Even more anatomical art!

We'll get to the anatomical art, but first I want to show you an upcycling collage I made. The oilcloth mural above used to hang in the gathering room of the church where Dear Husband and I now attend. After decades and decades with pride of place after having been donated by a parishioner, it suffered water damage during renovations, not to mention looking dated. On top of that, it depicts Saint George slaying a dragon for Mary, Queen of Scots, an allegory for Catholicism defeating Protestantism. So, yeah, maybe no longer something to have in the living room of a Presbyterian church.

The mural was removed and cut into pieces if congregants wanted to keep a memento. DH wanted the dragon, but someone else had snagged it, so he picked up the queen, which we loaded into the car with some difficulty on a windy Sunday after church. He wanted display her on his office wall, so I found a 3' x 4' frame online and invested in some supplies (black paint, silk roses, flower beads, old jewelry I no longer wear).

Then the person with the knight and dragon decided she didn't have a place for it and gifted it to DH. So I purchased another frame. When both had arrived, my Awesome Parents helped me prep and frame them. I then added the three-dimensional flourishes on the acrylic cover, so as not to damage the original mural.

They are so large that with the decorations, we could only fit one into his car at a time, so I will update this post once the second one makes it to the church and the building staff are able to hang them high on the wall above the couch in DH's office.

 

UPDATE: The Knight and Queen have been hung! In Dear Husband's office, that is. Sorry that the light isn't better.

Now to the anatomical art. I am slowly accumulating a collection from cross-stitch to collages to the piece d'resistance, a quilled paper skull and brain. Over the holidays I saw a social media post about the multi-media artwork of Emma Pannell, who uses upcycled materials in her embroidery and beading. I just loved this turquoise-colored hand with its copper wire and stones, so I treated myself to a print and a frame to match the ones above. Since she works in Great Britain, I had to pay a tariff and cut down the A4 size to fit my American frame, but it adds such a pop of color (especially since I left room on the wall for two other pieces I have been watching on Etsy, and they tend more to a brown palette). Now DH and I will have art in our offices in different parts of the city but in the same frame.

The second new piece was a surprise from friend J.R., who made a pair of sooty yet sparkly lungs out of resin and gifted it to me while we were in Tennessee. It reminded me of the antique medical dictionary a colleague had gifted me back in residency, Robley Dunglison's Medical Lexicon (1854). That led to a project on the history of Black Lung combined with a lesson on racial and cognitive bias in clinical reasoning that I have presented locally a few times.

While the semi-circular cut outs on either side fittingly made it look like an ashtray when flat, I don't have a lot of horizontal space on which to display it, and I thought I would get to enjoy the piece more if I hung it on the wall. In my stash of frames from the Goodwill store, I found a white, square one that wasn't quite deep enough to encase the lungs. After a moment's hesitation, I decided to cut out the "melanosis" and "pulmonary" pages from the dictionary as a background. Then I mounted the lungs on the glass to create a sort of shadow-box effect.

Besides the fact that I decoupaged the pages 90-degrees off from the original hanger and had to affix a new one on the back, I'm really pleased with how it turned out: old and new, two-dimensional and three-dimensional, in a spot where I will always see it from my desk.

Tennessee Gals, Part 2 of 2

Did you know that the world's only salt and pepper shaker museum is in Gatlinburg, TN? Well if you didn't, you do now! Andrea Ludden started collecting these everyday items in 1984, opened the first iteration of the museum in Cosby, TN, in 2002, and moved to Gatlinburg in 2005. In some ways it remains an amateur museum, with simple paper labels. But for $3--good for the whole day--it's more than worth the price of admission.

I suspect many people wander over for the same reason we did: long wait at Flapjacks (click here for Part 1). So we browsed most of the way through before brunch, and then we came back and went through the rooms again to look more closely a second time.

It's a veritable "I spy" bonanza of cultural references. Betty Boop? John Deere tractors? Shakers shaped like fruit? Animals? Star Trek characters? Glow-in-the-dark glass? 

Foreground: rainbow trout. Background: Hiawatha

"I never saw a Purple Cow; I never hope to see one; But I can tell you anyhow; I'd rather see than be one." Neither of my companions had read the children's book "The Purple Cow" or had the misfortune to try a "purple cow" (milk mixed with grape juice) at daycare.

These ones reminded me of my "dream vacation" to Santorini with Dear Husband. (We'll ignore the fact that parts of it were almost nightmarish.)

Left: princess kissing frog. Right: origami salt and pepper shakers folded to look like Hawai'ian shirts from Singapore Airlines

Apparently Ludden had actually started with pepper mills, so there is a collection of those, too. This is me in front of an incredibly tall one.

Tennessee Gals, Part 1 of 2

In 2024, I had suggested to a couple of girlfriends that we get together for a long weekend somewhere in the middle of where we all lived. I thought maybe a crafts festival in Virginia over Labor Day, or a she-shed outside Asheville for a weekend of crafting and reading and eating. Well, I needed to wait until after the book manuscript was done, which it finally was in November 2025. However, it wouldn't make sense to travel to publicize it until after it was published in March. That conveniently left MLK weekend in January for a get together in between book-related business. KS had a timeshare in Gatlinburg and wanted to take me to a moonshine tasting, and JR offered to bring food and crafts. My only request was that we prioritize couch time, as I desperately needed to be stationary after an incredibly long year+ finishing the book, taking a leadership seminar, compiling my promotion portfolio, and keeping up with my clinical work. Friday evening I flew down to Knoxville, TN, to spend the night with KS. Then we drove over to Gatlinburg, passing through Pigeon Forge. Reader, I was completely unprepared for the cultural phenomenon and capitalistic sensory overload that is PF/G. The best way I could understand it was as an inland Atlantic City or Ocean City boardwalk: shows! rides! museums! go carts! arcades! live animals (gators, bears, etc.)! tattoos! pancakes!

This is the WonderWorks, whose building was constructed to look as if it were upside down. A little ways down the main drag is another building made to look like it's collapsing from a natural disaster.

Hatfields vs McCoys dinner feud

This is a Titanic-shaped museum dedicated to the--well, you get the picture.

Hollywood Wax Museum, completed with life-sized King Kong on the side of the skyscrapers

 While the interlude through Great Smoky Mountain National Park was lovely,

traffic was wretched through the bottleneck that is downtown Gatlinburg.

Aaaah, at last, feet up in front of the fireplace with football on the telly and mountains out the window. Once we were all assembled, we headed out for dinner at Crystelle Creek, a nearby restaurant famous for the waterfall over its eaves.

We spent the weekend on various mending projects; watched Clueless, which was new to two of us; ate Flapjacks pancakes for breakfast (I highly recommend the original white pancakes--don't bother with the buckwheat ones!); attended a moonshine tasting at Sugarlands (ironically, we liked the whiskey best of everything we tried); visited a local yarn shop (Smoky Mountain Spinnery); and enjoyed the outdoor hot tub.

Alas, a job interview for JR and a guest lecturer who had to reschedule because of snow meant we wrapped up the trip a little early so everyone could get back to reliable wifi. Thankfully I made my connection and got back to Pittsburgh in time to host a history of medicine lecture (from the airport). I'm going to write one more post about what may have been the highlight of the trip: the Salt and Pepper Shaker Museum (yes, you read that correctly!). Stay tuned...

Above: a prodigious ramen noodle! And my bowl of pot sticker ramen--yum. Below: On our way out of town, we snuck in a wine tasting at Apple Barn Winery juuust before they closed.