A Squiggle of Hedge Apples

Every fall the hedge apples visit like some kind of vibrant, squiggly, smelly aliens, and I'm always so overjoyed by their presence.  I feel such kinship with these sticky balls of fluorescence.

If hedge apples had a group name, it would be a squiggle.  Storm drains are the perfect place to find a squiggle of hedge apples.  Grass, fall leaves, and other foliage can easily hide hedge apples, but storm drains are a perfect backdrop for them.  

Last fall I could no longer resist the temptation of the chartreuse calling to me from one of our many storm drains where I live.  So I sat with them.

I took a lot of pictures.  I looked at all the shadows of each picture and noticed that there was a world of colors living just inside the shadows, and that the shadows were everywhere.  

It took me a while to figure out a hedge apple method that clicked with me.  I initially laid out the tiny pieces with no color underneath, and it just didn't work, so I added a layer of paper underneath the tiny pieces.  I divided up the hedge apple colors into three categories of light, medium, and dark, and those shadows stayed consistent throughout the four pieces.  The background leaf litter shadows changed with each collage.  As for the leaf litter colors, I went effing wild with them.  Every tree that ever existed lives above that storm drain (at least in my imagination).  I've never had so many different paper tubs out all out at once!

I settled on four different collages and spent a lot of time precutting the hedge apple slivers.  Each time I worked with the hedge apples I started the journey by cutting more slivers.  By the fourth piece I was so over it!  Naturally, the fourth one is my favorite, mostly because I saved the cranberry shadows for the last one.  If it weren't for the excitement of cranberry shadows, I would have heaved the last one in the timeout pile with exceptional force.

About a week after finishing all the hedge apples, I found myself looking at a 24X24" blank wooden canvas I had on hand, and I could already see the giant hedge apples taking shape in the wood grain.  So who knows.  This may not be the last of the hedge apples.

Everything but the kitchen sink, but we'll personalize that too if you need it

In all the chaos of ordinary life things, I haven't mentioned how much fun Robert and I had at the Artfest art fair in Springfield, MO.  I had a lot of wonderful conversations, was inspired on so many levels (art, poetry, people watching, booth setup, overhearing conversations etc.), and sold a few things.  

Robert filling up the water weights in a gas station bathroom (he has a funny story about this):

Last minute hardware additions in the hotel parking lot 😆: 

I especially loved the conversations with people who said my art reminded them of their ancestors' and/or family's artwork.  I remembered two of these techniques, Kumihimo and Huichol beading, both of which I looked up later and was totally gobsmacked by.  There are so many beautiful techniques and art forms out there.  I will never know them all!

Robert and I also walked away with a few things to work on.  The biggest thing that needs to change is naturally the smallest thing.  I printed all my artwork tags on business card paper, and after putting them up, they all promptly fell to the ground overnight and also every time we had a breeze.  I also had two tags for almost every piece of art, because I decided to include QR codes to the item's blog post where I talk about the process and/or share progress pics.

My plan is to make laminate tags this time on the laser engraver at work and figure out a way to squeeze in the QR code so everything is on one tag.  That way when someone buys a piece of artwork they have something more durable if they want to look up the QR code later and not some tag that got super soggy from falling to the ground despite multiple hooks and gorilla tape.  I am still trying to figure out how to secure the tags to the walls.  I'm concerned the laminate tags will still keep falling if there is any wind.  I may need to tie them up with something durable instead of hooks.

It's nice to have a takeaway that's manageable.  I have another art fair coming up the weekend of June 7-8th in Topeka, KS.  The only thing that's changing for this fair are the tags.  Everything else we want to do will wait until fall if I'm accepted to the fairs I've applied for.  When I applied for the Topeka art fair, I knew I wanted to reach out to a writer friend of mine who lives there.  During the pandemic my monthly poetry group started meeting virtually.  Even once it was safe to meet in person again, we stayed virtual because one of the members of the group moved and we also gained two out-of-town writers who were friends of other writers in the group.  One of these writers that I've been meeting with virtually for the last few years lives in Topeka.  It's only an hour away, but we never get around to going there.  After the art fair, Robert and I are going to officially meet her in person and check out her garden, which is legendary.  It's going to be a wonderful weekend!

