I found an awesome vintage easel online (yeah, craigslist!) for a great price - it's over 7' tall and I LOVE LOVE LOVE it! - I haven't figured out exactly where I'm going to put it (it's REALLY big) yet but I have a feeling it'll end up in the garage.  We are thinking that if we clean part of the garage out I'll have room for my yarn storage system and my painting and circular sock machine stuff - it'll take some doing though - we're due for another yard sale!  (if only we had the time to do it!)  This photo is from the listing... I can't wait to get the area set up so I can paint - it'll be awesome!

We went to Alamitos Bay Yarn Co. for their sale but didn't find anything - all the wool (the stuff I loved) was not on sale - so we headed to Yarn Lady (in Laguna Beach I think) and I bought yarn for the buffalo sweater.  I started it yesterday, hoping to get gauge after my muddling around - but ended up with a back that's only 17" across - not quite big enough... I think I'm going to have to double the yarn to get the right gauge (which I believe means doubling the quantity) -

I also used a little mohair yarn along with the normal yarn - all the way through... and I think it makes everything blend a bit too much - so for the next try I'll use the yellow mohair on the oatmeal yarn, an orange one with the pumpkin yarn and a chocolate one with the brown - we'll see how that works... (that also means that while doing the rows shown above at one point I'll have like 30 yarns hanging in the back - 2 for every color - 3 colors in a motif, 5x across the row - not that I'll be working with all fo them but holy cow... that's a lot!) - it's doable though and I love the sweater so I'll keep working on it!

I hope everyone had a great weekend! 

... and here's a little treat for those of you who might not know... may I introduce to you (or remind you of) the one...the only; Alberta Hunter!  there's a wonderful documentary out there about her life... she had an amazing story - it is also a musical ("My Castle's Rockin'") ... check her out!

Tuesday evening we were assigned a project in my acrylics class... building up realistic images using a series of glazes.  our subject:  candy!  we were sent to a pile of candy - each person grabbed a handful (or a jarful as was the case in some instances) and went to work.  We sketched and drew and came up with some sort of composition.

Once we had our sketches figured out, we started to draw it on the canvas (24 x 30) and roughed in some color.  This gives us the chance to see the composition and decide if anything doesn't "work" - I was pretty pleased right off the bat with mine - I figured that it's candy - I decided quickly not to make a big deal of it... just ignore the actual "sizes" of stuff - blow it up "huge" and try to create some interesting lines...

By the end of the class I was starting to build up some glazing on some of the areas in the painting.  The "green" hard candy on the right had turned blue... and the "tootsie pop" wrapper on the bottom right was starting to take shape.  I have a L-O-N-G way to go on this but it's a fun start to my adventures in acrylic painting... I was freaked out at how quickly the paint dries (in the past I had used watercolor which just gets "wet" again with water or oil which takes 452 years to dry) - there's something I can buy called a retardant that will help slow that drying time though. 

I plan to put images of schoolwork in progress on here so that I can remember the way they progressed.  I have a history class on Wednesdays (no reason really for blogging that I can think of) and on Thursday I have a ceramics class! - going back to school is so much fun - I am 3 "real" courses away from a degree - the history class is one of them - biology and a "special project" type course round out the three - once they're done I will transfer my credits and get my Bachelor of Science degree from Middle TN State University (where I did 99.999% of my schooling)  -  I plan on flying to TN to walk across the platform - but that's in the future.  Today... I have a painting of candy, Christopher Columbus and a "theme pot" to worry about... tomorrow is another day!

(I'm a bit worried about my knitting - with all this schoolwork and these new creative distractions it's going to slow down...)