Paper dolls

Paper dolls, a photo by chaimann on Flickr.

Granola bar box, gesso, water-soluble oil pastels and crayons, pencil, pen, pastel - I think that's it.

Little sketches

Little sketches, a photo by chaimann on Flickr.

This week has been art-challenged. Real life, don't ya know? But last week, I made some little sketches for my daily art.

I am off work next week, with no plans to speak of, so I hope to indulge myself in some more fun projects.

May 1 (Every Day in May)

100_3054, a photo by chaimann on Flickr.

I sketched a little bit. I spun the silk on the tiny spindle a little bit. Then I sketched the spindle sitting on the sketches.

That's an 8.5" by 5.5" sketchbook. by the way, to give you some scale of how small the spindle is.

It's May!

How do YOU plan to go astray?



A few years ago there was a thing called Every Day In May, where the idea was to create something (wait for it) every day in May. Sand and I talked about doing something similar this year, but unaffiliated with any groups or rules.

Stay tuned.

Protector

With Roy P. and Roy E., a photo by chaimann on Flickr.

I was born long before fathers were welcomed into the delivery room. That didn't stop this big guy, though. At six feet, six inches tall, he was able to peek over the transom and see his baby daughter's arrival. He wanted to make sure the doctor was doing it right.

When mom and I were still in the hospital, she heard the phone ring at the nurse's station one evening. Shortly after that, a nurse breezed into the room and opened some windows. "She said it was to let some fresh air in," mom told me, "but I knew your dad had called." Sure enough, there had been a tornado warning, and the one thing every Kansan knew to do in tornado weather was to open their windows (to reduce the risk of damage from sudden air pressure changes.)

And look at those hands! You would think a huge man with a gravelly voice would scare little kids, but they loved it when he scooped them up with those big hands and let them touch the ceiling.

My brother and I still have conversations that include declarations like, "Dad would have like that." He's been gone ten years today, but we never forget that he is a big part of who we are.

Katie x 2

Katie x 2, a photo by chaimann on Flickr.

I showed this little painting to T, and he recognized who it was,, so I rate this one "good enough".

Snack time

I wanted a snack, and I decided to draw it first, and then touch it up with some paint. I usually do pen sketches in a sketch book, where they stay monochromatic, so it took some courage to do one in a watercolor book. I would like to point out for the record that part on the right, where it looks like I lost track of the perspective? That IS what it looked like.

My needs for courage are rather mundane, unlike this guy. [Edited to removed embedded video. Man, I hate it when they start playing on their own.]

Learning to swim

In my ongoing quest to incorporate more art - creativity - fun into my life, I signed up for a class on Watercolor Sketching. Aser signed up for it, too, AND called me out on her blog, so now I can't weenie out of doing the lessons.

I spent the first week painting color samples and whatnot in a tiny notebook, which is a nice reference, but hardly sketching. The other night, I told Aser I was afraid that if I combined my marginal drawing skills with my marginal painting skills, it would bring out the worst of BOTH skills.

Of course, I instantly realized the problem with that idea. My mother told me that when she was a child and they went to a lake, she was not allowed to go in the water because she did not how to swim. Because I was young when she told me this, she also stated the logical hiccup in this idea - "How are you supposed to learn to swim if you don't go in the water?"

Indeed. If you want to learn how to do something, you have to do, and be willing to screw it up, and be willing to try it again tomorrow. And let's face it - screwing up art is not nearly as scary as screwing up swimming.

This is all a long-winded way of saying, "Look what I just did!"



It's not perfect, but I think you would be able to pick this item out of a line-up. I am especially pleased at how the yellow background makes the candle stand out.

I tried to find a video of "Candle In The Wind" for our musical nightcap, but I didn't see one that especially turned me on. I found another Elton song, though, that I had not heard in ages.

Lucky Seven?

It's March 5, and it's my big brother's birthday. Cute little scamp, wasn't he? And dig that wallpaper! Don't blame our mom. It was a rental house.

It's also the seventh anniversary of starting this blog. How about that? I realized with some embarrassment that I did not post at all last month. Since I try to steer clear of work and politics, and the winter weather has been remarkably unremarkable, I guess I just haven't had much to say.

Here's some random dude with a birthday wish for my brother.

Bread time

I stopped by the grocery store today to get some chicken for dinner. Of course, I had to go to the back of the store for the chicken, and I returned to the front via the baking aisle.

Bernie and Sand have been carrying on for awhile now about Bernie's new-found bread baking skills, and that, plus the drizzly, foggy weather today, gave me a hankering for home-baked bread. I haven't seen the magazine that is fanning B's bakerman flames, but I was a 4-H-er, and I know a few things about bread.

