Little Fiddly Bits

Lethargy, apathy, and... stuff

noreply@blogger.com (Heather) — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 18:05:00 PST

It's been a moderately depressing summer.

Before anyone gets fretful, no, nothing heart-stoppingly terrible has happened; we lost my father-in-law to lung cancer in July, but frankly we were kind of expecting that and everyone seems to be coping pretty well. If you're looking for tragedies, sorry, but in my own personal selfish emotional life, there haven't really been any. Things have been... normal. It's just that, for me, "normal" has been a moderately depressing place to live all summer. I've had very little in the way of energy or motivation to do things, or much in the way of enjoyment outside of the various henna gigs I've gotten. So it just hasn't felt like I've had anything worth mustering up the energy to write about.

This is a slightly more glum way of saying "sorry I haven't posted to the blog in so long but I'm not dead really". Sorry for the glum part.

Henna has been fun though. In fact according to my bookkeeping, this has been my best year yet. And I've gotten back into the local choir, but I think that's old news. In July my hard drive died and, after $600 worth of data recovery (so much for savings, but the art photos, henna photos, kid photos, fiction, old emails: priceless), I'm still being lazy about getting my new hard drive up and running, loaded up with the files and programs and stuff like that.

I've been spending a lot of time on YouTube, and on fanfiction.net.

I need a day job to get me through the winter. I'd prefer part time hours, and it can be minimum wage as long as the people are nice and the work isn't soul-draining and horrible. Suggestions?

Cheers, everyone, and thanks for your well wishes.

My embroidery documentation

noreply@blogger.com (Heather) — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 20:23:00 PDT

Okay, so some of you heard that I entered by embroidery project into the SCA's "Art and Sciences Competition", which is kind of like a 4-H fair for medievalists. Judges don't compare your work to other entries, but to a set of criteria, and then score you accordingly.

I wrote up documentation for the competition – it describes the the entry, and any research you did – and after I placed first at Regionals (the state of Indiana), I advanced to "kingdom" (IN, Illinois, Ohio, Kentucky, Michigan). You're allowed to modify your documentation but not your entry. So what follows below is the documentation for Kingdom – where I placed second, by the way. (That's not as amazing as it sounds; since the judges are scoring you against criteria, it's possible for everyone to walk out of there with a first place score, or for no one to do so. I didn't "win" compared to other entries.)

Subsets of the criteria include Documentation, Methods and Materials, Scope (your intent with the piece), Skill (how well you pulled off your intent), and Creativity. A final subset is Judge's Impressions, which is the only area where a judge is allowed to let their personal opinions influence the scoring.

Without further ado.

Opus Anglicanum embroidered belt favor, completed December 2010.

Documentation

The piece is an SCA-typical belt favor embroidered in the Opus Anglicanum style of the European 14^th -15^th century, based on imagery and artifacts dated between 1340 and perhaps 1380 (with one example from the mid 15^th century). The piece is constructed of two-ply cotton embroidery thread on cotton muslin which has been doubled for strength.

This embroidery technique is known to have been used for such elaborate work as papal and royal garb, but it was also seen in more modest items such as relic pouches or the ubiquitous aumônières or almoner’s purses. While belt favors of this type are unique to the SCA and not to historical period (period favors consisting of kerchiefs, removable sleeves, gloves and the like), both are elaborately decorated items worn suspended from a belt, making the embroidery form perfect for my purposes.

The main sources of my information are three website addresses which carry a great deal of scholarly book citations and, most importantly for my purposes, pictures of surviving artifacts from the time period.

See:

· http://www.cottesimple.com/alms_purse/alms_purse_history.html

· http://www.doctorbeer.com/joyce/emb/almpouch/almpouch.htm

· http://threegoldbees.com/projects/5-embroidered-lovers-purse

All three websites were constructed by women in the SCA who researched and then created almoner’s purses for their own use, and detail both their research and methods of construction.

While I realize my own documentation would be helped by going deeper into my research in order to locate and use some of the primary and secondary sources they uncovered, the fact is I never planned to enter this piece into competition. My general habit is to research something I want to create, create it for its own sake, and then be nagged into finally entering the thing into A&S. In this case, I really only wanted to try my hand at embroidery for the first time since childhood, and to create a belt favor for my husband as an excuse for learning the embroidery. For those needs, the research on these websites was more than sufficient. And then I completed it, my friends nagged me to enter A&S, and behold!, here we are.

Having said that, the documentation you are reading now will incorporate images and examples from those websites and cite the sources from which they originally came, in addition to photos of my own piece at various stages of development.

Interestingly, when I returned to my sources to help build the documentation for my piece, I discovered that purses themselves were also treated as favors in period. The author of www.cottesimple.com quotes the following:

Since the height of courtly love in the 12th century, purses have enjoyed status not only as a fashion accessory but as a romantic token or favor, passed from one lover to another, according to Andreas Capellanus, the famous author of The Art of Courtly Love.
Camille, Michael. The Medieval Art of Love. London: Harry N. Abrams, 1998, page 51.

So it would seem that the adaptation of this style was both circular – a purse used as a favor inspired me to create a favor that resembled a purse – and even more appropriate than I had originally thought!

Methods and Materials

As described above, the piece was stitched using cotton embroidery floss on cotton muslin. Period examples were generally made with silk thread, often with gold or silver thread used for the background, and stitched onto linen, which may have stood alone or been appliquéd onto velvet for final construction of the purse itself. I, however, have a budget and discovered that locally, silk thread was going to be difficult to come by, especially in the variety of colors that I would need.

As an aside, one judge at my regional A&S fair commented that, while they understood the substitution of cotton for linen on this piece, they were a bit concerned with having so much of it show, as I left the belt loop un adorned. Following up on this observation, I noticed that in my husband’s most frequently worn garb, his belt is partially hidden under the “skirt” of his riding jacket, or under the blousing of whatever tunic he happens to be wearing, which by happy accident, means that the cotton belt loop is hidden as well. I confess this wasn’t a deliberate consideration on my part, but I’m perfectly content to enjoy the result anyway.

Almoner’s purses were embroidered on both sides, usually with related images, but occasionally with simple geometric designs on the back. My stitching capabilities as well as the typical way of displaying belt favors in the SCA made it much more sensible to embroider the front panel only. The embroidered panel itself is situated on the bottom third of a long, narrow strip of fabric, which was then folded over to create the belt favor’s loop, and the edges hemmed. The hem itself has not yet been completed; the current stitching was NOT done by me, and was meant to be temporary so that the favor could be presented to my husband on a specific date. Fortunately, I did remember to take a photo of the back panel itself, included here as “Image 1”.

Image 1. Back of the finished embroidery.

My sources show that almoner’s purses often depicted secular motifs and scenes such as fanciful beasts, musicians playing, and quite often that of lovers in a garden, suggesting that the name “alms purse” was merely a catch-all term, perhaps from the Christian exhortation to practice charity (www.cottesimple.com), or possibly a holdover suggesting that at one time the purses were reserved for such a use (pure speculation on my part). As the favor was a gift for my husband, I kept the secular theme of love but chose instead to design a scene of my own, depicting myself and our daughter in the garb that we wore most often. (The child has since outgrown the dress portrayed in the image, but the colors were originally chosen to represent a specific outfit.) The two figures stand between stylized trees, typical not only of illuminated manuscripts of this time frame, but also of the almoner’s purses themselves.

Image 2; artifact made in Paris circa 1340.

Cited on www.cottesimple.com as Camille, Michael. The Medieval Art of Love. London: Harry N. Abrams, 1998, page 50.
Cited on www.doctorbeer.com as an item in the collection at Hamburg, Museum fuer Kunst und Gewerbe (Inv. 56,137).

The embroidery itself was done in Opus Anglicanum, or “English work,” so called for the expertise and renown of English artisans at the height of this technique’s popularity. The main elements of the technique are figures embroidered in split stitch and outlined in stem stitch, on a background which was most often (but not always) done in gold thread worked in underside or “invisible” couching. Other stitches included chain stitch, satin stitch and knotwork, but these always were much less prevalent than the split, stem, and underside couching stitches. Another hallmark of the style is the use of a range of hues to achieve lifelike shading. Stitches on the faces of human figures often followed the contours of the cheeks and foreheads, resulting in additional lifelike effects as the stitches caught the light from different angles when the fabric was moved about. Finally, in Opus Anglicanum, no ground fabric remained visible once the piece was complete. Again, Image 2 provides an excellent example of the typical features.

As you can see in the entry, all of these hallmarks have been adhered to with the exception of gold thread worked in underside couching. A period artifact survives which shows a background worked in colored thread (Images 3a and 3b). I took advantage of this as well as extant imagery’s resemblance to period manuscripts to create a diapered effect using “laid work”, which gives the appearance of satin stitch while conserving thread, in alternating directions and overlaid with a lighter thread to represent the whitework so typical of manuscript diapered backgrounds.

Image 3a. German orphrey ca. 1450 showing colored background instead of gold

Image 3b. German orphrey ca. 1450 showing colored background instead of gold

Image 3, cited on www.threegoldbees.com as “German orphrey mid 15thC, St Anthony Abbot and a female martyr. V&A Museum, London. Photos courtesy of Mistress Acacia de Navarre.”

