turtles all the way down.

A box arrived in the mail today from my soul-sister, Michele…aka “my wife”.

Many tiny goodies, each individually wrapped. Hooray! Christmas in October!  We unpacked the whole package onto the table by the woodbox.

OOOOHHH! River rocks, painted to look like turtles! Let’s walk through the haul: OK, the thingy on the top left of the table is a wood plane – ignore that. (It lives on this table.) Likewise, the pelvis-shaped thing in the top center is a piece of wood – actually, that’s also a gift from Michele, but from a few years ago. The two purple thingies are weird abstract pottery pieces that I made – ignore those, too.

What you want to pay attention to are the TURTLES! Two sets of five, and two sets of four. Here are some close-ups:

Here’s a matching family of four…

A family of five…by the way, these colors are not being done justice – each set’s a bit different from the next, in subtle shades of green and turquoise, with gold accents…

Another family of five…

And there was another family of four.

I’m not sure what’s going on with the colors, as photographed – these next two shots? They’re the same piece, one with the flash on, and one without.

Either way, you can tell they’re gorgeous. Normally, I’m not a fan of painting things that don’t need to be painted (like, say, smooth river rocks) but I think I can make an exception for my new stable of TURTLES!

PLUS, two hand-carved and painted trowels!

And here are the ends of the trowel handles:

Plus, a really gorgeous piece of forest driftwood.

Aren’t we lucky to have an artist in our tribe?