1. You can make bread with just yeast, sugar, flour, and water.
2. And heat.
3. Yeast packets have recipes on the back.
4. Each box of yeast packets will have a variety of recipes, not the same one on every packet.

So since I was already in the baking aisle, I started flipping over packets, and  before long I found Whole Wheat Batter Bread. It uses whole wheat flour only, and T and I both like our whole grain bread on the chewy side. It is completely prepared in a mixing bowl - no need for kneading, which I usually find tedious. It sounded easy to prepare, and indeed it was.

I ended up with a nice, dense loaf. I think a little kneading might have lightened it up a bit, but it is good and edible just the way it is. I can't wait to slap some butter and jam on it tomorrow morning.

Also at the grocery store, I saw Girl Scouts selling cookies. Girl Scout cookies in January. What is the world coming to?

Off the top of my head, I don't know any songs about baking, but I do know one about someone named Bernie. The video doesn't really have anything to do with the song. Just close your eyes and enjoy the genius that is Dave Frishberg.

The best kind of Saturday

T and I were both off work today, and we had no particular plans. It warmed up enough that I could chip the icy gunk off the steps. And yes, today, January 14, is the first time I've had the snow shovel out this winter. I used it for about two minutes, and put it back in the garage. Weird winter we're having.

I messed around with some artsy stuff, including these two pastel faces. No great shakes, but I have another class coming up next week, and I may as well refresh myself on the "outside of your comfort zone" feeling.



Our chanson du jour was brought to mind by tonight's Lawrence Welk Show on my local PBS station. (Yes, I sometimes watch Lawrence Welk. Shut up.) The theme was songs from Broadway, and Norma sang "Till There Was You" from The Music Man. Considering how much I love old movie musicals, I did not manage to see this one until I was grown. I was surprised to learn that this lovely song was from a musical, because as far as I knew, it was just one of the filler songs on my brother's Beatles album.

This week in faces

This week, I took Carla Sonheim's online art class, Faces 101. Carla is the author of Drawing Lab, and the class utilized several of the projects from the book, with the goal of getting you to draw 101 faces during the week, using different media and techniques, before you realized that you had done something you were sure you could not do. (That's my interpretation of the goal, not her words. She says it is about trying lots of things and discovering your own personal style. But chacun son goût, and YMMV.)

On the Tuesday, I was tooling around the web, looking for interesting portraits I could used as inspiration for that day's project, and ran across a lovely picture of Sarah Bernhardt. From that, I created this:



When I saw that finished picture, I was completely hooked. I'm still sort of stunned to realize, "I did that myself!" I've been drawing and painting and pastel-ing every spare moment since then. Some stuff came out well, some not so much, but it has been fun trying new things. You can see more of my creations here.

I've already signed up for the Imaginary Creatures class, coming up in a couple of weeks. Until then, faces, faces, and more faces.

Speaking of being amazed with myself, and of faces... Anyone remember the group that Rod Stewart was with in the early 70s, before he went solo? Here are the Faces, covering "Maybe I'm Amazed". (See what I did there? Oh, yeah.)

Reasons it may be spring

It was beautiful today. I didn't even wear a coat to church, just a light sweater. We saw people riding bikes, people in shirtsleeves, kids in shorts. The sun warmed up the car so much that we turned off the heater and cracked the window.

Katie, bless her heart, picked up a flea or two somewhere. God knows how - she never goes outside, so either one attached itself to one of us, or it wiggled in through a less-than-tight window. We didn't actually see a flea, but rather "flea dirt" - which is the nice term for "blood-tinged flea poo". The vet gave her a pill, and dosed her with some goop, and we are trying to clean any place where we thing dormant pre-fleas may be hiding, which means "every square inch of your house, including curtains, closets, and under the bed." Yay.

Would some pretty music be nice about now? Yes, it would. Here are Alison Krauss, Yo-Yo Ma, and "The Wexford Carol".

I always wanted it, too

Singer Etta James is terminally ill with leukemia. Her doctor and her caretaker have asked for her fans to pray for her.

Godspeed, Miss James. This is one of my favorite songs ever.

Left-handed

 T had a meeting at a coffee shop this morning, so I took my sadly-neglected sketch book for entertainment. I've seen a couple of things recently about drawing with your non-dominant hand, and decided to give it a go with an old and ornate chair in the shop.



It is a modified contour drawing. In a contour drawing, you look at the subject, not the paper, and draw with a continuous line. I glanced at the paper occasionally to make sure I was close to the right spot, and allowed myself to move the pen to different places sometimes.