The website has three photos, of which two depict the figure of the abbot; I have labeled these 3a and 3b. The third photo, of the female martyr, is not included here. The web page’s author seems to imply that this was the only example of an exception to the gold-background “rule” she was able to locate, although it is possible that it was merely the first such.
(www.Dictionary.Reference.com defines “orphrey” as “an ornamental band or border, especially on an ecclesiastical vestment.”)

In my entry, I placed a grid on the background in stem stitch to keep the alternating squares consistent. Since my original concept drawing was done on graph paper, it was easiest to use that as the “skeleton” or template for my diapered squares – which means that, yes, I embroidered graph paper lines onto my piece. I had thought at first that the grid might remain visible, but I discovered that it was best put to use by piercing through the grid lines with the needle. This served to keep the “satin” stitches an even length, and also ensured that no fabric would be left uncovered at the ends of the stitches. Since the gridlines are now hidden, please see “Image 4” for proof of the depths of my geekery.

Image 4. Embroidery in progress, showing grid “skeleton” for diapered background

Every area apart from the hands and faces is worked in at least two and most often three colors, with the tree trunks making use of four and the lady’s gown five distinct shades; there are approximately thirty distinct thread colors used in the piece. The lady’s shoes are done in satin stitch, the stitching on the faces follows the contours of the cheeks, and no ground fabric is visible, even if the piece is bent backward somewhat. I attempted to make use of modern satin thread for the diapered background, but found it so extremely frustrating to work with that I opted to pull it out and start over. I had hoped to use satin for a bit of “shine” in lieu of actual metallic threads, but in the end I preferred not only the ease but also appearance of the natural-fiber thread.

It should go without saying that the embroidery was done by hand and not by machine. After outlining, I began by filling in the wimple and veil, followed by the skin, and from there worked my way through the different areas mostly going from smallest to largest. Apart from the leaves and lady’s gown, every area had its own specific set of colors that were not repeated elsewhere (and in fact the leaves use different shades of green than the gown), such that completing an area also gave me the satisfaction of finishing an entire color group as well. I kept all the thread and my concept sketches in one bag, and ceremoniously removed the colors once they were no longer needed.

The fabric was placed in a square frame rather than a hoop and the figure was completed over a span of about eighteen months (two years if you include “downtime”).

Scope

I’m kind of a fan of scope. As I mentioned earlier, I have never made a piece with the intention of entering it into competition, but I am naturally drawn to detailed, complex work that requires patience as well as some degree of skill to accomplish. Below is a summary of my intentions for this piece:

• Motif Complexity – lifelike human figures in natural poses and a degree of emotion portrayed in both posture and facial expression.

• Design (how the motifs are combined, appropriateness to period and place cited) – a balanced and harmonious composition of motifs typical of the style of almoner’s purses, using a palette of colors that all complement one another well without clashing.

• Variety of elements/motifs/stitches/techniques – accurate to and entirely typical of the Opus Anglicanum style, with reasonable exceptions made that were plausible and known to have existed in period.

• Difficulty of materials chosen – NOT. Materials that would be easy to work with for a (more or less) first-time embroiderer, consistent with my desire to experiment, fit into a low-income budget, and possess a degree of both strength and washability, since the piece is meant to be used and not simply displayed.

• Difficulty of stitches and techniques – typical of the style. When choosing a new subject I tend not to pay attention to how difficult it may or may not be, since I plan to learn whatever I need to accomplish the project. As an inexperienced embroiderer I can only tell you that split stitch is very slow for me.

• Size and density of stitches – small and extremely dense, but again, my intent for the piece was to imitate the typical expressions of the Opus Anglicanum style.

• Extent gone to ensure appropriateness to period of techniques and materials used – minor. When embarking on a new project I most often utilize materials that I already have on hand, although I will take steps to avoid using anything too overtly modern in appearance without justification. As for technique, my interest is in learning how it was done, so my intent is to accurately utilize period methods wherever it is feasible.

Skill

• Accuracy in design realization – see design drawings accompanying the piece, including original color sketch and a later shading map made for the gowns of the two figures.

• Neatness (especially in starts and ends) – I have no idea how I rate compared to experienced needle workers. I tied knots for most of the starts and ends, and supposedly that’s some kind of cardinal sin depending on who you talk to.

• Tension – insert cheesy blood-pressure joke here. Overall I think I’ve succeeded in keeping the stitch tension very even. Keeping the fabric under uniform tension in the frame was difficult and I ended up with a slightly off-kilter rectangle once the piece was removed. My thanks to the judges at my regional A&S fair for their advice on how to avoid this in future.

• Uniformity (in stitch density, stitch length, etc.) – my first stem stitch around the outside border of the piece – in other words, the first embroidery I had done in roughly two decades – is pretty uneven, but that improved steadily over the course of the piece. The split stitch has some minor variation in length, and I can point out one or two flaws in density.

If applicable:

• Finishing of piece (hemming, appliqué, etc.) – the hem currently in place was meant to be temporary, and not done by me because I’m horrible (and painfully slow) at hemming anything.

Creativity

Obviously you’ll be the judges here, since I have no hope of objectively evaluating my own creativity; I can, however, point out problems and challenges I faced throughout the project. As far as innovations are concerned, all I can really think of are the original design of the scene to depict a plausible variation on a known secular theme in extant artifacts, the variant background stitching used instead of underside-couched gold, and perhaps the use of a period embroidery style in combination with an SCA-specific cultural item.

Challenges included researching extant imagery and designing a scene typical to the period themes and representative of images in period manuscripts, selection of the entire color palette once the scene was determined, and designing the belt favor itself so that I could build it using a single piece of fabric. Once the embroidery was in place, I needed to figure out the best sequence and methods to hem the sides so as to eliminate loose ends, but avoid eliminating a loop for the belt to pass through. As a complete and utter non-seamstress this actually took me quite some time and several discussions to puzzle out.

There was only one circumstance that I think really qualifies as a “problem”, which I had nearly forgotten about. As Images 1 and 4 show, the lady’s wimple and veil were originally done only in white and light gray. They were the first colored area to be filled in after outlining was complete, so I was unable to tell whether the gray I used would be sufficiently dark. As it turned out, I went back after everything was complete and laid in some additional shading with the same dark gray used in the tree trunks. Apart from my first attempt to use “satin” embroidery thread for the background, this is the only area of the picture that I really needed to revise after beginning.

Conclusion

Thank you all for your review of my work, and your generally merciful commentary. I had two years’ worth of fun designing and constructing this piece; I hope you enjoyed looking at it as much as I enjoyed making it.

Because fire is pretty

noreply@blogger.com (Heather) — Mon, 09 May 2011 20:05:00 PDT

I've been working on oil lamps lately; our group camp is looking to upgrade to something slightly more authentic to the Middle Ages than tiki torches, and oil lamps were ubiquitous throughout our period of study, more prevalent even than candles. I took a class on them last year (man, I love Pennsic), and using that as a starting point I've gone a-hunting for period-looking substitutes for ancient oil lamps, vendors, and all that good stuff.

It turns out that a lot of candle holders make great lamps. In fact, it's believed that candle holders were originally a kind of logical extension of the oil lamp, so that when they were first made they were basically just modified versions of an already existing form. Certainly they carry a lot of similarities to this day. Observe:

Both of these are sold as candle holders at our local Pier One Imports.

Solid background provided courtesy of my husband (have you ever been in a Pier One?)

Note cameo appearance by swiftly-moving daughter.

I don't have them scanned just now, but these bear a crazily strong resemblance to surviving medieval artifacts, as well as lamps as depicted in countless medieval manuscripts, paintings, and the like. If anything, these are a little plain in comparison to these accurate reproductions of period lamps.

Here is another candle-holder that I have at home already. My so-called "votive holders" have already been filled partway with water and topped off with some leftover sesame oil (from a delightful evening learning about Filipino cooking, but that's another story) and three homemade float wicks.

The box it came in calls this a three-tiered votive holder. The stand is a little questionable, but those glass cups bear a very strong resemblance to surviving oil-lamp artifacts. In fact, they're almost replicas themselves, although the makers may not have realized that.

A (blurry) closeup showing the float wick

The float for this type of wick is often made of something flammable like cork. To protect it from the flame, you stack it with a little disk of metal (brass is period, the aluminum foil shown here isn't but I was experimenting), then punch a hole through both and thread your wick through. Any natural fiber will do, although I'm told wool doesn't burn well at all. My class instructor explained that for availability and cost, nothing beats an old-fashioned mop head! And in fact all three of these wicks were made from one strand of mop, which was originally made of four smaller strands of cotton twisted together. I just untwisted and separated the strands to get the right size I needed.

...And now you know a cute piece of trivia about mop heads.

Of course, the real question is, how does it look? The answer:

Pretty darn sweet.

And, although it's anticlimactic, I'll go ahead and include this image just so you can get a better look at everything...

Yep, still pretty darn sweet, even with the camera flash.

