October!!

Erik Holland is a local artist whose work I'm very fond of.  He's also the teacher I took acrylic classes from last spring.  He posted on Facebook some of the plein air work he's doing and I fell for this one of the Virginia Street bridge, which is marked for demolition at some point in the future.  When he said he was putting in Ryrie's, I knew it would be priced out of my range and said so.  He messaged me that he owed me a favor and named a price I couldn't refuse.

He messaged me yesterday that it was done and it was ready for pick up so while I was in town today, I went by his studio.  I was really disappointed.  It didn't occur to me that he would have painted in oil.  He was fine with that and said he'd go ahead and put in the gallery and paint one for me in acrylics, same price, he'd treat it as a commission. 

He lives in the Riverside artists lofts and doesn't have a car so I said as I was getting ready to leave that I could do him the favor of transportation to paint sometime.  That sometime turned into a concrete time.  I'm going to drive him to a plein air class he's teaching for the Nevada Museum of Art the end of this month.  The bad news is that I have to pick him up at 8:15 in the morning.  The good news is that I get to participate in the class and he'll loan me an easel.  I need to pull out my sketch pad and warm up before then!

I got the reds and purples warp on and going but I didn't have a clear idea of what I was doing.  The purple clearly is wrong for the colorway of Red Hat Society.  The first towel looked enough like Strawberry Shortcake that I did a pink, ice lilac and lilac before I decided to weave off the rest entirely in red.

And that's exactly what I've been going, alternating between the two reds in the warp.  I'm hoping there are six ladies who would like to buy their Red Hat Society friends a Christmas gift. 

These are the two reds and they're different enough that I decided to use both.  I wish I had done all ten towels in reds - oh well.  I took samples from both to ask Erik for their real color names since obviously Lipstick is merely a catalog name.  The left one is scarlet and the right is alizarin crimson. 

 I had to find time to make soap Friday.  I was really low on Lemon Bar and since soap takes three weeks to cure, that was the last day I could make it and take it to the fair.  I stopped by the Artists Coop today to see if they needed more.  Their back stock was gone so I left a dozen bars and can't make any more until I order more supplies.  I will never again enter a major craft fair with only four months to prepare, starting from scratch.  Never!

October is here.  I love this month.  It's still warm due to the high pressure system over the West Coast, but that's supposed to change tomorrow and bring in the real October.  Our CSA box now has pumpkins and squash.  It's been too hot to turn on oven and bake them - ham and acorn squash coming right up - and I'll finally be able to bake break again.  I love this month!!