Apparently August

It is still cool - not that I miss the 100+ weather we can get, but I've only worn shorts about three times this summer. I have turned a fan on twice.

I never got around to posting this, from early July.



Such a tiny embroidered face looked...wizened. But I decided to just finish anyway, because I knew of no rule precluding a tiny feather-cloaked lady from being wrinkled. Er, the cat hair is, ah, for scale.

No embroidery since then, as six weeks ago I (sprained?) two fingers on one hand and they still don't work right. Frustrating in a lot of ways, including that the weather is perfect for schlepping and organizing, except you can't do that one-handed. I had planned on doing the outdoor closet so I could install a hook to hang my bike, and I need to repot some plants, such as the hens & chickens the jays keep vandalizing.

Instead, I've read a lot, and managed to start getting back to painting. Hence the pods. Here are the next two stages:



Time for the little brush on the black and white painting; I think one more session of black and white before I add color. The colored painting...I'm somewhat stymied. I accidentally made a large pepto pink - yikes. Maybe it will help to get an apple to model for me. I need more practice figuring out how the different paints work together...which is after all the reason for these studies. And seeing the pictures all together reinforces my niggling suspicion that the last time I worked on them I made them worse. Some of it is my photography - even dry they're kind of shiny. And the camera seemed pretty unhappy with bright red and green.

July?!

Where has this summer gone? - or, where has it been? Because it just really finally got here. It's hard to be convinced by the calendar when the weather is cool and overcast.

At any rate, the weather has been almost completely like summer since last weekend, when I went on a hike:


(If you look at the large version, you can just barely make out one of the hawks that was circling around and around--one of the tall grasses points at it.)

Yesterday Princess had an excellent day.



And I finally got in gear and did some painting--two new in-process and one probably almost done practice piece from a while ago:

The pomegranate/seedpods are experiments in that one is going to be only colors, and the other is starting off with the black and white underpainting as per the workshop I took a couple of years ago. Initial notes: I "get" black and white. Instant color is fun. And I tend to either use very little or way too much Liquin (thinner).

Mailing Myself a Book

Unfortunately I can't post pictures at the moment--or, more accurately, I can't download new pictorial evidence of Sunday's productive painting frenzy, since my computer is unable to use the camera program. Apparently adding internet has addled its brain. Once I dig out the CD with the software I'll try reinstalling it.

Late last Wednesday, for the first time, I sat at home and bought a book on Amazon! Today it arrived: Orientalische Briefumschläge in Schwedischem Besitz, or in other words, Oriental Letter Wrappers in Swedish...well, "Possession" is literal, but I think a more English translation would use "collections." It is a charming book by Agnes Geijer and C.J. Lamm, printed in 1944--charming not because of the contents, but by virtue of being a small paperback with its original dustjacket.

Bibliographic interlude: Kungl. Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Akademiens Handlingar, Del 58:1; Stockholm, 1944, Wahlström & Widstrand.

I think the first time I came across a citation was in the Textiles volume of the Topkapi Museum.

[Insert intermission as the computer shuts off in protest when I attempt to look up the citation because I don't feel like hauling the book off the shelf. No citation tonight.]

Not quite 50 pages of text, two tipped in color plates, and 40 black and white illustrations--as usual with textile books, the emphasis is on the textile and not the thing the textile was made into. But luckily there are several photos which give an idea of just what these "Briefbeutels" looked like--tall, skinny bags. It's easier to imagine the documents being rolled instead of folded. There are Turkish, Persian, and "Tartar" fabrics.

Retroactive Posting

Battery issues etc. and not getting around to posting even when I happened to remember to bring the flash drive...not helped by still not having internet at home. Which now I'm not going to set up until I moved, which of course predicated upon finding someplace to move to. So far the house hunting rule seems to be:

I like a place: and:
it is too small, it needs work, I can't afford it, and/or it is not in a location I like

I obviously just need a lot more money.

Back when the painting class was going to start, I had a quandary about what to pick. I decided on a pomegranate, and then found out Kim was thinking of doing that, and I decided of course I needed to do something different. (Like somehow different pomegranates painted by different people wouldn't be different.) I decided on an artichoke, and then Sarah posted about artichokes, so I knew I'd picked the right thing. Right. Here are some artichoke paintings so you can get an idea of the technique:


By the time my artichoke had finished serving as model/muse, it was rather too desiccated to be eaten. It lasted a surprisingly long time!

