Saturday, March 16, 2019

Last week on Art With a Needle


Great drama in our home this weekend; I was awakened at 6 AM Friday with beeping.  Was it a truck backing up?  No, upon exploration it was a never-before-heard alarm from the Bose radio in the living room.  Either the 8-year-old or the 1-year-old, both of whom had been visiting the day before, had apparently activated the alarm while playing with the remote.

After only three minutes of hitting the wrong buttons I managed to turn it off and stumble back to bed.  Mentioned this to my husband, who said he had the user manual in his desk and would look up how to turn the alarm off.

I was awakened again at 6 AM Saturday with beeping.  He had not looked up how to turn the alarm off, but at least I knew how to stop the beeping on the first try.  Later we got out the user manual, followed the directions, and couldn't unset the alarm.  Cussing.  Looked up the Bose website.  Nothing worked.  Cussing.  Finally I noticed that the remote in my hand didn't look like the remote in the user manual.  Guess what -- the Bose in the living room is a different model than the Bose in the kitchen, although they look the same and both have always responded to signals from either remote.  Not that we ever tell the radios to do anything other than turn on and off and change volume.

And the remote sitting in the kitchen belongs to the radio in the living room, while the remote sitting on the table in the living room belongs to the radio in the kitchen.  Since the 1-year-old likes to take things from room to room, we suspect her as the culprit, but then it's always more comfortable to blame somebody else.  The other remote worked.  The alarm will probably not beep tomorrow morning, although I wouldn't put money on it.

Anna left a comment on my post where I described my unsuccessful attempts to make stitched "homes" for our gallery show:  "Thank you for the insight into your process.  I love that you can just push through the try/fail cycle."  Anna, I guess I love that too, although the fail part of that cycle is not much fun.  However, it does help to document the failures.  First, I can often get an amusing (to you, at least) blog post out of the most abject mess.  Second and more important, analyzing failure helps you figure out what to do next, whether that's a tweak to the technical process or an understanding of why something didn't meet your artistic expectations. 

A couple of other readers left comments that they like the stitched homes, even though I rejected them.  I took heart from Mags' and Mac's comments that they like the pyramids, even though they look like they're falling on their faces.  Maybe I will finish them and make more, leaning, bent, crumpled, bulgy.  Among lots of other falling-down structures, they will look deliberate rather than pathetic.  At least that's the plan.  So thank you all for your words of encouragement!

Here's my favorite miniature of the week, a sprig of lavender from California:





 

1 comment:

  1. We, too, have occasional unexplained beeps. Usually ours is a smoke alarm that needs a new battery. It is getting harder (I’m thinking that has something to do with age and my deteriorating hearing.), though, to tell where those beeps are coming from. It IS annoying.

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