Fish Pillows

 

August 12, 2020 – Fish pillows

 

         I find the lack of finances is the mother of invention.

         Let me take you back a few years to 2012.

           It was during a downturn in my business, I was beating the bushes for new clients, trying to widen my network. I was exhausted trying to scrape enough work together to make a living and in one of my Mom’s weekly letters she sent a quarter page of a catalog that had fish pillows, with the notation, “These are cute.”

          One thing about my Mom, she decorated the house for all the holidays – not over the top, but still in recognition of the major holidays. She’d start with Valentine’s Day hearts, followed by St. Patrick Day shamrocks, then moving on to Easter, she would put out her egg collection. The next holiday she celebrated was the Fourth of July, decked things with American flags, during August she would drag out a bunch of sea shells, followed by Autumn squirrels, nuts, and leaves and then into the traditional Christmas Decorations.

          Mom rarely sent gift ideas for herself and this was in a letter about three weeks before her birthday in June. 

          If you are like me, you run out of ideas over the years and I welcome them.  But, this time, when I started to look for fish pillows the price tags gagged me.  The first one I found was $49.99 for one pillow.  I don’t think so.

          Due to my pride, she was the last person I wanted to know that I was in a financial down turn. I was in a quandary – how to afford the usual Birthday gift on hardly any extra money.

          I had time on my hands at the same time as lack of money. In the past, I had been creative enough to paint decoys, paint a pair of mallards on the bottom of crab basket driftwood and, paint Egyptian lilies on a fabric room divider. Why not get out my brushes and paint my Mom some fish pillows.  Sure, why not, I can do that.

          I dug out the brushes and paints, I found large remnants of rubber backed fabric that was used as sun block on kitchen slider drapes and I visited Walmart to pick up pillow forms and some of that interesting liquid paint that stays like a ridge once dry.

          Next, I hunted the internet for interesting fish pictures in order to get fish ideas.  That was actually the hardest part.  I wanted something tropical and colorful and realized I’d have to dream up imaginary fish.

          Having a photocopier that enlarged, I could play with the pictures and increase or decrease them to come up with six imaginary fish designs with bright colors.

         At my office work desk, having been used only for St. John Title, I sketched and painted samples with water colors to make a sample to work from.  That is where I toyed with different colors for my make believe fish.

          When I painted the fabric squares. I stalled a bit between the painting of the watercolors on the sample pattern, and switching to the acrylics for the fabric.  Two different mediums and I had to re-learn the “shading bit” – but it was a work of love and inspiration solved the problem.

          Each pillow has two sides, one of each design.  The final touch was the fishing line with a hook holding a heart wherein I signed them “Tess 2012”.

         Like mother, like daughter, I too decorate my home as the seasons click  by. 

          We are in what I call high summer and that requires my sandpiper decoy standing in a platter of shells on the sofa table, the mantel lined with shells and coral, and a rock crab climbing over a platter of shells on the kitchen table.  On my to-do list for a couple of days was fetch the fish pillows out of the closet.

          Today I added the fish pillows I captured when we cleaned out my Mom’s home a week before her death.  They had given her much pleasure, and it gives me pleasure to know she enjoyed them, enjoyed my creative artwork, my original designs. Now I get to enjoy them.

          We may be in shut-in with this Covid19 situation, but I can easily imagine we are vacationing at a condominium down in Myrtle Beach when I glance at the fish pillows.