Morning Glory Garden and Equipment Failure

I love "Heavenly Blue" morning glory flowers. When I lived in Cambridge I tried to grow them and had some success, though the maintenance people from my landlord cut down most of the ones I had been growing on a fence. Some of my friends loved my flower paintings and commissioned pictures of my favorite blooms. This is one of those commissions. It's hard to reproduce the exact celestial shade of blue in these flowers. That isn't the fence where the destruction took place, it's from elsewhere in the neighborhood. I rarely if ever see them here in Metro DC area, either the climate isn't right for them or people just don't want to grow them. 

Meanwhile, right after I transcribed this picture from the old color slide, I experienced a major equipment failure. A disintegrating old paper frame on a color slide got jammed in my film-to-digital transcriber and even when I ripped the old slide apart I could not get the plastic slide tray out of the viewer. I think this crucial piece of equipment is kaput and I must get another one immediately so that I can continue my projects saving art from decaying color slides. Strangely enough, I have found the best examples of these transcribers, including the one that served me for years before it jammed, at "Hammacher Schlemmer," which is usually a catalog full of ridiculously expensive toys and frivolous novelty gifts. I have slide transcribing equipment which came with two scanners I own, but have found that the scanner-based slide work isn't very good at all. The new scanner at Hammacher isn't hugely expensive and unlike the one that just failed, it has an option to work with my Macintoshes. I just don't have the time or energy to shop through hundreds of scanners to find the perfect one. It will mean that you won't see any vintage art on this Blog until I figure out how to work the older and newer scanners. Please excuse this moment of frustration. 

Morning glory picture is watercolor on illustration board, 9" x 11", January 1986.