stench is finally gone from the studio.  I hesitate to put it in the trash container because our neighbor's bedroom is on the side of her house facing our trash bins.  I think that would go badly for all involved.  We'll wait for trash pick up day on Monday morning.

On to the project!  After several failed attempts at versions of an art project using a photo of my sister-in-law, I settled on something I thought I could pull off in this limited time I have until her party.  I tweaked a photo taken of her at the beach when she was young so that it's posterized, then attempted to print it on gessoed (sp?) canvas for further tweaking with thread and maybe some other embellishments.  If only the person who wrote the manual for the printer 1) spoke English as at least a third or fourth language and 2) had someone try to follow the lame directions and steps to make sure they worked.  They didn't.  They were wrong.  Steps were missing, settings were missing, screen shots in the user's guide were NOTHING like the actual screens that appeared.  After many choice words, a few whacks to the printer and a glass of wine, I finally managed to make progress and have printed the photo.  Of course, the borderless photo has borders on two sides, but where there are scissors, there is a way!  Wine first, scissors tomorrow.  A girl has to have some rules!

Here is step one.