Disappointed!

Please read the title in the voice of Kevin Kline in "A Fish Called Wanda". I can't use the word anymore without thinking of him and I love that there's a video of this moment on YouTube.

The other day I dreamed that I was travelling. I can't tell you the country and also not the first part of the dream because there's just a vague idea left of visiting an older lady.
Anyhow, I went to a beach I didn't recognize and half buried in the sand was a small open cardboard box which contents had spilled out on the sand. There were tumbled rocks, golden chains (not real), charms, a pretty wild mix. It looked as someone got rid of their old jewelry making supplies.
Of course I had to go through the box right away and I took apart clumps of golden chain, I picked some rocks and just enjoyed having a look at everything.
You may wonder why I didn't just take the whole box, but I remember thinking that I should leave some for the next person and indeed another person showed up in the end.

Picture via pxhere

When I woke up, I was a little disappointed for a second and didn't even know why. Then it came to me.

It hadn't been the first time I had a dream like that. I know from other collectors that they had similar ones.
Collectors are weird.
Over the years, a lot of my dreams about all kinds of things or events have been very vivid and I can still remember quite a few of them, also because there are recurring themes or locations.
No worries, I'm not going to tell you all of them now 😉

One of them is the department store dream.
I have obviously gone back in time and am in a huge store in the toy department. I only remember it in black and white. Despite having had dreams in black and white, I think that my memory is deceiving me in this case and I blame two episodes from TV shows for that - "Death at Bargain Prices" from "The Avengers" and "The After Hours" from "The Twilight Zone" both of which are set in a department store and both of which are favorite episodes of mine.
(This was before I watched "Are You Being Served?" or they might have been in color.)

What I definitely still know, however, is that I feel completely overwhelmed by the collection of pristine Steiff animals (pre-war) or Barbie dolls from the 60s - at the prices of that time.
Weirdly, it's always only one or the other. I guess my brain thinks I wouldn't be able to handle both at a time, but actually I can't even handle one.
For some reason, I'm standing there knowing I don't have a means of transportation and can't have them all, but how to choose?
There has never been an ending so far which may be for the better. Possibly it would end with my having to be dragged off the store floor because I'm losing my mind 😂

Other dreams take me to a street round the corner where I used to live as a child, to different antique shops. I have no idea why they are always in that street because there has never been any shop at all there in my time.
Not the one on the corner which has a lot of books, but also a few glass cases with small Steiff animals sitting between jewelry or trinkets. Most of them are not special, but there's always one that catches my eye.
Not the one on the other corner which seems to be a mix of jewelry and antique shop.
And not the one in a basement with some steps leading down (no doubt inspired by two real shops in different streets which had stationery, office supplies, and things like that and which went away decades ago), but with a window on street level where I once saw a row of Steiff wool miniatures sitting, at the original price, the most beautiful pre-war ones ever. I woke up just when I wanted to go inside. That one hit hard because I was so close and it really took me a while to realize it had just been a dream. I almost expected them to sit in my cabinet.

These cuties don't live me with anymore which is
probably for the better given Gundel's history
(I'm of course referring to the Christmas massacre of 2018)

I haven't had one of these dreams in a while. I also haven't been at fleamarkets or fairs in years.
That doesn't mean I have forgotten or never miss the thrill of the hunt which makes up a fair share of the collecting experience. Mind you, I wasn't a very good hunter (I hung around in front of book boxes too much) and maybe that added to the disappointment after waking up from such a dream when I thought I had found something really good? 😉

Have you ever gone thrifting in a dream?

The HeatherCat shoes - Part 4, Summer Dreaming

For those who missed the first three parts - which you can find here, here, and here - and those who don't know the HeatherCats yet, here's a little explanation.
"Heather is a friend of mine, a painter from New Zealand. I met her on deviantART and got to know the Essencestudios. I couldn't even tell you in what group it was, but among her talents Heather has a talent for bright, whimsical paintings, many of which are cats, so how could I not be fascinated the moment I saw the first one?" This is from the first blog post I wrote about the HeatherCats and in which you will find the whole story how it started.

I hadn't expected to finish the last part of the shoes so quickly. With the holidays and vacation days, however, and nothing else to do (that I wanted to do, at least ;-)), I concentrated on binge watching - or hearing, rather - crime shows and beading.
Oh, and some crafty documentaries which show in detail how someone is making something, a hat, a wooden inlay chessboard, a barrel or a church window, for example.
It may sound silly, but if my brain refuses to shut off, it helps me to pretend that I'm in one of those documentaries and someone else is watching me. It makes me concentrate on each stitch, each bead even more, the sounds of the thread going through the denim, the snipping sound of the scissors. It doesn't always work, but if it does, it's perfect.
It helps me to calm down and shut the outside world and its problems out for at least a while which is something I really need at the moment.

Back to the shoe, though.
For this side I had chosen another sleeping cat. Now I have three sleeping cats under blue sky and only one caterpillar, but they were so perfect in size and they all have their own charm. Maybe I'll have to get high top sneakers next time, so I can use Heather's vertical designs as well.
"Summer dreaming" is a white cat sleeping on a fence. The position reminds me a lot of the way my Merlin and Greebo liked to sleep which makes me smile every time. I can also imagine that this is my White Dude sleeping under a California sun before those crazy people dragged him off to Germany (if you don't know the story, it was for his best, really).

Just like the caterpillar, this little fellow was not easy to fit onto the shoe. I think I tried the pattern three times before I finally found the right size and position to get his tail on there and still not lose one of his legs to a hole. The sun wasn't as lucky, it had to squeeze into the corner.

If you wonder, by the way, what happened to the rest for my hands, well, I found that I happened to have one tube of the color that is still on backorder after all, so I couldn't stop myself. It went surprisingly well most of the time.
I mislaid the some of the blue for the sky instead, but I ordered so much that that didn't matter. Someone also ordered much too much brown, no idea how long I thought that fence would be. Maybe watching Tom Sawyer's famous fence painting scene had confused me.
So I guess I'll have to think of a design in brown, blue and white now. Any ideas? ;-)

And here's our cat now. I bet he's dreaming of chasing mice and his favorite treats!
I even managed to clean off the blood that had been shed. My friends told me to see it as blood sacrifice to the bead goddess. She has to be really happy because I sacrificed more than once, not to mention all the needles that gave their lives for this project.

This is what the shoes look like worn. I have been asked if I am going to wear them outside, and I keep joking that I don't even know when the chance will come up again with Covid around. Let's say that I won't wear them on a regular basis to avoid dirt and damage, but I will definitely show them off eventually.

Sorry that I couldn't take better pictures, but it's hard enough to get my big feet into a picture - they are a EU 43 which translates to a US 11 1/2 and a UK 9 ;-)

Now what will be next?