Lines and Sidelines

Still Snowing

2008-02-10T07:54:00.000-08:00

Although February is the shortest month, even in a Leap Year, it always feels to me like the longest. It's almost six weeks since the Christmas holidays, and it will be six more weeks until Easter. Post holiday dieting and economy have lost their novelty value but not yet produced results to brag about. Although hours of daylight increase, they tend to be overcast, and my God, when was the last time I saw some colour outside of a grocery store?

Yes, I've got that most Canadian of disorders, the February Blahs. I often wonder if people in warmer climates are afflicted with this annual visitation of ennui, or is it purely for the enjoyment of northern peoples?

As far as I know, there is no escape from the Blahs unless you actually get on an airplane and go south. All the little dodges people try, like making Margaritas at home and pretending you're in Mexico, offer only the most temporary relief. You just wake up the next morning, all blah again, and with a headache too. Years ago there was an article in the Ottawa Citizen about a family that made an elaborate plan to beat the Blahs, involving an all-day drive with stops at all their favourite places, but of course everything went wrong and in the end they were the beaten ones.

But we're Canadian, eh? We know that if you just keep waking up, day after day, spring has to come in the end, and will be all the sweeter for the wait.

I'm trying to work out a composition for my snowblower picture, and thought this vertical format might be good.

And I'm working on getting lights shining through falling snow. So far I haven't got close.

There are always trees. Some of them are even green.

This isn't a sunset, just the reflection of one from the south facing window.

More Fun In The Snow

2008-01-21T16:45:00.001-08:00

I've been having some fun with this little folded-paper sketchbook I made by following the instructions given on Nina Johansson's blog. (Thank you, Nina! I tried to link to you but couldn't get it to work for me. Still the techno-dummy on the block.)

It was really easy to do with just a ruler, scissors, a few minutes of measuring and cutting, and a sheet of BFK Rives printmaking paper that I got for Christmas. It folds easily and is heavy enough to take watercolour washes without buckling too much. The soft, almost fuzzy texture absorbs the paint in interesting ways, giving slightly blurred edges, which work well for me since that's how I view the world through my thick bifocals. I think the off-white colour works surprisingly well with these little snow scenes. There's no gouache used on the tree branch; the whitest areas are the natural colour of the paper.

I definitely want to try to make a more permanent sketchbook with this paper. The only fault I find with the little quickie book is that it has no firm cover, so it's hard to use the double spread. A somewhat larger book with a sturdy cardboard cover would be great.

I've been dabbling in watercolour for decades, using it frequently for sketching but always growling, "I'm not a watercolour painter", because for me the famous "happy accidents" never seemed to happen. There were lots of accidents, but none of them were happy. Results were almost always disappointing. I wasn't using cheap paper, either, although many of the images posted here such as the one below, were just scrawled in my Robert Bateman sketchbook.

Now, strangely enough, I have found two good papers in one month. The other one is handmade by a company with an Italian name - Rossini? Rossellini? - I've foolishly gone and lost the label. It was a sample pack of about five small sheets that I bought somewhere, sometime, probably at Wallack's in Kingston a year ago last September, which was the last time I was in a bricks-and-mortar art supply store. I seriously need me some more of this stuff. I have only one sheet left.

The paint seems to take on a life of its own on this paper, but in a good way this time. It does not race around in puddles and go splat. It looks for a good place to settle, and a good colour to settle with. It's so cool to just float the colours on and watch what happens. An expensive entertainment, I suppose, but worth at least the price of a good box of chocolates, and it isn't fattening. Oh, yes, this paper did curl a little, but I never did stretch it. The need to stretch paper is another reason I've never prospered with watercolour.

The Stage

2008-01-03T09:21:00.000-08:00

One good thing about recent events at our house is that I finally got the junk room cleaned out. Once it was all painted and clutter-free, we set it up as a sewing room, with the machine sitting invitingly on the table in front of the window. This was only for looks, of course; I haven't even sewn a button on in the last six months. But it is lovely to be able to leave the door open and see the sun streaming in whenever we pass by. It makes the whole house look bigger and brighter.

When this was my daughter's bedroom, I never spent much time looking out these particular windows, which face east and south. I'd forgotten that they give a pretty good glimpse of the river if you can ignore the big Mac's Milk sign stretched across it. Not good enough to put "view of the water" in the real estate ad, but good enough to lift the heart when the rising sun turns the water a peachy gold. I've always been able to spend hours at a time looking out a window, whether there was a view or not. It's one of those talents that don't just exactly fit on a resume.

As I started to sneak my art supplies out of the closet, a few at a time, it occurred to me that I could set the sewing machine aside, use the tabletop to rest my palette (and a bottle of water, and some brushes) and put it all away at the end of session, and the room would stay pretty neat. This has worked pretty well, except for the putting away and staying neat part.

So the sewing room is gradually morphing into a studio. Since lots of bloggers are posting pictures of their studios lately, this is temporarily mine.

Directly across the street in front of the south-facing window is a vacant lot with a storage shed on it. I've come to think of this empty field as a stage, with the storage shed on stage left and a little white house on stage right, and a backdrop of evergreen trees planted in the back yards of the next street.

Usually the stage is empty, but occasionally someone walks past with a dog. Or a garbage truck passes by. Or a school bus rolls up and ejects a bunch of children. That's about it for activity on Maple Street, until people start arriving home from work at the end of the day, and it's dark by then.

One day when I was sitting there, three children in snowsuits galloped onto the stage, which was covered with untouched snow. They ran around making trails of footprints, and flopped on their bellies, and threw sprays of snow at each other and tried to stomp out an area big enough for a rink.

Then they ran back to their house. When they grow up, they will probably tell their children that they played outside all day long in winter, but the whole event only took five minutes.

The next day a man appeared with a snowblower.

He cut random paths through the snow, more or less following the paths made by the children. I wondered if he was going to clear the space for a rink for them, but he didn't go near the little oval they had stomped. Perhaps he was just testing the snowblower. He also only stayed five minutes, which disappointed me because I want to make a picture of someone using a snowblower and it's hard to see most of the neighbours at work because of trees and other obstacles blocking the view. (Well, you don't expect me to go out in that cold to sketch, do you?) But the winter is young, and it's a year of heavy snow, so I hope to get it yet.

Breaking the Ice

2007-07-28T06:12:00.000-07:00

Hello out there. I haven't checked my comments in a while, and didn't realize people were inquiring about me. I sincerely apologize for seeming to ignore you all. I am truly touched by your interest. Believe me, reading your blogs every day has been a lifeline for me during the past few months.

It's hard to talk about painful events. Everyone has enough pain in their own lives and I figure nobody needs a play-by-play commentary on mine. Nevertheless, here's a little background to explain my long absence.

My daughter was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in April, at the end of the school year. She has been battling depression since her last year of high school, with baffling recurrences every spring and fall. We thought that for some reason she just couldn't stand the pressure of exams, never suspecting bipolar disorder because we never saw her in a manic phase. Until now. Lithium makes her sick. They're still trying to find the right medication.

As she was in no condition to take on a summer job, she couldn't renew the lease on her apartment in Kingston. She has moved back home, putting her furniture in storage and her education plans on hold. This arrangement is far from ideal. The quiet lifestyle that we enjoy here has limited appeal to a young woman in her twenties. Besides, living with her father's health issues is stressful in itself, and that's not a level of stress that she's well equipped to handle at the moment.

Her psychiatrist is in Kingston. You can imagine the awkwardness of that in a family with no driver's license and a $50 taxi ride from the nearest bus or train station. Let's just say life has gotten expensive, but we have been blessed with great friends who help as much as they can.

This has kick-started us into a decision we've been putting off for years: to sell our house and move to a city that has better transportation and medical facilities.

We've known for a long time that we would have to move one day. At the very least, we need a more handicapped-friendly house for my husband. He's no longer able to manage stairs, and he's not able to tolerate extreme temperatures, so air conditioning is becoming a must-have for summer. He also needs to be closer to a good hospital. However, he's always resisted change of any kind, even little changes like switching the furniture around. Up to now he has refused to consider even the possibility of moving. The seriousness of Alex's condition has finally convinced him to make the effort. Having made up his mind to it, he's become enthusiastic and is looking forward to it now, so that's one huge obstacle out of the way. As a Queen's graduate, he knows and likes Kingston. Ottawa would have been an equally acceptable choice, but the price of housing there is far beyond our budget, so Kingston is where we will be house hunting once we get to that.

We decided on this way back in early May, and hoped to have the house on the market sometime in June, after doing a thorough house cleaning and a few repairs, aiming to be out by early fall. It's all taking a lot longer than expected.