Last month I decided to do something brave and apply as an artist for a show/project that I've been a part of as a writer in the past.  This show is in Columbia, MO at the Columbia Art League gallery and is near and dear to my heart.  They pair up 35 writers with 35 artists and they spend a couple months interpreting each other's work.  I have been accepted three times as a writer.  This year I decided to apply as an artist for the first time, and one of my pieces was accepted.  I received the poem that I'm interpreting, and I couldn't be more pleased.  The piece I submitted for interpretation is an embroidery piece with flowers and a tangle of wild grass.  The poem I'm interpreting is about prairie grasses.  Seriously!  When I haven't been working on finishing up a couple collages for the June art fair, I've been making these absurd prairie grass drawings with lopsided birds.  I finally have three pieces of fabric and a few beads picked out.  It's going to be a wild journey.  

Work is still a lot, but I can now do so much more such as build trophies, plaques, and other things without assistance.  Customers and their stories are my favorite part of my job, but I also love the accounting side of things and pretty much anything to do with production.  I have no issues with stopping everything and building 70 trophies for a rush job while I listen to an audiobook.  Love it.

I love not knowing what someone is going to walk in and hand me - an old blue croquet ball, a horseshoe from a Clydesdale, a rubber chicken wing, a broken pig figurine from a trophy, a Precious Moments bible (haven't seen one of these since I was a kid), buck antlers, a dagger, bowling pins, an ancient matchbook so worn you can almost see through it.  We recently had someone ask to personalize the tiniest of lapel pins.  We have a scratch engraver but no jig to hold something like that, and nobody wants to lose a hand holding it, so that was out.  We had some time to think, so we did.  Finally, it came to me that we could stick it in a piece of styrofoam so it lays flat so we can UV print on it (UV printers can only do flat items).    

We are almost done with all the building updates, but it's been busy and kinda wild some days with our everyday workload in addition to end-of-the-school-year orders.  Also, we had just priced everything in the showroom, and now price changes are slowly trickling in thanks to the tariffs.  Thankfully, we chose to use price range stickers, so there are some items that are still in the right range even with the tariffs.

We also had our first official UV printer job with a handful of others starting to trickle in.  Our biggest task for the UV printer is making jigs for future orders, which are these pieces we custom cut on our laser engraver that will hold multiples of the same item such as medals.  Our first official sand carving job is due in less than two weeks, which is very exciting.  Once we get going on the sand carver I am going to be going to a lot of liquor stores to let them know we are officially in the bottle engraving business!

I am eager to share all of our before/after pictures around the shop, but we aren't quite finished.  Robert and I are hoping to put together more shelves this weekend, perhaps even the rest of them, and then we can officially organize products again, which will be a thing of beauty and so nice to have everything in its place.

For right now, Margo is the most beautiful thing at work (she has no trouble convincing others of this).  She has a few fans now who come in just for some golden therapy.  Occasionally I'll be with a customer and there will be a squeal of delight.  Next thing I know, Margo is at their side.  She's a pretty smart cookie.  She doesn't come out for every customer interaction, but if she does, she'll sit right at the entryway to the back, smiling and wiggling her whole self.  If there's a squeal of delight or someone calls for her she will go to them.  If not, she's been doing a good job staying right at the entryway.  Occasionally, she comes and sits in the entryway without me noticing.  I'm always so tickled when I hear that squeal of delight before I even register Margo is there.

Proboscis Monkey

Enjoy this proboscis monkey made entirely out of tea papers and cup sleeves.  

Most of the papers that went into this collage:

Truly my favorite monkey.  Seeing and hearing one in real life is on my bucket list.  He was a real stinker in my first couple drawings of him.  He turned out to be a real sweetheart thanks to some minor changes to the eyes and eyebrows as he evolved.  Don't be fooled though.  Underneath that sweet face are a couple of faces that show a different side to him.

rainbows

I loved working with the orange felt so much, I jumped right into another felt piece.  Every so often I need to grow some variation of a rainbow.  Rainbows feed my soul.  I occasionally like to create some off-the-wall rules just to see what color gets a little carried away.  It's an effective way of surprising myself, but occasionally I have to fiddle with the first draft so to speak in order to soothe any moments of imbalance.

