Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit

For once I have a great rabbit, rabbit, rabbit with which to begin the month. I’ve been working on this little guy for quite a while, and now that he’s safely off at his new home (he was conceieved, as it were, as a birthday gift for a rabit-loving friend) I can show him to you here.

He was a blast to make, and though I say he took a bit of time, it wasn’t his fault (nor, for once, mine).  It was the weather. As much as I love stormy grayness, a month of non-stop rain and creeping dampness in these parts has been tough on crafts that need some drying time.

He began life as some scraps of light canvas and some polyfill (recycled, I confess, from a stuffed toy coatimundi that my dogs loved to death) and first took shape thusly:

A few coats of gesso and a few of black acrylic paint–plus hours of drying time and the fortuitous arrival of two sunny days just as my deadline was looming–and a bunny was born.

If you’d like to see more photos of how I made him (and take a sneak peek at his cute little bunny butt), check out his set on my flickr site.

Second Child wants one now. Also black, with silver studs down his back. And I think there may be some more whimsical ones in my future. Stay tuned.

The exodus of jazzy pigeons . . .

Perhaps when you were in elementary school you learned a pangram or two.  A pangram (from the Greek pan gramma) is a sentence or phrase that contains all the letters of the alphabet.  Here is one that you may have seen:

Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.

Cases for loose type (also called job cases, or California job cases) are often labeled with a strip of paper on which a pangram has been printed in the font the case contains, to help you envision what your printed material will look like.

Over at Green Chair Press, Susan has a wonderful post today featuring some great photos of job cases adorned with such pangrammic magic.  My favorite:

For more printerly/book bindingly/artistic/poetic wonder, visit the blog for yourself.

My Daruma has two eyes . . .

Remember this guy from a month or two ago?

Here he is today. With two eyes.

Can you guess what my goal was?

Of course, the real goal continues to be just showing up every night.

Going off to soak my bruises now.

Itchy fingers

This isn’t the first time I’ve posted about wanting to invite a library book to take up permanent residence in my collection.  There was that Thomas Merton book way back around the time I began this blog, for instance. And the Nancy Marculewicz volume (now, alas, out of print) on making gelatin prints that I want so badly I’ve been haunting used bookstores and library sales.  And I haven’t even told you about the time I checked out Maggie Gleezer’s wonderful book on baking artisan breads about 6 times in a row. I’m convinced that this is why my local library now has limits on how many times you can renew a book.

The librarian finally looked at me in a pitying way and whispered, “Did you know there’s a bookstore right across the street?”*

But, anyway, now there’s this wonderful little volume, currently celebrating its 50th anniversary. If you mean by “celebrating” that I knelt down on the floor in the library stacks and just read books about Chinese brush painting until I got to this one, and brought it home, that is.

As soon as I brought it home, before I even started reading it, I was already online looking for a used copy of my own. And now, for something under $6, my very own nicely used copy (I can’t wait to sniff its ancient pages) is winging its way to me.

Which means I’ll be able to get out my ink sticks and ink stone and lovely Chinese brushes and grind the rich black ink and let Mai-Mai Sze come to life again as I try (clumsily) to breath life again into her wonderful paintings. Like these:

And this one, my favorite:

The translation makes reference to the fact that the people in the bottom left illustration are playing chess. It looks to my as if they are playing “go,” an old and venerable game that’s easy to learn but devilishly difficult to master.

Like Chinese brush painting.  Hurry, Mai-Mai Sze! Hurry and show me what you know. Preferably before the librarians abolish my borrowing privileges.

___

*I did actually go and buy the bread book. And used it well and with great success for several years. Alas, it was one of the books lost in the great flood that took place two years ago when a pipe burst in the ceiling over our pantry while we were out of town for two weeks and the house was locked up tight. Let’s just say hot, damp, wet books are not happy books. I’m back to looking for another copy of the Glezer book. Some terrible person seems to have actually stolen our library’s copy.

I always do . . . until I don’t

Carry my camera with me, that is.  So I didn’t have it with me when I attended a small, wonderful dinner party on Thursday of this past week. Three of my favorite women friends and I get together for a post-Christmas dinner every year, and this year our celebration was a little more . . . um . . . post than usual.

