Nanette Thorell

How It Began

Several years ago, one of my sisters became interested in the Ukrainian art of pysanky and (as sisters tend to do) sucked me into the world of Egg Art right along with her.

She has since moved on to other things, but I became fascinated with this process of batik on eggs and – having a predisposed attraction to organized geometric art forms – continued on into the world of the egg: One of the most organic of shapes, and an ancient symbol of life and rebirth. Talk about a square peg in a round hole!

Becoming increasingly obsessed with the challenge of wrapping a flat graphic around an ovoid surface (and having it come out balanced) I experimented with different patterns and motifs I came across in magazines, pottery, and various ethnic art forms. As long as the design could be plotted out on a grid, I could put it on an egg!

Way cool!

In my wanderings, I came across a book called Decorating Eggs: Exquisite Designs with Wax & Dye by egg artist Jane Pollak. Now SHE had done something interesting with goose eggs. She makes them into jewelry! I had seen eggshell jewelry before, but mostly they were pieces cut out from finished pysanky and then placed into a setting. Jane was decorating the pieces individually, specifically for the piece of jewelry. Hey, I like that!

Well it took a lot of hit and miss, searching for a suitable finish, finding a source for eggs, and trying to take the art of eggshell jewelry in my own direction. I finally settled on Ostrich Eggshells for my jewelry. They take the dye beautifully and they have a gently pebbled surface that makes for an interesting background texture. And they are nice and sturdy, being roughly 4 times as thick as a goose eggshell.

The back-filling was a real challenge. I never did find the grey industrial epoxy that Ms Pollak uses, but I did settle on a suitable alternative – clear tabletop epoxy. It has a super hard finish requiring a 48 hour cure, and it’s clear so I can sign the back of the eggshell and my signature shows through. I like that.

My designs? Well they are ever-changing. I specialize in the traditional Ukrainian, Polish and Russian designs typical to pysanky because I really love the colors and the symbolism. But I am constantly inspired by many many things. Textiles. Pottery. Ceramic Tiles. Ethnic Art. The Arts & Crafts style. Art Nouveau. And, of course, Mother Nature.

Re-posted from October 26, 2007

Thunder Mountain

Well, I didn’t want to go a whole year without posting again . . .

Status? Still in the 5th wheel, but very close to finishing the house.

This is taking way longer than I expected but I will be so happy to finally move in, that I will most likely be delirious for months afterwords.

We get thunder and lightning storms every afternoon for the past few weeks. The rain is nice but makes everything humid.  Monsoon season starts around the 4th of July here, and goes through August.
I’ve acquired some tomato plants from Ruby the Postmaster. She started too many and gave the extras away. I came home with 8 little plants. John planted 2 of them upside down in 5 gallon buckets, and I did the rest the old fashioned way. In a plastic bin. So far I am winning – heh.

Mine

Johns

(Original text by Nanette Thorell 7/18/2009 (re-posted with minor edits)

Dave’s Lunch

Well, we are surviving in the trailer without any major difficulties (save a few leaky window corners).   On the ‘glass half full’ side – it’s very easy to keep tidy.  As long as I keep up with it, it’s not a big hassle.  No storage of course, but we keep bulk items in the shed on the other side of the driveway and can restock easily.  On the flip (glass half empty) side, it is prettymuch impossible to cook a decent meal onaccounta there is no counter space.  So one-dish casseroles have become my friend.  We have an outdoor BBQ too, but used it sparingly during fire season.

What?  You say – This is the 21st century girl – what about a microwave?

Well I fried the microwave.  We borrowed another one.  I fried that too.

So now we are using a toaster oven for small stuff.  Of course we still have the trailer oven and stovetop, but am trying to keep the clean-up at a minimum so I don’t use the oven much.  This may change.  We’ll see.

The cats are adapting, as cats do.  This is Dave – occasionally he gets his own meals.

Chipmunk a la pine needles

(Jake took a video of this as well, but it’s too gross, what with the bone-crunching and gut-slurping sounds.  So I’ll just post the still and you can imagine you’re own sound effects.)

(Original text by Nanette Thorell 7/19/2008 (re-posted with minor edits)

Trailer Living

Well, we’ve moved out of the (money sucking) rental and are finally located on our OWN property! Despite the minor inconvenience of the small living quarters, this location feels so much better. For one thing, it is warmer! The mornings are lovely and breezy and it warms up nicely in the afternoon.

Here is a picture of our trailer in the trees:

Trailer in the trees.

Cute, eh? It’s pretty crowded with John and I and the 2 boys but we’re learning to organize our movements so we aren’t always running into each other. The cats are in and out, they do what they want. The chihuahua is in charge of everything, and John has fenced off a yard area for the BBQ and the laundry and all – so Chico is able to go in and out without taking off into the woods.

So here we are!

Original text by Nanette Thorell 5/8/2008 (re-posted with minor edits)

Is Winter Finally Over?

It’s two days into Spring and already we (on the mountain) are warming up nicely. There is still some old snow stuck in the higher elevations among the tree shade, but Timberon snow is all melted away.

We have about a month left to go in this rental, I need to give notice next week and we should be out by the end of April, and in to the trailer. That will be a year since John broke ground on the house.