It's for sale on Etsy.

staring at the sun

I am a little behind sharing my latest pieces, so my next few posts will be all about my artsy fartsy stuff. 

I knew I was going to use an ungodly amount of  baubles for this piece, so I used a ridiculously thick and soft piece of felt.  Any time I hit a snag, I pretty much had to say the hell with it, and move on.  There were no backsies due to every single stitch being gobbled up by the felt.

This piece has already sold, but I took some pretty snazzy shots for prints, so it will live on in different ways.

My niece, Autumn picked out a jar of buttons for me during one of their family trips, and a few are in this piece.  

This is for all you I Spy fans.  Autumn's buttons are the fuzzy red one (something I would have never looked twice at but am now obsessed with finding more), an orange umbrella, and a red star.  Can you find all three?

 

Blooms & Bulbs

I cannot keep up with life at the moment.  There's a lot of chaos - the good, the murky, the unknown.  A lot of creating what I think is a rhythm, but within days I'm scrambling to once again to try out another rhythm.  It feels a lot like it did way back when I was clawing my way through my undergrad degree while cobbling together enough money to pay for it with half a dozen jobs.  This time around I'm a little more set in my ways or at least the idea of having a set of ways.  

My spring classes are almost over, and I will have a small break for a couple weeks before my summer class.  Library work is still very much an intrinsic part of my being.  I get through entire days now where I don't mourn the loss of my job as a youth information specialist.  I'm honestly just too busy.  I have two semesters left of my degree, and it will be both a relief and another loss, even as I gain something that could be used as a bridge to that part of myself if I choose to use it later.

I still feel like I'm floundering at work some days as a business owner.  The gal I work with, J, started humming the muffin man one day, and I had to chuckle at the hilarity of it.  The two worlds of the library and a personalization business briefly collided.  Not that I ever sang the muffin man during my storytimes!  I so enjoy working with J and the work we do.  I thought Robert was one of the best teachers with the most patience, but J almost has him beat.  I only recently discovered that instead of winging it and trimming later (which still works best sometimes) when I cut metal for plaques, I can measure first and may not need to trim later.  Imagine working with someone who is so slow to these realizations!  But J is patient with me as I learn the work.  Robert is patient with me as I learn the accounting.  And we have all learned the new laser and sand carving machines together.  Next week we learn how to use a UV printer.  The building updates are almost complete too.  My hope is that by the end of the summer I know a little bit more, and we are dividing up the production tasks more equally.  I think this will go a long way with feeling like I am contributing and less like I'm gobbling up so much time learning everything.  

I was accepted for two upcoming art fairs, which has taken up a surprising amount of time and space in our house as we prepare.  These will be my first solo fairs.  I not only have a few new pieces, but also prints!  The first art fair will be in Springfield, MO, which is a very special place for me.  The second will be in Topeka, KS, which is closer to home.  I'm excited to learn more and soak up all the art energy.  

My experiences with family recently have been in the toilet, so I won't dwell too much on that.  I also have not written anything other than papers for months now.  Writing has always been a challenge for me, and recently it's been hard as heck.  I sit down to write, and I usually just cry it all out.  I think the only other time my brain has been so taxed was when I fought my way through math in college.  And I can't think of another time when my brain, when not focused on all the learning at work, has been so preoccupied with what feels like a losing battle with my longtime pal, the serenity prayer. 

I think my current plan is to ride the waves of chaos until mid-summer or so, which is when it sounds like I may have some time to take a step back and take a deeper look at things.  It's so important to me to take time to reflect on all the special moments in life, and I recognize I've struggled to do that for several months now.  Hopefully, I can get into a rhythm mid-summer or so.  For now, it's enough to embrace everything that's blooming at the moment and let go of staring at the dirt where I know dozens of bulbs have been planted over the years.   

squishy life update

My plan was to attempt weekly posts until the chaos settled, but that is currently too lofty a goal.