Just like other fuel-burning lamps, these wicks are adjustable to keep the smoke to a minimum. Unlike other fuel-burning lamps, this one smells nice and accidentally ingesting the oil won't kill you. (See above re: Filipino cooking. This stuff is slightly darker because it's the used oil, not the extra left in the bottle that we didn't cook with!)

These lamps are safer in another way, too: vegetable oils in general are also much harder to ignite than petroleum-based fuels, so much so that if this lamp were to tip over, the oil still in the reservoir could possibly extinguish the flame rather than catching fire. The added water in the bottom helps with that as well, in addition to conserving oil, allowing more light to shine through the reservoir, and acting as a heat shield to protect the reservoir itself. See, if this lamp were filled only with oil, then as the oil was consumed, the flame would get closer and closer to the bottom of the vessel; the glass would get too hot to handle, and could crack. (To say nothing of what would happen to the lamps that were made of wood!) A number of medieval illustrations show people carrying around larger versions of this lamp shape in their bare hands, not unlike the way we carry around a glass of wine or a large snifter-type glass; that would be impossible without filling the bottom with water.

And oh look, I've rambled on yet again and it's 11pm yet again, and I'm really bloody tired, yet again. Time to go downstairs and blow out the flames, which have been burning steadily for at least the past 3 hours. Fire is pretty; it's even prettier when you can make it safe.

Special thanks to Bedwyr Danwyn for his research and presentation of much of this material during Pennsic University.

Big Awesome Calligraphy, Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Heather) — Fri, 06 May 2011 19:45:00 PDT

When last I posted about this, I believe I got as far as the planning stages with you; making decisions about layout, testing different text styles, and so on. Moving on!

The happy cluttered workspace. As seen from the other side of the table.

First, there was an intermediate period where I rested my hand, 'cause ouch. I hadn't done any major calligraphy in about three years, and while you don't forget the letters, you can lose some of the finer points of technique if you let yourself get rusty. One of the big ones is a mistake beginners make all the time and you have to train yourself out of doing, and if you let yourself slide for awhile, it will come right back. We usually call it The Death Grip - you're So - Focused - On - Getting - Each - Letter - Perfect - You Must - Hold - The Pen - as if it were trying to escape, as if a super-villain was trying to take it away from you as part of their plot to destroy the world, and as if you needed to prove the depth of your concentration and commitment by bruising the tips of your thumb and fingers. Trust me, the bruises might not ever show, but things will hurt for close to a week after you do something like that.

There's an invisible part to every piece. I know I talked in my previous post about some of it - the decisions, the measurements, the research that all go toward the final effect you're looking for. But there are also false starts, side trails that you follow to see if they'll go anywhere, options you wish you could have used but didn't work out, and so on. Some work doesn't have any of that, if you're feeling really confident or treading familiar territory. But with any new challenge, anything that's stretching your abilities or represents something you haven't tried before, you'll see a lot of those. A note of advice: having this happen does not indicate failure. It's part of the process, just like it's part of the process to scrape your knees at least a couple of time when you're learning to ride a bicycle. Falling off isn't failing; it's learning. (And if I could just remember that myself, I'd be all enlightened and stuff and my life would be a lot more serene, dammit.)

For this project, the main "false start" or dead end was that I'd really, really hoped to use vellum as my ground material. It's sturdy, it's authentic to the time period, and it's one of those things that we traditionally reserve for the Really Special (tm) awards in our society. The particular piece of vellum I wanted to use had gotten damaged shortly after I got it. Alas. I had already found a text size I was happy with, and I'd done a lot of work with wording and so on to make sure that the entire block of text would fit into a precisely-measured space, which meant that the rest of the piece had to be a certain size overall if it was going to look good, which meant that the vellum couldn't be trimmed down far enough to completely eliminate the damaged areas.

Oh well.

Research into the Cross of Cong (again, see previous post) gave me the shapes I was going to use in my decoration as well - except I had to modify them because my open areas turned out to be about half as wide as the ones on the cross. Here, I can show you:

Sketches from the Cross of Cong.

These sketches are of the creatures woven all through the metalwork on the Cross of Cong; the three large shapes in the middle are roughly the same shape as the corresponding areas on the cross itself. Along the sides you see my attempts to make sense of the knotwork by breaking it down into the main elements: critters and weaving lines. And then across the top are attempts to get the creatures to fit the shapes I'll be using in the large initial.

As a complete tangent, I never plan it this way, but these pages always delight me afterward because they remind me of stuff from da Vinci's notebooks - all sketches and notes in the margins and ideas in progress. Frankly, if I planned a page to look like a da Vinci, it wouldn't work as well. I know this, because I made one once as an award for someone else.

Adaptations and variations of one creature,
with explorations and development of a bird figure.

The first figure was the best for adapting to my initial shape, but since my own open areas were going to be so much narrower, in the end I decided to just use a single critter rather than two of them tangled together. I also needed something that would fit into the end sections, which were smaller still, and ended up creating a knotwork bird.

Knotwork birds (aka twisty-bendy birds) are found all through the Book of Kells and other sacred texts from Ireland. It turns out that peacocks represented the incorruptible flesh of Jesus, back in the day. You wouldn't think there were very many peacocks in Ireland at the time, and in fact there weren't, but there was a bit of folklore that insisted that peacock meat would never rot. And that is your nerdy tangent for the day.

**

I really expected writing this post to take less time today, but my mind is not at full speed for some reason, and I've had to edit, re-write, erase, and start over way too flippin' many times. It's getting late enough that I'd be better off going to bed instead of continuing to fight with myself. I promise the next post on this topic will get out of sketches and mockups, and into the actual project. I do not, however, promise that the next post will be on this topic.

Good night. If you like, tell me about some situation in which you've found yourself making side tracks and false starts, as part of your process of learning, or of growth. I'm curious.

Something I don't understand

noreply@blogger.com (Heather) — Tue, 03 May 2011 18:38:00 PDT

There's something I don't understand: How is it that a person can have the blues long enough to sing the blues, but upon hearing the blues, they no longer have the blues? At what point in the middle of your blues singin' do the blues go away, and after that point, are you still really singin' the blues?

And if not, what do you call it?

And if you're not really singin' the blues, wouldn't that be enough to give you the blues all over again?

(guitar riff)
If you not really singin' -- if you not really singin' the blues....
I said if -- if you're not really singin' the blues...
If you not singin' the blues, won't that just - give you the blues all over agin?
(more guitar riff)

It's like Heisenberg, man... .I'm speakin' to you here, listen now
Some kind of blues paradox goin' on, messin' wit the space-time continuum
Messin' wit mah head
Messin' wit blues, man, and that's just not right

Is it like a standin' wave of blues, or is it more like...
like...
like Schroedinger's blues?
Man, you got Schroedinger's blues, you never know if you comin' or goin'

'Cause you both.

***

Yep. That's my brain, doing what it does best, right there... sometimes I feel like I'm just along for the ride the same as you, but it sure is a lot of fun.

Also, I'm not sure if this is more evidence for the theory that quantum physics really is about everything, or if it's just proof that blues music goes well with everything. It is, however, an excellent demonstration of what happens when I free associate and try to get philosophical while listening to the blues. Only silliness can result.

Jafar's Game

noreply@blogger.com (Heather) — Sun, 01 May 2011 18:52:00 PDT

Today on Facebook, one of my old high school acquaintances asked why life has to be so boring. Here is my spur-of-the-moment response:

Answer: It doesn't.
What did you learn today?
What were you grateful for today?
Who did you talk to today?
Where did you find beauty today?

Her question and my response brought my mind back around to remembering something known as "Jafar's Game."

Within the SCA, there used to be a young guy who went by the name "Jafar" when he was at events. (Remember, we're all pretending to come from the Middle Ages, so we each adopt a "persona" with their own name and interests, whom we're supposed to behave as while we're at events.) While I only ever met him once, he was very well known well-loved, and when he died of a sudden illness at the age of 28, people around here and across the United States were devastated.

Jafar had the kind of personality that begs to have tall tales made about it, and given the things he got into, there are in fact at least a few stories still being told about him. He was known for, among other traits, being perpetually cheerful. The story goes that one night, he was on a long ride home from an event, in a van with a bunch of friends. He listened to the other people gossiping and bitching for awhile - So-and-so is just such a jerk sometimes, Well they said they'd be changing it but you know that'll never happen, and so on – and then he put on his patented glow-in-the dark grin, turned to the person next to him, and said, "So – what did you learn today?"

Thus was born Jafar's Game.

The rules are pretty simple: on the way home from an event, everyone takes turns describing one cool thing that they saw, experiences, or learned over the course of the day. When it's your turn, no one can interrupt you, although your commentary can certainly spark plenty of discussion. When you're done, the next person goes, and so on around the car, and when it comes back around to you, you add a new cool thing that you get to describe and discuss. This goes on for as long as possible, until you either run out of things to discuss or the car pulls into the driveway. At no time are you allowed to have "learned" something that involves snarky, bitchy gossip; even if it turns out you had a bad day, the object is to try and pull something positive from the experience.

Jafar's Game has introduced many a newcomer to the joys of playing in our Society, given me the chance to be grateful for and share with others any number of terrific experiences, and saved a small handful of really rotten days and made them into something a little less miserable and more valuable.

