Zany Doings in the Name of Art

The other day I got myself a container of 500 brand new pins and retired the old ones.  The old ones were bending under the tasks I demanded of them, no longer sharp enough to go through many layers of fabric and fiber.  But I didn't want to discard them altogether...so I found an empty baby wipes box from when Lucia, 19, was in diapers, and made it a home for retired pins.

Retired pins.  What a concept.

The paint on the lid of the retired pins box demonstrates that I've been using these not-so-sharp pins to hold fabric to foamcore board while making sunprints.  This paint is dark spruce green, a mix of emerald green and black.

But I can use these no-longer-sharp pins for low-stress jobs, like holding fabric to foamcore board during sunprinting.  Which is why there's green paint on the lid of the retired pins box.

In today's other nutty activities, I painted the scales of pine cones of a Norway spruce in our yard.  I'd already preserved these scales in a mix of hot glycerine and water.  As they dried, they lost some of their green coloration, so I sought to preserve that today by painting their ends with Pebeo Setacolor paint in light green.

All the better to add them to a fabric rendition of this photo:

I'm calling it Deconstruction.

And you know what else?  I made another sleeve for a noodle today.

Yessss!