The learning curve

We all know a learning curve is the correlation of trying something the first time and the number of attempts to do really well at it. Sometimes urgency demands we figure out how to get good at something really quickly other times it takes great patience and many tries to get it right. 
My latest experience with this is cleaning beaver skulls. I have a few in the freezer from a trapper I know. And last year was not a good year to get them all boiled and cleaned and ready for painting, but this is the summer it will happen and is happening.
Now I have been boiling and cleaning lynx skull for a couple of years and have gotten pretty good at making quick work of the job especially after they have been boiling about 90 minutes.
Now beaver are certainly a different critter. I have bought precleaned/bleached skull of these treee eaters so I thought I was somewhat familiar with their heads. 
90 minute is not enough time to soften all the connective tissue and cartilage in a beaver skull. 2 and half hours is not enough. A 3 hour minimum and then make sure they are well cover with water the whole time.
I also figured out to separate the bottom jaw from the top and clean it first. The collagen congeals if it cools down and it becomes more difficult to separate from the bone. The bottom jaw will split in half as the connective tissue holding the two halves together will get soft enough. 
When working with the top half I remove the large slabs of meat first and then scrape the joints and stuff in back.
The tree eaters seem to be built with way more shock absorbers than lynx have so there are more bones that are a little less fused or kept as semi separate sections. More bumps and more holes.
I now clean out the brain and nasal areas quickly in the process and so many of the holes seem to lead to these two areas.
OK enough of this detail. I know few people ever will need this info.
My thoughts about this whole endeavor in general. I clean these skulls because I use them in my art. Buying them cleaned gets expensive quickly.
I can get them raw from local hunters much cheaper. However they do take up room in the freezer all winter since I do boil them outside.
I boil them outside because everything I read about doing this said it smells bad.
I think it is not that so much as we feel like they should smell bad. Or else an aversion to cooking something you have no intention of eating in a kitchen space.
For myself I use an old rice cooker and a burner under the pan outside because I have no room to cook 3-4 skulls in a pot at a time.
Dental tools are amazing. especially scrapers that let you get to bare bone without damaging the bone but get rid of clinging tissue.
If you run across this and you are looking to clean a beaver skull I hope these notes help shorten your learning curve.

Serious business follow up

I have had the chance to read two of my friend Lizzie's book.
Fisherman and the Sperm Thief, and Sapho's Agency.
 Both are good stories with a unique slant about sexual liaisons in a world lacking enough men.
I highly recommend them and you can buy them at Amazon.

Lost it

I swear last month when I was looking for something else I kept running into these about making various origami ornament/balls with aluminum cans. So I started saving cans including some unusual ones I ran across. And finally at long last I have the cans the tools the time and... Uh wait. What the heck happened to all those posts about how to make these things. I searched everything I could think of "aluminum origami", "can origami", "can folding", "aluminum ornaments"... Zip zilch nada.
 I hate when that happens!

Following my dreams

Sometimes ideas and inspiration come at odd times; in the shower, while in the bathroom, or in my dreams.

 Last night I had a dream about painting on canvas. This is of course something lots of artists do, but I have never actually done so. In my dream the canvass I was painting on was about 4 feet by 8 feet. so extremely large. and I was simultaneously painting two of these.
On one of them were some drawings that I had planned to paint very opaquely on top of my vibrant translucent mystical background. The frustration was trying to see the drawing behind the first painting.

 But that neither here nor there. What I did find interesting is that I had family members who had died making comments about my work and talking about how proud they were of my creativity. Both my mother and my grandfather who I struggled with in life were saying how they always knew I was talented and following this path was the right one for me. 

Anyway in general the dream felt very positive and I feel inspired to go pick up a couple of small canvasses to play around with. I have several types of paint and several media to mix it with as well as other ideas to try out. So yeah. I am gonna play with these.
I am completely ready for failure in terms of achieving anything like my dreams but the chance to play and experiment has me excited.

Following my dreams literally, almost never happens and when I do I seldom achieve the vision of my dream, but I often achieve something interesting. 
Those quiet moments when your mind can speak to you and help you to create are important and to be cherished and listened to.
Seek them out.

