Koi

I just finished another "treasure box" pendant. This one has a little personal history behind it. The first thing to bear in mind is that my father loves sushi and always has, long before it ever gained the popularity it currently has in the U.S. When I was a child, the only place you could find a Japanese restaurant was in a major metropolitan area. This essentially meant that whenever we went on family vacations (which tended to be in larger cities), we always ate at Japanese restaurants. The second thing to bear in mind is that I hated Japanese restaurants as a child. You couldn't get a decent hamburger or plate of spaghetti at any one of them - just ick, weird-looking food that tasted funny. (In an ironic twist of fate, the Short One's favorite place to eat is our local Japanese restaurant - he'll slurp up soba noodles, munch on vegetable tempura and eat avacado maki any day of the week. But I digress...) There was only one thing I enjoyed about going to a Japanese restaurant and that was the koi pond that almost all of them had at that time. Naturally, my parents encouraged my enthusiasm about the koi, and I always insisted on spending a good amount of time watching them. As an adult, I do not have a koi pond, have never raised koi and hardly ever see them, but I still love to watch them when I do.

I've had a koi pond piece in my sketch book for the past four months, and the store opening finally motivated me to try to make one for the first time. I made the little koi out of polymer clay. The box is filled with hand-tinted resin. As usual, I made the box itself from PMC. I love the way this turned out. In fact, I really want to keep it. This suggests to me that it probably is good enough to go into the store, so that's where you'll see it next.

As an aside, all of this talk of Japanese restaurants made me remember the time I had dinner with my family in the Ginza in Tokyo, back in my 20s. The fish was so fresh that it was swimming around in tanks, literally. After my Dad ordered his sushi, the waiter brought one over to him, flopping around in a basket, for approval, the way a sommelier presents the label of a wine bottle to a patron for approval. When the sushi arrived, the carcass of the fish was draped elegantly around it, in a decorative display. This in itself would not have bothered me so much, had the tail not still been twitching, which it proceeded to do during the whole dinner. I suppose it's only fair to "know" one's food, if one is a meat eater - which I am - but I have to admit that this is one of the reasons I still don't eat sushi.

Thanks for stopping by!

ps I keep forgetting to post this. I've been seen at Art Bead Scene! ABS had an article on skull beads the other day, and mine were among them. If you like skull beads, pop on over here.