Since I last blogged: the propane is in and hooked up, we have a big new tank outside in the yard. The electrical is (still) almost finished. Maybe a couple more runs up the hill for our electrician – he lives down in Alamogordo.

Income is trickling in from my eBay business, an auto parts store. John bought some old shelf stock and we have been cleaning it up and selling it. Seems to be doing well, and we made out initial investment back quickly. Now it’s all gravy.

I did take some more pictures of the inside of the house and I will get them up on my nanbiz today. Not sure if I have a link here somewhere, but if I don’t, it’s at
www.nanbiz.net/loghome.html

Better get to that now . . .

Original text by Nanette Thorell 3/22/2008 (re-posted with minor edits)

Slacker Checking In

Fast-forward to the present

I’m calling myself caught-up on this blog, even though there’s a gap of like 3 months due to my procrastinating ways. Most of the time has been spent settling in, figuring out shopping, starting the kids at school, being fascinated with the ever-changing weather, and generally sucking in the clean mountain air and smiling a lot.

Here is a current picture of the log home. It’s coming right along.

House Front (those big windows face east)

Pretty, eh?  The roof is next.  It was delivered yesterday and will start installing it next week.

Local wildflowers growing in our backyard:

Yellow flowers

Original text by Nanette Thorell 10/5/2007 (re-posted with minor edits)

Welcome To New Mexico!

Welcome To New Mexico

The remainder of the trip was uneventful, we stayed the night in Tucson at a pet-friendly, swimming-pool- enabled Heritage Inn motel. Ahhhhhhh. Poooooooollll.

Next morning we headed out early. Drove steadily for many hours. At Alamagordo, we headed up the hill (the 82), the last leg of our journey. The trailer tires had become worrisome, they were heating up and we had to stop several times on the way to let them cool down. Fortunately, the travel gods were smiling on us and provided a nice cool rain all the way up the grade.

Heading up the hill from Alamogordo

We arrived just after noon on July 1 2007. What a beautiful sight. Our rental is on a little hill up in the pines, with a view of the Sacramento Mountains out the back porch. We met the neighbors (B.F. and Gwen) had a beer, reunited with the big dogs, had another beer, and unloaded what we needed for the evening.
We were there for about an hour or so when distant lightning struck a power tower, and killed electricity for a day and a half! Hahaha – welcome to the rural life!

Few random notes: Dave, the explorer-kitty got spooked by a deer and ran up a tree.

Tree kitty.

Ponderosa pines are not great for climbing because the bark is loose and breaks off easily. He ended up traveling along a branch to where he could jump down to the roof of the house.

Original text by Nanette Thorell 10/5/2007 (re-posted with minor edits)

The Road Trip

. . . OK now where was I? Ah. Still in California. Right.  Here we go . . .

Those last two weeks were endless. The boys and I did do a lot of packing, but not nearly enough (as we found out) when we finally did began to load up the trailer we had a lot stuff still to go in boxes and bins.

Note to self: If we ever do move again (not likely – heh) we do NOT have to take every single little thing.

We finally – with the help of our friends (thanks guys!) – got that bad boy loaded and closed up for the road. Check it out:

Homemade Moving Van

This is a flatbed carry trailer. John built walls and a ceiling and voila, A moving van! Very cool.

We departed August 31 at 5:00am. In the morning – yes. I had all the animals and one kid in my Saturn. John had the other kid in his truck. We had walkie-talkies, which were great for communicating back and forth. It took us 2 days of hot hot driving and looking at trailer-butt out Interstate 10 East through lower Arizona and New Mexico.

Some pics of the trip…

Early morning.

Trailer-butt going through those wind generators near Palm Springs, early morning day 1.

Here’s how the animals rode . . .

Dave

Dave, would NOT stay in his cat carrier but was perfectly happy on the passenger side floor among the candy wrappers and feet.

Diego

Diego, on the other hand was very good and stayed happily in his carrier. As long as we had it high enough so he could see out the window.

Chico

Chico was the baddest. He kept running back and forth between windows, barked at anyone who looked at him, and tried his best to explore the pedals under my feet. We must have hauled him out of there at least 10 times. Finally he found a comfortable spot (comfortable for him) wedged behind my head sitting on my shoulders and panting in my ear.

Brubaker (parrot) was in her cage, behind my seat she chirped every once in a while but didn’t say much.

More next post . . .

Original text by Nanette Thorell 8/14/2007 (re-posted with minor edits)

Yes, I am a slacker.

I’m slacking this blog because, frankly, there’s just not much to write about at this point. We’re packing what we can. The kids are out of school so I’ve put them to work as well. I took my computer in for a tune-up which included an infusion of decent RAM (thankyouverymuch) and a new DVD burner. So the ol’ box-o-wires is primed and ready for her new home (I checked ahead – broadband is available. Whew!).

Meanwhile, I’ve acquired some cool books: Growing Food In The Southwest Mountains by Lisa Rayner,
New Mexico Gardener’s Guide by Judith Phillips and
Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond by Brad Lancaster . All look promising, in terms of helpful information and pretty pictures.

Three more weeks to go!

Original text by Nanette Thorell 6/9/2007 (re-posted with minor edits)