This is it, no more changes! I'm calling it done. A mojo bottle.

I added half a teaspon of anise seeds because, I'm not sure why; the scent and color seems right and a quick search for magic uses turns up Lucky Mojo saying they have hoodoo value for psychic powers. Besides that, they sweeten the breath. So this reliquary bottle has become a mojo bottle. The chain is spliced together salvage, the hook I fabricated myself, and the fob on the hook is a Kaiser Wilhelm birthday commemorative coin and a Victorian cameo button jumped together, suspending a green freshwater pearl. One thing that tickles me about using old text is the way lines of text taken out of the page can generate poetical considerations, as your brain attempts to deal with fragments, helplessly assigning some meaning. In this case, the text is from an antique book of the essays, poetry and hymns of Cowper, an index page. It generated the title of the piece; but wait, there's more, if you read the back of the bottle. "Love of the voice of the fat oyster," how marvelous. Soon to be listed in my Etsy shop.

A Plague of Possibilities Strikes Virtuous Marcia

 

The other stopper, with the mirrored chandelier part, just didn't work out; for one thing, just not sturdy enough, and for another, it didn't "click." When you have a pile of hoarded found things and parts to use, too many possibilities can weaken your focus -- it's endemic!  So I dismantled the stopper and made another with a crazy weird old Bakelite button that seems to work better. Then, when I attached the chain for suspension and it draped across the front, I rather liked the effect, which lead to another layer of quanderies selecting a fob, or no fob.  I settled on a pretty lampworked bead after picking through my box of keys, milagros, charms and such.  It seems to like cozying up to the illustration and the button, with dots echoing form and color.  I am putting Marcia away for the day now, to let her cook slowly overnight, and maybe in the morning the matter will be settled.  We'll see.

Hello 2014

Have you noticed people have started saying "twenty fourteen," instead of "two thousand fourteen"?

Now, go visit this artist:  http://www.guylaramee.com/  Guy Laramee is doing fantastic things with old books and you can explore them just as you would mountains.  Just go look right now, you'll see!

And I have another project on my bench to begin the new year -- a second bottle reliquary.  Here's a sneak peek at the bottle and some parts.

Enjoy this first day of twenty fourteen, make it happy and keep it that way, and if that gets to be boring, try Universal Peace and Freedom!

Goodbye 2013

The last piece I will ever make -- in 2013.  I've been thinking about the seriousness of resolutions, how they are actually promises you make to yourself, and so have decided a good resolution needs a reliquary, a place to honor it and keep it close. So I made one from an old bottle, found buried in a house lot in Sedro Woolley, Washington.  It is marked "FF" in a circle, which identifies it as made by Foster Forbes Class Co., probably around 1942.  It has the beginnings of iridescence here and there, and it had no top.  I made a stopper from a crystal bead, rhinestone spacers, copper tubing and paper torn from a 1880s schoolbook, which was also the source of the pretty floral line art used to collage the front and back. The bottle was drilled to add a rhinestone fob salvaged from broken earrings, and then suspended on salvaged chain from an antique button.  It was then finished with more of the salvaged chain, spliced to six crystal beads, also salvaged, and a pretty hook to close. The stopper can be removed to insert the resolution represented as a written word, or another symbol of your promise to yourself for the New Year. It will soon be listed in my Etsy shop.

Good Movies for Holiday Sharing

My favorite comes first.  With Peter O'Toole's passing, we need to say goodbye, and fondly thank him for his gift.  There's a perfect movie for that:  "Dean Spanley."  It's a New Zealand jewel, based on Lord Dunsany's short novel, My Talks With Dean Spanley.  Sam Neill plays the Dean, a delightful performance, and the central gem of the piece, but Peter O'Toole shines even brighter. It's about reincarnation, and it's about dogs, so what's not to love?

Next, a film from Russia, historical, fascinating for the sets, costumes and ravishing portrayal of court life among the descendants of Genghis Khan,"The Horde."  As long as you are wanting a bit of delicious escapism, why not really, really escape, far, far away?

 

And, a third, another Russian work, "The Russian Ark," filmed on location in the Hermitage -- a bit like being invisible passing unseen through moments of history, and among the fabulous treasures of that great assembly of the greatest art. In one scene, you can see the reflection of light shining off the surface of a Reubens, so finely painted the texture is more of canvas than brush strokes, and in another, a glittering Romanov ball scene with a huge cast in the finest formal court dress dancing the mazurka, in the waning days of the Winter Palace.

  A feast for your eyes and imagination; bon appetit, and happy holidays!

Floods of Stone and Ice

Friend Jena and I made a timely escape from the gloomy weather on the west side of the passes, over east, to the Columbia basin, to an area geologists call "The Channeled Scablands." It's a fabulous landscape, created by ancient floods released from continental glaciers in Pleistocene times. But that's not the whole story -- long before the glaciers began to melt, even long before the glaciers, in Miocene times. great lava flows flooded the area over a period of thousands of years, thousands of feet deep.  When the glacial floods came blasting through, hundreds of feet deep, armed with boulders and grit traveling at highway speed, the lava was scoured and sculpted into a regional-scale picture of drainage patterns.

Our hike covered five miles of trail in the Ancient and Dusty Lakes area, near Quincy, Washington, rambling through two embayments of scoured lava cliffs, over a frosty sagebrush steppe ecosystem, under bright skies in blustering northerlies, that kept us moving briskly, but not too fast to enjoy our glorious surroundings.

Frozen sagebrush

Frozen lava

Jena views the Columbia

Priscilla views lava cliffs

A closeup view of carved lava

Going east for a day-long dose of sunlight is the best way to make up for the short, dark days before winter solstice.  Today, sunrise was at 7:51 am.  Sunset will be at 4:18.  'Scuse me while I take my Vitamin D.

Sparrow Is Seven Years Old This Month!

Still glossy, happy and occasionally popcorning, my sweet Sparrow is 7 years old this month.  She is proof that GPs are not just "pocket pets," but can be companions for a nice slice of your life. She wants you to know certain things are necessary for happy healthy GP lifestyles, though:  Guinea pigs need to have Vitamin C supplements, first of all.  Sparrow takes chewable Vitamin C from my hand just as readily as carrots.  I provide her with timothy hay, dandelion greens in season, fresh water, an orange crate for hiding and a salt lick, along with good quality guinea pig feed.  She has learned to wheek when she hears the crackle of vegetable bags, the regrigerator door, or the knife chopping vegetables for stir fry.  She knows her name and responds to "hello piggie."  She is also grateful that I don't handle her alot and disturb her peaceful existence, but she is not fond of getting her nails clipped, although that is one of the necessary things.