Tag: tiny tuesday

Tiny Tuesday!


When the teen and ‘tween babysitters at the last cookout of summer won’t let the little kids play with the coolest adult toys.

This made me think of the time when we were teenagers and Lynne was babysitting her niece and nephew. I was along as the self-appointed “not a good idea!” patrol. Which was pointless, because when Lynne decided to go down the hill on the road next to their house in the kids’ little red wagon, and predictably overturned and hurt herself while having a roaring good time somewhere along the way, I could neither stop her nor shame her afterward.

I was the worrier and she was fearless. Decades later, not much has changed.

Tiny Tuesday!

Now I can share this painting because it has been received by the person whose gift it is.

“Muse Garden No. 1: Need You Tonight” is mixed media on an 8×10 canvas. The painting’s inspiration came from the lyrics of “Need You Tonight” by INXS. Lines and words from the song are printed on the stems and leaves of the flowers. After I painted the canvas, each flower was individually hand-colored by me and applied.

The recipient has great affection for the late Michael Hutchence, Australian musician, singer-songwriter, actor, and co-founder of INXS. The center of the sun is a bottle cap from manufacturer Carlton & United/Carlton’s Crown Lager and says, “Australia’s Finest,” an apt description of Hutchence.

I was inspired by art I found on the Internet that used Spirograph drawings. I found them when doing research for this excerpt from the Neverending Saga.

She browsed the shelves and tables until a notebook caught her eye. The colorful flowers on its cover reminded her of ones she and her best friend used to draw. They’d start with her Spirograph, color the shapes and patterns with markers and pencils, then cut them out and glue them on things like the covers they made for their school books, her 45 records boxes, and notes they wrote to each other. They gave the shapes stems and leaves so they became flowers.

To create both a painting and fiction inspired by someone’s art and someone else’s music is extremely gratifying to me.

Tiny Tuesday!

Back in August of 2010 (on Marika’s birthday, in fact), I wrote a post inspired by Toy Story as well as a dream I had. Those two things led to my purchase of a couple of vintage Arco Gasoline Dolls of the World to replace those I’d been given as a child: Spain and England. I had six in all, and I’m not sure when they left my life, but dreaming about them left me feeling nostalgic.

During the apparently unending (thanks to misguided, willfully ignorant, dishonest, cynical, or callous humans–don’t get me started) pandemic, I decided to replace the other four dolls I’d once owned.

The boy doll in the photo below represents one of my characters in my work in progress. He’s currently spending time with me as my muse while I write two new chapters featuring him that are necessary because I’ve changed how the books are divided (three books now becoming what I think will be four? I’m not sure at this point) before I continue the saga that will be ongoing (but in a more positive and creative way) even longer than COVID. I’m eager to know how many books will actually come from the original book I wrote first in 1979-’80 (from stories that started in 1970 or ’71), then rewrote in 1988-’89, and now again in 2019-’20-’21-?. When I look at all those numbers, I get dizzy. When I think of all those words, I get fatigued in a giddy way.


From left to right, the dolls represent Colonial America, Sweden, Spain, MY LIFE’S WORK, Scotland, Holland, and England. There were more Arco dolls, and who knows, I may one day purchase France and Ireland even though I didn’t have them as a kid because they are relevant to characters in the Neverending Saga.

I hope you have a spark of creativity or a tiny bit of whimsy in every one of your days.

Tiny Tuesday!

As soon as he had a chance, he took the papers and hid them under a loose floorboard in the bedroom he shared with his little brothers. The papers joined his only two treasures. The oldest was a non-working pocket watch he’d found in a lot empty of everything but trash. The second, a recent addition, was his most prized possession: a woman’s ring. He hadn’t so much found that as tracked it.

© Becky Cochrane

Tiny Tuesday!

Found this tiny box among my old business stuff. It was full of coins that I moved to the piggybank. It now has incense cones in it. Incense burns and becomes wisps of smoke that vanish into the air.

Now all them things that seemed so important
Well, mister, they vanished right into the air

Bruce Springsteen

You can’t say I traded money for nothing because I’ll be giving Houndstooth aromatherapy.

Pick your video, or be bold and go for both.

Tiny Tuesday!

When I was cleaning out my old business stuff and finding little items I’d forgotten, this was one of them.

I have no idea what this came from (maybe a leather bracelet?) or how it came to me, but I kind of dig it, because I do like cowboys.

Directed by a page from Keri Smith’s Wreck This Journal, I did a rubbing of it. Always knew those Crayon pencils would come in handy.

I am going to turn this into a bracelet.

Tiny Tuesday!

Three such small devices: my original Nook, my newer Nook, and my iPad. The Nooks are for my Barnes & Noble ebook purchases, but that old Nook also contains many books I downloaded from Kobo using my Murder By The Book account. They’d then get a portion of the sales. I can still do that as a way to support a local, independent bookseller, but now I can do it using the Kobo app on my iPad. My iPad also has a Kindle app.