Funny how I don't think I've ever taken Jafar's Game and applied it to a regular day away from any SCA events… but I guess now is as good a time to start as any.

I dunno – I just disagree that life "has to be" boring, even if I'm often guilty of inflicting boring days on myself.

So I'm asking: What did you learn today? What were you grateful for? Who did you talk to? Where did you find beauty?

I'm looking forward to your answers.

My Current Hope-To List

noreply@blogger.com (Heather) — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 16:37:00 PDT

Longtime readers will recognize that I've made some cosmetic changes to the blog in the past few days (let me know what you think of those, btw); well, I was doing some stuff behind the scenes and had cause to look at a bunch of posts from about 2008 or so.

It was kinda cool, but also kinda depressing.

Cool to see some of the projects and ideas I'd had floating around – but depressing to see how many of those are still in stasis, and more so to see that the things that were bugging me about life in 2008 are still bugging me today, in 2011. I still need a job. I still am having relationship issues. I still question my abilities as a mother, and my value to society.

Like I said: depressing. It's as if I'm the project that is currently in some kind of indefinite holding pattern.

However, that's not what I want this post to be about. I want it to be about all the nifty ideas that I've had floating around, waiting to be acted on, and on all the sweet projects that actually have come to fruition in the past few years.

So, here is my current "hope-to" list. It's not a to-do list because those are depressing and frustrating; it's a list of stuff I hope to get to because it would be nifty if I could.

Hang-gliding; and once upon a time, you could actually take that for PE credit at Indiana University in Bloomington.
Marionettes, which have interested me ever since I read Pinocchio when I was about six, and the book had this terrific appendix about them, their history, and how to craft papier-mache heads and the proper way to rig the controls.
Mosaics. I have #3 to repair and then 9 more to build to finish that monster of a project
Oil lamps and
Silk banners – both of these are for our group campsite at Pennsic, but I've taken a class on oil lamps and they're really really cool. Cost-effective, safer than tiki and lighter-fluid type things, pretty, and crazy easy to make. The banners would involve learning silk-painting, which I could totally see becoming my Next Crazy Project for a few years, you know?
Hand-crafted books. I already know how to do a specific type of limp-binding, and I've even built one full of calligraphy already as part of a group project to make a "scroll" (see previous posts about the accuracy of that name) back in 2003. I keep thinking of crafting a pair of books with favorite poems in them, to gift to a couple friends of ours. Making the book itself only takes about 90 minutes, if you have all the right supplies. Prepping the pages, doing the text and illustrations and such, takes considerably longer.
Decent, regular work in henna bookings. I could pay my bills with this if I had more consistent business, but that's a big if. I really enjoy puttin' the pretty on people, though. Also, that's not really a "project" like the other things on this list.

See, that's my problem with lists: I start out with "want-to" and start putting in "should" and "need to". For instance, right now I need to get a job and should start looking. The house needs de-cluttering, organizing and cleaning. I should be downstairs getting a load of dishes going. Blah, blah, bleah, blah.

Anyway. Watch this space; I hope to get more calligraphy stuff up this evening – but I do have a gig tomorrow that I still need to finish preparing for.

If any of you have ideas for how I could turn this stuff into a regular job, I'm all ears!

Big Awesome Calligraphy, Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Heather) — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 20:25:00 PDT

So, I made this amazing scroll* a couple weeks back, and ever since I've been promising I'd upload pictures of the entire project from start to finished, and have repeatedly, y'know, not done that. I realized part of the reason I've been delaying is that, just as the process itself was involved, time-consuming, and quite a bit of work, posting the story of that entire process is likewise going to take a lot of time. And I simply haven't had both the time and the energy in one place all at once in order to be able to do it.

However. I do have time to put part of it up. So here we go.

*Note to all those people who don't actually participate in the SCA. A "scroll" is our term for an award certificate, given to one of our members for any number of reasons but usually related to skill in fighting, skill in the arts, or service on any scale. It's worded like a Victorian/modern romanticized version of medieval legalese or proclamations, decorated to look like a page from a medieval manuscript - usually something pretty like a bestiary, Book of Hours, psalter or Bible - and referred to as a scroll. Yes, we know none of those pieces fit together to make anything truly authentic to the time period. We kinda don't care.

In this case, the recipient was known to have an Irish persona - in other words, when he dresses up in funny clothes on the weekends, he pretends to be someone who might plausibly have lived in medieval Ireland - but his chosen time period turned out to be a few centuries after the creation of the Book of Kells, Lindisfarne Gospels, or any other obvious choice for gorgeous Irish manuscript art. Hunting around for stuff in his century led me to a 12th century artifact called the Cross of Cong. This is a processional cross - the kind you put on the end of a long staff and march through the streets on holy days, then remove to use on the altar - and was also at one time a reliquary. A piece of polished, clear quartz on the cross's body once sheltered a little sliver of wood believed to have come from the True Cross. The thing is absolutely gorgeous:

Public domain image imported from Wikipedia

And, as has been established before, I can get absolutely carried away by things that are absolutely gorgeous, so this became the inspiration and basis of the entire piece. It was made of gold, silver, copper, bronze, and something called niello, which is a metal alloy that comes out black, all laid over oak. In addition to the piece of crystal I mentioned above, it had colored glass and and semiprecious stones, enamel work, and probably more that has since been lost or damaged. The thing is 900 year old, it's going to have a little wear and tear, okay?

Manuscript pages very rarely used silver leaf, and so far as I know they never utilized copper. Speaking personally, I've only used more than one metal twice, the first time being gold and "silver" (actually 12K white gold, likely a 50/50 blend with silver) and the second time being gold and copper.

I have to confess something to you here, whether you are actually surprised or not: part of my joy in making these pieces comes from knowing that I'm doing something a little crazy. Having people look at me and suggest I need professional help (or to quote one friend, "OCD much?") is, in fact, a source of delight when I'm sinking my teeth into a new project. What can I say? Cackling madly is fun.

Annnyway...

Further research gave me some insights into which alphabet style (aka script or ductus) to use; even though I've described our scrolls as being built out of a handful of disparate elements, I personally do like to at least try and match the time period of the words to the time period of the decoration. So I test-drove a few.

Testing different alphabets, line spacing, letter sizes, and so on

The script being used most often at that time was actually meant to be a quick-and-dirty system, built for speed rather than elegance, but the scribes also had a more formal style, and would "hybridize" the two pretty much at will, so I got to have some fun creating a hybrid that I liked and was readable be people besides me.

Believe it or not, though, the alphabet studies didn't come first. First was a round of concept sketches for the entire piece, getting an idea for what layout would look best, figuring out how much space the text would be allowed to fill, where my margins would be, and all the other kinds of decisions that underlay a piece but are generally invisible once it is finished.

I have those. I didn't scan them. You'll be able to see the final layout yourself once I upload the thing. If you like, I can give you the measurements and other such, but I have this feeling I'd only be boring you. I mean, do you really care that I originally hoped to have the measurements of the paper match the measurements - or at least proportions - of the Cross of Cong? Does exposing that much of my geekery leave you concerned, or entertained?

Yeah.

And now it's 11:24 and we're done with part 1 because I don't want to stay up till 2am going further with it. And I would. I know me.

Music! Henna! Links!

noreply@blogger.com (Heather) — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 10:38:00 PDT

So, as part of my involvement in the SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism), I have finally gotten back to singing in our local chapter's choir, the Rivenstar Madrigali. Recently one of our members recorded one of our rehearsals. As my friend and fellow soprano Katya said, "Not bad for a take-all-comers casual choir," and I agree.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhXwGMH6giU

If you want to play Spot The Blogger, I'm the only one there who didn't have this piece memorized, as the others had been rehearsing it for months and I only rejoined in January.

As a self-professed choir snob, it's been hard for me sometimes to just let go of the expectations about what I think we "should" be doing (based on years in college-level choirs with conductor/instructors who demanded a very, very high level of focus, discipline, attention to detail, skill, and all the rest that goes with taking choir for a grade), and allow myself to enjoy all the things that we are doing. We're singing, and we're enjoying the sound, and you know what? That's something to be grateful for all by itself.

**

Next Wednesday kicks off my fourth season with the Sagamore West Farmer's Market! Today I finally got my contract and booth fee delivered to the right people! They were already full! They were only merciful about letting me in because I'd achieved "permanent" status! I'm using up my lifetime quota of exclamation points with this paragraph! Woo-hoo!

**

Next Wednesday, a couple hours before the market kicks off, I'll be at Sunspot Market giving a talk as part of Sunspot's "Food For Thought" program. Basically they serve lunch and invite a speaker to come be all educational and stuff, and I get to talk a little about the history and culture of henna, then give people free samples before dashing up the street to set up my booth. They have a little flier that they put up for each month's speakers, and when I stopped in to buy supplies today, I saw that they were gracious enough to give me a really nice blurb. Felt nice to see, you know?

If you're local, I'd love to see you there, and if you can't make it, well, the market really is only a few blocks away.

Cheers!

PS - Ladysmith Black Mambazo. That is all.

