Last year’s January Cure didn’t go so well for me. I did something to my good knee early on and as it was only getting worse, I put myself to the sofa with the mutts and Netflix. That knee is no better now and the knee on the already goofed up leg is failing because it’s had to do too much to make up for the other knee. I won’t discuss other skeletal failings at this point, suffice to say I need an android body.

Another issue that will hamper my Cure this year is Art. It’s insidious. It slyly creeps into your life as an innocent and fulfilling hobby and then spreads like herpes. A friend got me interested in acrylic pour painting. It is very cool and very rewarding and makes watching paint dry actually exciting. It’s also a good way to participate in art for someone like me who cannot draw, much less paint.  What acrylic pour painting requires are, a sense of color and space. Lots and lots of space. Overheard in this house at the beginning, “Do we ever actually eat at the dining table? Okay, let’s do this there.” I’m no longer sure we have a dining table. We must, all those paint bottles, cups, popsicle sticks, jars, jugs, canvases and stuff can’t be floating on air. I just can’t see the dining table.

There’s a big mess to be made with acrylic pour painting. As the name implies, you pour paint. When you pour, there is inevitably runoff. Turns out, when this runoff dries, it too makes interesting and colorful patterns that can be peeled up, cut out and turned into really groovy pendants. No room on the table for that. Had to set up a jewelry making station in the actual craft room. That was art station 2.

I posted a picture of a couple of pendants I made and was asked “Do you sell those?” and answered “I guess I could”, which prompted “Can you do one in these colors <insert wild combos here>?” and I answered “I could try.”, which led to art stations 3 and 4, an Etsy shop and 12 hours a day prior to Christmas trying to balance art and rest for my busted up body. 

So, there’s art all over the dining table, 3/4 of the craft room desk my son and I built along two walls, a card table in the craft room and a card table in the den. We have renamed the house “The Mad Artists Laboratory” and our Etsy shop is named after the friend who started us down this road (probably rubbing her hands and cackling maniacally), my son (who also got sucked in) and me, JJaphne. If you’d like to see (and dear lord I hope you buy, because I need to reclaim some space and pay my Home Owners Insurance and Property Taxes) our stuff, the Etsy shop is here: JJaphne Jewelry and Art.

So, this year I have to have a different relationship with The Cure. Large projects will have to be done during the week on my son’s days off, and might not get done at all. The smaller “Jean Safe” tasks will be accomplished on weekends and on three days during the week which may or may not coincide with The Cure Calendar. 

That’s enough for the rationalizations. On to the first real assignment to clear out and organize a drawer in the next post.