Tag: tiny tuesday

Tiny Tuesday!

nickel provided to show scale of small canvas

Mountain Man, acrylic on canvas, 2023/24

Another of my tiny bottle cap paintings. This cap is from the Wasatch Brewing Company and features the state shape of Utah. It’s the only one I have, likely given to me by David and/or Geri.

Today’s my brother David’s birthday. He has spent many decades of his life hiking, climbing, camping, and living among the mountain ranges of Colorado, Utah, and Nevada.

Happy birthday, David! Much love from all the humans and canines at Houndstooth Hall. Come see us–there’s always a brew in the fridge for you. (And birthday cake. Banana pudding. Or all of the above. Maybe not at the same time.)

Tiny Tuesday!

I’m not sure what possessed me to put not one, not two, but THREE Aries characters in the Neverending Saga. I guess because I well understand the Aries nature and its range of manifestations. In my experience, Aries + Aries either tend to attract or repel–there’s no middle ground. With my characters, one is on the cusp of Taurus, one shares my birthday, and one falls only a few days after my birthday. Those last two repel each other. The Aries/Taurus character has a mostly good relationship with both of them.

That wee painting (above) uses a Shiner Wicked Ram IPA bottle cap. I’ve only ever had one of those come to me, and naturally, I held on to it because: Aries. I would really enjoy creating some more bottle cap art (and continue to accept bottle caps if you have them). On future Tiny Tuesday posts, I’ll share some of my bottle caps that haven’t made it into art yet, and maybe even some more bottle cap art I’ve done. To get a better sense of how wee the one above is, here it is with a bit more of the wall art in the writing sanctuary.

Tiny Tuesday!

I guess Tiny Tuesday is a good occasion to offer a decent goodbye to this pencil that’s becoming too short for me to scribble notes to myself without discomfort (arthritis in my fingers). So long, Peewee, and thanks for your service. Notice I’m replacing you with another of your kind because you Ticonderoga Noir No. 2 Pencils are the BEST.

Tiny Tuesday!

Share, 2007

Just a wee 4×6-inch canvas, painted in acrylics in 2007. I was looking to see if I’d ever done a painting in the One Word Art series with a particular title, and I haven’t. But in looking at all my photos of old paintings, I see a lot that became part of other works and then disappeared into the unknown. I hope some of them found homes where they were wanted.

Every time we share any part of ourselves, whether it’s been channeled into visual arts, words, performing arts, confidences to people we trust, we take a risk. Sometimes we find affirmation. Sometimes we don’t.

However you present yourself–your feelings, your thoughts, your creativity, your dreams–it takes courage. Never let anyone tell you otherwise. People who make you feel small or weak are not your people.

Tiny Tuesday!

Time to browse the book that inspired this weekly feature, and today I chose this prompt:

 

 

I’ve recently taken out my wee keyboard to see if I can still play any of the easy piano music I learned WAY BACK WHEN. Turns out I can (falteringly); it’d probably be a lot easier on an actual piano. The electronic keyboard really is wee, having only 26 white keys (natural music notes) and 18 black keys (sharps and flats). For comparison, a standard piano of 88 keys has 52 white keys and 36 black keys.

Still a lot of fun though, and coincidentally, this favorite old classic my parents liked to dance to is in the music book, so I took a (very slow) run through it.

Sounds better when Ella sings it.

Where would your sentimental journey take you?

Tiny Tuesday and Song Challenge: Day 26

A pair of tiny heart-shaped ruby earrings Tom gave me on some occasion probably in the 1990s.

Here I am, celebrating another turn around the sun today, and the song challenge is “a song that makes you think of falling in love.”

At my birthday party many years ago, a joint event with two other women with birthdays that same week and an open invitation to a horde of friends and acquaintances, theirs, mine, and ours, I danced for the first time with a man I’d only recently met. He seemed like one of the good guys, but I was coming off one of the worst years of my life, with terrible losses in my family, a broken relationship, some friend betrayals, and the consequences of many, many bad choices and bad judgments on my part. The last thing I wanted or needed was a relationship with a man, no matter how nice he was. I needed to deal with my messy life and make hard decisions about what to do next.

