Meet Iris – finished but nekkid! I think she might need some clothes, but Alice says dragon girls are fine Just the Way they ARE. Thank you.

The pattern was wonderful fun. She is knit entorely in the round, and each piece begins by picking up stitches from existing pieces. I thought it was going to be crazy-making, but instead I had a wonderful time, and was SO relieved at the end when I didn't have to sew anything together. I did get kind of carried away with her lower legs and ankles – I added some shaping the designer didn't have, but I have a major thing for a shapely calf, and it came out well enough.

The last thing that surprised me is how solid the knit fabric is. I was using tiny needles for largish yarn, so it makes intellectual sense, but to be able to stuff her fairly firmly and not have the stuffing show through the knitted fabric was lovely. I have lots of experience stuffing muslin bodies and faces, and they take a phenomenal amount sutffing; just when you think they might be finished, you are only half-way done, and the same amount again of stuffing goes into them and smoothes out the lumpiness. Iris is not stuffed to that standard, but she did absorb more stuffing than I anticipated, and is much sturdier because of it.

So. That was fun. Back to the landscapes!

Of course, much of what I like best about the original idea I had was the focus on details of how water carved channels through the marsh and offshore. And that is the part that is the most difficult to convey. Which is just how life goes, yes? Yes.

My mother lives where she can look out over the salt marshes. When I go and visit her, I go to the beach, because it is the best beach, and because I have a pass for it.

I have a pass so that I can go and be inspired by various Trustees of Reservations properties, so that I can make artwork for the Crane Estate Art Show and Sale that usually happens on an early weekend in November. (You should totally go – there are so many beautiful things, and admission is free when it isn't the opening.)

While that pass is getting a workout this year, this particular piece is drawing more from Google Earth than from the photographs and sketches I make when I'm there.

This is the first layer, the deepest channels.

The same piece of river as the last two, this time at sunset. Al is correct that the long sloping bank makes for a dead spot in the picture, but I knew that when I looked at the photograph I was working from. I've done what I can to add texture and interest to the area, but really they are all experiments.

can't write, knitting

knitting this person; isn't she great? 

In a series of nine images, you can see the order I generally use to make a piece. This one has an average number of layers. The stitching in the second image shows how I sketch things in to make sure the top layers will fall correctly on the underneath layers.

In the second row, you can see the details sketched in with stitching, including the reflections in the river and the foliage on trees.

The third row shows the final details added to round out the picture.

There is a phrase that delighted me when I learned it: contra-jour. If you have some French or other romance language, you recognize that as, basically, "against the day" and it means, in art at any rate, to sit looking towards the sun, and draw or paint (or photograph) what you see. If you think for a minute, you'll realize landscape painters and photographers generally do not do it that way. They position themselves at right angles to the illumination so the objects they are working on depicting have shadows that imply mass and form. Sometimes they look down-sun, and see everything illuminated in an interesting, flat way. Contra-jour means the sunlight is making you squint, and all the shadows are pointing directly at you, and things are oddly dark with very bright halos. There are moments when that is what you want, which is why there's a word for it.

This is sort of contra-jour, except my light is the setting moon, shining across the stretch of river north of Hadley. So I called it Contra Luna.

I think part of what makes me so fond of this one is the utter absurdity of the colors involved, and yet the forms of the river are all present.

When I worked with satellite images, particularly Landsat imagery, we would composite three bands of an image together using different colors for display. That sounds like murblemurble, I'm sure. False color shows what the terrain would look like, if you used different eyes; ones that could see in infra-red, or ultra-violet, or x-rays.

Earth Observatory has a very nice explanation, with examples.

This is the second one I've finished. I feel now like I should go look up what it means to be abstract, but I'm not entirely sure it would help.

I'm pleased with the lines and colors in this one, and particularly pleased about the places where the lines that indicate fields interact with the lines that indicate terrain.

No sooner was the above finished than I started the next. When I asked the kids what color the river valley was, if the hills were blue-green, three voices all said purple. Alice originally specified a redder color than I eventually chose for the river itself, but the whole thing is making me happy in a goofy, giggly kind of way:

One easy way to make something more abstract is to change the color scheme (and then simplify)(at least, that's the way I understand the process).

I started thinking this would be brown fabric with blue stitching again, but that dusty purple just called out to me, so I stitched the river (from the back) using perle cotton through the bobbin. The colors in the edges of the river still have a speaking relationship with the real world. I think for the next one I might go whole-hog otherworldly. There are some colors sitting in my room that I don't get to use often enough in landscapes.

Or, I might have to incorporate those colors in more of the landscape work I'm doing.