Second hand middle class

We try to make our "make do" spirit a virtue. But in reality it is how we survive. Unlike the younger folks exiting institutions of higher learning with massive debt, my husband and I are now beyond those years. It only took a decade to pay off what I owed. 
But we are like so many we know living that second hand lifestyle, not actually because we are adamant tree hugging save the planet at all cost types, but rather because we can't really afford anything else.
In my grandmother's day she raised 3 daughters, through the deprivations of WWII on just my grand father's salary and the ration books. And an active garden that kept them fed along with the extended family. After that was over though my grand mother was quite fond of name brand clothing and matching shoes and hand bags. She can and did occasionally sew something for herself, but she enjoyed shopping. They also managed to save a nice retirement investment and had grandpa's pension that allowed them to travel extensively after he retired.
In my parent's day they raised 4 kids on one salary. though having an extensive garden was also part of that picture. They too managed a retirement saving that allowed them to travel a bit though not as extensively as my grandparents had. My mother also enjoyed shopping and while we were by no means wealthy we did not struggle to put food on the table.
In my time the decrease in financial comfort is much more apparent. We both hold jobs that give us health care and retirement benefits, but we shop at second hand stores and even dumpster dive for clothing. We shop for bargains constantly and never buy name brand anything. We do not lack for most of the basics like food as we stock our freezer with fish and any kind of meat as long as it costs less than $1.50 a lb. 
The luxuries we do indulge in are few and far between. We are Not going to be travelers even after we retire as there will be no money for that kind of frivolity.  We are middle class, but only because we live a second hand lifestyle. 
Part of my hope in indulging my creative side with art and sewing and such is that it will bring an added financial benefit to our efforts.
I struggle to empathize with friends who post about trips here and there. taking a week or weeks off from work because they deserve a break. They complain about salary declines while they post pictures of lavish dinners they prepare from steak and truffles. 
They say necessity is the mother of invention so maybe too is desire. the desire to indulge in a nice meal or a week off work to travel to see family, the desire to buy shoes that are not on the markdown rack, the desire to buy clothing that actually fits rather than what I can afford. I am not seeking a closet full of shoes and matching handbags. 
I asked myself two questions today. What do I want to do? and What am I prepared to do? 
In my creative endeavors there is a real difference in finding financial gain vs. personal satisfaction.

Too Tired to be creative?

It feels like long hours and restless sleep cause by the stress of those long work hours leaves me brain dead when it comes to being creative. But I am not sure if it that or if I am just too aware that I will not have the time to execute anything outside of a very limited scope in terms of time and energy. So there is no point in putting thought into big projects or intricate exacting work.
I recently acquired a stack of jewelry magazines and as I flip through them I do not even let myself consider trying anything I see. Too much time, too much effort, too much learning curve, too much money, too many other pots simmering on the back burners.
I want to sit down and develop some long term plans for my creative endeavors. start taking classes instead of thinking about taking classes. start investing in tools rather than making do with what I have. Develop a structure of time that puts my creative self front and center of my daily routine instead of grabbing time in between other people's priorities.
Unfortunately I think that one way I have tried to justify my need for creative endeavors is to try making them marketable outcomes. I can always sell my bead work so its ok to spend time doing that. I can always give things as gifts so that makes it ok to do it. But the truth is that I have started becoming more invested in processes like quilting where I tend to like and keep the things I make with no other plan for those items. So do that just start to give me the mental space to take classes in glass fusing, mineralogy, jewelry design, and metal smithing. 
But these are thoughts for another day when I do not have the pressure of time pushing me to get enough sleep for that next long day at work.

When It Doesn't Work

Sometimes Life seems to stack the deck against success.
Improvising on an art plan that did not work out. Much to the disappointment of the 7 year olds and myself.
Trying to stimulate some creative writing in 12 year olds who only see writing as a chore and the concept of organizing thoughts as stupid. 
Some days I find it quite difficult when faced with set backs. Especially when I am doing my best to help stimulate the creative process in others.

I have been thinking about what I will do first when it finally gets warm enough for me to be out in my unheated studio space.

Photography will probably be it. I recently asked a professional photographer about how I should take pictures of my art skulls. And his advice was to just try different things. different lighting, different set ups, different cameras, different exposures... And take notes. figure out what works best so that it becomes second nature to get the right set up every time I want to take a shot of a piece I have done.

I admit I am one of those people that always resented the process of learning. Practicing clarinet, practicing hand writing, practicing throwing, kicking... I just hold some tiny hope that one day I will try something and I will be perfect at it. I won't need to figure out why or how or go through the process of getting better. 

It is difficult to excite others to the process of practice and improvement when I resent it too.

So i find myself opting for those processes where control and perfection are not part of the final product. Haphazard or maybe serendipitous would be a better word.