Colored Glass and Jewelry

anytime anyone has ever helped me move all of my belongings from one location to another there has at one point or another or two or three been a comment about the amount of "junk" i own. i always reply with a good amount of denial and explain that most of my possessions are related to my photography and art...and therefore can not be qualified as junk! i may some day need that shoe box full of test strips of photos from my days in school...they could be really useful in some really cool project i might like to try some day! and there's no way i could ever have enough paints or pastels or pencils!!! if my friends want to give me the art supplies they no longer use, how can i say no? it's much more cost effective to accumulate these items rather than spending money on them as they run out. and i will always need paint brushes, canvases, and paper...and the scraps could one day come in handy too! i've never been able to cut this collection down...and i never will. so there! :)

i must admit that the remaining amount of my possessions that i own great quantities of are not related to art. but! i do have reasons for keeping them. my other biggest collection is books. i never sell them or donate them and i continue to acquire them even though i'm no where close to having read what i do own. the purpose for this is that i do hope to have my own library someday...a place where my future children can feel surrounded by the magic and joy of literature...where i have a nice big cushy window seat to laze about in with a nice big fat book:) books are treasures. screw digital readers! (even though i would take one...only for traveling purposes!) so there...you see...i can't get rid of my books.

and finally...jewelry and colored glass vases and objects. several of these items belonged to my grandma bonnie...now if you wanna hear about someone that never threw anything away...it would be my beautiful grandma bonnie...and yes...i resemble her the most between my paternal and maternal grandmothers...and yes...maybe i am a lot like her when it comes to holding on to things. but anyway! irrelevant! i have no where near the amount of stuff she had...of course i'm not quite an old lady yet either. moving on. when grandma bonnie passed away, i was up at school in iowa and couldn't come home in her final moments or for her funeral...it was a very difficult time for me. my mama asked me if there was anything from her belongings that i would like to have...i said, without hesitation, her colored glass bottles and basically any jewelry that no one else claims! they were my most vivid memories. i loved the way the light shined through the glass and painted the colors on the walls...how the bottles glowed like inside was something magical. she wore a lot of jewelry...and it could have been pieces she had for years or something she just picked up at the thrift store...but i loved here eccentricity! i wish i could have had her in my life just a little longer...to enjoy her presence as an adult. at least i have pieces of her that made her beautiful to me...and so i hope that someday my grandchildren see magic in my collection of colored glass and wonder where i've been with the jewelry i use to wear. to tie this in with art i could say that i've photographed the colored glass bottles before...but i don't have those cds with me or files on this computer. someday i will do some funky photography with the jewelry too!

well! would y'all like to see what i use to draw and paint with? haha:) imagine at least 3x the amount in each picture...that's about how much i have:) so thank you to all of my friends who have passed along their old art supplies to me! i haven't had to buy anything new in years!!! i really would be a starving artists without these hand me downs!







oil pastels, prisma colors, and graphite pencils...






paint brushes and acrylic paints...a woman can never really have too much! an artist...who happens to be a woman that is. at least i don't own a crazy amount of shoes:)