a different kind of basket case

I'm making a basket- my crafty neighbor Ava showed me how. Cotton clothesline and strips of a checkerboard body pillow cover salvaged from The Bins. This is the first serious use of the glorious new sewing machine I got for my birthday (thanks, Mom!) I even refilled the bobbin and solved a thread tension problem- yeay, me!

progress

Yeay! Just finished the background of the piece for this year's CAP piece (due on the 22nd) . That sounds a little more accomplished and decisive than the full truth: I painted the foreground for the 3rd or 4th time, and I finally like it =D I got a sky I liked yesterday. This bad boy is 93 square inches- looooong & narrow.I think I'll ask $265 for it- there will be A LOT of detail.

i'm a happy basket case

<-- Oscar helped me with this entry. For some it's spring cleaning, but I've been obsessed with organizing for days. The garage & basement worthy Ikea shelves I got last year were a good start, but now I have little piles of things that fall over. Some of that was helped by the bookends my mom gave me for Xmas. I saw that Michael's was having a 40% of all basket sale, so I grabbed Mom & went. I had a list of 5-6 containers I needed for miscellaneous things, bits, collections, and projects. I got the 4 most important- everything fits perfectly, and was on sale- whoopee! I scored an extra one- long, shallow & narrow- a beautiful green, 70% off because it was "Christmas." I'll have that thing overloaded in no time. Now that I have twice as much horizontal space as I did last week, I can get my butt in gear & paint something for the CAP Art (For Life) Evening & Auction. I'm pretty pleased- I got a letter not long ago basically saying "gee, we really hope you can donate again this year." Freakin' rad. I'm so happy to have my work accepted by them for 2 years, and that both pieces sold for more than the value I place on them- now they're back for more because my works sells! How do ya like them apples!?

what do you do with a painting...

that hasn't sold after being shown a bunch of times in a year & hasn't sold? OK, not just 1- a series totaling 21? There are 2 that I quite like & will keep for myself, and 5 that I just don't like & will paint over. Secondarily- do I rename them, or use the same numbers with the new faces?

All are series- monochromatic red, blue, brown & green. I never really liked the red, so those will get erased. The rest are generally paintings I'm happy with- they've just had no hits. Here's a possible cause: they're most expensive than usual for their size because they have about 10 layers forming their collage background & therefore have many more hours of labor.

Should I reduce the prices to what's now standard for me for that size? Retire them? Experiment with the surfaces? Paint over & rename? Paint over & keep the name?