Two years later, I’d marry that good guy, and a few months after that, we would move to Houston. We’ve had quite a life together–the good, the bad, and the ridiculous–and I can’t imagine celebrating all the birthdays since I met him with anyone else.

I think Fleetwood Mac’s “Crystal” is the first song Tom and I danced to at my birthday party that night. He may remember differently–that’s just part of having a few decades together. =)

ETA: Coming back after the fact because of the dreams I had last night–so vivid that after the dream began, I woke up briefly, went back to sleep immediately, and the same dream picked up where it left off. It was about a key person in my life story and evoked an array of memories and feelings. Mostly it reminded me that sometimes it’s good not to get what we think we want and that we–I–need to acknowledge, to myself, the better things about my nature instead of being hard on myself for my mistakes and flaws.

Tiny Tuesday! and Song Challenge: Day 19

Today’s song challenge is “a song that makes you think about life.” Oddly, one of the first songs that came to mind evoked Judy Collins, and though she recorded it, it’s the signature song of its composer, a different female artist.

Then I realized Judy Collins had a 1975 hit with a different song that also makes me think about life, a Stephen Sondheim composition from A Little Night Music, “Send in the Clowns.” Collins received a Grammy for “Best Song of the Year” in 1976 for her rendition. The song was frequently performed by the character Doug Williams on “Days Of Our Lives” in the years when I watched that daytime drama. Funny that the Time cover celebrating soap operas came out the same month Collins won that Grammy and featured “Doug and Julie,” played by real-life married couple Bill Hayes and Susan Seaforth Hayes. I’m not sure if he’d performed the song on the show before the Grammy win, or if that’s when the writers decided to make it Doug and Julie’s song because the characters were so star-crossed in their relationship.

A favorite memory of mine is living on the bottom floor of an apartment in Tuscaloosa and watching Doug and Julie’s wedding on TV. It was the kind of moment that you wish you could share with another viewer (now we have social media for that!), and I remember being so happy and walking outside just as the girl from the upstairs apartment came out. She looked happy, too, and we smiled at each other. “I know it’s dumb,” I called up, “but I’m SO HAPPY Doug and Julie just got married on my soap opera!” “ME, TOO!” she said, having also just watched it, and thus a friendly acquaintance based on a soap opera began.

Years later, I watched the wedding of the characters Luke and Laura from “General Hospital” with a theater full of people at Ferguson, the student center at Bama, where cake and punch were served to us in their honor. Soaps were a BIG DEAL to college students. In graduate school, I took my daily lunch break in the TV room at Ferguson to watch “The Young and the Restless” with other students (I didn’t own a TV anyway, but it was fun to sit with a diverse group of people and react to the show.)


I don’t have clown phobia, but I couldn’t think of anything at the Hall close to a clown to photograph to tie the song challenge to Tiny Tuesday. Then I remembered this little item from the toy box: the character Nemo from the movie Finding Nemo,, who is a CLOWNFISH. =)

Tiny Tuesday! and Song Challenge: Day 5

For some reason Instagram isn’t working for me at all today. I’m taking that as a message to preserve my sanity by knowing as little as possible about how “Super” Tuesday is making people feel and behave. In honor of those who are willing to endure politics with their popcorn, here’s a wee miniature I received recently. Popcorn kernels added for scale.

Since today’s Song Challenge is “A song that needs to be played loud,” I will handle that immediately as I get back to my writing (I don’t know if this song is referenced in the Neverending Saga, but Led Zeppelin is, more than once). “Stairway To Heaven” has meaning in my life, but I feel no compulsion to elaborate. (It’s fine if you’re glad about that.)

What do you like to listen to LOUD?