Owning a business is a lot of work!  Especially since I am learning everything.  Whenever I am feeling overwhelmed Robert keeps telling me I'm doing a good job for somebody who is trying to jump on a moving treadmill that's also on a moving train.  This is about the best analogy for my situation.  We went to the APA (Awards and Personalization Association) Conference the first week of February, which was SO overwhelming in so many ways.  But we walked away purchasing some much-needed equipment - a sand carving machine, UV Printer, and a new Laser.  Whew!  I have been learning about our current laser, which will continue to be primarily used by J, who is our graphic designer and engraver extraordinaire.  However, I plan to learn everything there is to know about sand carving and uv printing, so I will be involved in a lot of training.  We are also making some exciting updates to the shop itself - updating some areas, adding storage, and modernizing our showroom.  All this and I'm still learning the business itself and accounting.

My personal life has been chaotic as well.  Robert and I moved my dad up to the city and have been working on getting him into a permanent place.  Holy paperwork, prescriptions, and phone calls!  Taking an active role in his care and needs has been challenging.  He's very stubborn, has a lot of issues especially with mobility, and finding that sweet spot of autonomy he deserves but without falls or other scary happenings has been difficult.  I'll keep you all posted on the journey.  

One of Robert's sisters and her fiancé just moved to the city too, so suddenly we are flush with family.  

One of the two classes I'm taking this semester has been confusing and overwhelming, but I am enjoying my other class, which is Librarianship in Prisons.  Completing my degree is important to me, but it also feels very weird.  I will finally have the degree at the end of this year but may never have the word librarian in my job title.  While working on my business cards with J, we were puzzling over what my cards should say.  I really feel like an elf in Santa's workshop but I also spend a lot of time on the backend of things like accounting.  It's the first time in my life I've had to come up with my own job titles.   

At the end of January my brother Scott and his wife welcomed a new member to their family, Grant, so I have another nephew!  I couldn't lead with the most exciting thing though, could I?

I bet y'all want some pictures from the past month, so here we go!

Our winter has been particularly hellish.  I was a member of various tennis clubs for fifteen years.  In 2019, when I had my yearlong battle to mend some herniated discs I ended my membership, and I haven't been back.  January 2025 is the first year since 2020 where I missed an entire month of tennis due to shitty weather.  An entire month!  Thankfully, the first couple days of February were beautiful.  I told Robert the two most beautiful words were empty and dry.  It took three parks that day to find a court that was both empty and dry, and it was glorious. 

Just after landing in Las Vegas for the APA conference, all the lights went out at the airport and someone had to manually open the train to let us on.  However, the airport did have generators for the most important things.  Can you see the slot machines glowing in the dark?

Currently we have a Trotec laser at my shop, and it's been amazing, so that is what we purchased for our next laser.  You can make a lot of things in the laser, including these cool patches for your shoes, which is what their salespeople were wearing.  I also really liked this wall of trotec art.  

Margo and her boat.  Having my dogs with me pretty much all the time has been one of the biggest blessings in the past six months.  They bring me so much comfort, and we have so many fun adventures together.

Josie and her bed, which she lets us use sometimes.

Some mega exciting pictures of a small part of our backroom.  The first picture is the before picture.  We finished out some unfinished walls and added storage.  Everything from the ceiling to the floor is 40 years of adjusting the space to make it work over the years.  

We have unearthed some very weird things:

* Florescent lights connected to power strips in the ceiling.

* Drywall tape used as trim.  Fancy!

* 23 trashcans, 6 filing cabinets, at least 20 space heaters/air purifiers, and 11 office chairs were unearthed

* Cords that go to absolutely nowhere hanging all over the place.

* A door and some two by fours were used to make a desk (not a bad contraption so we still have this).

* The heating doesn't cover one third of the showroom or part of the eye doctor's office next door (thus so many space heaters).

* The refrigerator and microwave both plug into a power strip that leads to one of the restrooms (so many powerstrips).  The fire inspection lady (Margo's new bosom friend) has told us this is called daisy chaining.  If you ever see a pamphlet for fire safety where they show you pictures of what not to do, I'm pretty sure many of the pictures come from us.  You're welcome!