On Weather, Reading and Painting

I am always writing blog posts in my head--it's a hazard of the lack of internet access at a time when I'm thinking of writing, or a lack of inclination and time when I'm online (which is at work). There is odd weather again today which disagrees with my sinuses--like yesterday, today is intermittently sunny, rainy, and snowy; yesterday included hail, and today had something that was somewhere between sleet and hail but more the consistency of miniature snowballs.

Wait! I have remembered. The other morning I found Princess picking out what she wants to read next. She must have finished all the books on the floor.


I myself am reading The Coptic Tapestry Album by Nancy Arthur Hoskins and, intermittently, Speiser's Manual of Braiding and also numerous novels. (Connie Willis: To Say Nothing of the Dog--go read it!)

On to the pictures. I have been thinking a lot about oil painting lately; it is a distinct pleasure to work on something that provides basically instant gratification! I'm not sure why oil paint has such a reputation of difficulty, because it is delightful to work with. Yesterday was the last class, and I missed it because I was completely unaware of the time change. I painted at home, though, so that's all right.

Friday has been attained.

Is it really June?

The weather leaves that open to question. Calendrically, of course, June it is. But if it stays in the low to mid 60s here in Portland, I'm going to find Florida pretty heavy going (Complex Weavers conference).

I have been working on stuff, but not having the extra energy required to turn around and turn on the scanner. Any potentially-extra energy has been expended on preemptive stress and anxiety—in a few weeks, my supervisor will be heading off to spend four months at our subsidiary in the Netherlands, and apparently at some level I feel the unfortunate need to worry now, even though I know it will go fine. (Oh, he and I are the entire department, in case you wondered, and the end of June is the end of the quarter, that surprise of the business world that happens every three months, and our jobs are involved with all the last-minute moving of boxes every which way around the world.) This week I have been feeling like a Hapsburg, being unable at times to close my mouth. I finally deduced that the pain in my jaw resulted from tension elsewhere...and additionally of course my sinuses are continually stimulated by the weather.

At any rate, here is some proof of action.

To begin with—something Completely New *AND* Completely Finished!!! One type of thread (Caron watercolour, 3-ply Pima cotton used in single strands), one type of cloth (cotton Osnaburg), and one stitch (eyelet, I guess you'd call it). Kind of minimalist in its own way.

[As I write this, Thursday evening, Princess the cat is playing purposefully with the container of Holistic Natural Feline Treats on the floor. She knows goodies ought to come out, but they just won't.]

The white embroidery as of Wednesday, June 4:

In conclusion, as part of the ongoing struggle to achieve some sense of actual order, I had to empty the bedroom closet so I could fit in the new shelves I got. Naturally, an inordinately large percentage of the things that came out of the closet will not go back in, leaving yet more things to add to the chaos in the living room. (I eventually reconfigured that enough, once again, that I can get through without too much trouble. And as always, there are numerous cat routes. I'm a good cat mommy, even though she doesn't like me to work on the mat that appeared in her fur. It's spring, technically, and I have been harvesting prodigious amounts of feline fluff. I have a project in mind for it, too. Naturally.)

At the bottom of one stack of four boxes in the closet was the box with my photo albums. I've been wanting to get this picture out for AGES. It's a carved cedar relief of Hathor, and it's my favorite thing from the strenuous visit to the Met in 1997 (!!!) with Marla. We mainly did the Egyptian collection—also Cycladic art, which I adore, and musical instruments, which I covet, and briefly peered down into the armour gallery. But mainly we saw the Egyptian galleries. They are endless. Every room has rooms off it, and littler rooms off them, until you get down to a few closet-sized rooms. I particularly remember one that was floor-to-ceiling full of tiny faience objects. You begin to wonder how there could be anything left in Egypt. It would be good to have some Egyptian version of Ariadne's ball of thread, too, to find your way around.

So after all that, here is Hathor. The picture is rather dark since I was good and did not use my flash.