11. Watercolor Class

With the negotiation of the sale of our current house and the hunt to secure a rental in North Carolina, along with the chaos of trying to prepare for the pack and the move, blogging has been low on the list of my priorities this last month!

Even right now, as I sit on my back porch and think about how I am going to miss my favorite part of living here~the songbirds that wake me up in the morning and continue to serenade me all day long~there are a million packing details zooming around in the back of my mind. But since the hardest part of writing is often just the starting, I purposed that today I was going to sit down and begin again!

One of the things that I have completed on my list in the last months was #11. Take a watercolor class. In short, it was wonderful! The Major asked if I was now going to become a 'moody artist'...I told him it depended on how my work turned out! Below is my last painting (a work in progress).

My lovely teacher was Doreen Myers at Center Place in Brandon, a wonderful association that promotes fine arts in the community, and, conveniently for me, is located right next door to the library! Doreen was a wonderful teacher, extremely funny and lively. The class was very small (only 3 of us plus Doreen), so we received quite a bit of one-on-one instruction, which, as I was a beginner who knew nothing of watercolor at all, was extremely helpful!

By the end of the month, in the way of all women starting a new endeavor, I had all the supplies to experiment on my own (paints, special paper and brushes, giant palette and a super cute tote to carry them). And I HAD started experimenting a bit on my own (see green bird, above, which was copied, sort-of!, from my favorite watercolorist's blog~Pam Garrison. If you scroll down about 10 photos in the link, you will find the bird I was trying to copy.)

I also took another workshop at the Bloomingdale Library taught by Laure Ferlita, where the class watercolored a black & white photo copied onto heavy paper (see above). This class was quite informative (Thank you, Doreen, for signing me up!) and Laure's website Imaginary Trips, is an unusual venue for anyone interested in watercolor or sketching. {On a side note, I cannot say enough good things about the Hillsborough County Library System! If you live in the Tampa area and are not taking advantage of this amazing resource, do so immediately!}

In a similar vein as writing, I found watercoloring to be a bit difficult to start once on my own. My lack of sketching ability frustrated me some, although apparently in the watercolor community it is perfectly legitimate to use tracing paper to achieve your outline and then the talent is used to place the watercolor. But to me, I have to confess, that felt a bit like cheating! But what I discovered, as with most things, if you just stop trying to be so impressive, and have a little fun (see above) things become a lot more enjoyable! And since the most important part of any new skill is practice, practice, practice...one must find a certain amount of fun in the process!

So my pictures here are a bit backwards, as this flower (above) was my very first attempt. It turned out okay, if I do say so myself! I learned a few things in this class that I am going to try to keep with me, not the least of which was how to play with the paint!

First, we are our own worst critic. The lovely ladies that I took the class with were so hard on their own work, it hardly seemed that they received any joy out of painting at all! Which I hated for them, as for me the entire thing was completely novel. It could be a bit daunting, to watch Doreen (a self-taught artist, go figure) just whip something right off the page, but I kept reminding myself that nothing that requires real skill comes to any of us right away~you have to enjoy the process of learning. Easier said than done, I know, but an important life lesson for certain.

I believe that I will continue (once I am unpacked again!) to make attempts with the watercolors and hopefully achieve my goal of an art journal. And I know the Major at least will admire all of my efforts (appropriately hung on the fridge), since he was my patron for the experience!

13. Learn to make my mom's Black Bottom Pie: Lesson 1

In honor of Easter, Friday I spent the morning with my Mom, but instead of the usual clutter patrol, we had a lesson in pie.

To fully appreciate this feat, a little background is in order: My Mom's Black Bottom Pie is legendary. My Nana had a housekeeper/nanny named Maggie, who helped raise my Mom and subsequently taught me how to make an excellent hospital corner, who was the original pie maker.

When my Mom decided that she would like to learn how to make it, she asked Maggie come to our house and teach her...but Maggie would show up with a pie already made! Lovely, but no help to the learning process. So Moms dug in and tried the recipe on her own. As she will tell you, you had to eat her first effort with a spoon...for about three days. Several people have asked her for the recipe since those days and made the attempt themselves, with equally poor results.

However, over time, and a little input from Maggie on what she was doing wrong, Moms figured out all the pie's tricks, and it became the desert of choice for family and friends alike. You were special indeed if my mom made a pie for dinner when you were invited.

For years my family has poked and prodded me to learn how to make this dessert...it really is that good, by the way. It doesn't matter how much you have eaten beforehand, Black Bottom Pie always finds room to slide right down.

It is a graham cracker crust, a layer of what is basically homemade chocolate pudding, a layer of homemade custard, topped with a layer of real whipped cream and chocolate shavings. The trick is doing about five different things all at once to get it together...oh, and being able to make all that stuff from scratch.

But I digress...I have always contended that, frankly, I don't really know anyone that I'd go to all the trouble for. (It takes my mom about an hour to make one, longer if she doubles the recipe. And she is a pie-making machine.)

BUT... in an attempt to carry on a family tradition (and to make my husband happy), I decided that I should learn how to master this, if for no other reason than every woman should have a recipe in her arsenal that will completely impress her mother-in-law. :)

So...with supervision, here is the finished result of my first pie-making lesson! I'll need a little practice to get it on my own, but this was a good start. And there wasn't a scrap left over today at our Easter lunch, so I must have done something right. Or so they tell me. (No one has keeled over yet...)