I am glad that so many of you were able to attend the Art-A-Fair Premier Night party. I had a great time. And I especially enjoyed telling the story of my shoes.
 
Hmmm, my shoes? Yes, my shoes.  For those of you who did not get to hear the story, here it is…
 
I have been showing my work at the Art-A-Fair Festival for 20 years now. My very first year in the show I wore a gold outfit along with a pair of gold pumps. In the intervening years, my size has, um, changed. The gold outfit no longer fits. However, the shoes still do.

Here's a photo of my first Art-A-Fair Festival Opening Night 20 years agp! That's me in the center of the photo wearing the gold top.

I thought it would be rather poetic to wear the same shoes I wore 20 years ago.
 
Unfortunately, when I took them out of storage, I discovered that all of the gold had flaked off of the leather leaving a very sticky residue. Well, at least they still sort of fit and they were in good shape.
 
At this point, I decided that since I didn’t have a pair of red shoes, why not bling these out? Off I went to the local hobby stores to stock up on red rhinestones. I think I bought every bag of red rhinestones within a 20 mile radius!

A couple thousand rhinestones, a bottle of glue, and about 15 hours later here was the result…

They went perfectly with my new red dress!

While I won’t be wearing the red shoes, you can see my work and maybe even me at the Art-A-Fair Festival in Laguna Beach now through August 28.

I have been working on the new piece. After some deliberation, I decided to work on a photo I took of sailboats with Catalina in the background. The photo itself isn’t all that great. In fact, as a photograph, it’s rather boring. However, it has all of the elements that I was looking for: the sky, the water, an island, and boats.
 
The first step was to create the sky. I did this with my usual technique of collage with tiny pieces of various sky blue and light blue fabrics.  I did the same thing to create the ocean, using darker blues. I left a gap all along the horizon line so that I could add the island with the water coming up to it. (If I just added the island on top of the water it would look odd.)

In this photo you can see where I am adding a piece of water fabric over the island. Shortly after adding in Catalina Island and finishing the stitching, I stepped back from the piece. I looked at it and wondered what to do next. I couldn’t decide.

On the one hand, I could be completely true to the original image with one larger sailboat in the foreground and many tiny ones in front of the island. But then I started thinking about how difficult it would be to add in all of those tiny boats. Even though they would not be that detailed, they would require enough detail so that you can see what they are. Otherwise they would all end up just being blobs of color.
 
So, the next possibility would be to have just the single sailboat in the foreground and leave the rest of the boats out. But this particular photo is on the day of the Newport-to-Ensenada boat race. There were about 200 sailboats out there that day…and that was what I was trying to capture. So, to only have the foreground boat in the image is really not where I want to go with this piece.
 
Well, that is where I now stand. I have not yet decided on how to complete this piece. I will keep you posted. And, given that the Art-A-Fair Festival opens in 7 days, I don’t think I’ll have it done by then.

And speaking of Art-A-Fair, for those of you who are able to go, I still have a few tickets left for the official Premier Night Party next Wednesday, June 22 in Laguna Beach, California. If you would like to go to this invitation only event, please send me an email with your name and address right away so that I can snail-mail the tickets to you. In the meantime, I have lots of things to do to get ready. Hope to see you there!