So many little home repair jobs were postponed over the last couple of years while we lurched from one crisis to the next. Now they all had to be done at once. Summer being the the peak busy season for workmen, getting professional help for some of the jobs proved impossible. I still have two doors that need hanging, and a loose stair railing that needs securing. I seem to have spent the entire summer on a ladder, with a paint roller or a screw driver, a drill or a staple gun; or else on my hands and knees with a scrubbing brush, or hauling huge loads of garbage to the curb.

I must say, the house has never looked so nice. We've finally reached the stage where we enjoy it, between sweepings and moppings. The windows are clean, the floors are clean, we are clutter-free. My pictures are hung on the walls instead of being stuck behind the furniture.

The cats are not so pleased - they are locked out of the bedrooms for fear of getting the new bedspreads all haired up.

The downside for me is that all my art supplies were stuffed into a closet, and there's no corner of the house that I dare to mess up enough to get into anything interesting. I'm looking forward to getting settled again, but have no idea when that will be. We haven't had any offers on the house yet. Of course, fall wasn't the ideal best season for selling, but there was no way to get the work done any sooner. We're now expecting to be here all winter at least. At some point we'll probably slip back into normal living, which will mean another big clean-up effort next spring... I know, it's useless to try to look that far ahead.

I did try to keep up my daily sketching, and succeeded (at least sporadically) into July, but then lapsed for a couple of months. In December I started dabbling again. The watercolour above is an attempt to capture a snowy day. I think it looks more like rain.

It feels good to get this posted. When you've neglected a blog as long as I have, you wonder what you can possibly say to start off again. If anyone is reading, Happy New Year.

I've Been Tagged!

2007-05-11T20:28:00.000-07:00

Imagine my surprise, while reading Casey Klahn's blog,"The Colorist", to find myself in the list of blogs being tagged. Why, I had no idea that Casey knew I read his blog daily. Apparently, there are ways of knowing who's reading you. One of these days I really have to sit down and find out how to do all these things. Anyway, I'm totally flattered and also have a huge case of stage-fright. What's everybody looking at me for?

Hmm, seven little-known things about me. There are a lot of things I hope are not known, but seven little things I wouldn't be embarrassed to have known...

Hmmmmmm.

1. Most of my gainful employment has been as a secretary. I started in my home town in a lawyer's office. After moving to Ottawa I worked for five years at RCMP Headquarters as the secretary to the Officer in Charge of Criminal History Files.
The main thing I took away from that experience was the determination never to name a child of mine Wayne or Wade, since that was what all the criminals were named.

2. Some years later, I had a few temporary and part-time jobs that sometimes overlapped. I worked for the Anglican Diocese of Ottawa, and at the same time for the Ottawa Torah Institute, a Jewish yeshiva. They were both very nice work-places, but working two part-time jobs sucks. There's a lot of travel time involved, and you don't get paid for that. I finally got a permanent job with the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, a missionary order of Catholic priests and brothers. For a week I went around asking, "Did you hear the one about the priest, the minister, and the rabbi who needed a secretary?" The Anglicans and the Catholics laughed, but the rabbis only looked puzzled. I think they were waiting for the punch line. Unfortunately, I never did think of one.

3. I have a phantom child. My daughter Alex is an only child, but some people don't believe that. When she was little, she had one of those dolls that looks like a real baby, a girl doll named Jenny, but she wore a blue sleeper because we didn't believe in colour-stereotyping girl dolls. Alex took it everywhere, but she would get tired of carrying it and hand her over to me. I would walk around with this doll on my shoulder and go into automatic-mother-mode, absently patting it as if it needed to be burped. Apparently quite a few people thought it was a real baby. To this day, I run into old acquaintances from Ottawa who, after being updated on family news, ask, "And your son? How is he doing? He must be big now!" When I tell them I don't have a son, never did have one, no second child at all, they stare suspiciously at me. Clearly, they think I'm lying. Maybe they think I named him Wade and he ended up in prison.

4. I have one near-sighted eye and one far-sighted eye. I may have mentioned this before; it's one of the excuses I trot out regularly to explain blurry detail and bad perspective in my pictures. It's supposed to be quite a rare condition, but in my family of four siblings, three of us have it, and I've met a surprising number of other people who have it as well. Maybe the doctor who told us this was just trying to make us feel special.

5. I won a prize for shooting at targets with a pellet gun. That's the only kind of gun I've ever handled, and I was nagged into trying it by my husband, who likes guns of all kinds, but to my surprise I enjoyed it and did well in the gun club competitions. I was only in the beginner's category, but I got the top score. Seldom in my life have I been able to brag about anything requiring eye-hand coordination, so I'm making the most of it here. My sister, the one with the 20-20 vision, could hardly believe her ears when she heard. "You????!!!" she exclaimed. Yes, me!

6. In the past year or so, I've taught myself a small bit of Scottish Gaelic, and hope to learn more. It was the first language of both of my MacNeil grandparents, he a MacNeil from Christmas Island in Cape Breton and she another MacNeil from the Codroy Valley in Newfoundland. It wasn't passed down, except for a few snatches of song. A few years ago I was reading a novel by Jane Langdon in which a character remarks that most of us, if we met one of our own ancestors, would be so separated from them by barriers of language, education, culture and custom that we would have practically nothing to say to each other. In other words, we would be strangers, foreigners, to each other. For some reason that bothered me, and reignited an old desire to learn Gaelic. If I meet my ancestors in the hereafter, at least I'll be able to say Hello.

7. I don't have a driver's license. Well, this one really is embarrassing, and something I've avoided mentioning in blogland. Furthermore, I live in a rural village with no buses or taxis. Yes, it is a horrible inconvenience. No, I don't intend to get my license. I actually did learn to drive, and would be all right if the roads were kept clear for me, preferably with no other car within sight, but the Ministry of Transport is strangely unwilling to do that for me. Consequently, I'm a great walker.

Whew! That was hard. I don't think I could find another seven facts about myself to save my soul. As it was, I had to dip into the dodgy stuff for the last one. Now to put the arm on...I mean, graciously nominate - seven more bloggers to be tagged. I hope I'm not committing some terrible faux pas here. I have a long list of favourites that I visit frequently, quite apart from the daily reads s listed in my sidebar. Some of them are so illustrious that I would feel presumptuous tagging them, and others are just so popular that they must have been tagged many times before. However, here are seven that I enjoy hugely, and I would love to hear seven facts about them.

Some of these links aren't working right. I will try to correct them, but it's quite late at night and I really need to leave it for now. I think the names are right, though.

1. Doreyme. http://doreyme.blogs.com Edith Dora Rey, a vibrant and prolific professional artist who lives in Montreal. There's almost always something new here, and it's always fresh and original. I loved her tree series all winter. For some reason she gets very few comments. I don't understand why that's so. I myself have never commented there, because I'm intimidated by the lack of other people's comments. They must know something I don't.

2. Hashi at Hashiworks http://hashiworks.blogspot.com is always making something interesting. She has recently taken on the "One Mile from Home" challenge since Julie finished her 365 days and retired. I'd love to join her, but my life is too chaotic right now to commit to anything like that. I'd have to call it "ten feet from home".

3. African Tapestry. http://rnllvanwyk.blogspot.com/ A recent discovery for me, but a very impressive blog, mind-blowing in fact, full of wonderful paintings and equally wonderful writing.

4. Carol Marine's Painting a Day. http://carolmarine.blogspot.com Very good quality paintings produced with great regularity. http://carolmarine.blogspot.com

5. Dawn Breeze Daily Paintings http://dawnbreezepaintings.blogspot.com/ Beautiful and inspiring work.

6. Christopher Stott. http://christopherstott.blogspot.com/ Beautiful paintings in lovely, cool, Canadian light.

7. Dee Farnsworth at http://deefarnsworth.blogspot.com/ Check out her remarkable pictures of fires.

Crocus, Finally

2007-04-20T10:02:00.000-07:00

As everyone knows, April has been unusually cold this year. The crocuses (croci?) in our yard got snowed on twice after first rearing their brave little heads, but here they are at last, none the worse for it. It was such a beautiful day that I was comfortable in short sleeves as I toured the yard for the first time this season. The recent wind storms did a lot of minor damage, leaving a litter of small broken branches all over the ground, but no large ones. My vegetable garden is almost dry enough to start working the soil. I tied up a new clothesline and hung the wash out to dry in the sun. I'd forgotten how much I enjoy hanging out the clothes in summer, and working in the garden. After being housebound all winter, being able to get outdoors is like a whole new life opening up.

