This is the second Spirit Mask work. I've called this one Amiryha and she is a sister to Zharyha. The story is the same. After much consideration, I decided to leave the tails off this one ... I don't find they add much to the work and only serve to lengthen the piece for display purposes. I think she is busy enough without more embellishment. This one has blue sand dollars, dyed in my kitchen sink with vegetable dye. They are very interesting to make once the main mask is shaped. That is where all the work comes into play as it's done over a form I fashioned out of large styrofoam balls. I have some new felting pads coming soon, so I'll make a new form from my two old pads and I think that will make my life easier for the third mask. How many of these I make will depend on sand dollar supply, which is getting dangerously low. Time to hit the beach again. I'll also be searching for small crab shells .. the smaller the better. I'd like to use them on one of these masks as well.
I'm keeping pretty busy with my art these days, but I must admit, I'm getting a bit shack whacky, so I think it's time for a mini vacation. I'm looking at sometime in May for a trip to the South Shore, where I'll spend one night with a dear old friend who lives in an inspiring place beside the ocean, and one night with my cousin Deb, artist and owner of The Wardroom Gallery. Really looking forward to that.
Last weekend one of my higher ranking relatives spent the weekend with me here. We got out for a nice dinner and had some leisure time to catch up. This coming weekend I have a social event to attend on Saturday night in Halifax at the Lord Nelson Hotel. I'm not sure what time I'll be returning here, or if I'm spending the night in the city, so have made arrangements for a dog sitter.
Having done all that spring cleaning awhile back, I managed to find a place for everything in my studio, and promptly forgot where some of those places were. Some of my tools are now a bit hard to find and I was disgusted to realize I'd put my felting needles away and couldn't find them anywhere. Frustration set in! I ordered more and they should be here soon, and of course, found the old ones in the meantime in a little drawer labelled "needles". Duh! Anyway ... it's a good thing as I ordered smaller needles this time. I've stopped breaking them so I should be good to go with the smaller gauge. That's a lot of felting needles, but I've fashioned tools to hold multiple needles (my favorite tool takes four) so I'll use many of them that way. Needle felting has become slightly more popular down this way, so perhaps I can also sell some of them in smaller quantities, but in any case, you can't really have too many needles. I'll likely have to go through a learning curve with the smaller ones too, so some will get broken at first. I have a ring to finish this afternoon for a customer but that's all the creating I plan to do today. It's dreary, chilly and looks like rain so I'm going to treat myself to a "no" day. Just relax and watch the tube, read or nap. I deserve it.
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