The niece-com-poops are visiting and we are up to all sorts of no good. Blue pancakes in the morning, wild dress up parties in Annalie’s room, art projects galore and of course some outings to all the local tourist spots. Bethany‘s town has a lot to offer. You should come visit her.

I’ve been running around after them, wildly trying to clean up. It’s amazing how much more mess three kids can make than one. But then they are the niece-com-poops so making messes sort of runs in their blood. Not to mention my mom is here and she’s been sewing up a storm so there is material and thread all over the place.

My mom sewed three skirts for me, a skirt for Bug, a hat for Bug and a skirt for Bug’s stuffed green bear all in one day! I think Bethany’s house brings out the creative juices in more than just me. CC has also been here sewing and even put up some cute pink skull coffee sleeve thingys in her shop.

I haven’t doing much besides yelling at the kids and cleaning up their mess. But that’s okay. I’ve had lots of time to be creative already. As you can see below:

I picked up the pottery we painted the other day. This dog mug is a lefty mug. It wasn’t supposed to be but when I painted a dog face at the bottom inside of the mug (not shown–see shop for details), I painted it upside down. So yay for lefties! Or yay for Marci who already bought it! Thanks Marci.

I also painted this blue cat plate but when I was in the drawing stages, I accidentally went to brush off my eraser shavings with a paper towel that had a bit of black paint on it. DOH! I wiped a big black streak around the middle. Thankfully, most of it washed off but as you can see there is still some residue on the left and over the cat’s head. I should have drawn something to incorporate the smudge but when it was all wet and covered in pencil marks, it was really hard to tell the difference between pencil residue and paint residue. Excuses, excuses…

What is it with me and messing up my pottery? It must be my signature. I think I’ve messed up every piece I’ve ever painted. Sure, it gives everything more character but it also makes it so I can’t sell them full price and since I haven’t figured out a way to buy bisque cheaper yet, that’s not really working out for me. But I can’t complain, it’s a hobby that almost supports itself. Which is a lot better than other hobbies I could take up. It’s in my shop for cheap, if you’re interested.

Now here’s a piece of pottery that Bug and I sort of messed up on purpose. It’s a collaboration. First, I drew on the bear in pencil. Then she painted it with a flourish and then I outlined some detail over the top. I think it’s rather cute. It’s in our shop but if it doesn’t sell, that’s fine with me.

So that’s what we’ve been up to. Don’t come home, Bethany, we’re having too much fun. Just kidding. Hurry up and come home and join in the fun with us!

I brought my remaining dog paintings home from the Surf Dog Market yesterday. The Surf Dog Market is closing it’s Redondo Beach location so my paintings need a new place to go live. Somehow the remaining ones look really really sad without all their companion paintings.

I think I have homes for the two big ones but if anybody really really really wants the smaller ones I could probably be convinced to send them to you for the cost of shipping. Or I might just paint over them. I think the little little ones wanted to be painted over. They want to be the story behind the painting. So somebody can say, “This painting used to be “Cool Paw Luke” but now it’s bla bla bla….” I don’t know. It kinda adds to the fun of paintings when they have a long story to go with them.

My favorite painting didn’t sell. I thought it would be a big hit with it’s light feature but maybe it’s just an eyesore. I still really like it. I’m going to give it to my brother. I know he’ll put it up in his bedroom, next to the eleventy-seven other reject paintings I’ve given him over the years. That’s what’s great about family. They like what you paint no matter what it is.

Edited to add:

These are the paintings that are still available:

and the blue coyote one pictured at top. Click on them for more details.

Oh my goodness, I have a shop! How many commenters does it take to get me to do someting? I know. I lag. It’s just that these sorts of things intimidate me. I want to do it right and I know I only have the attention span of a gnat so this sort of creates a problem. Gnats do not make nice pretty shops. But enough of you hinted and cajoled that this is something I should really do so I finally buckled down and opened up an Etsy shop.

I’m not 100 percent happy with it. I want to ship to places like Canada and the UK and Paris ( because Paris is a country on the map of SAJ) and maybe even Japan (love you guys!) … but I don’t know how to yet. I have to walk down to my local UPS shop and inquire. So if you live somewhere outside of the United States and you really want a print, do not despair! Just contact me the old fashioned way and we will use you as a guinea pig to figure out how to do it right for my Etsy shop.

Another thing: Everyone who ordered a print via email in the last week… You got a deal! I didn’t realize shipping is so expensive when you need a box and you are sending glass… I just lumped it all together as a flat rate thinking I’d have plenty of profit to cover shippping.

Well guess what? Shipping costs bucks! Ack! Way more than I expected it to too. Maybe someday I will find a way to do it cheaper but for now I’m charging $25 to cover it all. It really does cost that much. Well, it’s actually $23 something. I’m adding two bucks for my walking because I’m worth it.

