Long ago, when I was much younger than I am now, I stumbled onto a job working at what was then the Natsoulas/Novelozo Gallery in Davis, California. The job entailed answering the phone, taking messages, filing papers, preparing mailings, and popping open bottle after bottle of champagne when a new exhibit was installed.

It ended up being a short-lived assignment, but it was, in it’s way, magical, and part of the magic was that going into work, I was always surrounded by art. Everywhere I turned there was something wonderful to look at and experience, and while there was a panoply of world class art for me to enjoy courtesy of Roy De Forest, Bob Arneson, Roberta Laidman, Marilyn Levine, Richard Shaw, Wayne Thiebaud, and David Gilhooly, some work resonated more deeply with me than other work did.

Some of my favorite work was that created by Peter Vandenberg. He sculpts large ceramic heads that look a bit like a Modigliani meets the Easter Island heads. One piece that I grew particularly fond of was one of a woman with windows for eyes because, the artist explained, the eyes are the window to the soul.

It was a thoughtfully whimsical piece, and I was sorry when the exhibition came down and what I came to think of as “my lady with the window eyes” was replaced with some other piece that did not capture my fancy to the same degree, but it was that sculpture I recalled as I began work on two more sugar skulls for my 2020 Day of the Dead fence decor.

In 2018, he first year I put up a Day of the Dead yarn bomb, I installed just one:

For Day of the Dead 2019, I decided to add two more:

And this year, I decided to add still two more crochet sugar skulls.

My only problem?

I have to crochet them.

So yesterday I dug up my trusty Day of the Dead yarn bomb graph, got out some black, white, and papaya color way yarn, and got to work. I decided that since the eyes are the windows to the soul, that is where I would start, and late this afternoon, I had gotten this far on the white skeleton head:

and this far with the variegated papaya color way skeleton head:

Obviously, I have a ways to go, but I will continue forward, one stitch (and two yarn bombs) at a time.