Hello, Winter!

Yay!  First snow of the season.

Looked very crisp and snuggly this morning, too bad I had to go to work.  Fortunately, the pavement was warm enough that the roads were just wet rather than icy.  Meant a nice slow day with plenty of time to work on the store samples, at least.

Got some pickles started, as well.  They were the leftover radishes from the Thanksgiving relish tray, and I'm hoping to have the pickles done in time for the Christmas relish tray.  I'm doing tsukemono-style pickles, sliced thinly and pressed with salt.  If everyone likes them well enough, I may be able to get a bit of a subsidy to buy a proper tsukemono press instead of using two stacking tupperware containers with weights in one.  

In progress

Thought I'd post a few in-progress paintings that I'm working on for the show next week:

This one is going to probably be the most heavily reworked.  I don't know what the hell I was thinking here, trying to just paint a checkered tablecloth without doing a few sketches first.  The perspective problems just make me cringe.



This one is just an abstract, it's almost done, I just have a few details to add.  I found an entire package of metal leaf that's going to be going to a good cause  - my painting instructor would be so proud.

I think this one's self-explanatory.   He may get a friend looking for his bucket depending on my time constraints.

Novels and Knitting

Well, NaNoWriMo is going fairly well so far.  It helps that this year I had a setting planned out.  I'd actually started to write a story in this setting several years ago, but I'd been writing it all longhand between classes, and and some point the envelope I was keeping my pages in kind of vanished somewhere and is still probably floating around campus.  I still had all my setting and character notes, though, so I'm using them to start over from scratch.  

I'm also coming along well on getting some stock together for the craft show next weekend.  I have high hopes of actually selling some of my paintings, and I've got some jewelry pieces I'm pretty proud of, too.  I'm thinking that I'm going to change my policy and go ahead and put stuff that I'm working on to sell in my Ravelry notebook.  After all, most of them are original patterns, I could be selling the patterns through Ravelry, or be getting some attention focused on my Etsy store.  which reminds me, I need to get to work finishing up my tags and business cards for next weekend.  I'm pretty excited about the whole thing - every now and then I need a little validation that my college degree is somwhat useful.