Couple brief announcements

noreply@blogger.com (Heather) — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 20:00:00 PDT

Okay, first, the farmer's market season starts next week if you can believe it. I almost can't, which is probably why I still haven't actually gotten my signed contract and booth fee in to the right people so that I have official permission to show up. Yes, I plan to fix that tomorrow.

**

Before that, though, there is a bellydance seminar called Mirage Caravan, with workshops and performances taking place this weekend, to benefit the Ehlers-Danlos National Foundation. Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome is a very weird and rare thing that affects the collagen in a person's body. Sometimes this means that their skin can't hold together and tears easily. Sometimes it means that organs won't hold together, and a sudden sneeze or laugh can actually break things inside and kill the person. And sometimes it means that the person's cartilage is extremely loose, such that they can go to sleep and wake up in the morning with dislocated ribs. That last version is the kind that the event's organizer lives with, and she tells me that it's the least serious of the three, but still quite painful and inconvenient on the better days. I didn't know that a person actually could dislocate their sternum, but apparently if your cartilage is loose enough, you can.

I will be slingin' the henna at a social a couple days before the event, so local performers can get all prettied up in time to allow the designs to darken to their peak color on Friday or Saturday. I'll also be vending on Saturday, and slingin' again at an after-party to be held Sunday.

I have high hopes for my credit card bill this month. And yes, there's a whole soapbox there about how I don't like having to think in such a mercenary fashion about something I enjoy, but there it is. It's a debate that has raged among artists especially, that I have seen at least, for some time - how ought one feel about charging money for something that is inherently rewarding just to do? But that's not an announcement and I am genuinely trying to stick to the damn topic for once (heh), so let's save it for later.

**

Finally, I know I keep promising to post pictures of the calligraphy project that I did recently. I spent today scanning some of the background and prep-work pages - sketches, text mockups, things like that - so that I could include them when I go to describe the process. Unfortunately, by the time I finished everything it was (is) nearly 11pm and I'm tired. Trust me, if you don't do a blog of your own, or write elsewhere, putting all this together takes time. I've put a couple hours into posts before now when they were especially image-heavy, and I assure you, this one will be one of those.

Tomorrow. Really. I mean it. After I turn my contract in to the farmer's market people at City Hall.

**

Finally, I still need a job, and I still hate the job search process. I'm just tossing the thought onto the waves of the Internet Ocean and letting it drift where it will. And no, that isn't the ONLY thing I'm doing to find work. Sheesh.

Later!

Stuff

noreply@blogger.com (Heather) — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 20:00:00 PDT

Lately I've been playing Dungeons and Dragons with some friends; the moderator runs a very character-based game, less plot and campaign focused than some I've been part of. So the character I created is really grabbing my attention, and now I'm writing up our game sessions from her point of view.

Sorry - I almost never share this kind of thing outside of gaming groups. My fiction is one of the few things I feel truly uncomfortable about showing around. But it's creative and I'm enjoying it, so I wanted to at least mention it here.

**

Our local group hosted a major medieval event on the 16th; I entered my embroidery project (see elsewhere in this blog) into the Regional A&S Competition. If you're not in the SCA, try to imagine a statewide 4-H fair only old-fashioned; you make stuff, display it, and judges score it based on specific criteria for whatever type of thing it is. Your "place" is determined by your score, not by actually competing with others. It's completely possible for everyone at one of these to walk away with a first-place score, or for no one to do so. To my surprise, I got a first place.

I've had a few people look at me funny when I tell them I wasn't expecting a first. For the record, my surprise doesn't come from thinking I did a poor job on the embroidery, okay? I might have self-esteem issues, but I do know what I do well. Relax. No, I was surprised because I know what the criteria are and what kind of work A&S competition generally favors. By and large, my focus when I make stuff is on using it for a specific purpose - a belt favor my husband can wear, a kite that I can actually fly - whereas the focus on authenticity in A&S (we are an educational non-profit, after all) means that things made for competition tend to be best suited for display. Imagine a kite made of parchment and silk instead of Tyvek and nylon - the one I made would have cost close to $200 just to build and then I'd be petrified of damaging it, right? So I make different choices when I make stuff, and those choices generally would hurt me in A&S competition.

The highest possible score you can get is a 30. The lowest score you can get and still be in first place is 24.5 if I remember correctly. Each of three judges will score you independently and then those scores are averaged. Of the three judges' scores, my lowest was a 24.2. I find this really, truly unbelievable. My fabric is all wrong! My thread is modern! My research was (for me) scanty! I built something we use in the SCA but that didn't exist in period! How in the world did I score so well?!

Answer: what I did right, I did very, very right. Heh.

**

Speaking of very very right... you know that calligraphy thing I was talking about in previous posts? Presented Saturday morning. Audiences often will say "oooooh" at an especially nice scroll. I'm trying to remember when an audience last applauded for one, though.

Award of the Sapphire for Sir Raedwulf Caveron O'Dell

Sorry it's sideways.

Made on Bristol board with India ink, gouache (pronounced "go-wash", it's just opaque watercolor), 23K gold leaf, 12K "white" gold leaf, 100% copper leaf, glass gems, three rough sapphires, one sapphire pendant, and a partridge in a pear tree. This is the most ambitious thing I've ever made without assistance, and ranks up there in the top two or three most ambitious things I've ever made even with assistance.

Fear not, I'll get all educational here at some point and post a full start-to-finish explanation. I get a kick out of photo-documenting my big projects - going back over the process is just fun for me, and sharing with people is too, so why not?

I'm sure this makes me some kind of egotistical maniac in some people's minds. My five-year-old likes to show off the stuff she did really well at, and no one accuses her of being self-centered. It is, however, nearly 11pm and I don't feel like stepping onto that soapbox so close to the time I should go to bed.

G'night, folks. Buenas nachos and all that. Somebody hire me for a job.

The Thing

noreply@blogger.com (Heather) — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 10:17:00 PDT

Today and yesterday there was gold. I finished the 23K ("yellow") gold, have just finished lunch, and now there will be gesso again. LOTS of gesso.

I'm taking pictures, fear not. It looks awesome so far.

I've also spent a little time rubbing sapphires against sandpaper. Because my life is exciting like that.

Gesso

noreply@blogger.com (Heather) — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 20:01:00 PDT

Today, thanks to the generosity of Beloved Husband, I got something close to eight uninterrupted hours on the Thing. There was gesso. Possibly tonight there will be gold. Tomorrow will be more gesso, followed by white gold, and even more gesso followed by copper. And then there's the flat gilding to do. Muahahahaa.

What is gesso? Super-thick paint. The medieval recipe called for slaked plaster among other things (mix a batch of plaster. Stir it too long and you will mess up the chemical reaction, and it will never set. This is slaked plaster). Modern people use gesso to help prepare canvases for oil painting, I think. We medievalist wingnuts use gesso to create a raised surface, a little 3D action on our work, and then we put gold leaf on it. The gold gets all flickery and flashy as the light hits it from different angles.

It's crazy time-consuming to do, and can get discouraging when you realize you've spent all this time on this one step and still have more to do. But the gold takes care of all that. Laying gold is not like painting at all. Gold is instant gratification - lay it on the sticky gesso or whatever else you're using, hit it with a dry paintbrush to sweep away the bits that you aren't planning to keep, and poof! Instant shiny.

The only thing is, gold sticks to itself. This is a blessing most of the time, because it lets you build up the layers of gold to get an almost velvety, luxuriant result (and yes, up close you can tell the difference between one layer of thin shiny metal and several layers of thin shiny metal. You wouldn't think it would matter, but it does). However, if you're working with more than one color of gold - say, 18K "white" gold as well as 23K regular gold - you can end up with your second color trying to adhere to and cover up the areas you did with your first color.

What this means for me is that I'm taking precautions by laying the gesso in stages, so the gold won't have any option but to go where I want for this first stage. For the second color, I'll lay gesso down in the new areas, and then do something with the new color that we fancy artist types like to call aiming carefully. As in, hit the target and don't miss.

Luckily, the third stage will be copper. I've never worked with more than two metals before, but copper is nice because it doesn't stick to itself, nor to the gold. This means that, a: I can put it on last and not have to worry about ruining my previous efforts, and b: the leaf itself starts out thicker (since you can't build on it with more layers) and therefore much, much sturdier. Just in my experience with my stuff, copper leaf is to gold leaf what aluminum foil is to copper leaf.

No, I won't be adding aluminum to this page. Yes, dammit, I did just get the idea to try it sometime.

Here endeth the lesson. I'm just so edjimacational, you know?

Tomorrow, lots and lots of shinies!

Progress on the THING

noreply@blogger.com (Heather) — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 19:24:00 PDT

This is the most ambitious calligraphy project I've done ever, and that's saying something. I hereby christen it the Thing; everything I work on is usually called a Thing for at least a little while, what can I say?

Anyway.

Today I gave up on the vellum - it's just too damaged for me to cut a large enough piece out of it (though I can and will cut smaller sections out for other projects) - broke out the Bristol board and the ruler and pencils. This one is large enough I also broke out the T-square (the ruler is longer) and because of the design, I even got to use my compass. I like my compass. I've done ridiculous geometric marvels with the compass before. Today I just drew a dozen circles in various strategic locations.