Cranberry Glass

2007-04-20T09:50:00.000-07:00

Another piece of family history, at the opposite end of the scale from the homely horn cup. This pretty little glass, about the right size for juice, was brought over from Ireland and treasured through what must have been very rough-living decades. Perhaps it was once part of a set. My husband remembers being allowed to drink milk out of it when he was a small boy visiting his grandmother, but since its gilt and paint trim is starting to wear off, we never use it now, except for the times when I take it out of the china cabinet and try to capture it in paint.

Horn Cup

2007-04-17T16:16:00.000-07:00

This little charred cup made out of a cow's horn has been passed down through my husband's family, who were early settlers in what is now Stittsville, Ontario.

One day their log cabin burnt to the ground, and the horn cup was the only thing recovered from the ashes.

It probably was never very pretty on its best day. After its trip through the flames it was charred, scarred, and ugly, but for a hundred years it has spoken about endurance and survival.

2007-04-13T14:45:00.000-07:00

My infatuation with Ukrainian Easter eggs did interfere with daily drawing, unless you count drawing on eggs, but I'm back at it now. Just some carnations...

a few objects from the cupboard...

and, of course, a cat.

Jelly in the Bowl

2007-04-13T10:47:00.000-07:00

My daughter, home for Easter, found a forgotten package of orange Jello in the back of the cabinet. "Ooh, Jello! Let's make it right now."

It seemed like a lot of excitement over plain old Jello after I had gone to some trouble to stock all her favourite foods for the holiday, but, oh, well, it's certainly not hard to make. On goes the kettle and out comes the mixing bowl.

Confronted with that familiar chemical fragrance and in-your-face colour, I was suddenly catapulted back through time. Food fads come and go, but there's always Jello. An old skipping rhyme popped into my head, one of the first I ever learned.

Jelly in the bowl, jelly in the bowl,
A-wig-a-wag, a-wig-a-wag, Jelly in the bowl.

Sausage in the pan, sausage in the pan,
A-wig-a-wag, a-wig-a-wag, sausage in the pan.

This was accompanied by vigorous waggling of one's hind end, hopefully without missing a step, which is quite a feat if you are very small and just learning to skip. We children thought it was hilarious and a little naughty.My daughter had never heard that one. She thought it was funny, too. We spent some time recalling other skipping rhymes, coming up with a dozen or so off the tops of our heads.

My old granny, ninety-nine,
She can drink a barrel of wine.
She can drink a bowl of soup,
To make her belly go boop-boop-boop.

Passed orally from child to child down through how who-knows-how-many ages, they tend to be irreverent, ungrammatical, impolite, sexist, ageist, probably racist, certainly politically incorrect. Raw kid culture.

Do not leave this rope be empty.
If you do, you shall be out!

I hardly ever see groups of girls skipping in the street anymore. In my day (that's the Jurassic era, not the Antedeluvian) it was one of the certain signs of spring.

Of course, I was a baby boomer in a Catholic town. Almost every house teemed with children, and it was usually easy to get a gang together just by stepping outside with a long rope in your hand. Parents were also eager (not to say desperate) to keep the kids outdoors as much as possible, as the houses were pretty small for the size of the families. Skipping drew in a wide age group, from about five to about thirteen. Once you were in high school, you didn't skip anymore, even if you wished you could.

In this village where I live now, there are fewer young families, fewer children, and I suppose less willingness to let children entertain themselves for hours outdoors, especially on the street (although road hockey still flourishes). However, I still see skipping ropes for sale in the stores, and sometimes I see a rope turning on a school playground. So I'm hoping the rhymes are still alive and being passed on.

Cinderella dressed in yella
Went downtown to see her fella.
Guess how many kisseshe got?
One, two, three...

Did I Say Distracted?

2007-04-03T08:06:00.000-07:00

I've always looked at Ukrainian Easter eggs with enchantment and awe. Such moving symbolism. Such beautiful colours and patterns. How do they draw those straight lines on eggs? How do they do that tiny cross-hatch thing? >

Last week I finally got to attend the annual workshop which has been offered by our local library for the past seven years. Turns out, it really is simple. It does take time, for sure. Nothing about this process is fast, but it's so absorbing that you hardly notice the time passing.

Obviously, experience and practice count for a lot in turning out a really high-quality piece. My lines are still wobbly and I often have to compensate for blobs of wax in the wrong place. Honestly, though, anybody can make these. You only need the kistka, the little tool for applying the wax, and of course the special dyes.

>

As soon as I got home from the library, I went online and ordered supplies from www.babasbeeswax.com. They were great to deal with. Everything is reasonably priced. My package arrived within six days and everything was in perfect order.

I got the basic beginner's kit, which consists of five dyes, a medium-size kistka, a piece of beeswax, and instructions. I chose the plastic kistka, which costs more, because that's what we were using at the workshop, and some people who had attended in previous years said they're much easier to use than the old wooden ones. I also ordered a packet of black dye, which wasn't included in the basic kit. I knew I wanted black after seeing the eggs the instructor had made. All the other colours just glow against it.

I once read in a magazine article that many Ukrainians regard making pysanky as a prayerful activity. They meditate and pray as they work with the ancient symbols of life and faith handed down to them by their ancestors. It certainly isn't necessary to take that approach in order to make beautiful eggs and enjoy them. For myself, I thought that trying to be too pious might rob me of some of the fun, so I didn't consciously set out to do that. However, I found that sitting by a lit candle, calming the mind enough to draw the simple shapes on the surface of an egg, and thinking in the most general way about the ideas expressed by the cross, the fish, the rose, the little dots that represent Mary's Tears, has been spiritually uplifting in a totally unexpected way. I'm definitely planning to make this an annual event.

Habit Almost Formed

2007-03-26T20:16:00.000-07:00

It's a popular theory that it takes 28 days to form a new habit. Alas, in my case, it seems to take a lot longer than that. 88 days have passed since I started this drawing practice, and it has reached the point where I do draw something every day. It's become routine to pick up the pencil each morning, after coffee and blog-reading but before anything else.

Still, I don't think it's an actual habit yet. I feel that any little change in my routine, any distraction, could disrupt the practice, and I might not get back to it. Perhaps it needs another month.

I don't think my drawing has improved at all. Sometimes it's awkward, sometimes it flows, but there doesn't seem to be any way of predicting which it will be. My learning pattern tends toward sudden leaps after a long season on a plateau, so I hope to see a change soon.

I am discovering a little about the use of pencil, which is something my spotty art-education missed. I suppose my art college teachers assumed we had all done that in high school, but my school had no art program, and I lived in a town where you couldn't buy drawing pencils. Willow charcoal sticks were available, which I used and loved, but this made me very resistant to the harder pencils when I was asked to use them. I thought life was way too short for shading in teeny-tiny lines with an 8-H. Nobody told me you could expose a long length of lead and use it on its side. I always thought those pale leads were terribly fragile, but they are actually stronger than the big soft leads.

Study of Irises

2007-03-04T19:10:00.000-08:00

This week's winter storm didn't live up to its billing for us. A few hours of freezing rain were followed by some gloopy wet snow, but nowhere near the amount predicted. It was warm enough yesterday to bring flowers home from the grocery store without their turning into purple popsicles.

UPDATE ON NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTION

2007-02-24T18:13:00.000-08:00

My plan to do more sketching is coming along pretty well.

I sketched in the local diner, learning that coats on hooks sit pretty still, people not so much.

I drew a guy in a wheelchair having coffee at Mac's Milk. (I knew he wouldn't mind being drawn because he's my husband.)

A guy in a baseball cap. No relation.

The cats were happy to pose. This is Vinnie, a very large, gentle, sweet, ten-year-old tabby. He likes to lie on his back to take the weight off his feet.

I even dabbled in a little colour. Of course, Jake took up a lot of room on the table, distracting attention from the fuji apple which was supposed to be the subject.

So I'm an almost-regular sketcher now, but obviously the blogging still needs work. I'll try to show up more often from now on.

FIRST SKETCH OF 2007

2007-01-05T06:40:00.000-08:00

This is a pencil sketch of Jake, our Himalayan, taking a snooze. The lower one is the undoctored photo. The upper one was "fixed" in photoshop to make it more visible. Maybe I need a more high-contrast medium.

After trying for weeks to come up with a plan for developing my drawing skills during the coming year, no particular subject appealed to me as a focus, so the plan, if you can call it that, is to pick up some kind of drawing tool and wiggle my fingers until black marks appear on the page, then publish the results on this blog.

The only rule is that I must draw from life, not photos. I see wonderful work by other artists done from photos, but I know that working from life is what I need at this time. If it limits me to cats, pears, and coffee cups, so be it. Sigh.