I wish I could show you the beeeyooootiful food. The chicken tikka. The curried vegetables. The rice–two kinds of rice! The spicy shrimp. The cucumber raita, the potato and pea samosas, the naan (okay, I made the naan myself), the wine, the apple dessert, the lovely table setting.

I wish I could replay the marvelous conversation that went on for long, leisurely hours.

Hmm. Maybe not–much o f it is just fine staying within the four walls where it took place. Ahem.

Anyway, all I have to show you is this little pen and watercolor sketch, which I made the next day.  Each of us had two little jars by her plate, our take-home goodies.  Various spices, with instructions to go home and use them in a new dish. Mine were fenugreek and pink peppercorns in a neat little thick green glass bottle stoppered with a cork.

Pink peppercorns in a green glass bottle

Now–does anyone have a nifty recipe to share that makes use of fenugreek and pink peppercorns?

The age(s) of creativity

My friend Marie sent me this link to a wonderful New York Times story about creativity and age, how the creative impulse  sometimes wanes in midlife and sometimes only just gets kindled then, flaming up fiercely in later life. Think Grandma Moses.  It’s a good (and a short) read. Go, go–what are you waiting for?

How long does it take . . .

to make art?

I was thinking last night after I made the padded mailers that they were among the most satisfying of the projects I’ve done during this blogathon challenge month.

And honestly, they were just about the quickest, too. Instant art, from stuff I just had laying around.

Sooo . . . getting back to my original Floating Ink notion that it’s possible to fit a little art-making into any life, how long does it take to make art?

Off the top of my head, here are some estimates.

If you have one minute, you can:

• make a quick sketch
• write a poem
• take in all the turquoise, or peach, or deep blue colored things around you while you’re riding on the bus or waiting for your daughter to get out of her karate class

If you have five minutes, you can:

• fold an origami crane out of a piece of neatly patterned paper you probably have on your desk right now (and may not even know it–maybe I’ll do that one for my next post)
• open your journal and make a more detailed drawing of something beautiful or useful you see or want to make
• add to that poem
• play a game with your son while he sits anxiously on the paper-covered table and  you wait for the doctor to check his ears–take out a crayon (you do carry crayons, right?) and draw a circle or a zigzag or a wavy line–right there on the exam table paper–then hand him the crayon and ask him to finish the drawing. Then swap–let him make a starting doodle for you to complete.

If you have 15 minutes, you can:

• write a limerick
• write down the dialog you hear playing out  in the next booth at the diner, which will become the bones of a short story–or a novel
• pull out your colored pencils and draw the pleasing design inspired by your coffee shop napkin or the tiles in the lobby of the building where your meeting is
• knit 8 rounds on the cuff of the sock you’re making for your dad
• cut some flowers or some ornamental grasses and arrange them in an old jar or your favorite teacup

If you have an hour, you can:

• spend your lunch break at the museum
• walk in the park and refuel your brain
• read, read, read
• write a sonnet
• open your palm sized watercolor set and make color studies of the building you can see from your desk, or the bowl of jelly beans on your assistant’s desk

If you have all day . . . wow.

If you have all day you are a fortunate creature indeed. You can immerse yourself in a project that you may not even know you need to make until you lay down the first brush stroke, or catch the first whiff of paint as you open the tube, or stare at the blank block of carving medium, or run your fingers over the velvety surface of the drawing paper, or just sit quietly, close your eyes, and clear away all your thoughts.

You have time.

P.S. Of course, if you have 31 days and lots of supportive blogging friends egging you on, you have time for a whole blogathon challenge!

Mail art and true confessions

I have a confession to make. This thing that I am about to show you, this thing that I just made?  I did not make it up myself.

As my friend Sandi, channeling Matthew Arnold, reminded me yesterday, “There is nothing new under the sun.” But, still, I really didn’t invent this idea so I want to make it completely clear that I did not just steal it from someone else. Okay, I did, but I admit it and I can’t remember from whom I purloined it.

And I started this blog entry determined to give credit to the blogger at whose site I first encountered it.