You wouldn't think that just getting guidelines down would take a couple hours, but it does. Either I'm precise and fussy, or just slow, or both, but it took at least two hours. Some of that was ruling the lines for the margins, quite a bit was involved with the first initial of the piece, and surprisingly, not very much time at all was needed to get the guidelines down for the text. The finished piece, not counting margins, will measure 12x14 inches. Of that, only a 5.75 inch square will be devoted to wordy stuff. Yes, I know. Don't give me that look, my husband already did and I was immune to it then, too. Just trust me.

Tomorrow I'll put the text down (whee!) and finish drawing in the knotwork on the letter T and animals on the initial I. And then there will be gesso... and probably also the first stages of hand-polishing gemstones. I've never done that before either, so I want to start as soon as possible.

And that's the Thing. Pictures will follow after the piece is given to its intended recipient. It's an award certificate, basically, and in our society, these things are very hush-hush, "state secrets" so that we don't spoil the surprise. In other words you don't get to see it till they do.

My fingers have had a few days to recover from Death Grip Calligraphy (it's a beginner's mistake but I still make it whenever I've gotten out of practice), so while I now feel able to do the lettering without pain, I'm concerned I'll have somehow lost my comfort with the alphabet style. Feh. Second-guessing gets me nothing, especially when I have tomorrow to fret over it and tonight to sleep.

G'night, people who may actually be reading! (Thanks again, Barbara Sher Who Is Awesome.)

Facebook

noreply@blogger.com (Heather) — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 20:24:00 PDT

For those who are curious, I've been on Facebook a lot lately. I used to avoid it in favor of Twitter, but then this gaming thing came up and the character-creation thing and so on and so on. I've been posting short tidbits about the calligraphy project over there, if anyone is interested.

It's Facebook.com/heather.bungardjanney if anyone who comes here is curious to know about what is over there. Frankly, the blog just doesn't get that many visitors as far as I've been able to tell; that and I put a constraint on myself to leave my personal life out of this arena and try to keep it dedicated to creative pursuits. I don't know that ranting about politics would get me any more henna customers, after all. So I haven't had a whole lot that I wanted to post about, in recent months.

Lately, though, I've had things I wanted to say that have nothing to do with marketing henna. I've had rants, and musings, and whatnots (I hereby declare "whatnot" to be a category of ideas), and I've been keeping myself from posting them here. I have this odd dilemma going on, in that I've wanted an audience to hear what I have to say, but - if this makes sense - I didn't want my friends and family to know they were mine.

It isn't that I'm ashamed of my ideas. I'm just a: not in the mood to argue my opinions, b: not in the mood to be judged by family or disagreed with by friends, and c: maaayybe, interested in just presenting the ideas on their own without "me" attached to them. That last is less crucial than the other two reasons, but it still holds some weight in my head - a thought coming from a random schmuck is received differently than if it came from the President, or your best friend, or someone you're fighting with, or someone you adore. I dunno - maybe that does mean I'm ashamed of my ideas a little bit, or at least, unwilling to be seen in the same room as them. Mostly I want to rant about Stupid Freaking Daylight Saving Time and not have to argue with people who think it's just awesome.

You ever have that happen? You want an audience, but you don't want them to know your name? What would you talk about if you could be completely anonymous?

***

In other news, calligraphy, and oh by the way one of my uncles is dying of cancer and will probably be gone by the end of the week. And Barbara Sher Who Is Awesome (if that isn't her full name, it ought to be), popped over and commented on my last post and told me I'm "nourishing," so now I feel like maybe I should say something more often. Even when I don't know that I have anything to say.

Hm. Maybe I should write more for the Internet and less for "is my mom going to see this?"... but again, marketing. Trying to get henna bookings. Doesn't go well with my latest philosophy on porn. Or politics. Or whining about relationships. Or, well, whining about much of anything, really.

Gah. It's 11:21 and I'm rambling, because I feel like I should. Bedtime would be wiser.

Winter's End

noreply@blogger.com (Heather) — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 17:20:00 PDT

Oh, my goodness. I knew it had been awhile since I'd put anything up, but this is crazy.

Should I tell you about the henna party I booked in December? Or about the health fair I did at Sunspot Market this past weekend? Should I make excuses about the winter blahs getting to me in a big way, or tell you I had some other project on the boil and just never had time to write? (Well, either that last part is a lie or I've already forgotten about whatever it was I was doing.)

If you live anywhere in the Midwest you know already that this was the winter that just wouldn't end. I'm glad that it's officially spring, irritated that Daylight Saving Time exists, and gearing up for another season of henna at the farmer's market. I'm also mulling ideas for a calligraphy project to be completed in a couple weeks' time, creating a character for a role-playing game with folks I haven't played with in ages (yay!), reading a new-to-me book by Barbara Sher who is my absolute favorite self-help person, and fighting a cold, all while mothering a kid and halfheartedly looking for a job.

Put that way, I sound tremendously busy. This is what is known as spin.

How have you all been surviving the winter? What will you be working on now that spring has officially arrived?

All the best,
me

Thought for the holidays

noreply@blogger.com (Heather) — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 10:52:00 PST

It's that time of year again. The time of year when radio stations feel an overwhelming need to play Christmas music of all varieties; the only time of year when non-country, non-oldies stations will play things like vintage 1947 Gene Autry. The time of year, in fact, when the radio stations show some decency as compared to, say, Wal-mart, which by this point has been playing this stuff for nearly a month, because as we all know, nothing says Christmas like autumn leaves, 70 degree temperatures, and turkey shopping!

We were on our way to my parents for Thanksgiving dinner, and the radio was playing the required holiday-themed stuff, when "Frosty The Snowman" came on. If you've forgotten the lyrics (and if you have, good lord, haven't you been paying attention at all?), here's a snippet:

There must have been some magic in that old silk hat they found,
For when they put it on his head he began to dance around

And that got me thinking....

If the hat is magic --
if the hat is the source of Frosty's liveliness, personality, and mobility...
Dude, you could pretty much put the hat on anything vaguely person-shaped, and it would work. Right? You wouldn't need to wait till wintertime to build a snowman; you could use it year-round!

For Halloween, you could break out a plastic skeleton and put the hat on, and you and your new friend Scully could go trick-or-treating while your parents stay home and hand out candy! Win-win!

Go back even earlier in the year and you could make a scarecrow -- although, on further consideration, thay might not be the best idea. Historically, animated straw people don't usually turn out well: best case, you've got some guy trying to take your daughter off on a road trip to an unspecified destination with the intent of getting advice from a travelling snake-oil salesman. Worst case, you've got something like Children of the Corn. Not good. Okay, skip the scarecrow.

But you see what I'm saying here, right? Right? Keep the hat out of the attic. Use the hat.

***

By Way of an Explanation

Mentally torturing my husband is one of the things I live for in life - I try very hard to come up with something absurd enough to make his brain hurt, and he tries desperately hard not to laugh because It Would Only Encourage Me. I've warned him multiple times that that look he gets - the one that says, "I am a mature adult and I refuse to laugh at this silliness (no matter how much I'd like to)" - is just as rewarding for me as his actually laughing, but either he's refusing to Get It, or he's decided that his half of the game is to play the part of Mature Adult Refusing to Laugh.

Now that you know this, you pretty much know everything there is to know about my personality, sense of humor, and the best dynamics of our marriage. I'm not sure if it's a good thing or a sad thing that I can sum all those things up so quickly and easily, but there they are.

The main point is, you have some idea of where my brain most likes to go, and why.

Ooh! Mardi Gras!

Zelda the Zombie
was a corpse without a soul
with a shambling gait
and a lust for brains
and one eye that's just a hole...

Happy holidays, everyone. (Keep the hat.)

The big damn can project, part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Heather) — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 19:05:00 PST

Okay. When last our intrepid heroes met (that'd be you and me), the milk can had a stencil on it that looked like this:

…which is pretty and all, but is only the tiny skeleton of the actual knot. In order to make the stencil without it falling apart, I cut channels that were only about a third as wide as the actual bands. Compare:

So, once I actually got the "skeleton" in place, it was time to flesh it out. For some reason I didn't get a photo of just that stage, but you can still see what went on here:

Take a brush that is the right width (if you're lucky, you'll have managed to make a knot pattern that matches a paintbrush in your arsenal already, without checking beforehand). Go over every single freaking one of the bands in the stenciled design and widen it. Carefully.

You can also see from the above photo that all that work to get a white band on the milk can – excuse me, the Big Damn Can – was for the sole purpose of having a background on which the actual color will show up. Painting the colors directly onto the olive-ish surface of the can would have made them dull and difficult to see without at least three coats for every color. As it stood, I still needed to go over the yellow more than once because it didn't want to lay down a nice opaque coat the first time through.

The color scheme for this piece was chosen to blend well with the background; our original choices of good old Irish green-and-orange were not going to cut it, but a rich mustard yellow, two shades of blue, and rust red did the trick nicely. When working on a project like this, always start with the lightest color and work your way toward the darkest.