* The back doors don't seal and the cutest snowdrifts have been living just on the inside of the doors all winter.  Hell, it can't be a fire hazard with our cute little snowdrift buddies, right?

* False walls, cork boards, whiteboard, and pegboards that looked completely innocent on the front, but with backs absolutely chock full of spiders and nests so thick, they were beginning to build skyscrapers, urban green spaces, and their own transit systems.    

We are so thrilled to get some walls!

All of our items that are ready for pickup are now in one spot with some custom shelves.  Look how the bottom allows space for taller items!  

I keep finding really old stuff.  We were holding on to items customers didn't pick up in the 90s.  No joke!  This has been the oldest find so far - an unopened burn cream tube from a first aid kit with an expiration date of 1987.  Robert joked that at least burns aren't something we need to worry about.

Margo really needs you to know she's the most important part of this post, so the post is ending with her.

comfort in the midst of screaming saws

This past week in pictures:

I'm going to call the person I work with "J" just to make things easier.  J and I have been trying to figure out how to categorize, describe, and list products and customers in Quickbooks.  It's a surprising amount of brain work.  

Margo has it much tougher though.  She's still trying to figure out which bed she wants to have at work.  

Margo is definitely a distraction, but whatever stress I feel just falls away anytime I look at her.

Both Margo and Josie are much more content now that they go their separate ways to do their important jobs every day.  They come home very tired and barely have time to do their important home jobs of providing comfort to their stuffies before falling asleep.  

While talking to my dad the other night I told him I felt like my life had come full circle.  First, I took things apart in his junkyards, and now I'm putting things together.  I've been learning the fine art of trophy construction, which is really just keeping your effing hands away from the saw and screwing shiny things together.  

When a customer came in and asked how to remove a placard from something, I said (very authoritatively) you need a pancake screwdriver.  He nearly fell over laughing when I brought out a cake spatula (which is its real name).  As you can tell I don't spend a lot of time making cakes either.

I really have no idea what things are called or what I'm doing, but oh the mirth this brings.  It helps that I work with someone who is incredibly capable in this business and who also has a lot of patience.

The first time I saw the backrooms of the shop and the 50 old coffee cans with all the doodads (bolts? Lugnuts? Hoopty Hoos? Screws?) and the various screwdrivers and tools I had a small chuckle, because it felt like I was back in the junkyard.  

It's been snowy and chilly here, so eating cold salads almost makes me cry right now.  Not sure who else out there likes to roast vegetables, but I've been eating a lot of roasted tomatoes.  They are the best thing to eat on a cold night and you don't need a cake spatula to make them.

just a brief life update

This post has been a long time coming, but I kept putting it off because I didn't know how to write it and I also kept thinking a little bit of balance and routine were just around the corner.

I no longer work at the library.  I am proud to say that the library job I had for the last fourteen years was everything to me, and it no longer shames me to tell you that when I realized I could no longer keep it, it completely consumed and devastated me.  For a while, I struggled with both the loss of this job and feelings of shame for it being such a huge life crisis.  I spent a lot of time working through that, and I'm ok with how much the loss affected me.  I loved my job, patrons, and coworkers and thought I would retire there.  I wanted to work in a public library since the summer before sixth grade, and I carried that dream for a long time before it became true.  It was a dream I fought hard for, and the job was even better than the one I dreamed of having for so long.  

I am finally at a place where I can say I am so stinking grateful I had the incredible opportunity to work at a library and live the dream.

I am still getting my Master of Library Science degree.  I was extremely fortunate to enjoy both my summer and fall classes after a tough spring class, and I am taking two classes this semester.  I'm hoping to finish by the end of this year.  Though I do not have plans of returning to libraries any time soon, I still want to finish this degree.  

