Ol' Chuck Is Turning Over In His Grave!!

That would be "All Star" Chuck Taylor, you know the guy who's name is synonymous with Converse High Top Tennis Shoes. Oh yeah I have had a secret love affair with those hi-top bad boys since I was a kid.

Now mind you back then there were not a bazillion choices of super hi tech "athletic shoes" Oh no there was just tennis shoes. The guys wore converse hi-tops and us girls wore "keds". Yeaaah keds, those cute little white canvas tennies, so feminine and lady like... But definitely not cool!

So it was back in those early teen (everything embarrasses me) days when it was important to fit in that I became a closet hi-top chick. :) Course there was those glorious teen rebellious years when Mary Shaddle and I wore our enormously wide "bell bottom" jeans. You know (...well some of you know) when we split the outside seam  to the knee and pieced in some truly obnoxious print fabric to widen our jeans.

But with those "it can never be tooooo wide jeans we wore our, here to fore "worn only at home" converse hi-tops! Oh what heady rebellious freedom we lived those days! :) But all to soon came the responsible days of college, nursing school, working nurse, wife, mother and the responsible shoes that went along with those roles.

Ha but by the time I had little acorns to dress, Converse made little people hi-tops. And my 3 kids loved them. Could be cuz when they were taken to the store to buy their "fall-winter" shoes they were always steered over to the hi-tops and told they could have any color they wanted. ;) Then came the glorious couple of years when my "the acorn doesn't fall far from the tree" daughter decided she was going to wear 2 different colors of hi-tops at the same time. Oh be still my heart!! Can you imagine?? one of the other girls mom's asked me how I managed not to die of embarrassment when my daughter went to school dressed that way??? "Heck I only wish those colors came in Mom size!!" I replied. "That poor child, what an odd duck her mother is. No wonder she's the way she is" Like I said, "the acorn doesn't..."

Fast forward to 2011 Mazatlan, Mexico, I while drifting along in a cyber-stupor stumbled onto the Converse website. Oh my what fun I must have been there hours first gawking and then creating. Did you know that you can now customize your hi-tops?? It's true!! And not only that you can design them from the color of the shoe laces to the inner lining! Weeell when I found the Dr. Seuss fabrics I was sucked in hook line and sinker. I would love to show you the adorable hi-tops I created but alas the site won't let you copy and paste but I can give you a link to the Dr. Seuss fabric ones, and you can create your own. http://www.converse.com/#/products/shoes/converseone/builder/chuTayHiCanDrSeu1103,,,,

I'm telling you those bad boys are going to be waiting for me when we get to the northlands in June! But, but... I'm an instant-gratification kinda girl. I want adorable hi-tops NOW!!! What is a girl to do, I ask you??? Well the answer is to go to the "sport shoe" store and buy a pair of Converse hi-tops. So off LW&I went, and I bought a pair of navy blue Chuck Taylor hi-tops. The perfect definition of Boring! But home we came and out came the fabric,the Super Seventy Seven adhesive spray,hole punch,glue,pins,tissue paper&pencil. And when the dust settled a few hours later these appeared out of the mist.

I traced patterns from the sides of the shoes onto tissue paper. Cut out the pieces of fabric, then sprayed the fabric pieces with spray adhesive. I didn't spray the shoes because I have never found a way to control the spray. So everything within a ten foot radius is always cover with stickup, including me!! Then I carefully lined up the fabric piece to the shoe and stuck them together. slowly, using my bone tool to burnish, and smooth out any trapped air as I went.

For the  heel strip and tongues I used a different print in the same color family.

I decided I'd leave the edges unfinished. Just a bit frayed around the edges sorta like their creator ;) To prevent them from continuing to fray I spread a thin line of "Stop Fraying" from Aleene's on all the edges. It also added another layer of stickup on the edges to help keep the fabric from lifting.

Notice the tongues? They are the same fabric but different stripes.

I used my multipurpose hole punch to punch the lacing holes into the new fabric,then dabbed a bit of stop fraying on them. For the final touch I glued a little piece of red flower trim across the toes, where the toe pad meets the fabric tongue.

There you have them. Admittedly they aren't "One Fish 2 Fish", the "Whos" or "The cat In The Hat" but pretty darn spiffy and a might "Springy" if I say so myself. I can't help but think that when Ol' Chuck quit spinning in his grave he was kicking himself for not thinking of them first! And I'm almost sure somewhere in the world Mary Shaddle is turning ten shades of green!! :)

Have a most audacious art filled day my Bloglandian playmates, no matter where in the world you are   p;)

A Little Bit of a Smile In a World of Hurting

Between the pain that the powers of nature and the assumed powers of Man have inflicked on the last 2 weeks there has been very little to smile about. I thought I might post a few photos of the joy this year's Carneval brought to Mazatlan.

A few pictures LW took of the night parade. All the floats are made by hand. The teams start planning and building the next year's floats 3 days after Ash Wednesday!! All the costumes are hand made and by the time of the parade there is not a sparkly, lame,felt,feather,rhinestone,sequin to be found any where in the city!! :)

These are of the daytime parade that closes Carneval for 2011. This fellow leads the parade he launches aerial fireworks every 10 meters or so.

What's a parade without a queen or two or maybe... the more the merrier??:)

They start them young here. 

A Carneval Queen is forever!

Dancing Jelly Fish and their puppets.

How about a marching band as a show closer?

