As it happened (from my Journal archives)

March 23, 2007

Friday 5:20 pm - I'll start cutting #708, Pea Picker tomorrow. Although this is a small puzzle, it's going to take a while to cut, since I'm going to do it in my Creative Style. I expect to complete the puzzle Sunday and have it on eBay the same day, might get delayed until Monday. Going to be little rest next week, I need to then work on the next item for the Puzzle Parley and then focus on the following two Puzzle Parley items.

March 23, 2007

I'll start cutting #708, Pea Picker tomorrow. Although this is a small puzzle, it's going to take a while to cut, since I'm going to do it in my Creative Style. I expect to complete the puzzle Sunday and have it on eBay the same day, might get delayed until Monday. Going to be little rest next week, I need to then work on the next item for the Puzzle Parley and then focus on the following two Puzzle Parley items.

March 26, 2007

Monday 8:55 pm - I continued working on the Pea Picker puzzle today but did not finish it, I'm now about 2/3 done, cutting continues to go well. I plan to finish it tomorrow and launch the auction.

I left for Mixed Media fairly early in the morning, but events unfolded which led me to delay the start of cutting for more than three hours. The outdoor area between the "main" building and my shop has been filling up with all kinds of items: metal screens, broken lamps, all kinds of kiln items, an old door, various pieces of lumber, crusty buckets of paint, plastic bags and pieces of cardboard, broken furniture, and much, much more. On my way to my shop I wanted to put a waste basket which was blocking my path to where it "belonged", but there was podium in the way, and the podium couldn't go back to where it belonged because there were chairs in the way, etc., etc., so I finally decided to expend a massive amount of energy and reorganize the whole place, including moving shelving, emptying work bench drawers full of countless items and putting things in place with like items with near like items. So for the first time in years, all kiln related stuff is together in one place, paints supplies in one place, electrical grouped together...... Well there is still work to be done, but a huge improvement. A few weeks ago a refrigerator which had been sitting out in the garden area for almost a year was removed from the property, and the rest of the garden area gone over with some outdoor furniture tossed and plants replanted...... So the whole place is looking up!

Could barely stay awake this evening in an American Tango class. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz!

March 27, 2007

Tuesday 2:48 pm - The Pick Picker puzzle is done. I will start the auction soon and then catch up on email. Windstorm hitting San Diego today, quite a bit of damage next door to my shop, with large wedding tents blown down and swept into a large writhing pile of torn flapping plastic and swaying upside down bent metal poles. My shop is OK, but I had to do today's cutting to a background of intense banging and rattling as the wind did its best to try and peel off some of the sheets of metal, plywood and fiberglass which make up the walls of the shop.

Tuesday 9:40 pm - Auction launched.

From the auction description:

This puzzle features a print I made using archival inks from a scan of a painting by Zawadi (Lanetta Wilkes), a local artist who is a member of Mixed Media Gallery & Studios, the artist's collective where I have my puzzle shop. This is the second time I have featured a painting by Zawadi, the first being "Self Portrait", the 8th puzzle of the 100 Puzzles Project, auctioned in December, 2000, the first year of this project.

This highly abstract image is a picture of a person, sitting, deciding on two peas: a Green Pea or a Black-eyed Pea. The actual Pea Picker painting is about 8" by 10", painted on wood. The puzzle is the same size as the painting, except the edges of the scan were cropped slightly to form straight lines - the painting on wood does not have super straight edges. I was attracted to the painting as soon as I saw it and I'm happy I was able to purchase it. The horizontal grain of the wood is clearly evident in the scanned image used for the puzzle.

My elaborate Creative cutting style is a time consuming cutting style. I try to make every puzzle piece a work of art in its own right, sometimes pausing quite a while trying to figure out how to harmonize a particular cut in relationship to the other cuts I've already made. I rarely make Creative styles puzzles anymore. I've had an order for just one Creative style puzzle since the beginning of 2006, mainly because I raised my price for this style to $3.00 per puzzle piece, an that is still too low for the time it takes to cut in this style! So here is an opportunity to pick up one, perhaps at a big discount.

I must say that this cutting style sometime stresses the normally excellent Finland Birch wood I usually use for my puzzles; in this puzzle I had a number of small chip-outs on the back. Also the matte paper I used was stressed a bit. I'm seriously thinking of switching to use a very thin lamination in the future Creative style puzzles make from digital images, and alternate wood. Lithographs cut better and do not require lamination.