You don’t know how hard it is to schedule a walk to the UPS store with a toddler that you have to wrangle into a stroller. Or maybe you do and you’ll probably be happy to forward two bucks for my latte fund.

So anyway that’s that. I will probably upload more over the weeks to come. I’ve got some other digital art in the works and of course I’m selling prints unframed substantially cheaper.

But believe me, the frame is totally worth the $55. I thought fifty-five dollars was a lot at first but then after I blew dust and fiberboard sawdust out of the frames over and over, cleaned the glass over and over and then spent hours trying to match the matte up juuuuuust right (which took several tries of course) and wrestled with the matte and the funny bendy things on the back, I was so over it. Fifty-five bucks is mere pittance for my efforts.

Well maybe I exaggerate just a little bit but it did take a bit of tender loving care. Because I do care.

And with that I bid you farewell to go snoop in my Etsy shop. Don’t feel obligated to buy. This is just an experiment. When I have my real shop, I will have way more stuff and then I’ll really put on the hard sell.

You’ve probably already heard from the wonders of twitter that the big art show was a whole lotta fun. It was a whirlwind of activity for me. I’m still trying to sort it out into some kind of cohesive story that will capture what it was really like.

It wasn’t huge. It wasn’t some grand debut on the art scene. There weren’t people were asking for my autograph or writing up articles for the scene and be seen magazines… but it was REAL. It was genuine. It was a combination of so many of my friends who really love me and GET me and a bunch of dog people who were besides themselves happy to have a party with art for their dogs. It was a bunch of happy people.

When you get down to it. Isn’t that the kind of party you really want to be at anyway? It was really fun. I think I loved the accordion music the best. It reminded me of walking along the Seine in Paris, licking a passion fruit ice cream cone. Toby said the music jammed his frequencies but for me it was a few hours of being that silly happy Parisian girl again enjoying the wonder of a warm summer night. It was wonderful.

The paintings sold pretty well. Some of my loyal fans rushed in early and swooped up their favorites so I felt all special and stuff. Man, you guys are the BEST and I know my funny paintings will be loved in your homes. The other artists had really great work and if they weren’t so nice and constantly telling me to get over myself, I would have probably had a huge inferiority complex. Thankfully, I did not have any time to whine and worry about such things because it was a busy busy night of talking to all sorts of old friends and new friends, furry and not so furry.

Did you see everybody who came? Lots of bloggers. It was like a little mini so-cal blogher except not just for her. (thinking of you Mr. BlogHim). Some lovely bloggers I didn’t get photos of and I’m kicking myself. And some other lovely bloggers got there while I was busy getting ready in my new magic dress and being fashionably late. Thank you for the champagne mip mup! I’m sad I missed you!

I was a terrible photographer all night because I was so distracted and scatterbrained. I think I talked everybody’s ear off. And if I wasn’t blabbing excitedly, I was exiting with Baby Bug because she needed some one-on-one time with her mom. She was really good most of the night but she did have a few crying jags when people came up to her too quickly or tried to take her away from me. She is such a mama’s girl. But then what do I expect, we hang out together every day all day.

Everybody else took pictures so I’m hoping they email them to me or send me links and I can post them here. I tried to capture the fun of the night but… well I already explained that. I was a little stretched. Toby tried too but he was number-one baby watcher and Baby Bug kept him running from one side of the gallery to the other.

Her cousin SuperChic was there, who is four, and they are best friends. Best friends who like to run around and chase each other. If they weren’t chasing each other they were chasing the many dogs who came as guests. How cute is that? The dogs were very well behaved and my brother even adopted one.

All in all it was a really sweet event.

Kinda like Baby Bug and pupcakes.

***UPDATE***
Kelly uploaded his pictures from the show and two movies!

Tomorrow is the big day and I’m starting to get nervous. I’m not a wreck but I could be. I haven’t blogged about it because it didn’t seem newsworthy (and I didn’t want anybody not coming just because they were afraid of germs) but…. I have had a cold all week and guess what, my voice is completely gone!

No voice! Imagine that! Arg. I’m crossing my fingers, drinking tea and hoping it comes back by tomorrow. I am pretty much better. I feel fine and I’m sure I’m not contagious but my voice, it has left the building. So if you are thinking of coming, PLEASE COME! Don’t be afraid of my germs. I’m harmless!

You know why you want to come? Because you want to see me magically transformed from this:

…into something fabulous! I don’t know how it’s going to happen or what I’m going to turn into but it’s going to be good. So please come and see. Otherwise the suspense is going to kill you.