Yesterday was the the first day. Not only am I rusty, but I've also lost the ability to concentrate for more than a few minutes. My brain does not want to observe. It whines that it wants to go watch the food network. I expect to be pretty creaky for a while, but hopefully the brain and I will limber up.

ESPRESSO

2006-12-30T13:54:00.000-08:00

When my husband asked for an espresso maker for Christmas, I had some misgivings. Moderation is not exactly his middle name.

Whenever we visited the Indigo bookstore in Kingston, he would go directly to the coffee outlet and order two double espressos to start with, then keep ordering one after another. By the time I finished shopping, there would be a litter of little cups on the table, and the waitress would be looking as if she wished he would go home.

I'm forced to admit that the caffeine never did keep him awake, nor did the acid bother his stomach, but I stubbornly maintain that it had to be bad for him in some way. There's no way that all that pleasure comes for free, mister. (I myself can't sleep a wink if I consume caffeine after twelve noon. Life is so not fair.)

He says he only ordered so many at once because he didn't have access to any at home. He promised to keep it to one or two a day if we got the machine.

So we've got one, and he is as good as his word.

The one who is flirting with addiction is me. Holy Cow. I love this stuff. I love the espresso, and I love the little ritual of making it. I love the cappuccino even more. The froth is made from skim milk, so I don't even have to feel guilty.

Well, yes, well, there's the question of sugar. I've always taken my coffee black, even espresso, which is probably why I was able to take it or leave it until now. Having recently read, in one of Frances Mayes' books, that espresso is really meant to be sweetened, I decided to try just use a tiny spoonful or two of sugar. The rest, as they say, is history.

We're finally using the demi-tasse spoons we got with our flatware set when we got married. That's a good thing, right? And the little cups? Aren't they adorable? We got them really cheap because there were only five in the box instead of six.

The key, I think, is to handle these drinks like very rich chocolates. You can eat one or two chocolates a day, but more than that and you'll be in trouble.

My New Year's Resolution will be Moderation in All Things Caffeinated.

Oh, yes, and I'll be getting up earlier from now on. Gotta make sure to get my two drinks in well before noon.

Happy New Year to all.

BOXING DAY

2006-12-26T08:07:00.000-08:00

It was a green Christmas here, and I'm not kidding. I harvested fresh thyme, rosemary, and sage from my garden for cooking. Some friends dug up carrots. This is unheard of in this climate even in snowless years.

Then, this morning we woke to a perfect holiday card scene.

Some might be annoyed at this timing, but I'm reminded of Boxing Days when I was young. Children would inquire anxiously, "It's still Christmas, isn't it?" And the elders would reply, "Yes, it's Christmas for twelve days. It's only just begun."

We knew there would be no more gifts, except for the odd stray that hadn't been delivered in time for the 25th. But the beautiful tree would remain, the candy dishes would be refilled as they emptied, and we would be allowed to sit in the front room which was not used at any other time of the year. We had our new toys to amuse us, and we would exchange visits with friends and relatives we hadn't seen for a while.

The fever of anticipation had peaked and started to drop, but there were still things to look forward to, so the descent was gentle and gradual.

By the twelfth day, known to us as "Old Christmas Day", we would be back in school. The bone-dry tree would be broken up and the branches laid on the flower beds to protect them from the January frost. The boxes of chocolates were gone, the bucket of hard candy was empty. By that time we had sucked all the juice out of Christmas and were ready to turn our attention elsewhere. Even so, there was a tiny crumb of cheer on that day, knowing it was still officially Christmas for 24 hours.

JOY TO THE WORLD

2006-12-24T06:56:00.000-08:00

For almost as long as I can remember, I've wanted a miniature village at Christmas. The idea must have been planted by some long-forgotten children's book. In recent years the wish is being gradually realized with these little houses and figures purchased a few at a time from the dollar store.

Lined up on the kitchen windowsill, they are cheap and crude, yet they satisfy my old longing to a remarkable degree.

It occurs to me that the child I used to be knew nothing of scale and workmanship, and only wanted enough to set the imagination working. These pieces are perfectly able to do that. If they were more expensive, I might not have bought them, or might feel a twinge of guilt whenever I look at them.

As it is, whenever I behold them I feel a thrill of pure joy. Who would have thought that the elusive Christmas Spirit would inhabit these tiny dwellings?

It's not likely that anyone is reading this post, as I've been a terrible slacker with this blog, but in the new year I hope to get it going again, so if anyone does happen by, I wish you a very merry and joyful season for whichever festival you might celebrate at this time of year, and please do visit again.

The Makioka Sisters

2006-09-09T20:06:00.000-07:00

This photo was actually taken at an ethnic festival in Brooklyn NY, by Wendy Zarganis, who has a column about local events on About.com. (I tried to put in a link but didn't succeed, sorry) but it beautifully illustrates this book that I found in a hospital waiting room and slyly slid into my bag to take home with me. It does bother my conscience a tiny bit, thinking about the next person who comes along and has to be content with tattered Harlequin Romances, but there wasn't time to read the whole thing there and, well, I just had to know if Yukiko ever finds a husband! Besides, it's quite an old paperback, printed in 1966, and it was falling apart in my hands as I read, so it's unlikely that anyone could have read it after me.

Maybe I'm just the last one in the world to know, but I've never heard of this book or this author, Junichiro Tanizaki ("author of THE KEY and SOME PREFER NETTLES") before. According to the blurb on the book, he was already very famous in Japan when this book was first published in 1957. It was written in Japanese and translated into English by Edward G. Seidensticker. It's the story of four sisters from a merchant class family in the years leading up to and including World War II (but it doesn't go as far as Pearl Harbour).

While quite distinct in style and content, it strongly resembles a Jane Austen novel, with perhaps a dash of Georgette Heyer. Although there are some delightfully humorous scenes, the author can't match Jane Austen's subtle wit, but makes up for it with intriguing, complex characters and fascinating scenes of daily life, combined with a story line that manages to keep you (me) turning the pages. My Harlequin-programmed mind naturally focussed on the two unmarried sisters as the heroines. A husband must be found for Yukiko, the third sister, before Taeko, the youngest, can be married to the man she already loves. This is why it's important for Yukiko to find someone soon, but she's not one to settle for just anybody. In the end, I find to my surprise that it's Sachiko, the second sister, and her wonderful husband Teinosuke who are the true heroine and hero. What a darling couple!

I'm totally charmed by the seasonal celebrations that mark the passing years. Each spring the sisters go together to view the cherry blossoms, wearing their beautiful silk kimonos, and have their photograph taken together on a bridge. Didn't I tell you the picture above is perfect? I don't know when I've wished harder that a book was illustrated. There's a festival just for admiring the harvest moon. Imagine that. The whole family spends an entire evening admiring the moon, writing poems to it, painting pictures of it, and remembering family members who are not there to share it with them.

At the same time, I have been very surprised by the degree to which this family's life is "westernized". They drink coffee for breakfast, have "western" rooms as well as "Japanese" rooms in their houses, wear foreign clothes, go to movies, listen to foreign music as well as traditional, speak foreign languages, and occasionally go out for barbecued chicken. In spite of this, the Makioka sisters - except, perhaps, for the youngest, Taeko - live quite comfortably with their deeply traditional heritage, perhaps because it's been one of wealth and privilege.

These people, even the youngest and flightiest of them, think long and hard before they speak. They ponder. They discuss. They debate. They consider all the points of view, and all the possible outcomes, and do their very best to make prudent choices. There's plenty of pressure to conform, but individuals are left to make their own decisions to a remarkable degree.

I would love to see this story made into a miniseries. A good one, a BBC type, with close attention to background and mood, and less to sex and sensationalism. What are the chances, I wonder?

Just Playing Around

2006-08-12T18:46:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to learn how to place photos where I want them in the text, and not just all at the top. Here's my first attempt, a few peaches.

Hey, that actually worked. Let's see if I can do it with this old pastel of a clothesline from last summer.

And now, on my left, a statue in a misty park with a face that didn't turn out.

This is fun.

Farewell Old Friend

2006-08-08T18:27:00.000-07:00

We've sold our tent trailer, along with a lot of other things, to help pay for installing a bathroom on the main floor. There's no doubt that we need the bathroom, and it can't be said that we need the trailer, which hasn't left the yard in two years. Still, it wasn't easy to let it go. A very nice family bought it. Their little boy fell in love with our gray cat and carried her around the yard in his arms (she almost as big as he) while his elders made their inspection. I like to think of him tucked into his bunk at night, listening to the loons as he falls asleep. My daughter composed her first two poems, at the age of six, while doing just that.