Three little devices packed with hundreds of fiction and nonfiction books. There are many I haven’t read because I bought them just before the pandemic or during the pandemic, and I haven’t read any fiction during those months. I’m not sure there’s a reason for that or what the reason is.

Maybe I’m just too lost in the world of my own fiction.

Those pages are the draft of my newly completed third novel in the Neverending Saga. I’m pausing here, because I’ve moved back into the home office from the writing sanctuary. I’m going to do a thorough edit of all three books at my larger desktop computer.

The first book needs better chapter divisions and the storyline needs scrutiny and a few enhancements due to many things I’ve come to understand about the characters over the course of the second and third books.

The second book is way too long. I have good ideas about where to trim it without losing any story.

By the time I’ve finished those edits, I’ll be ready to read the third book again with fresher eyes. Then I’ll hit the ground running with Book 4, which promises to deliver some fun, some growth, and some changes to these characters I love so dearly. Even the ones who aren’t lovable, because sometimes they’re fun to explore.


Yeah, I know people think my fascination with dolls is weird/silly/a waste of time. Longtime readers know dolls were my first characters as a youngster. I wove stories for them in my head long before I put pencil or pen to paper or used Daddy’s typewriter. Letting dolls stand in now as characters often amuses and inspires me. That’s a good thing. I realized when I put them all together to shoot a photo, five really important characters are missing, but it’s only because I haven’t surveyed my inventory yet to match them to dolls.

People can be driven and/or comforted by a variety of passions. Mine is creativity. To get to creativity, I draw from art, music, nature, and my relationships and life experiences. Through creativity, I examine, contemplate, explore, reason, feel, advocate, and speak my truth and my conscience.

Will my Neverending Saga ever be on tiny devices? I have no idea. The first time I ever saw the phrase below, it was on a wedding gift to Tom and me. It still makes sense.

“Success is a journey, not a destination. The doing is often more important than the outcome.”

Arthur Ashe

Tiny Tuesday!

The other day after I titled a post with the Doors lyric “Break On Through,” I thought I took that a little too literally and broke my little toe. It looked dislocated at first, then it didn’t, so I sort of coasted through the night with some Advil and sleep.

But it REALLY hurt on Sunday and the bruising was bad. I know I’ve said on here before that I have diabetes, so it’s not news, but one thing I’m super careful about, as all people with diabetes should be, is my feet. So off we went to the ER because shit always happens on a weekend, especially a long weekend.

They didn’t see any fractures on the X-ray, so I’m going to assume all is good and the bruising will fade in time. The pain comes and goes, but it’s so much better than it was.

I haven’t gotten much writing done because my focus is for shit, so I continued to work on a couple of sewing projects. I’ll probably share those at some point, but since today’s Tiny Tuesday, I really want to talk about this product I got in the mail today.

First, a word about some of my older dolls. Male and female. Through the years, they can develop hair issues. Like this.

(Full disclosure: I did a temporary fix on him for a previous photo shoot, but when I pulled him out of the bin today, he looked like this.)

And there’s this guy.

I tried some of my hair products, and even some of Timothy’s hair products, but nothing was working for these poor guys. I did some online research and found a doll collector who swears by Volks Water Wax to tame unruly doll hair. Thus I whipped out the credit card.

It comes in the tiniest tub! She also suggested using a flea comb and a toothbrush on doll hair, only I forgot that “flea” part and bought a lice comb, lol.


I photographed the Water Wax with the toothbrush so you can see how small it is. But she says it lasts forever because it takes so little for a good hair fix.

Improvement?


My girl dolls are all, “Hubba, hubba!”


It even returns luster to their hair! This dude looks like Andy Williams.


I know some old Midge dolls who’ll be very happy the next time I feel like playing hairdresser.

Great news! These dudes are also lice-free.

Tiny Tuesday!


Lately, because I’ve been messing around with my dolls, I’ve felt a compulsion to sew. I don’t think I’d realized how many of my sewing supplies were lost in the Harvey flood, including several bins of wet fabric, and hundreds of beads and tiny doll-scale buttons in containers full of water. It was all too overwhelming to think about cleaning and sanitizing when there were so many higher-priority tasks during that time. I was also working sixty-plus-hour weeks. So I let that swamp-water-logged shit go.

I’ve slowly begun replacing a few supplies when the mood strikes and the prices are good. These include packages of buttons and bundles of fabric amounts in small-scale prints.

I won’t sew right now. I’m determined to finish the third book in the Neverending Saga before mid-June. Has anyone noticed how months have raced by this year as compared to last year?

My characters and my words and my dolls and my sewing notions are good company for these rainy days we’re having while Tom is busy at work in the home office and the dogs are busy worshipping Tom while he works in the home office. =)

Hope you’re finding good things in which to lose yourself–or at least some good trouble.