I have a couple of finished projects to show off when next we meet. This has been a busy week for LW&I. We go all year with hardly a visitor. Now in one week there are 3 sets of friends all here at the same time! Oh but I'm not complaining! One of our visitors was Deryn (Something Sublime) and her family!!! YEA!!!! They come down with her parents once a year which means we have lunch and visit about art,blogs,mom things,well you know all the stuff you save up to share with an art sister! 

Talk to you soon, until then: Have a most audacious art filled day no matter where in the world you are.  p;) 

11th Hour Vision=Bird&Nest

I bet not a week goes by that half a dozen people ask us what we do all day. Holy Moly I'm wondering just what do they think retirement (from outside work) really is! For heaven sakes the only thing we retired from was our careers not our lives. Heck we manage to keep busy all day long so much so that LW said the other day, he wondered how he could ever find the time to work at his "job" if he still had to! :) We moved down with out a TV thinking we would buy a new one when we got here. That was 5 years ago and we still don't have one. We never have time to watch it if we did. Jeez even to get a whole uninterrupted day working in my Little Art Corner takes a shoe horn. But "What do you do all day??" Any more my answer is "What ever I want"! So much easier then trying to explain that I don't know, but what ever it is, sure takes up a lot of my day! :)

And what you may be asking does my so called "busy" days have to do with the necklace in the picture??? Well let me tell you. Okay? last fall my friend Ann bought a pair of tiny nest earrings I made. They looked a little like these and had an amber stone between the nests and fishhooks.

Right after the first of the year she asked me to make a nest necklace to go with the earrings. "No rush take your time" So the Feb. Art Walk went by and I didn't have the necklace done. Heck I hadn't even started. I couldn't even come up with a divine vision for it. Then before I knew it Feb. rushed by in a whirlwind of "busy". Still no progress and I had promised her I'd have it for the March Art Walk. It's a good thing the Walk got push back a week because of Carneval or I still wouldn't have had it done in time. But thankfully my 11th hour vision came through!! I paired the amber with pretty blue-green Turquoise nuggets.

Added some of my magic verdigris patina to a bird and leaf charm. Then attached to 2 sides to the nest.

I attached a branch of ivy to the bird charm. I made it with polymer clay. Jackie P has 1(very lonely) sterling silver earring that the branch comes from. I made a mold of it and then made the polymer one from the mold. Because it's thin and long (a good 3") I ran a flatten 18gage wire through it for stabilization. Then formed a ring on each end to attach with. I added some stamp pad dye and acrylic paint for a vintage ivory/bone look, and buffed the heck out of it. Now if you look closely you can see what it is that makes this "earring" piece so cool. See the gecko?? In Chinese homes you will find a luck cricket. Here we all have lucky geckos! They control the mosquito and fly populations. We have a little group who live on the walls of our sun room and others that live on the first floor. Because there are many places where we are open to the outside these cute little critters come and go as they please. I just couldn't pass up a chance to play around with it Jackie's orphan earring. Can ya blame me?? I painted just a tad bit of very light green acrylic paint on the little guy, so you could see him.

I sure don't know what I'm not doing right, but no matter how close up my picture is when blogger gets a hold of it the zoom view is no more!??

I finished up with one of those new fangled snap clasps. seems to be holding so far. I told Ann to test-drive it for a bit. If it wasn't going to work I'd make a hook clasp for it.

I have to tell you I think this time the 11th hour vision turned out great. But the litmus test of course was whether Ann like it. YEA! she was really pleased with it. She kinda did one of those happy little girl squeals and exclaimed it was perfect, exactly what she hoped it would look like. She even had to put it on right there and wear it for the rest of the Art Walk. Kinda made me all warm and smiles (you guys know that feeling) cuz she had to show everyone the necklace I had made to go with her earrings. Some things just like the commercial says are priceless. It was the best medicine I could imagine for my little soul!!

Add that is "what I do all day" ;) Have a most audacious art filled day, no matter where in the world you are  p;)

"Return of the Muse"

Let the Party Begin as LW would say. Yep today was opening day for the 2011 Mazatlan Carneval. The theme this year is "The Return of the Muse". There will be a humongous fireworks show along the city beach &sea wall, Sat. night. Sunday night is the huge much anticipated night time parade. Floats that have been a year in the making, all the schools from primary to university along with the branches of the military have bands, the queen,king, & princess, state&federal dignitaries not to mention international representatives. On Tuesday afternoon the parade will be repeated going in the opposite direction to close the year's celebration. If you are wondering why the parade doesn't happen until Sunday it's because  one it's tradition and for many of the participants (especially in past generations) Sunday is their only day off. Mexico still has a 6 day a week work week for many of it's workers. Therefore it's not until after 6pm that the historical part of town is closed off with street music, parties, food and libations (emphasis on the loud music and libations) :) Along olas Altas there are live bands setup nose to bum to each other. All vying to be heard above the others, and all playing different types of music. It's unbelievable!!! :) Olas Altas is a good 3-4 miles from us and we can clearly hear the calliope!!!

Here is a video from the cultural department for this year. It's in Spanish but you get the idea. The B&W photos are from some of the very early years.

I'm going to have to see if I can get some better pictures of the "eggs" statues along the sea wall. The ones I took the other day are hard to see. What with the sun, sand and reflective water this is not an easy task!!! We are planning on hibernating for the duration  We will walk down to see the night parade and the firework show. But the night time partying we will leave for other fool hearty souls. :)

Hugs to all, stay happy,healthy,artful and safe no matter where in the world you are.   p;)