My Daughter Has Blue Hair

2006-08-08T18:13:00.000-07:00

Figures and portraits are my first love, but I hardly ever get models, so my life drawing is rusty. My daughter spent too many childhood hours posing for Mom and can rarely be persuaded to sit for me anymore. Nowadays I can only catch her occasionally when she's dozing on the sofa. She's much prettier than these sketches show. The blue hair is surprisingly flattering to her fair skin, although I don't think it's as nice as her natural ash blond.

A Few Wildflowers

2006-06-27T14:04:00.000-07:00

The purple vetch is very luxuriant this year. Although it's a small flower, it shows almost the same range of blues as delphiniums. The sketch doesn't do them justice. This little bouquet also includes a red clover blossom and some Dutchmen's Breeches.

My Watercolour Box

2006-06-23T21:19:00.000-07:00

Behold the perfect watercolour box.

Perfect for me, anyway. A painting kit is such a personal thing for each artist. I'm a casual, undedicated, impulsive watercolour painter, so this sturdy black plastic box made by Pelikan suits me very well.

I've had it for sixteen years. It's 8.5 inches long, 4 inches wide, and 1.25 inches deep. It came with 24 pans of colours, arranged in two trays that snap together, one on top of the other, allowing seldom-used colours to live in the bottom tray, while all the current favourites stay in the top.

The inside of the lid is white, or used to be, and serves as a palette. It also used to be attached to the top tray with hinges, but they wore off around the tenth year. If anything, this is an improvement. I can now remove the lid altogether and place it wherever it's most useful. It still snaps back into place with no problem.

This box is so durable that it once spent an entire winter outdoors, when I forgot it on a rock in a campground at the end of the summer. When we returned in the spring, it was right where I had left it, no harm done. Being made entirely of plastic, there's never any worry about rust.

It's very light and easy to carry around. I just put it on the scale and found to my surprise that it weights 8.9 ounces, or a smidgen over half a pound (roughly 225 g) - the weight of a large Delicious apple. I didn't think it was that heavy. I usually carry it in a canvas tote bag that easily accommodates it along with a couple of sketchbooks, a set of brushes rolled in a bamboo place mat, a plastic water bottle and a cheap plastic juice glass. In a pinch, I could carry it in any reasonable-sized (i.e. large) purse. Water would be a problem, perhaps solved with one of those plastic waterbrushes, but I've never tested that idea.

Not liking the Pelikan paints much, I gradually replaced them with Windsor and Newton pans, which were a slightly different size and had to be glued down with globs of that blue sticky stuff, but that worked fine.

Then, for reasons I have never understood, all the manufacturers stopped making full pans. You could only get half pans or tubes.

Half-pans are too small for my slap-dash approach, and although the tube paints have a lovely fluidity, and are worth the trouble for indoor painting, they are just such a royal pain to use outdoors. First, they have to be carried in some kind of separate container, a box or a bag. The colours don't gaze soulfully up at you when you open the lid of the box, but lurk inside the tubes thinking of ways to waste your time and ruin your day. Sticking caps is one way, lost caps another, squirting tubes a third, drying inside the tube a fourth. Their ways are endless.

So I squeeze tube paints into the old empty pans and allow them to dry. The labels kindly fixed in place by Pelikan don't match the new colours; I have to guess and test a bit with the blues. Most of the others are easy to identify by sight.

The old pans, made of flimsy plastic, are remarkably long-lasting. I often wonder what I'll do when they wear out, because the closest thing to a full pan that I've seen advertized lately are the round pans in a new Pelikan box. Who needs a round pan? You can't fit as many in a box, and they look like the first watercolour set I ever had, at the age of five - eight puddles of cheap paint on a kidney-shaped wooden palette with a thumb hole. (Hello, toymakers, you don't use wood for water-based paints. Stop leading small children astray!)

It seems that some manufacturers make good paint, others make good boxes, and some make beautiful boxes that are works of art in themselves but are as useless as casters on crutches. So it's a good thing my box is so durable.

Now, Where Was I?

2006-04-23T10:57:00.000-07:00

These are a few sketches completed before I regretfully dropped out of Laura's tree study during the month of March. I did continue to draw when time permitted, but the regularity wasn't there, so not much progress took place. The big pines with the spreading branches make me want to do a bigger picture of them. More sketches needed there.

Meanwhile Laura, as always, produced some truly inspiring work as the month went on. http://laurelines.typepad.com. And did you see her recent drawing of the female cardinal on its nest? Absolutely stunning. I can't wait to see what she brings back from France.

After a couple of weeks of very good weather, our trees are starting to pop - much more inspiring than they were a month ago. So I'm still studying trees, but hope to show other things as I get back into a more serious working mode. I also want to get more familiar with Blogger and learn how to make it work for me, arrange my photos the way I want them, have lists of books and my favourite sites, and all those other things I enjoy so much on other people's blogs.

I'm Back

2006-04-19T18:11:00.000-07:00

Everybody's out of the hospital, still alive, and back to normal, or as normal as we get in my family, so I'm hoping to be a more faithful blogger from now on. Thanks to everyone who left kind notes, and I'm sorry I didn't answer them at the time. I didn't really see them until it was a bit too late to send a prompt reply, but I did appreciate them very much.

I thought I would kick off my comeback tour by participating in List Friday, hosted by Mrs. Pom over at Pomegranates and Paper. She asked for a list of ten things we love (or at least like) about where we live, and somewhat to my own surprise I came up with ten right away. So here they are.

1. The bicycle path, which winds for miles along the river's edge, past water lilies and weeping willows, tall reeds and old apple trees. The great blue heron fishes in the shallow water. Sometimes you might see a fox, a rabbit, or a deer. There are otters in the neighbourhood, but we only saw one once, crossing the highway right in town, against the light.

2. We are located on a major flyway for migratory birds, and our local bird sanctuary is a northern breeding ground for Canada geese. After a skimpy beginning back in March, enormous flocks began to arrive, and continue, night and day. When I open the door at night to let the cat out, I can hear them honking up there in the dark, passing overhead like clouds. Soon we'll see them swimming beside the bike path with all the little goslings in tow.

3. There's a beach I can walk to. It's a manmade beach, not very large but not very crowded, mostly patronized by the campers who have permanent sites in the local park. A lot of people around here refuse to swim in the river because of pollution, but I love to swim in natural water, and have never had any infections or illness because of it. I prefer it to an overcrowded pool on a hot day, for sure. There's nothing like a beach to cleanse you inside and out.

4. In June and July, the wildflowers are spectacular. Mostly pretty common varieties, nothing rare or wonderful in themselves, but so abundant, and the days so long, and the weather so perfect, that the effect is intoxicating.

5. It's a short walk to the post office, the grocery store, and the bank, and I'm known by name at all three. When I lived in Ottawa, I had the same bank account at the same branch for fifteen years and nobody ever recognized me.

6. My back yard is big enough for a really large vegetable garden. (And one of these years I'm going to plant one.)

7. There's hardly any traffic here. People routinely walk down the middle of the street even when there are sidewalks on both sides. It's also very quiet, which is nice if you want to have your coffee on the deck on a fine spring day.

8. There's a bridge between here and Cornwall called Hoople Creek Bridge, which strongly resembles the Lingan Bridge of my childhood, so I feel good whenever I cross it.

9. There's a dramatic story attached to this village. It was created in the 1950's to house the people whose homes were flooded when the St. Lawrence Seaway was built. Many of the older residents of Ingleside remember homes, farms, churches, and family graves they will never see again although they lie only a few hundred yards away, under the water. This was a planned flood, of course, not a sudden tragedy like Hurricane Katrina, but it left deep emotional wounds, and affects life even today. I don't mean to say that I'm happy this happened, but it gives a context to the rather bland, suburban appearance of the place. Ingleside is not what it appears to be, and I like that.

10. Should the pleasures of village life start to pale, we are just one hour from Ottawa, an hour and a half from Montreal, the same from Kingston, four hours from Toronto, and eight hours from New York. Really, folks. This is the centre of it all.

It's Been a While

2006-04-09T21:50:00.000-07:00

Just to let you know that I haven't given up blogging. I've got two family members in the hospital, and posting had to take a back seat for a while. I'm bringing my sketchbook on my travels, and I'll be back.

A "Duh" Moment

2006-03-21T13:21:00.000-08:00

While drawing the kitchen-window tree today, I noticed that one of the limbs has practically no bark left on it.

Of course, I have seen this every single time I drew it, and each time I would think, "What an interesting contrast in texture", and that's as far as my thinking went.