I like this detail shot, because it gives you more of a sense of the structure of the knot pattern itself. The yellow actually comprises two separate bands running along the top and bottom of the design. The blue bands thread their way through the yellow, occasionally doubling back into a kind of figure-8 as shown here, before continuing on.

The figure-8s are mirror images of one another throughout the pattern. Here you can see both blue bands complete, and a couple spots of yellow that I missed the first time through.

Just in case you wanted to get the full effect.

In my previous post I talked a lot about "reminder lessons" – things that you should already know by now, but that you keep learning over again with each project. One of my favorites is, "Outlining rocks." This one was less of a reminder, since I'd already planned to outline the work and knew that doing so would bring the entire design to life – but still, it's always nice to see.

Now, if you look really closely at the above, you'll see places where the white background peeks through, or places where the color overlaps across the outlines into places it doesn't belong. The idea isn't to simply outline the color you have; it's to delineate where the bands are supposed to be, and yes, to point out errors so you can go back through and touch those up, too.

Which I did…

…all the while pounding into my head the main lesson for this piece: "If you're going to charge for knotwork, take what you think it's worth and triple it, at least." At the end of the day – and let me be clear, I am not in any way unhappy with what I made off the piece, and was happy to do the work – I probably was paid about 25 cents an hour once the effort behind the stupid stencil and Stencil 2: the Sequel gets factored in.

Secondary lesson: Never make stencils out of paper, you bonehead!

***

Coming soon: henna (maybe), mosaic stuff, embroidery, and a brief explanation of how I'm able to work on all these projects. Hint: unemployment helps.

Happy Thanksgiving to one and all.

The big damn can project, part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Heather) — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 04:00:00 PST

Every art project I take on is a learning experience – some more than others. Occasionally the learning is more along the lines of a reminder, as in, "Why did you not figure this out last time? Why are you telling me you did figure it out, when you've gone and chosen to do it again, on purpose?"

Yeah. This was one of those projects. And I liked it.

For my younger readers – back in the day you didn't get your milk at the grocery store, and it didn't come in plastic jugs or cardboard cartons. It came in glass bottles, or in these big damn cans:

And the big damn cans (I don't even want to know what they weighed when they were full of milk) are now considered quaint antiques that look nifty as decorative objects, pretty much just like spinning wheels and really old rocking chairs.

So okay. Friend of mine has this big damn can. She keeps it out in her flower bed, and she wants me to decorate it a little so it looks nice. Her mom has a big damn can of her own (I just like saying that) that she's decorated with an American eagle or something like that; my friend has some Irish blood, and she wants me to take hers and put some Celtic knotwork on it. She's willing to pay me, which is always nice, in cash and in stained glass, something she claims she's just a beginner at (ha!).

I like stained glass. I like knotwork. My like of knotwork causes me to repeatedly forget just how involved the process of making knotwork can be. Gorgeous end result – ridiculous amount of work to get there. That would be Reminder Lesson #1.

So, I break out my books and putter around finding a pattern that my friend and I both like… then I spend a couple months tweaking it before committing the design to paper. See, knotwork starts out with a simple lattice as a skeleton; changing the shape of the diamonds in the lattice can radically change the look of the final knot pattern. Graph paper (trust me, always use graph paper when you do this, it will make your life way easier) lends itself well to one diamond shape, while the pattern in the book had a different one, and I wasted a lot of time trying out different variations and sizes.

Reminder Lesson #2: Go with the first thing that looks good – not because I'm lazy but because I am easily distracted by the joy of experimentation.

Finally, I settled on a design and got to work making a stencil to use, since even I am not quite insane enough to try and draw the knotwork directly onto a curved surface like the big damn can. Drawing a Celtic knot is complicated enough; when you add in the extra step of taking a scalpel and cutting out channels in the finished knot, well, you pretty much cancel out the "no really, I'm not crazy" of opting to make a stencil in the first place.

It gets even crazier when you have to make the stencil twice.

Yes. I did.

See, it's a funny thing about paper – it's flimsy. If you tape it to a big damn can and then paint over it, it's gonna try and stick to the thing, and only be usable once.

The picture above is what the stencil looks like, salvaged and taped to a sheet of plastic, so as to serve as Reminder Lesson #3. Yeah, I know, it probably won't work, but it's a nice souvenir anyway.

At least clear plastic makes it really easy to trace the design and start over; and this time I only really needed to trace the channels, not the entire knot. It worked perfectly, and I was able to wrap the knot almost all the way around the can – there's a gap of about four or five inches in the back, largely because I didn't feel like calculating pi into my measurements.

The design you see there was repeated four times each around the top and bottom of the can.

Wait, you think it's finished? You don't know me well yet, do you? The bulk of the really difficult work is done, I'll say that; stay tuned for the next installment, In Which Things Get Colorful.

About my child

noreply@blogger.com (Heather) — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 08:25:00 PST

For reasons of personal and Internet security, my husband and I don't discuss our child online. There's the whole pedophile thing, but there is also the simple fact that in her future, job applications and interviews will almost certainly come with a Google search in addition to today's criminal background check, drug screens, and such. Even now people are losing their jobs over pictures posted online, Facebook pages showing a bit too much of your personality, and so forth. So. If you pay attention, you'll eventually discover that we have a daughter, but we try not to use her name, and until today there have been absolutely NO pictures of her uploaded to the Internet. No matter how awesome we think she is, we don't intend to put any videos on YouTube or anything like that. That kind of thing needs to be under her control and with her consent.

Yes, I said "until today".

You see, our child loves to take pictures. She is forever begging to use my phone, or her dad's, or our digital camera, to take pictures of anything and everything she finds interesting. Some of her visions turn out to be black, or hopelessly blurry (or pink and blurry as when she did the extreme close-up study of her favorite stuffed animal). A few of them, however, turn out really nicely. I have a post coming up where nearly all the photos of me working on my mosaic were taken by her.

She also loves self-portraits. Here, for the first time ever on the World Wide Web, is my Beloved Child:

When she was smaller, she wasn't coordinated enough to both aim the camera and push the button, such that a lot of pictures she meant to take of me, or her stuffed animals, or anything else, unintentionally became photos of her feet. Eventually she got the hang of things, obviously, and in fact she recently figured out how to make funny faces and take pictures of herself at the same time. But we told her about all the inadvertent shots she took of her toes, and she thought this was hilarious, so now she does it on purpose.

What? Did you really think after all that lead-in about respecting privacy and Internet safety, I was going to show you her face?

Pff.

Talk to the foot.

Placeholder Post. What?

noreply@blogger.com (Heather) — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 12:11:00 PST

I've not been feeling motivated to write anything lately. It's been kinda depressing, actually, but at least I've managed to keep some projects in the air, even if I haven't been in any sort of mood to write about them.

The embroidery project – remember that one, from so long ago? – yeah, it's been almost two years and I'm in the home stretch, finally. Filling in the blue background and probably 3/4 done with that. I need to get pictures up soon so you can see where I embroidered graph paper on the fabric. I wanted a checkerboard pattern, I needed a guide, I stitched lines in place to use – and they are graph paper.

This may be a new level of obsessive for me.

***

The painting project on the milk canister is finished, and I have photos for that as well, and simply need to upload them.

***

And finally, since cold weather is coming and I want something that will keep me from getting cabin fever during the months spent indoors (well, okay, I should say "will permit me to focus my cabin fever maniacal leanings and use my powers for Good"), I've gotten back to my mosaic project.

Remember that one? I'm casting stepping stones, planning to use them around an outdoor fire pit or something, with each one looking as medieval and awesome as I can pull off given my level of expertise (low) and nitpicky tendencies (high). The third stone didn't set right when I cast it – the mortar mix was off – and it broke into pieces when I tried to show it off at my kid's preschool.

Yeah, that kinda sucked.

It's been probably two years, and now I'm getting around to the repair work that I knew I'd need to take care of eventually. I get to basically play archeologist and lift each glass tile out of the stepping stone block, which involves chipping and scraping at the mortar around each and every one of those fiddly little pieces of hand-nipped glass, sharp edges and all. Then I get to clean off the dust and bits of mortar still stuck to it, and place it on my work board as close to its original position as possible.

My work board is a cookie sheet with modeling clay rolled out on it to the exact size and shape of my stepping stone mold. I can press stones into it, pull them out, rearrange, and all that good stuff as much as I want without having to worry about anything becoming permanent before I'm ready for it. Once all the pieces are in place the way I want them, I lay strips of duct tape over the entire image and carefully peel it out of the clay. After that it's just mix up some cement and go. Once the stone has set for a couple of days, I can pull the duct tape off and the image stays where it belongs, and looks awesome.

The funniest part is that this is the exact method that the ancient Romans and such used – only the tools have been updated. Instead of modeling clay they used quicklime, which is basically mortar that you deliberately mix wrong so it won't set; and instead of duct tape they used several layers of fabric soaked in glue. Apart from that, though, the process is identical.

And yes, I need to get some photos up of that, too. Beloved child will be five in December and she's taken the most recent batch of pictures for me. Did a good job, too!

