I was surfing around the blogosphere today, and when I dropped in at May Dreams Garden I found a quite amusing Friday the 13th post up. She sent us off to visit all sorts of wonderful places, and one of the inspirational blogs we were sent to was photographer David Perry’s. He demonstrated using a wide mouth mason jar as a tripod, and of course I immediately had to run off and try it.
These are shells Jim and I collected on the beach of the Atlantic Ocean in Spain when we visited there.
Here is another shell, much older, that Jim found in Zae Hollow a few years ago when we were fixing fences.
Aside from all that, I haven’t really accomplished that much today. I kept the fire going, fed myself and the animals, did three massages, paid bills, ran errands, took Ruby for a walk, did four loads of laundry, vacuumed the worst offenders in the carpet sweepstakes, and tried to get the living room dusted.
This is a difficult thing to accomplish, because there are oodles of wonderful art objects to look at. Today I started off on the coffee table and after I polished the obsidian ball and its companions I picked up the quartz crystal ball and spent some time looking through it. It is a wilderness of fractures and rainbows in there and I almost didn’t escape from it.
Then I got fixated on a cork carving that my sister gave us years ago. She found it at an open air flea market in San Diego over 25 years ago, and bought it for less than a dollar. The glass in the oval was loose, which was partly why it was so cheap. Jim fixed it up, and it has moved around with us ever since.
This thing absolutely amazes me. I am fascinated by the little summer house, especially the benches in there. It is truly three dimensional. Take a look at the cranes down in the bottom of the scene.
This just blows me away. Somebody painstakingly carved all that scenery, and glued the leaves on the trees. I’m afraid I got stuck in this piece for about 20 minutes, drawn into the scene as I was polishing the glass. Then I turned it over.
The tags under the price tag say “Made in China” and “Thank you”. FOUR DOLLARS AND NINETY-NINE CENTS.
I’m sorry. That just boggles my mind. How fast do these people carve anyway? How much did this artist get paid?
I’m happy to hear you enjoyed my post! I’ll probably continue to post some “mason jar macros” periodically.
And that is an amazing cork sculpture. One wonders who carved it, under what conditions, or was it done assembly-line style? It’s interesting, none-the-less!
And so the circle is completed. Beautiful!
that cork summer house is so pretty
(how much was $4.99 worth 25 years ago…?)
About $10 — still not very much.
$4.99!!!! I can’t get over it! The craftsmanship looks incredible to me, I can’t imagine that a machine could do that, just a really low paid artisan. Or the Chinese government subsidizes it so the Americans will buy all the cheap stuff, putting our own workers and businesses under then raising the price since we can no longer make anything ourselves. Not to be able to compete at those prices anyway. Sorry for the rant.
Frances
Now, take a deep breath. . . Bear in mind that this price tag was affixed to the object sometime before 1982. Actually, that fact doesn’t make me feel that much better, but at least the thing was made back in the days before our balance of trade became so incredibly lopsided. This had to be the vanguard of the trend, though.
However, this is why I am so very proud that all the shoes I presently own and wear, including my work boots, were made in the USA.
As consumers we participated in this problem, being willing to buy cheaply made crap from China even though it generally didn’t last as long so we had to replace it sooner, thereby actually spending more over time for whatever it was than we would have if we had spent more for the first item and buying American made.
Our desire for More Stuff has made it necessary for us to have bigger houses. We have so much stuff we can’t keep it in our houses and have to pay for mini-storage. Why is that? I’m just as bad as the next person, I have a whole entire drawer full of t-shirts I have acquired over the years. How many do I actually need? Probably 8 or 10. Back in the “old days” people could pack every bit of clothing they owned plus their bedding and dishes and pots and pans in one big steamer trunk.
I love seashells. Those ones are gorgeous.
We were so enchanted by the different colors of these shells, which were strewn all over the beach by the little town of Mazagon, just north of Donana. Definitely a memory jogger for me to look at these.