Today, for the first time, it occurred to me to wonder why the limb is losing its bark. It's too high to be rabbits or deer, and there's no bird that could do that. Squirrels don't eat bark.

Is the tree dying? Does it need to be trimmed? Is it a late symptom of the stress from the big ice storm eight years ago? Or is this just part of its life cycle? Will the bark grow back? Can the tree survive without bark?

I'm also wondering why it took me so long to make this connection. I think it's because the mental effort of drawing usually doesn't allow any "outside" thought at all. That's one reason it can be a very nice rest from life's usual run of problems. It's all you can do to handle the problems of getting the tree, or some part of it, on the page, and anything else has to be blotted out of your mind. But I've done this tree so many times lately that my mind felt able to let that one little thought in while dealing with the drawing.

Today I studied the bark, particularly the places where branches split off to become new ones. I tried different ways of using the pencils to see if the texture changed. (it did.) I tried a paper stomp, which I don't usually use, to see if it improved the smoothness of the barkless branch or the roughness of the barked. I think it contributed a bit to the round shape of the tree when used sparingly at the edges, but I don't think it helped the smooth trunk at all.

I'm realizing that I have never once done a sustained drawing of this tree or any other. I sometimes manage a graceful gesture, occasionally capture the idea of a massive trunk, but I always quit too soon to get any more than that. After that little bit of drawing, if the tree still attracted me, I would usually move on to paint or pastel. I'm not a detail painter and don't want to become one. My paintings go for big blocks and major movements.

But studying the subject in detail with different media, over and over, helps to develop a knowledge of the tree, an understanding that will strengthen the final product. Who knew?

That's why I call this a "Duh" moment.

Yikes, What Happened to Last Week?

2006-03-19T12:36:00.000-08:00

Sorry for being a no-show all week. Life got busy, and I was never able to get the pictures taken before dark. My camera doesn't do so well by artificial light.

Anyway, here are two of the week's trees. The coloured one was done in pastel pencil in my sketchbook. It's not really that bright out there, yet, but I seized upon any hint of non-gray and exaggerated it. Blogger is not being very cooperative today, so it looks as if two is all I can post.

Drunk on Spring

2006-03-12T11:58:00.000-08:00

Forget spring fever. This is a drunk, people, an event when common sense is forgotten, you imagine yourself twenty years younger and much more beautiful than you ever were, you fall insanely in love with every puddle and twig. In short, if there was a lampshade out there, I would have been wearing it.

Sunshine, blue sky, a fresh if chilly wind, puddles everywhere. I still love puddles just as much as I did when I was four. I still like splashing in them if I'm wearing the right boots and there are no witnesses. (Being a grown-up is a drag that way.) I could still stare into them for hours. I can still remember specific puddles from different times in my life. Now, during the spring melt, they're everywhere. Yippee!

Every year I look forward to seeing the pools that form at the bases of the trees along the driveway into the park. I guess the standing water is really bad for the trees, but I love to see the repeated reflections going off into the distance. From close up, you can look down through the sparkling water and ice to last year's grass underneath, with the sky floating on top of it all.

I always want to paint it, but there's not a single good spot to work from. The only reasonable place to stand is in the road, which isn't busy but does have some traffic. There's no place to put anything down. My sketchbag, balanced on a handy log, kept threatening to topple into the water.

So the sketches are really quick and crude, in my little book, with the colour added from an already-fading memory after I got home.

The last sketch is of the open water near the faraway shore of the river. Everybody knows that when there's open water, the geese start to come back, and sure enough I saw a little flock - so little that I thought they might have overwintered, but after that I saw two larger flocks. The geese are back! And local farmers say winter's over when you can hear the crows. I didn't just hear them, I saw them flapping around everywhere.

More Trees

2006-03-09T12:50:00.000-08:00

An overcast day with freezing rain edging the branches with ice and reflecting the sky, while the rest of the tree is dark, wet, and broody. I attempted to capture it in the big sketchbook, but I'm not happy with the result.

These trees all look alike to me. The trouble is that they have too many "arms". I mean the real trees, of course, not the drawings, which have too few, because I haven't got the time or patience to put them all in.

Advisers on tree-drawing usually say to just draw the primary, secondary, and tertiary branches (biggest, second-biggest, and third-biggest, to me). After that, they say, you can put in a tone to represent the groups of tiny branches. I've seen this done successfully by other artists, and I always start out with good intentions, but I get seduced first by one branch, then by another, and before I know it I've lost my place. Then it's impossible to give the lines a graceful flow when I'm inching along and following every by-path.

Clearly, there needs to be more science in my method. Tomorrow I'm going to try doing all the primaries in one session, then leaving it and coming back later to do the secondaries, etc.

Sunday and Monday

2006-03-06T11:22:00.000-08:00

On Sunday I worked from the bedroom window, little pencil sketches of our back yard trees, and some distant ones behind the neighbours' houses. There were great patterns of intense blue shadow cast across the snow, but I never got to paint them because my husband lost a lens out of his glasses. He can't see without them, so he needed me to put them back together. I dropped the little screw, couldn't find it, and then had to go look for some wire and pliers. So the shadows were gone when I got back to it.

Today was much milder than it has been, allowing me to go outdoors for a while to draw the big pine tree. Had to quit when my hands got cold. This is a huge tree, probably 50 feet high, and it surprised me how dumpy it looks in my drawing. Needs more study. I loved using the charcoal, though. It's always been my favourite for sketching, if I can use a big enough surface. The paper is some kind of manilla that I found in my stash, a nice yellowish colour.

A Few Trees

2006-03-04T11:57:00.000-08:00

Laura of http://laurelines.typepad.com chooses a different subject to study every month, resulting in beautiful and fascinating sketches that show impressive skill development as the weeks go by. And her drawing skills weren't too shabby to begin with, not by a long shot.

This month she's inviting us all to join in on her study of trees. I'm a little late getting started, but here are my first attempts. The idea is to make as many sketches as there are days in the month (or more, of course, if it suits you), so by the end of March I need to have 31 drawings of trees.

It happened to be freaking cold here yesterday. I did go outdoors, but then wussed out and came right back in again. It's not much better today, so all these were done from the house windows. You may have gathered from previous posts that we have lots of trees around us. I figure I can do a dozen different trees before having to to venture out again. Surely the weather will have improved by that time?

The last two pencil drawings look as if it's the same tree continued upwards, but that's not the case. One is an ash tree from an upstairs window, and the other is a softwood maple from the kitchen. Maybe by the end of the month the difference in the trees will be apparent in the drawings.

Actually, these are just sections of the trees. A whole one is too big to do all at once -- at least from this short distance -- and my sketchbook is also too small. For the bigger drawings I borrowed an old book of my daughter's which wasn't full. I don't like the paper, though. It's only 60 lb and buckled badly under the tiniest bit of watercolour.

Robert Bateman sketchbooks have been my standard brand for the past few years. They have 110 lb paper, thick enough to take light washes without buckling, although the pages will curl at the edges. I also like being able to use both sides of a page, getting 100 sketches into a 50-page book. I just wish they would make them with more than 50 pages. Recently I've been finding this landscape format in stores, and I love it, but I don't see them online at Curry's, only the old standard sizes. Dick Blick doesn't carry Robert Bateman books at all. I'll have to try to hit an art supply store next time I go to Ottawa, which won't be until March 15, and meanwhile root through my stash of supplies for some big drawing paper.

Tacky Crafts I Have Done

2006-03-03T13:22:00.000-08:00

This is for the Friday List on Pomegranates and Paper. You asked for it, Loretta.