How did I get to be such a slovenly looking hippie mom anyway? This sort of snuck up on me. It had something to do with having a baby and not being able to go shopping for clothes or get my hair cut. I like to think of myself as someone with style but lately the comments from my friends have got me wondering. It’s not that I don’t care about how I look it’s just that… well, I can’t be bothered. I have no time for vanity!

Except today I was crippled with vanity. I started thinking about all the people who are going to meet me for the first time and how my pictures on my blog don’t accurately portray me as the shabby hippie mom that I am. I started to freak out a little bit, actually.

I decided to go dress shopping. More for my self esteem than really needing a new dress. (I must be crazy. Who goes dress shopping to boost their self esteem?) I know everybody’s still going to like me if I wear that black strapless from 1998 or my old stand by “seagull poop” dress (as Toby calls it except he doesn’t say poop) that I wear all the time for any photographable event like going out to donuts for example. But I wanted to get something new.

Shopping is the pits for me. I hate it. I hate all the new styles. I hate all the new colors. I hate how nothing fits. I hate how I’m always drawn to styles that are not flattering to my body type. I hate how everything is for fall when it feels like summer. You want me to wear wool and brocade when sweat is dripping down my back? Fashion is crazy.

Baby Bug was a good sport but the endless hours in dressing rooms even wore her down. She was very frustrated when I would pick out something orange or green and not let her try it on too. She’s obsessed with orange and green.

Get this, while buckled in her stroller, Baby Bug tried to take her shirt off and put on an orange brocade dress from Anthropologie that was hanging on the wall beside her on a hanger. Her efforts were worth a gold medal. I’m not completely cold hearted so I gently let her put the five thousand-times-too-big dress over her head.

That turned out to be a big mistake. She got twisted up in the rolls and rolls of sweaty thick fabric and the more I tried to pull her out of it the more she cried. It was really really sad. We both left the dressing room feeling frustrated and completely deflated.

We wandered out of Anthropologie in a daze and somehow, probably because I just plain wasn’t looking, I walked straight into a couture boutique shop not even noticing that the dresses I was looking at had price tags of $700 and up.

I do not belong in such a shop. I don’t know what I was thinking but guess what, a miracle happened. Now that I think about it, I think I did say a little prayer of desperation to God while we were tangled up in the orange dress at Anthropologie. I think I said something like, Please God, help me get out of this mess. But I never expected my prayer to be answered like this.

There I was wandering aimlessly in a fancy boutique shop, probably muttering to myself, when this very friendly sales guy came up to me and asked me if he could help. I think I said something like, “There is no hope for us.” He laughed but I really meant it. He somehow got it out of me that I have a big gallery opening tomorrow and decided to take me under his wing. I think I might have said something about being a painter… in my hoarse whispering voice.

“Stay right there,” he said. “I’ll be back in five minutes with five fabulous dresses that will be perfect for your show.” He didn’t even ask my size. He just looked me up and down and was gone in a flash of fairy dust.

That was about when I finally woke up and noticed that the price tags had extra zeros on them. Uh oh. How was I going to tell this guy that I can’t afford to be trying on clothes in a shop like this? I decided I would humor him and just pretend I didn’t like any of them.

But he read my mind. He came back with five dresses in shades of dark grays and browns. “You don’t really want a couture gown for your event,” he said. “Your art is whimsical. You need something fun that you’ll feel comfortable in.” I looked at the price tag of a dress dangling from his arm. Phew… it was totally affordable.

How did he know? He must be an angel. I took all five dresses into the dressing room and proceeded to try them on with my eyes bugging out of my head. Guess what? Every single one of them fit. How did he know my size! I would have never picked any of them out myself. They just hung limp on their hangers, looking like nothing special.. but then when I put them on they became magic dresses! Hip hugging dresses with low scoop necklines and fancy sleeves that offset my um…generous pear shaped lower half. How did he know!

I wanted to hug him and do a little dance. The dresses, they fit! I didn’t feel ugly or fat or shaggy or unkempt. It was a miracle. He even played peek a boo with Baby Bug through the dressing room curtain so I could examine the hem and swoon over the pretty magic dresses. It was wonderful.

I bought one dress and I’m wearing it tomorrow. Maybe you’ll get to see it.

Look what arrived in the mail the other day. Isn’t it great how my family supports my crazy obsessions? I love my family. My Aunt Keren sewed this based on a simple sketch I drew up. She added the applique with my approval but it was totally her idea. I love it. I can’t wait to take pictures of Baby Bug in it.

Just so you don’t worry that I’ve turned into a dog person and abandoned my love for cats, here is a picture of Pounce. Baby Bug and I got bored so we dressed him.

He did not like it.

