Fiddle progress

I've made progress on the fiddle. The neck stayed black but the rest of it was painted white. I'll be doing circles of buttons around old cd's for the body. The neck has pieces of the old cd's cut up and glued on. Years ago AOL used to send out cd's, I saved them, so I have lots to play with. If you heat them up with a heat gun they are very easy to cut. This afternoon I'll start glueing buttons and cd's down.

What have I gotten myself into???

The big event for the year in Weiser is the National Old Time Fiddlers Contest. It takes place the third week of June. There have been large plywood cutout fiddles, painted brown, that hang around town during that time. This year it was decided that there should be a contest to decorate the fiddles, it was announced about six weeks ago. Since the announcement Don has been dropping hints that I should do one, and I've been saying no. Yesterday I started getting some ideas and decided maybe I should do one. After I picked up the seven foot fiddle(which barely fit in my car), I read the paperwork I signed and realized that I have less than 2 weeks to do this.



This is how it looks now. I'll take more photos as I work on it. I'm still not sure what I'm doing to it, but some of the ideas are a diamond pattern (I've been working on a diamond quilt) or black and white circles. I had breakfast with a friend who suggested I use some of my buttons. It has to be weather proof so fabric would not be a good choice. So what do you think?

Home from another road trip

We've been on a very busy road trip to Nevada. Some great clouds on the way there.

Part of our trip took us out to the middle of Nevada on highway 50 (America's loneliest highway). So we had to stop for photos of the shoe tree. Those are all shoes hanging from the tree. It's been there for many years and the gully beneath the tree is full of shoes that have fallen off.


Also on the trip Don bowled in a tournament, we celebrated a one year olds birthday, saw three of our five kids, and I did a 10k race with my son. Twenty years ago I used to do a bit of race walking and averaged a 12 min. mile. I still walk, but not at that pace or distance so I was pleased that I averaged a bit less than 15 min/ mile. My feet weren't quite as happy.


My son came in 1st in his age group and my 5 yr old grand daughter ran in the kids race, doing a mile in 15 min.

It was a fun trip, but now I'm ready to get back to the studio and actually make something.