by Susan Lobb Porter | Art, Studio |
You may have noticed I’ve been a little…lax about posting this last week or so. Well, there’s good reasons.
Ch-cha-cha-anges are a brewin’.
Oh my sweetums, SO MANY good things happening in Arty Life land these days! Good things! Uber good, super good absolutely freakin’ AWESOME good things!!!
This is the week ALL the construction loose ends get wrapped up in the new! improved! Studio Grande! At least the interior. The part I need to be finished so I can move in and make it my work place home.
I am SO excited!
But to get there we’re going through the storm before the calm. Oh indeed we are. You cannot walk anywhere in the house without seeing the chaos that will morph into studio orderliness.
This is what the living room looks like right now. Imagine those drawers in the studio. Loaded with art supplies in an ORDERLY manner. Sigh… I can’t wait.
I even bought drawer organizers.
I don’t have to wait much longer. This is Mr. Spouse doing manly things involving the soon to be major suck exhaust fan. The fan that will be my best friend when it comes to stinky art stuff.
The slate that will be the windowsills and firesafe back splash for encaustic land. Because building the studio is Mr. Spouse’s project. His art. And I’m not complaining. And the tiles will be beautiful splashed with beeswax, don’t you think?
While all these changes are going on in studio land, changes are going on with Arty Life too.
Oh. My. YES!!!
I’m in the process of adding a store and lots of art. You can see the progress on that if you click ‘latest art’ up on the nav bar. Still figuring some details like shipping and the boring behind the scenes stuff so it will be a couple of weeks before it’s operational. And I’ll be adding prints as well.
There will be price points for every budget.
Including FREE!
Yep, I’m going to add some freebies for download!
And that’s not all…oh no, my sweetums, not hardly…I have a BIG surprise!!!. Yes. I. Do. But like all surprises, I CAN’T TELL YOU. Not now. You have to wait.
So to do all that, I’m taking the next week off. Off from posting, that is. I’m going to be working my tail off. Finishing the studio. Moving in. And making some MAGIC happen here in Arty Life Land. Like I said, SURPRISES!!!
So come back Monday after next (July 9) and check it all out.
I can’t wait to share it all with you!
by Susan Lobb Porter | Mr. Spouse, Studio |
Mr. Spouse likes to play in mud. Big boy mud. Concrete. He has his own mixer. Actually, it’s his second one, the first having gone belly up a few years back. Because he used it that much. Seriously. One concrete marvel after another.
But until this weekend he never got to realize his big dream…countertops.
It was the one thing he was adamant about when he offered to build the new studio. I agreed, as long as he understood it’s a working art studio. His countertops will not be precious. They will be used. Most likely abused.
He was okay with that.
First he built the forms on the base cabinets. The lower section is my office area. Computer, scanner, printer, stare out the window at the squirrels office area.
Saturday morning we got up bright and early. Too early for me since I’d only gone to bed a few hours before.
My job was to mix the color into the dry cement. I don’t remember how many buckets I mixed. I do remember grasping the stir stick in both hands and feeling like a witch hovering over her cauldron. My lower back remembers it too.
I had black concrete dust in all my pores. On my clothes. Under my clothes. But not in my lungs because I wore a mask. Which in the end was the only part of my face that remained clean.
The first plops buckets of wet concrete hit the forms.
First layer gets troweled.
Then covered with a sheet of steel mesh before layer number 2. The edge is reinforced with rebar. You’ll have to trust me on this.
Lots of troweling. Lots of waiting. This is Mr. Bobby, our concrete friend, with his handy-dandy concrete vibrator. This excited the concrete and allowed Mr. Bobby to have his way with it. ‘Nuf said about that.
By late afternoon it was looking good. Starting to firm up. Forms were popped. Edges repaired. More troweling. Mr. Bobby and Mr. Spouse were both adamant that I NOT scribe into the oh so tempting, oh so succulent, oh so WILLING countertops in process.
So I decided I had better things to do. I headed down to the old studio to photograph art. I’m setting up an e-commerce site and need better photos.
Sunday Update
Show and tell!
Yee-haw and Yowser! Doin’ the happy studio dance, oh yes I am! Because Mr. Spouse is a handy man indeed. The weekend construction man super hero!
And in a couple of days we’ll be coming up on our 30th anniversary. The traditional gift for 30 years is pearls. The modern gift, diamonds. In our family it’s looking like concrete. And that’s okay with me!
