Yeah, I feel better...

and just a little ashamed of my whine yesterday. I was feeling crummy, but no reason to inflict it on everyone else. Nevertheless, thanks for the sympathy. I was all out of ginger tea and bourbon, so had to pass on the recommendations, but I have filed them away for the future...

Today was a new day and much better. I gotta lotta stuff to do in the next few weeks, so it was back to the grindstone.

First of all I have to elaborate on something I mentioned yesterday. Car upholstery. My 10-year-old Subaru Forrester is still a great little car, but apparently my bony butt has taken its toll on the driver's side seat. Look at this. Sad, no? It cracked and then bits peeled off.

It has been this way for awhile and I despaired of a good solution. I made a cushion to put over it, but that was not a great solution. The cushion doesn't stay in place and is more trouble than it is worth. I got online and looked for covers. Not inspiring. I looked online for something to patch it or repair it and found a kit that had gotten pretty good reviews. It has been sitting on my desk for about a year and yesterday I finally decided it would be a good day to use it and let the car sit overnight to cure. The kit consisted of little containers of goo in different colors. You mix them to match your vinyl upholstery as closely as possible, then fill the damaged area with the goo. The kit includes little paper sheets with embossed leather-ish textures. You lay one of those over the wet goo and heat set it, by moving a hot tool over it. I used my little Clover iron, which worked perfectly. When you pull up the paper the texture has impressed itself into the repair. Mixing the color to match was the hard part. I thought it was a perfect match, but you know how paint and such never dries the same color as it was wet? Yeah, that was a problem. But it is definitely an improvement. It actually looks like a better match in person, than it does in the photo. It feels pretty strong and firmly stuck in place. Time will tell.

I had another handy person task to attack, so today seemed like the time to take it on. I am participating in an art show and sale next month and I need to provide my own display fixtures. I have been stewing on this all summer and making little sketches of folding screens or panels I might build and basically just procrastinating what seemed like something hard. Then—I ran down to the local ReStore, where they sell salvaged and donated building supplies, to look for a few vinyl floor tiles for a project Ray was working on at our rental house. I found just what he needed, and I was about to check out, when I spotted two 3-panel folding screens. Huzzah! I could see possibilities and the price was right.

Both looked like this:

Kind of faux shoji screens. What isn't apparent in the photo is that some of the panels had tears in the papery fabric and some of those little thin wood strips were broken. So I started taking the fabric and strips out of the top panels, leaving the the bottom panels that were in better shape. I am cutting foam board to insert in the openings for now. It looks OK, I think.

I think this will work to hang my work on for this sale. If these work out OK, and I think I will do more of these kinds of shows,  I will replace all the panels with some cloth covered panels that I can stick pins and tacks into. They fold completely flat and fit into the Subaru with inches to spare.

And while laying around watching TV yesterday I finished another little piece using some of my patina-ed copper washers and copper beads. 

 This one is 4" x 5", more or less. I have made a whole bunch of these little thingies and I am mounting them on mat boards and fabric covered board and I ordered some frames for them. I am hoping these will be some reasonably priced work to sell at the upcoming shows.