Dear reader, I tried. I tried so hard to find She Who Thought of This First.  And if someone can tell me, I will hasten to edit this blog to give credit where it is so very, very due.

In the meantime, however, see what I made this evening?

The better half and I went to a sad small tag sale this morning (one of those where they all but tell you about the gall bladder surgery they’re trying to make possible for their ailing mother and so you must buy something or never be able to look yourself in the mirror again) and I picked up several wonderful things: 3 Pyrex bread pans for $2 for the lot, and two lovely illustrated children’s books for 25 cents* each.

These books were charming and colorful and just ratty and bedraggled enough to enable me to cannibalize them without (too much) guilt.  I always feel terrible deconstructing nice kids’ books (please don’t leave comments yelling at me about this), but–and trust me on this–on purchasing the books I bought this morning I only saved them from a more dire level of recycling, and they weren’t in good enough shape to add to the long shelf of books I’m putting together for the grandchildren I’ll have someday.**

Anyway, I got these books and after a long nice Saturday of chivvying Second Child through a wicked pile of homework, getting First Child to work, finally getting to try out the oil pastels First Child got me for my birthday,*** and going to the movies***** with the Better Half, I turned my attention to them and turned out these two padded mailers in about 9 minutes for the pair of them. Easy peasy.

They are sweet, I must say, but I feel guilty still, not about the books, but about not being able to give proper credit to the craft blogger at whose site I first saw this. If you’re out there, please speak up.

Again, the process is intuitive. If you want to make some, you’ll need:

• a few pages from illustrated children’s books (or computer scans of same)
• a bit of bubble wrap (the little bubble kind, not the fat bubble kind) in need of recycling
• a glue stick
• a slightly more precisely directable liquid glue product for sealing the side edges

If you can’t figure it out from there on your own, leave me a note and I’ll write a real tutorial. Really.

Oh, and to use these nifty padded envelopes, of course, you’re also going to need a plain white 2 by 4″ sticker for the front so you have a non-illustrated place to write the address of your terribly luck recipient (would you not love to receive something like this in the mail?), and some more glue or double-faced tape to facilitate the secure closure of the envelope.

Second Child is so tickled with these two that I don’t know whether she’ll actually let me send them off in the mail.

—

*Someone please tell me when and why the little “c with a line through it” symbol for “cents” was deleted from American keyboards? In these uncertain economic times, such a symbol is more and more useful for describing my economic worth.

**In other words, the books I won’t let my kids throw out. I mean, really. Can’t you just hear my someday grandchildren saying, “Oh, Granny! You have Miss Bianca?! The real books and not those hideous theme park driven movies?  And all of the Tom and Pippo books?! Oh, I love coming here so much more than I love going to my other gramma’s house!”  Just saying.

***What I learned today: oil pastels were invented by Pablo Picasso (with Henri Sennelier, from whom he bought his paints and other art supplies) . Oil pastels are difficult. Oil pastels are richly beautiful. Pablo Picasso is spinning in his grave watching me try to draw something of value with my new pastels. In your face, Pablo–I am not beaten yet.

****The Better Half and I–who never, never agree on movies–saw L’heure d’ete (sorry, too tired to go to my character map for the properly accented characters) and both loved it. Go. Go. Go.  Then come home and make padded envelopes from your (otherwise unusable) favorite childhood books.

A quiet gallery viewing

I’m telling you, I’m just about worn out after the excitement of the Whipup woo-hoo yesterday.  All the brouhaha also meant that much of today has had to be devoted to (shhhh) actual writing for, you know, money.

So tonight here’s a little peek at some more artwork from my gelatin monoprint experiments.

Complimentary catalogs are available in the lobby, and thank you for visiting.

I’m going to retire to my fainting couch now and recuperate from all the excitement.

Floating Ink on Whipup!

Sat down with my cup of tea to surf some blogs, and look what I found on Whipup:

Me! They’ve linked to my tutorial from a few days ago on how to make inspirational wall hangings.

Made my day. Thank you, Sandi, for suggesting it to Whipup.

The neat Whip Up button above, by the way, is by Ann Benoit.