Those woolly men made out of yarn and pinned on your lapel. You looped the yarn around a piece of card about twenty times, made a second one just like the first, then pushed one through the other to form a cross. Then came the artistic part. You cut short lengths of yarn and tied them to form a head with a topknot, a belly, legs with topknot feet, and arms with topknot hands. I loved those. For years they satisfied my wool-craft craving when I couldn't learn to knit.
Silver pillows made from cigarette wrappers twisted up and looped somehow. To be honest, I never made any of these, but I wanted to. It was de rigeur to have two of them in the back window of your car and we didn't have any in ours. I could never get enough wrappers together to try it. Besides, I think you had to "send away" to the cigarette company for directions.
Wineglasses and pipes made from cigarette wrappers. These only took one wrapper each so I used them to while away many a quarter of an hour.
Paper drinking cups made from a folded piece of notebook paper, the only thing I learned to make in Brownies. We had the pretty Brown Owl who didn't know how to make anything, let alone keep twenty-five eight year old girls under control while she taught us. We had a lot of singalongs and poetry recitals. The other pack had the smart, capable Brown Owl (a school teacher in real life) who taught them all kinds of things, and when our Brown Owl was out for a sick day, she took the two packs together and I learned how to make a paper cup. I still make these sometimes, when I'm bored. You have to drink fast. It doesn't leak, but it will dissolve.
Speaking of folded paper, what about those Fortune-Telling things? Eh?
Eyeglass cases made from a square of felt sewed up with a blanket stitch.
Place mats made from two pieces of waxed paper ironed together, with pictures of food cut from magazines sandwiched between. I learned to make these in Grade Four Health Class and was very taken with the process. You could make a pretty scalloped edge with scissors.
Every Christmas, my sister and I got an Embroidery Kit. It contained four napkins, a cross stitch pattern, embroidery floss, a hoop, a needle, and a thimble. I don't think I ever completed a set, but I liked cross-stitch. It was a better gift than the stupid model airplane my brother got.
Once I got a ceramic kit. There was a plaster statue of a "colonial boy", paint to colour him with, a brush, and some kind of glaze that you didn't have to bake. It turned out terrible. The glaze didn't go on exactly right. I liked that kit, though. But I never got another one.
Potato prints. Yuck.
My goodness, I could go on an on. I'm going to stop here with Kleenex Flowers. What can I say? It was a rite of passage to womanhood. You couldn't feel like a grown-up until you had made a bushel of these for someone's wedding. Also, a teacher once had us make a lot of artificial flowers but you had to get special florist's wire which was not generally available, so I never made any more, although I still remember the basic how-to.
Oh, and one more, to make a dozen. In Grade Three I learned how to make folded paper baskets to hold Easter candy.
All right, a baker's dozen. In my kindegarten class I saw a sample of a little mat woven from strips of coloured paper. I waited all year to get taught how to do that but the teacher never came through, wasting our time on reading, writing, and counting, so I just figured it out for myself at home. Of course I didn't have the nice construction paper to work with. You couldn't get that stuff just anywhere, and at school they conserved it as if it was silk peau de soie. When my daughter was small, I bought her stacks of construction paper and she liked making those mats, too.

Going Back in Time

2006-03-02T13:51:00.000-08:00

These sketches are the beginning of an attempt to recreate a past that is very long gone.

At a recent family wedding, my cousin Patti asked me to paint a picture of our old home. Normally I'm uncomfortable with commissions. Trying to fulfill a client's request makes me nervous and has a depressing effect on my creativity. But this was different. I had actually been turning the idea over in my own mind for a while before Patti mentioned it.

This was our grandparents' house, where I lived from the age of two until I moved to Ontario at age 25. Patti spent a few weeks there every summer and lived there year round for a time. So, of course, we both have very clear memories of this house. I don't even have to close my eyes to bring it all back, detail upon detail. The wallpaper in the front room when I was four. The curtains lifting in a breeze at an open window on a summer day. A vase of lilacs in the center of the lace cloth on the dining room table. Well, you know. You probably have similar intense recollections of your own childhood home. I could probably create dozens of these little vignettes from memory.

But to draw the whole house, a portrait, from the outside, turns out to be surprisingly difficult. What view to work from? We were back-door people, but the front garden was nice, and Patti would like to see the snowball bush, but also the roses that grew in the back yard.

The worst thing, though, is that the house doesn't exist anymore, at least not in its original form. Long ago the second story was removed and it was remodelled into a bungalow. The wood shingles have been replaced with aluminum siding, and the original 4-paned windows with a plate glass picture window and sliders.

So I can't go back and look at it, or ask someone local to photograph it for me. There are very few photos of it, and those not very helpful. It only got into a picture by accident, a window ledge here, a doorframe there, a background against which some family member stood, squinting into the sun. It never occurred to anybody that we would ever need a picture of the house itself.

I can't remember ever wanting to draw or paint it, because my idea of subject matter was a New England salt box with green shutters and tall, shading elm trees, or a Victorian mansion with bay windows and wraparound verrandahs. Our house was basically a big box, with an almost-flat roof, 2 chimneys, and rectangular windows evenly spaced. Neat and tidy, no frills. Although it was never a company house, it was exactly like hundreds of other houses flung up by the coal company in 1913. Not a single building in town predated that year. There were a few built in the Victorian style,, and some attractive craftsman-style bungalows, and there was a handsome brick post office with a clock on top, but it was a raw place, exposed to the four winds, waiting for trees to grow, for sidewalks to be laid, for time to cast a mellow patina over it all.

It was our home, and we were sometimes moved by affection and pride to think it better than it was, and at other times were unable to see anything but its all-too-familiar shortcomings. But, honestly, it wasn't a pretty house. If I had tried to paint it then, I would have had trouble making a composition out of its uncompromising bulk. I still don't know how to do it. And now I can't even see it.

How I would love to be able to walk back in time and see all these things again. My sister disapproves of this desire, but she thinks I'm trying to relive the past. I don't want to re-live it, I just want to see it. Check my memories against the facts, study proportions, make notes. Be able to say to my daughter, "See, this is how it was". Obviously that's not going to happen. I'm thinking this is going to be harder than building a new house from scratch.

Yes, I finshed in Time

2006-02-28T12:19:00.000-08:00

Here's the Knitting Olympics project, completed on the night of Thursday the 16th and blocked by Friday morning, but the weekend was very busy and I neglected to post about it. What's that you say? "A likely story!" No, I really did! I just didn't have time to post before now. I have earned the gold medal. Isn't it cute?

This has been quite a learning experience for me. The first few days were so rocky, with constant mistakes and frogging, that I would probably have quit (or, as I would have preferred to say, "set it aside for now") if I hadn't committed to keep trying for the two week period. Even after I was well into it, there would be a day of good progress when I would think, "I've got the hang of it now", followed by a day when nothing went right. There was no time when I felt really in control. At first I had a hard time following the pattern, simple as it was, but then after it was memorized, it was still necessary stay constantly alert. In other words, this never settled down into a comfortable knit, and I was never certain of finishing at all, let alone before the deadline. Yet, at the end of all that struggling, I finished early, and lo there is lace!

Before blocking, it looked just like a textured rib, and I feared that it would stay that way, but once wet it spread out beautifully and really looks like lace. I give credit to the Filatura di Crosa, which I considered very pricey, but it's proven to be a truly superior yarn. No thick or thin spots, soft yet strong, it never threatened to break when the wet threads were stretched, and not a hint of dye came out in the wash. I would definitely buy it again for a special project.

There was a dispute with a cat as to property rights on the scarf while it was blocking. My first idea was to use my daughter's bed for this job, since there's a door I can close to keep the cats out, but the scarf was too long for the bed, so I had to take a chance on the dining room table with extensions added. I'm pleased to say I defended my handiwork against all comers, with the help of a spray-bottle of water. At least until I went to bed. Then the feline claim was reasserted, but only a few of the pins in the center came out, so not much harm was done.

Remember how I agonized over length and width? I kept asking my husband, "Is it too narrow? What do you think? Is it long enough? Maybe too long?" and he would just stare at me like Norman Bates's mother. Well, it really is too narrow for my original idea, but my daughter likes it the way it is, so it will not be reknit. It's eight feet long and works well in one of those pashmina-type knots, where you first fold the scarf in half, put it over your neck, and slip the ends through the loop. It could also pass as a stole as long as you don't expect it to actually cover anything. Oh, and it only took two balls of yarn. For future reference, I think four would be more than enough to make the wider stole.

How did everybody else do? I'd love to hear.

The cool wine colour of the yarn doesn't quite match the warmer wine of the dress, but in candlelight after a couple of drinks, will anyone care? I'm just going to sit and admire my gold medal.

KO Update and Some Sketches

2006-02-21T08:05:00.000-08:00

Here are a few more sketches, just to show that I'm not knitting all day long. In fact, I'm confining work on the stole to lunchtime and evenings so precious daytime hours are reserved for art. These repeated sketches of my neighbours' gable are paying off. Yesterday I moved from the sketchbook to the easel, and I'm quite pleased with the underpainting. I'm hoping to do a series of at least four, including a night painting.

The stole is almost done. As I mentioned in the comments yesterday, I don't know how much to expect it to stretch lengthwise during blocking, so it's a wild guess where to stop. It's sideways stretch that's needed most; it really looks too narrow right now. Remember how I worried in the beginning about running out of wool? I haven't touched the third ball of yarn yet, so it could have been a lot wider.

I hope to have it blocked by Thursday, because my daughter will be home for Reading Week and can try it on with the dress. Also, I need her bed to do the blocking! If the colour isn't right, it can still be used with other outfits, and it could even function as a snowy-day scarf if wound a few times around the neck. So it will be used. The question is, will it be used for its intended function, as a wrap for the wine-coloured spaghetti strap dress?

