Maybe I was slightly inspired by that one Facebook frame. 

This is the time of year when I usually put up a Halloween-themed bulletin board, but somehow, this is what came out. Potentially I could still do a Halloween/All Souls’ design next month, but lately I have more design work than I can keep up with. Some of it actually pays money! And some of it is for fun, but it’s still serious to me. I’m working on something a bit blue, which I might as well say after that orgy T-shirt. Now I know what will happen when I post adult material on my public blog. My father will send me a personal message about how my mother can’t see things like that. My mother won’t see it because she has never, ever, ever understood any of my work and doesn’t look at it unless you force her to, and even then I suspect she’s looking but not seeing, the way, when I was a kid, that I could hear her without listening. My brother will post a sort of funny joke about it on the blog, and I will be charmingly reminded of the day that he, as an 11-year-old, confronted me with the shocking realization that AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long,” was entirely about sex. My grandmother hasn’t had internet since the hurricane but she’s got a stained glass panel of a naked lady above her bed, so, you know. It’s my blog. I’ll post whatever I want.

Anyway, I had the idea about the hands with the candles and after I made them I started thinking about the quote: I’ve almost done the Dumbledore one about turning on the light a couple times, and I was leaning in that direction. Then one of the kids hanging around the school (it was during conferences) started asking me a million questions and I had to spent 10 minutes explaining to her why we call the holidays the “season of lights” and then she told me to just make the text, “Happy Holidays,” which I have never once done. The Rabbit called me up at the same time and didn’t like the Dumbledore quote and then started reading quotes about light to me until I finally chose this MLK one. The complete quote reads “Darkness cannot drive our darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

What percentage of all elementary children will even understand what a chalkboard is? I don’t think this school even has any chalkboards.

Friday, Monday, and Tuesday, I went to school to put together this retro bulletin board. The original idea was to make it look like a smartboard on the right side and a chalkboard on the left, but they were out of white butcher paper. I had to use construction paper for the writing. The lettering is hand torn and the rest I cut out freehand with a scalpel. I hadn’t really figured out how to create the effect of a smartboard’s silver frame using the material at hand, and my time is limited anyway, so it’s best that the simpler concept prevailed.

This piece took a little more than 4 hours. I had my apprentice (the Girl) for the first time in a while, and that really helped it go faster. She’s tall enough to just reach the tip of the frame, and she’s a lot more patient and fastidious than I am, and there were tasks that she could do unsupervised that she could do just as well or better than me, like going back after the rubber cement dried to fix the places that hadn’t gotten sufficient adhesion, and then cleaning all the extra bits of rubber cement off the paper.

Other than that, I’ve been cleaning my office out, trying to get ride of a lot of material objects that no longer serve me, many of which I’ve been carrying for decades without ever using; setting up a floor desk, which I expect will be better for my back; and generally degunkifying the place, which I’ve occupied continuously for 7 1/2 years. I’m not quite ready to forsake all my material possessions, but a lot less clutter would be nice.

Will probably start posting more regularly soon, but possibly not 5 days a week. There many be another big project in the works. Maybe even 2!