three days and a pencil
February 10, 2014
Roberta wanted to know what the triangular pencil looked like, so I put that in as well.
Author: Lee Thomson
partner, parent, artist, knitter, sailor, cyclist, sketcher, house painter, set designer, safety officer, itinerant equestrian, kite flyer, questions?
pencil eraser
February 7, 2014
I have these great triangular pencils, and the erasers are triangular too. So I added one to the array of things:
and then today I finally carved something on the end of the first eraser, and it looks like this:
overview, and a snow day!
February 5, 2014
I promised hand carved things and then promptly got subsumed by the stomach bug of the ages, and its uncle: smacked not once, but twice, while still nursing a sore hip and weird ankle.
The hippo is an older stamp I made for a different project, but I still like him, so I used him too. The squares and rectangles are the uncut ends and edges of the erasers I intend to carve, just noodling around with patterns. In the state I was, sharp carving tools seemed like a very bad plan.
Today I was thinking of the individuality of snowflakes and trying to get my fingerprints to show on the fabric, but the weave is too coarse for them to show up.
I think I missed a day in January too, from plummeting off the red horse. Things were a little hazy there.
long week
February 2, 2014
Wednesday I fell off the red mare, and landed hard on my butt.
Thursday the Dr. who'd pronounced me sound was over-ruled by someone with a different interpretation of the x-ray, and I was warned I'd probably broken my ankle. From falling on my butt. I think it has something to do with the stirrup, but I dunno. Plus, I can stand and walk on it?
Friday I got an air cast, got an earfull for walking around and got ready for the first of two set building Saturdays at the high school, except –
Saturday both Al and I had either a very fast virus or food poisoning. I won't go into details, but we basically slept or prowled around the house all day. Mostly slept. I handed off the plans, lists and lists of lists to somebody else, and was grateful there was someone around to pick up some slack.
Today I realized the month had changed while I was …out of it, and I need a new idea for February.
So for February I intend to make a new rubber stamp every day. I like carving stamps, and I have all the tools I'll need for it, including a couple dozen erasers. This should be fun, putting little pieces of design into practice. And then in March, I can try to make larger patterns with them, as part of the process I'm thinking about for teaching myself fabric design.
I'll post all the pictures tomorrow, from the end of January to the first couple of stamps of February.
updated and new
January 28, 2014
Sunday morning it was bright and clear and blowing like snit from the north-west. I know this because I heard it all night at my mother's house, sleeping in the other bedroom. Her dog tried to tell me something in the middle of the night, but since we agreed it wasn't about my mom's health, we both went back to sleep again.
You can just barely make out the swirly wind shapes I was drawing on the image. I printed it onto a cheap vellum paper, and stitched it into the book. This is the end of Book 2.
For Book 3 I was thinking about February, and Valentines and pink, and then I wondered what the opposite of pink might be. If you have suggestions, leave them in the comments! The first page looks like this:
I printed this image onto printer-ready canvas – I think a coating is what makes it printer ready – and then stitched in the spruce tree behind the big sycamore. I realized a while ago that my threads for evergreens in winter are not the right set of colors, I needed more that were grayer, and less green and even dustier. This was a test of one of the new evergreen colors.
Today I went back to the cheap vellum paper, and tried gluing it down with semi-gloss acrylic medium. Which sounds like an incomplete idea, but if you think of medium as the stuff that carries color in paint, then you realize that acrylic medium is basically acrylic glue/varnish/texturizer (the uses are many). Using it as glue produced some crinkling and buckling in the paper, and a certain amount of color smearing, but it could be worth exploring further.
cold and blowy, with a dog
January 25, 2014
i took my mum's dog to the beach, where it was blowing like snit from the west, and we walked all the way to the rocks at the end of the point and back. it was glorious, and fierce. and there were three deranged people in wet suits swimming. they said from Gloucester, which seemed unlikely, but no more unlikely than swimming at this time of year.
more experiments, also I am MIGHTY!!
January 24, 2014
Many things have gone right today: Aerin and I found the bassoon guy after a very twisty drive into the edge of Boston. We got home from that safely too. I found my camera. I bought a new faucet for the kitchen sink, and removed the old one, and installed the new one, and with Red Kate's help even managed to remove the old sprayer spigot and replace it with the new one. I found a bunch of pieces for the Music Man set that will get built next weekend. I also have enough budget for a lot of them.
So here is yesterday's piece – a transparent piece on the back of the previous day's piece. I like the way the image is visible and less so depending on the intensity of the gesso that bled through the fabric.
Today's was one more reason I am mighty. I used an opaque transfer, and I wanted some of a transparent transfer over the top of it. So I ironed the transparent transfer face down on the opaque transfer…. and it STUCK. ARGH!! I tried to peel it off, and Red Kate tried to peel it off, and we agreed maybe water might help, and IT DID. (mighty, I tell you what!)
The end result is very misty and mysterious, and might still have a thin layer of paper over the top, but at least the image is visible. Which is better than I hoped for originally. (Really. I had a picture of the blank white back of the transfer paper, with pathetic little rips along the edges, all ready to post because I had already accomplished so much today I was willing to let that go. And then: win!!)
negative results…
January 22, 2014
Negative results are still results, and these two are good examples of refining ideas and making them work. I wanted to try transparent transfers onto fabric prepped with gesso. Yesterday's had a seam in it, so the contact with the iron was spotty, meaning it didn't peel well.
Today's I tried putting the transfer down on the gesso while it was still wet (experimentation plus impatience) and ironed over the whole wet mess. I think the bubbly bits in the center were where the gesso steamed as it was cooling, and failed to stick to the transfer.
And I cannot find my camera, so these are taken with my phone. Which, when I say it that way, makes it kind of amazing, that my phone has a good enough camera to take pictures of what I'm doing, so I can edit them a little and post them here.
In other news: cold. Really, really cold, plus wind chill.
snow and more snow
January 20, 2014
Sunday the snow from the night before was still stuck on the branches and telephone wires – it didn't start to fall off until the wind picked up. Or until the squirrel galloped across the phone wire, that brought a lump of snow onto my head when I was not expecting it. This is white paint pen (from Sharpie) sketching in the snow on the trees.
This one is an attempt to show how the weather came in from the west, high and fine at first, and then lower and gray.
A friend and I clipped some of the winter coat off the red mare, so she wouldn't get so hot exercising. One of the other women in the barn asked what kind of meany clipped a horse before the temperature plummetted? While we were working, the wind picked up and the snow started. I left her wearing her thick blanket, and I probably have to go find a midweight one so she doesn't get too cold…
whether the weather
January 18, 2014
Honestly, there are days I feel like this book is nothing more than a weather report: today it snowed, it was pretty.
I took the simplest of Margaret's suggestions (I know the toothpaste was a joke, but I did think about it for a minute, because Aerin's is blue with sparkles, and Alice's is faintly pink and I wondered what that would look like) and used gesso with a toothbrush to spatter snowflaky speckles on silk organza. What is harder to see is the white pen indicating snow on the branches of the tree underneath, which I was quite pleased with.
Lee Thomson 