A Creative Mess is Better than Tidy Idleness!

Someone asked me why I changed the name of my blog. 
It's from a wooden plaque my mother kept hanging in her workroom.  It was her justification, I suppose, for being more involved with her artwork than her housework.  At one time or another, she did everything except paint pictures. 

As a young mother,
she always had some project in the works and it was commonplace to find her elbow-deep in wood shavings, fabric or clay. In later years, she began making and selling porcelain reproductions of antique dolls: Bye-los, Dream Babies, Armand Marseille little girl dolls, and many others, completely by hand. She poured porcelain slip, fired, painted, assembled, stuffed bodies, sewed clothes and even tatted lace for them. The only parts she didn't make were the wigs, the shoes and the eyes.
She did a little catering as well. My brothers and I helped make thousands of canapés and watched wedding cakes and hand-dipped chocolates grow out of the chaos that was our kitchen.  She was always busy creating something. 

As the years caught up with her and her thinking became

clouded, she turned back to the needlework she had learned as a girl, embroidery, knitting and crocheting. She crocheted quite a few lap robes, she called them, to cover one's legs while watching tv  and donated them to a nursing home.  After a while, she began losing her way and she would forget to increase, or neglect to make a corner, and the lap robes took on a very different shape. 
I came to see her one day and asked what she was making.  She held it up, looked at it and said "It started out to be a lap robe, but it looks more like a watermelon cover. Do you need a watermelon cover?" 

She was a witty, intelligent, creative woman who told me once

never to strive for perfection.  Of arts and crafts, she said
"It's a thing's imperfections that give it it's charm."  

She is why I consider myself a proud member of the "Not Too Crooked" School of Art. A creative mess is way more fun than floors you can eat from!

Lord, how I miss my mama!

Carole

ps. The painting above is a half sheet watercolor inspired by a photo I took of some fruit and wine on a shelf at a window.  It's not too crooked and not for sale.