see the squid

My daughter's friend just designed and made this cute crocheted squid, using yarn I gave her. She still has to buy some eyes to sew onto it. I think it is so cute! Her sketch is next to it.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I got a 20-lb turkey for $7 at Safeway (it's in the oven now). Last night, I made this lovely pumpkin spice castle cake in my new bundt pan -- we will eat it for dessert today. We're also having stuffing, salad, and yams. That should put us all into a coma for awhile.

Fall Wreath painting is finished

Here you go--I finished the Fall Wreath painting yesterday.

I'm also considering selling prints or jpegs of my paintings for $5 each. If you see one you like, contact me about it. I just ordered Christmas cards from Snapfish using a Nutcracker painting I did last year. If you'd like to do the same, I can email you a jpeg and then you can order the cards yourself. The understanding is that I retain copyright and you will use the jpegs only for your personal cards, not to make cards to sell. Here are four Christmas paintings I did last year that you might want to use.

I started a new painting today

It isn't quite finished, so here's the photo that I used for inspiration. As soon as the painting is done, I'll post it too, so you can compare it to the photo. The weather is very dry and hot today, this really affects watercolors -- the paint was drying almost as fast as I painted.

Win a gorgeous silk quilt!

The San Francisco Quilters Guild is selling opportunity tickets on this lovely silk quilt. You can check out their web site to buy tickets: $1 each or 6 for $5.

It is called "Gypsy Shimmer" and is 8 feet square. Designed by Sue Fox and made by many members of the quilt. The proceeds will support the various activities of our guild, including approximately 500 quilts that we make and give to hospitals and other charities every year.

Japanese Cats are finally quilted!

This weekend, I finally quilted the Japanese Cats quilt that I started over a year ago (or was it two?) Anyway, it's done and I'm very happy with it. I used Mountain Mist fusible batting which worked very well--I didn't have to do any basting. The cat pattern, designed by Susan Hill, is available here. It shows the cats on a white background, but I think they look cuter on the dark Japanese woven fabric. I keep trying to use up my collection of Japanese fabrics, but the pile grows faster than I can make quilts.

Alternative Press Expo in SF

This year, my daughter Jemma and her friend Katie shared a booth at the Alternative Press Expo in San Francisco. Katie is on the left, waving, Jemma is in the middle of the picture, wearing a black and white shirt. Her brother Isaac is on the right side of the picture, giving a thumb's up. Jemma created a comic, "Unicorn Life Cycle" just for APE, it is very funny. Katie was selling two of her comics, "The Queen's Knight" and "The Lives of Seamonkeys" which are also very funny.

I bought three books by Enrico Casarosa: "Sketch Crawling, watercolors and comics of varying degrees of silliness" "Fragments" and "The Venice Chronicles". He told me to check the web site sketchcrawl.com to find out when sketch crawls are being organized around the world--sounds like fun! Looks like I just missed one in October in SF, but they are planning another one for January.

By following a link on Enrico's site, I discovered that one of my favorite writer/illustrators, Danny Gregory, has two new books for sale at blurb.com, "Bad to the bone" and "Me Time." Check them out!