Knitting Olympics Day 10

2006-02-19T11:40:00.000-08:00

The stole measures 51 inches, but, hey, it would be about twelve feet if all the pulled-out rows were included. There ought to be a way to include that in the official final stats. Something like, "One thousand rows completed, six hundred completed with no errors, total sixteen hundred rows, ten points for the good ones, five points for the rejects, total fifteen points".

Also, because I'm sure you're all wondering, I've compiled a list of all the different ways I can make a mistake in a six-stitch repeat pattern that I've done successfully hundreds of times:

1. knit a stitch instead of doing a yarnover
2. forget to do a yarnover at all
3. slip a stitch instead of doing a yarnover
4. knit a stitch instead of slipping it
5. slip a stitch instead of knitting it
6. count stitches before I get to them, as in "4-5-6-7" when I'm only on 4.
7. forget to pass-slipped-stitch- over
8. knit the border stitch on the right hand side as if it's a pattern stitch.
9. drop the border stitch off the left end of the needle and knit two rows before noticing.

I could go on, but you can see how it goes. All these errors are caused by wandering attention, which happens constantly now that the pattern is memorized. A couple of times I even zoned out while just counting the stitches on the needle, from one to thirty-nine. What was spooky was that the count was accurate. Like, one-two-three (zone out - zone back in) twenty-seven - what? How do I know I'm on 27? Count again, 27 it is.

This would be great if it could be repeated reliably, but of course it can't. I've always been fascinated by what human beings can do unconsciously, ever since I learned to touch-type. To this day I don't know where the letters are on the keys but my fingers do. Most of the time, anyway. And why do they sometimes forget? And those days when you find yourself at the bus stop with your purse and your lunch and the last thing you remember is watching the toast pop up? What's with that?

Being number-challenged as I am is a handicap in knitting, which is a math-based craft. I often wonder how early knitters, most of whom were illiterate, coped with that. I assume that most of European peasantry could count to a hundred and could work with groups of ten. You see that all the time in the Bible. "Divide them up into groups of fifty," etc. But what did they do if their gauge didn't come out even? Did they have some way of doing fractions and decimals? I suppose they worked in the same gauge pretty well all the time, using their own handspun yarn, and if something was the wrong size they just pulled it out and re-knit. Fitting tended to be general rather than specific in those old patterns. But what about all those cable and lace patterns? I suppose it was the people with a natural gift for math who developed those, and others just struggled to learn from them.

One good thing about being number challenged is that I'm not the least bit fazed by the Knitting Olympics time clock. I don't have one on this site anyway because I don't know how to put it on, but lots of K-Olympians have it and are freaked out by it. For me, it would be a problem if it was a pie chart. I understand pie. But numbers I always view as through a veil of gauze. So I'm fine with the clock.

Rooflines and Trees

2006-02-16T12:40:00.000-08:00

More rough sketches. This is the view from my kitchen window. This is where I usually see the moon early in the evening, or a glimpse of the sunrise in the morning. Such a familiar subject should be easy to draw, but I find that each sketch is different, and none are accurate, yet they're starting to tell me what I need to know. I had to do a study of the tree branch by itself, even though I've drawn it numerous times before. The coil binding of the sketchbook interrupts the flow, but then there's a divider in the window, too, cutting the branch in half.

I'm pondering a series with this motif and different skies and weather. Last year I saw a sunset at the National Gallery that was just a dormer window and roofline silhouetted against a yellow sky. I couldn't get it out of my head for weeks. The painter was Lemieux. (Jean-Paul? Jean-Luc? I forget!) He had a lot of wonderful landscapes and city scapes with very minimal subject matter, pared right down to the bone but eloquent. He was from Montreal, and much of the landscape he dealt with was similar to what's around here.

Drawing houses exposes my weakness in straight lines and perspective. I need to get a ruler and protractor and take measurements before I tackle the next one.

Window Views

2006-02-15T10:15:00.000-08:00

We just replaced a window in the bathroom, and I'm suddenly fascinated by the view, although we've lived here for fifteen years. I'm trying to work it into my February resolution to do some local scenes. Here's the first, pretty rough sketch. Please note: I'm not a watercolour painter; this is a working sketch only.

Knitting Olympics Day 8

2006-02-15T10:06:00.000-08:00

It measures 18 inches, and I've only used half the first ball of yarn, so maybe there will be enough after all. It's not really as narrow as it looks here. It's curling under at the sides. I hope that will block out. Otherwise I may have to consider some kind of edging?

The weather got a lot milder overnight. I was surprised to see how much snow has melted. I'll have to look for a new background for these pictures.

More Gestures

2006-02-13T14:12:00.000-08:00

Two posts in one day. Blogging is going to my head, right? I'm just experimenting.

Knitting Olympics Day 4

2006-02-13T13:35:00.000-08:00

This may look pretty much like what I showed on Saturday, but there's a difference. No, I don't mean the powdering of snow. Those circular needles just don't want to let anything lie flat.

No, the difference is, this has no mistakes. Ta-da! I'm starting to get the rhythm of this pattern, and this afternoon I was thinking that it would go faster now and allow me to make up for lost time.
Wrong. Even while the thought was forming, I ran into some unexplained flying-fickle-finger-of-fate type of experience and had to rip back to the next purl row. It's all right now, though. Touch wood.

For variety I'm going to try posting some gesture drawings from my sketchbook. It's mainly to see if I can put two pictures in one post. These were done on a freezing cold day with sun so bright I could only really see silhouettes. They were done in the park where people took their small children to play on the ice with hockey sticks.

Well, I didn't really intend for that to turn up 'way up there with the knitting. Needs work.

What's This?

2006-02-12T07:11:00.000-08:00

Yes, it's back to row 1. Yesterday I was gaining and losing stitches with alarming frequency, but didn't think the mistakes would be all that obvious after it's blocked, so I continued knitting.

Well, in the harsh light of morning it's impossible to keep deluding myself. So I ripped it all out even before I had the first sip of coffee. It was only agonizingly painful for a minute.

I'm glad to have this chance to start again (glad, I tell you!) because the first version was looking a little too wide. I don't know what the final width will be, but it doesn't need to be more than six inches, and shouldn't exceed eight or nine. Keeping it narrow will make the yarn go further, too.

My Knitting Olympics Project

2006-02-11T10:39:00.000-08:00

Here's what I'm working on. (At least I hope it's here. This is my first attempt to post a photograph.) I haven't got to six inches yet. It's definitely a case of one step forward and two steps back, but so far I'm pleased with it.

It's going to be a very long scarf or very narrow stole, meant to be worn with a spaghetti strap evening dress. The pattern is "Razor Shell", a shetland lace pattern by Hazel Carter published in the Summer 1997 issue of Spinoff.

I wanted to make it in silk but couldn't find any in the right colour. Black or white would have been a more sensible choice than the wine, but I didn't want to subject my eyes to working on black lace, and white just wouldn't be right with the dress.

So I took this beautiful Filatura de Crosa merino, and I only hope there's enough of it. I was feeling a little cheap that day, with several other projects to buy for, and I decided to go with the advice of Elizabeth Zimmerman on how much to buy, which goes something like, "when using fine yarn, surprisingly little; when using bulky yarn, quite a lot..."

I bought three 50-gram balls, and that is indeed surprisingly little, not to say frighteningly little. I'm hoping that the holes in the lace, combined with blocking, will stretch it far enough. Otherwise I'll have to try to find more of the dyelot, and what do you think my chances of that are, remembering the principles of Murphy's Law?

Here I Am!

2006-02-10T19:31:00.000-08:00

So now I have a blog.

I get a huge amount of pleasure from reading other people's blogs (I'll post some links to my favourites tomorrow) but being a very dull person I honestly don't believe anyone wants to read about my life. However, I felt the need for a blog to take part in the Knitting Olympics, in case any of the 4000 other participants want to check the progress of my lace stole, so you can blame the Yarn Harlot if you like. (It's cast on, folks, and has already been frogged six times. Oh, yes, I had to do lace! I'll probably still be on row six when the Olympic flame goes out.)

Of course I don't knit enough, or do anything enough, to warrant daily reports. Nevertheless, I'm a blogger now, so I'll be hopping around a lot from topic to topic, trying to scrape up something to say, and resurrecting all the padding and space-wasting tricks I knew in high school. If nothing else I hope to learn to use my digital camera properly so all my pictures aren't out of focus. My thanks to anyone who takes the time to read this. Please believe that I'm not this boring on purpose. Tomorrow there will be pictures.