I finished all my paintings yesterday! I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself now. That’s not true. I have tons to do but it is going to be very strange not to be completely obsessed with painting any more. I still have three more canvasses I could dig out if I really get desperate but I feel like the collection is complete.

I have a collection! I can’t even believe it. I’m so happy I did this. Even if the show is a complete bomb (which I know it won’t be) I am soooo glad I forced myself to go through this exercise.

Hi! Did you want to tune into Channel Baby Bug? Hah Hah. Well, there you go.

Flipping over to the SUMMER IS GOING TO THE DOGS channel, I finished this pink dog! It’s called, “Pink Dog, Deconstructed” but you can call her “Armadillo Dog”, everybody else is. Or “Icky Mauve Dog” for those of you who hate mauve.

I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of painting dogs. I finished up TWO today and am in the middle of a very very cool TOP SECRET painting that I’m not going to show you on this blog BECAUSE I WANT YOU TO COME TO THE SHOW and see if for yourself. It’s really neat with a light feature! After the show, I’ll put pictures up here but not until then.

Oh you wanted to watch the Baby Bug Channel and you are tired of that other silly dog channel? Hmmmmf. Well. Okay. We’ll compromise. It’s Baby Bug AND Dog Prints on the BABY BUG DOG CHANNEL!

Baby Bug is helping with the framing of the dog digital prints. Notice how they are in the middle of the coffee table. That’s because when I lined them up on the floor, she thought they were blocks and promptly knocked them over and then tried to stack them. So if they have a few nicks in the frames, you can blame Baby Bug.

It’s amazing what cheap IKEA frames can do to your art. It makes crappy ink jet print outs on cheap office paper look all puurty and stuff. These are not the final prints. I’m just trying to make up my mind what I’m going to frame… When I decide, I’ll print them on really nice archival paper and have a pro do it for me.

The show is only eight days away. I’m SOOOOOOO excited!

p.s. letters coming later.

I threw caution to the wind, blew off work and painting to make a stuffed dog today! I don’t know what hit me. I was working on the eternal couch cover project (I’m always altering it, one of these days it will be perfect and then it will be so brittle from the sun constantly beating on it, it will fall to shreds and I’ll have to start all over again) and I just got this crazy hair-brained idea that I should make Baby Bug a stuffed dog. You know, since I’m on this seemingly endless dog kick these days.

Before you go complimenting my sewing, let me just say that I am not a very good seamstress. I am horrid, in fact. Part of it is my sewing machine and the other part of it is that I am just a hack job artist with no attention span to be a perfectionist. If you look close, you will find puckers and gathers and back-tacking where there shouldn’t be back-tacking, knots where there shouldn’t be knots… It’s a big mess. My Aunt Keren, the seamstress, will not be allowed to examine it closely. This, like most of my sewing projects, will put her many years of kind teaching to shame. I’m sorry Aunt Keren.

It’s not all my fault though. My sewing machine doesn’t like me very much. I know this because it makes rats nests with the bobbin thread on a regular basis. This might be because I keep my sewing machine in this canvas tote and every time I haul it in and out of the closet, I think I break it. The tension is whacky. I don’t know what the numbers mean so I don’t even know how to fix it.

The little spool thing that holds the thread is busted off. I have to stick a skewer in the hole, where it used to be, and let my spool of thread wobble around on the skewer unbalanced. It’s really amazing that I bother to sew at all.

All that said, I had a blast making this little stuffed puppy. I used to make these sorts of things all the time when I was a kid and I used to visit my Aunt’s sewing room. And then there’s the Lumpy Cat Ranch of course. I think imperfect sewing is my thing. I know Baby Bug is too young to really appreciate the fun of this but I think someday we are going to really have a ball. Or a puppy or a doll or a kitten… or a truck.

Today was SUCH a better day. Thank you for all your kind comments. I don’t think I so much needed more sleep as I just need to time my caffeine fixes better. I could and should make a chart for myself, mapping out the direct relation between my coffee intake and energy level. I was crashing pretty hard these last two nights. No wonder I couldn’t eeek out a decent blog post.

It also helps that I managed to take some decent pictures today. I’m such a weak writer lately. I really rely on my photos and illustrations (which are waxing farther and farther apart because they just take too much time) to get me through a post. I would give myself a guilt trip about it but I’ve been exercised lately not to take blogging so seriously.

Today was a fun day because Baby Bug painted today. She wasn’t supposed to but I accidentally left a container of paint open in her reach. ( I knew it was going to happen one of these days) I thought I was in big trouble but amazingly I managed to guide her paint smudged hand to the back of my big white dog painting and she painted a pretty picture for me. She was sooooo happy.

It was really fun for both of us. We didn’t even get any paint on anything. How I managed to get the camera and keep her fingers off the patio furniture, I do not know.