This month Robert and I bought a business together, an awards/promotions/custom gifts shop that has been around for over 40 years.  Last summer the owner, a longtime customer and friend of Robert's, mentioned she was thinking about retiring and selling the shop.  After many discussions, Robert and I decided to take the plunge.  We all agreed to finalize the purchase on the first of January.  While we waited for that to happen I did a lot of shadowing, learning the business, diving into accounting, and also much reorganizing and cleaning.   There are so many things you can customize, vendors to buy things from, there's outsourcing of some products and making others in house, and machinery/processes/products to learn.  It's been overwhelming but also fun.  At the library I was fortunate to hear so many patron stories and be a part of some of those stories in a small way.  In this new business I get to do the same.  Just a couple days ago, a librarian came into the shop with a fantasy baseball trophy, and when I asked what his league's name was, he said it was Moose something or another.  But the figurine was an owl!  So yes, there was a reason the trophy no longer had a moose.  For me, the stories and connections with others are a big part of my happiness. 

In September there was still so much uncertainty about my future job path.  In October and November I was shadowing and getting to know who I was going to be working with.  I work mostly with one other person, a very patient, capable graphic designer who is about my age.  In December all the transitions were happening and there was a lot of reorganization and cleaning going on.  And now I am officially there, still learning but getting a little more comfortable each day.  Right now the focus is learning Quickbooks.  We chose not to transfer all the product and customer information from desktop QB to QBO, so each customer and item is being added as we go.  Every invoice is a fifteen minute discussion.  Do we want our perpetual plate metal to be a different item from our sheets of metal?  Do we engrave enough business card holders and desk wedges to create a "Desk" category?  If we have multiple contacts from a local business/university/high school, how do we want to create subgroups?  What if we have two contacts from one school of pharmacy and they each have their own orders?  It's the kind of brain work I enjoy, but wooeeee there's a lot of it.

Right now we are getting a lot of fantasy football trophies brought in for updates.  These trophies are usually brought in each year by different people.  So we created a way to group each fantasy football league but keep their members as individuals.  

It's not just Quickbooks and bookkeeping though.  There's so much variety to the work and there is even a little bit of repetition and detail work I enjoy.  After the graphic designer puts together the designs, the afternoons are usually all about printing, cutting, and assembly of various plaques, medals, trophies etc.  

With the new accounting software, some reorganization projects that have things helter skelter right now, clusters of fantasy football trophies everywhere (the collective noun we've chosen is a "stadium"), and a snow storm that briefly upended us, we have not found our groove yet.  But we are getting there.

There are a few bonuses.  I do not have to ask permission to go to doctor appointments.  I can work longer if I need to or scoot hours around.  The shop is less than ten minutes from my home and even closer to Robert's office.  Josie goes to work with Robert, and Margo goes to work with me.  And probably the thing I'm most grateful for is that the other person I work with all the time has lots of patience and humor.  She is also passionate about the job, asks the questions I don't always think of, and isn't afraid of spiders, which we have been evicting from the premises thanks to our big cleaning sweep.  I am still working on my big feelings about spiders, but I feel like I'm having a lot of moments of personal growth, so it's ok I'm still flunking in one area.  I started to add the cleaning of different areas in the building to my calendar but realized (with some embarrassment) that once I make my way through all the areas, I need to start over again.  I can hear the spiders laughing at me about this.  And really, they're laughing every time they hear one of these conversations:

Who needs a vintage desk plate thingy from the nineties?

Oh, every year or so someone will ask.

Ok, we'll hang onto it.  

How am I going to remember to clean out those boxes with the vintage doodads though?  

Cue the spider laughter.  

My health struggles are still a mystery, but there is a procedure I'm doing beginning in March that sounds promising.  I had hoped the issues were exacerbated by the extraordinary stress I was under while working at the library the past year, but I haven't had much relief.  I was able to get a second opinion, and at the very first appointment the doctor was both exceptionally understanding and also told us what he thought the issues were.  That's the good news.  The bad news is that they're so booked up I have to wait until March.  Thankfully, I have the most understanding and supportive husband and also a job where I can have some flexibility about doctor appointments and restroom breaks.  

I will likely be a little flighty about posting in the next month or so while we work toward our new normal.  Thanks to those who have reached out.  It means so much to me.

dog joy

Some dog joy to start your week:

Margo met a friend the other day.  Everything terrifies this dog.  Not this mask though.  She did not want to leave it!

Is there anything better than coming across a fluffy and glowing creature from the heavens?  Look at those lip wrinkles!

Or going out for puppuccinos with the windows down in single digit weather?

How about some rare sister cuddles?