Studio #1 The Little Red House

In 1969, as a late-blooming flower child (22 year old mother of a 5-year-old boy), I rented a half-heartedly remodeled shack in Carmel Valley with Allan, my new husband and Michael’s soon to be adopted father. The shack barely held in the warmth in winter in its singly-constructed walls and you could smell the tar on the roof softening from the heat in summer. My old friend, Gary, builds better looking and better constructed chicken coops.

But, it was $400/month and we were just crazy enough to love it. We tacked posters on the walls and painted the tiny bathroom a glossy and distracting sunflower yellow with green trim and built enormous, blazing fires in the stone fireplace that ate up firewood like Godzilla gobbled skyscrapers and barely kept us warm.

After a pep talk from my friend Suzanne (see post, “Suzanne”) I walked into our little shack one day with new eyes. I evaluated every corner of the tiny living room. I imagined what I might need for design and business classes at the college: tools, books, pencils, paper, paints, glue; about the time involved, the deadlines, goals to be met in between the regular lines of my life story of kid and husband and work. Stay up later? Get up earlier? And where? Look at this - this living room is the size of my closet back in Ohio.

Then, my eyes landed on the far left corner by the kitchen - a tiny side table, lamp, rocker no one sat in because it was too far from the fire. My juices flowed. My eyes widened. I called to Allan, “Come and bring your measuring tape.”

I can hear my mother and see why she called it a “far out little pad.” My first “studio” was a built-in corner table made from a 1/4 wedge of pie-shaped plywood about four feet deep, smoothed out along the outside edge with wide bender board and stained a shiny beet red with many layers of polyurethane. Muted yellow and orange striped Indian Print curtains hid all the artistic paraphernalia underneath - boxes of fabric, paper, whatnot. I still wasn’t sure what I would do in this space. All I knew was, it was mine.

On that corner table in the Little Red House I painted umpteen million little squares in hues, tints and washes of every color under the sun for design class; wrote a thesis for psychology class; graphed a basic business plan for another class; painted Easter eggs with little Mikey; built gingerbread houses.

My mother provided a sewing machine and I conjured up all the tricks and tips from Mrs. Shedlosky’s high school Home Ec classes and tried to forget that once I sewed the needle into my index finger through the nail, and yes, it hurt like the dickens when I had to crank the sewing machine handle backwards to get it out. They never let me into the Home Ec classroom alone again.

But, more careful this time around, a few years older and perhaps five minutes wiser, I found a pattern for a long Boho style dress and followed the instructions. Hey! It was pretty good! I could sew!

My Bohemian friends flocked to the corner table for my sewing skills (and willingness) and paid  cash for skirts and dresses of India Print spreads. We split the legs of old blue jeans and made them into skirts, embroidered complex designs on work shirts and denim jackets. Here is a design I called Allan's Wedding Shirt.