TGIT Thank God It's Tuesday!

I'm so glad it's Tuesday again which is the first day of my 'weekend'. Above is a picture of my three projects for this week. I'm still enjoying experimenting with textile art and fabric painting. I dyed and stenciled the piece above and I never like to waste fabric even experiments, so my challenge is to turn my sample into a finished item.

My second project for this week is to finish one of the dolls I started months ago. She's the blond with the big smile. Her name is Samantha and she was inspired by the character in 'Sex in the City'. My doll faces have become so much better over the last few months and she looks a little more comical to me now but I'm going to finish her anyway. I started the other three characters too, so I plan to finish them also.

My third project is my "little old grey haired lady". I've been wanting to do a "little old lady" for a long time. I'm inspired by another doll artist in one of my doll groups who did some 'grammy' dolls. Usually, my dolls don't tell me what their names are until I paint their faces. Yesterday my "little old lady" fell off my work table and when I bent over to pick her up she was very annoyed with me for letting her fall and she told me her name was Mildred. I can't wait to see what Mildred will look like by the end of the week.

I didn't get my first male doll Keannu finished by my deadline yesterday. I had some technical difficulties when I was making pants for him. I realized that when I made the pattern for his body I didn't give him enough 'bum' so his pants cave in in the back. I know this sounds strange but I just can't live with 'bumless' boy doll he just looks odd. Anyway, after I finish this post, I will give Keannu a 'bum' implant to help his pants fit better. They actually had to do that for Ralph Macchio on Dancing With The Stars last week because he didn't have enough bum of his own to do the Samba =)

Work has been so-o-o-o slo-o-o-ow this week. I work at the The Market Place in Rancho Cordova, California on the weekends. We have a great art gallery with paintings and sculptures by local Sacramento artists and we also have antiques and collectibles, custom jewelry and a book section with books by local authors. We have fountains and indoor waterfalls, so we have the relaxing sound of water all around us. It is such a creative and inspirational place to work but the economy here has still not recovered from the recession and our artists, authors and business owners are struggling.

I'm an artist and crafts person but I'm also a business manager and the term "starving artist" is very "romantic" but it doesn't pay the rent. I have friends in the art community who like myself, got ambushed when the job market dropped and had to go on unemployment. Finding a job was next to impossible especially here, we had the highest rate of unemployment in the country, so a lot of us turned to our creative backgrounds to supplement unemployment and part time incomes. Thank God for the spirit of creative people. We've added beauty to the world making it less cold while managing to survive.

For some, the recession became a blessing in disguise because out of necessity, we found out how to become independent of the corporate world, how to live with less and be happy, how to value our ingenuity and how to use our own time for our own business success. I think this discovery has changed a large segment of our population and our economy forever.