We have Sirius XM in the car, and one of the classical music stations goes all Christmas-y in December. It's good stuff, too - not a Bieber or a Mariah in sight. Yesterday, they played John Rutter's Shepherd's Pipe Carol, which is a song I always look forward to hearing. I love how happy and lilting it is. I would join any choir I knew was going to sing this.



The song may be unfamiliar to you, so here is a link to the lyrics.

Not Scrooges after all

T and I haven't put up a Christmas tree for years. We have one, but it is too big for our living room, and we just never got around to replacing it. But this year, we found a nice, and smaller, tree at Target, and after church today, T said, "Let's go get a tree."

It came pre-strung with lights, but just white ones. T wanted colored lights, so we added a strand of those, and now it is extremely well-lit. It took us three trips to three different Targets to get it displayed just right, and we are quite proud of our ingenuity in making a table from plastic storage boxes and a gold tablecloth.

To celebrate our decorating prowess, please enjoy Miss Angela Lansbury singing one of her hits.

December already?

I must have blinked and missed November. Now, all of a sudden, I need to start making tracks on getting T a Christmas present or two.

We bought an exercise bike recently, which required rearranging some of the basement. I put the spinning wheel up on a table to save floor space, and also to lessen the temptation for Katie to mess with it. I may need to rethink this strategy.

Since I took the picture a few minutes ago, she has actually fallen asleep right there, even though she is just inches from a soft, warm chair.

It's pledge time at our public TV station, and tonight I flipped on the TV to see Peter Noone doing Herman's Hermits' hits. When I was 11, a neighbor boy asked me if I would marry him when we were 14. I agreed, and decided that this would be Our Song. Sadly, my family moved away less than a year later, and that was the end of the romance. I still like the song, though.

Do-over Done

Last month, I posted a picture of some wool that I had spun very shortly after I learned how to spin. I decided to try respinning it into something more usable. Today, I finished plying it, and gave it a nice, hot bath to get it cleaner than it had been.



There's not a lot of it, maybe about 50 yards, so it's probably destined to be a stripe on something.

I have reached new lows in dental emergencies. About a week and a half ago, I broke some dental work while eating a cracker. Seriously, a cracker. I finally got in to see the dentist Wednesday, and he set me up with a temporary crown, since it will be a couple of weeks before the real one will be ready. Anyway, today I was eating soup - SOUP - and the crown popped off. Of course, the dentist is closed on Saturday. T took me to Walgreens, where we found a number of DIY tooth repair items. I managed to spackle the crown back into place, but I'm eating VERY gingerly.

Who better for today's musical selection than Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem? This is my absolute favorite song of theirs, largely because of Animal's contribution.


CHEEP! CHEEP! CHEEP!

My Soldiers

I am the daughter of a World War II era soldier.



I am the sister of a Vietnam era soldier.



I am also the great-great grandaughter of a Civil War soldier, the granddaughter of a World War I era soldier,  and the cousin of a Gulf War soldier.

To all who have served, I salute you.

I owe it to mom

As promised, we had snow, and I have to say it was a very unsatisfactory snow experience. It snowed overnight, so I didn't get to see it falling. By the time I woke up, it was a slushy mess, not pretty at all. We got the aggravation without the prettiness. What a rip-off.

T and I both had the day off, which was good, and we both had dental appointments, which was annoying, but not too bad. I broke a crown last week, and today was part one of getting it repaired. I'll be glad to have that done.

As we were driving back and forth to the dentist, we saw that Noodles & Company is finally open at the mall, so we went there for dinner. We discovered it in Indiana when we visited my family, and had been looking forward to them arriving in Iowa.

Tonight, I took a wild notion to bake some oatmeal cookies. I haven't baked oatmeal cookies in ages, but they are Terry's favorite cookie. He used to get them at The Bookstore Whose Name We No Longer Speak, and they had cranberries in them, as well as raisins, so I put cranberries in mine.

I read something today that was giving advice about how to learn to cook. It talked about reading recipes, understanding the "flow" of the preparation, making sure you have all of the ingredients, and so on. It occurred to me as I was mixing up the cookie dough that, even though it's not a regular activity for me, it was easy to pick up again because my mom started teaching me how to cook when I was a young child.

And later, I was crocheting, and I had the same realization. To the uninitiated, a crochet pattern must look like hieroglyphics. Because it's something I learned young, though, it doesn't take me long to figure out a pattern, even if I've gone years without thinking about crochet. Again, this is something I learned from my mom. Most of the things she taught me to do, I still know how to do, even if I do them irregularly. That's a nice legacy, don't you think?

It's autumn, and the moon is almost full, so what better time to end the day with Mr. Van Morrison?