***

So yeah. I've been working a sucky day job, but I've also been pursuing some projects, which are the only things keeping me from going nuts at the day job. I have pictures, I just don't have a lot of motivation to upload them right now. Not to whine overmuch, but it is hard to muster up the energy when I'm not sure more than two people actually read these posts anyway. If I don't have an audience, writing for myself is still valuable, but I don't need photo evidence of what I'm doing – I have my memory, for as long as that lasts.

Showing off some henna

noreply@blogger.com (Heather) — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 18:07:00 PDT

Hello all,

I'm excited to have a booking this coming weekend at a bridal shower, so partly in honor of that, partly as advertisement of my capabilities for any of the guests who might visit, and partly because I feel like showing off, here are some images from the past couple of months.

When I get bookings, I like to really dress myself up with the henna beforehand – again, partly just in the spirit of things, and partly to show my clients what they can expect to see on their own skin. There's no better way to explain what henna does than to show it! So, back in August, I went completely nuts on my palm in preparation for a booking with the Phi Mu sorority on campus.

I apologize for the quality of the photos here, but I hadn't yet rediscovered where my real camera had been hiding for the past year or more. And when I was a kid, phones weren't even portable, much less capable of taking pictures, so quitcher whining.

For the record, I took my sweet time with this design, finishing the index finger over a couple of hours on a Monday night, and the palm over a couple more hours on a Tuesday evening. Most of my photos show the henna paste still on the skin; that paste is staining your skin with the natural dye contained in henna leaves. This is what henna actually looks like after after you've let it sit for several hours to absorb as much as you can, rinsed the paste off, and given the design a day or so to darken.

If you look very closely up near the large leaf shape (at the base of the fingers) you can see some "ghost" images of henna. I slept with the henna paste on, but didn't do the best job of wrapping and protecting it, so when I closed my hand I got a few mirror-images of lines along the major creases there.

This detail of the index finger shows the mirror images very clearly, from the leaf up onto the middle and ring fingers. Lesson: wrap your henna to protect it and to protect all the places you don't want it to go.

Over the next few days, I'll give you a forearm design I did for the heck of it at a birthday party – not a booking, just an excuse to give some free work to one of our favorite babysitters – and a pair of hands from the farmer's market a few weeks ago.

Speaking of the market: Weather, illness, more weather, and a kid's double ear infection have kept me away from the market lately, but I really hope to be able to make it there on the 20th. The season ends for good on the 27th, and then I'll have to rely on bookings or else quietly go stir-crazy until next spring.

Cheers, all!

Found: My camera, plus I'm a psychic now

noreply@blogger.com (Heather) — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 19:37:00 PDT

The thing's been missing since January, and we hadn't uploaded the pictures from it since sometime in 2008. Yeah. It's kind of a miracle this blog gets updated at all.

However, I've got a recent photo for you that I'm really proud of, for a couple of reasons. First, the kind lady whose hand I'm about to show you told me that she got her most recent henna (prior to visiting me) at Indiana Beach, where she paid almost double what I charged her, and was... underwhelmed by the result. The henna never really darkened, and she wasn't too thrilled with the artist's skill either. Not to brag too excessively, but she was a lot happier with mine.

Second, this design was a complete and total "wing-it" from the first line; neither of us was sure what we would end up with, so I was as surprised and happy as she was with how it turned out. Yes, I know that sounds like a line of bull - how could I not know what I was drawing, right?

Well, you see. There's this thing.

After I've been slinging the henna for awhile, I kind of tap into a deeper intuition than I usually work with - it's almost like someone is standing over my shoulder going, "no, no, you're gonna draw this". Other times I feel less like I'm inventing a design and more like I'm tracing something that's already there; I really can nearly see the basic shape, or at least a starting outline, when I look at the client's hand or leg or whatever. I hesitate to call it "psychic" because that just sounds way too full of myself, but I'm kind of sleepy right now and I can't come up with a better word for it right at the moment.

How do I explain it... okay, you know what it feels like to get an idea, right? You're asking yourself what to have for dinner or how to write that story or do that other crafty thing, and your mind says, "oh, I know, how about..." and you've got an idea. Right?

Okay. Now, if it's never happened to you, try to imagine that you first say, "oh, I know," and you get your idea, and then you immediately follow that with, "wait, what? That? Really?" The biggest thing for me is that sometimes the thing doesn't really feel like it's completely your idea; there's some aspect of it that feels like someone else just gave you their idea and made you say, "huh?" It's not what you'd normally come up with. It isn't completely you, if that makes any sense.

Anyway.

The lady was feeling a little skeptical after her most recent henna experience, and I think maybe she wanted to test me a little bit. Certainly she was curious to see what I could do for her.

Her boyfriend's design made even less sense to me, but he loved it, so that makes it a success.

That's the hardest part - not having the idea, but trusting it and being willing to run with whatever comes into my head, even - especially - if it doesn't make sense at first glance.

So, how many of you have had similar experiences? Do you run with them? What kind of results do you get? I want to hear about it.

Till next time,
cheers!

Heather

Henna and other things

noreply@blogger.com (Heather) — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 14:00:00 PDT

If you like, I could enter the obligatory, "gosh, it's been such a long time, I'm really sorry, insert reason here" paragraph, but honestly – it's been life. Getting temp assignments (aka work with a real paycheck attached!), getting a kid who's sick and crazy or healthy and loopy, procrastinating, following some other obsession (Hello, Eminem, shall I call you Mr. Nem?), and sometimes just plain guilt that I haven't posted in so long, have all taken their turns at various points to keep me away from the blog.

Meh.

I try to keep this blog focused on the creative side of my life and not all the other boring, mundane, and/or angst-depression-emo-girl stuff. So. Life has kept me from doing anything other than post to Twitter for some time, and if you want details, you can follow that.

***

I'd like to take a moment to thank the Phi Mu sorority at Purdue for a lovely time this past Tuesday evening. Get the rude jokes and sorority-girl references out of your system if you must; they were hosting a welcome-back party for the sisters and invited me to sling the henna.

Five hours and nearly forty women later… (oh, all right, even I admit there's no way to avoid the innuendo in that one) –

Anyway, I was able to draw lots of Greek letters, pretty viney things, and cover more ankles than I have in a long time. My default at the farmer's market tends to be designs on hands. This time around there were a lot of requests for designs up along the base of the neck, and quite a few on the inside of the wrist. I grant that the wrist is a nice feminine spot to put something, but I have no idea whether the ladies got any color to their designs. They've promised me pictures, though, so here's hoping.

***

The August Mosey has come and gone, and some of my customers were gracious enough to pass along photos that they took while I was working. So here they are, with thanks to Cynthia:

My next appearances will be this week's farmer's market (as always, assuming the weather cooperates), and the Morton Center Global Fest this Saturday the 4th. At the moment, it looks like the September Mosey has chosen to shift weekends – it would ordinarily fall on the 11th – so that it conflicts with Global Fest, again, but if that changes then I will be able to attend both events. Otherwise, I'll be slinging ten hours' worth of henna at the climate-controlled Morton Center, rather than five hours' worth outdoors at the Mosey.

***

Probably I should unbury the scanner long enough to take a picture of the embroidery. I've been putting off working on that for awhile now, also, but it's looking so, so cool. Let's look for that in my next post, mmkay? For now, I've got life to get back to in the form of laundry and dishes.

(See, aren't you glad I leave that stuff off my list of things-worth writing-about?)

Adventure, mayhem, and pretty things

noreply@blogger.com (Heather) — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 19:23:00 PDT

Hello folks. How ya been?

I keep forgetting to mention the embroidery project, which is in its final stages for color. I'm working on the blue background, finally, or I would be except the project is currently stalled. Why? Well, because, it's sitting in top of my scanner, waiting for me to take pictures of it to share with all of you.

***

I also keep forgetting to mention that I've been given an art commission to paint some Celtic knotwork on a large antique metal milk-canister. I've spent the past several days drawing out the knotwork on paper, reworking it to my satisfaction, and the past two days using an exacto knife to cut the drawing into a decent stencil. Relax, it's just to get the guide lines on.

If we hadn't killed my van today, I'd be heading to the store first thing tomorrow morning to pick up paints and such so I can begin the transfer onto the can.

***

Related to the knotwork is the fact that I recently claimed an SCA "scribal" assignment - a request for volunteers to do calligraphy for our society's award certificates (we're medieval history buffs and re-enactors, did you think we were going to print awards off on a computer?? Psh!) - for the first time in about five years. The SCA is, by and large, a game where we dress up and pretend to be medieval, but like anything, it has its group dynamics and its politics, and between the political stuff and some honest burnout, I haven't really had the heart to do a "scroll" in about five years. If you look back through the archives, you'll find a private commission for a gentleman's SCA award from about two or three years ago, but the regular stuff with deadlines hasn't held any interest for me in quite some time. I think it'll be good to get back into the swing of things; here's to hoping I'm right.

***

Oh, and I'm also auditioning tomorrow to join the Lafayette Chamber Singers, one of those very small groups where you can only get in if someone else dies. Fortunately, no one died this time around, but they did move far far away, freeing up one slot; and the conductor has decided to expand the soprano section so they can take on more ambitious compositions, which has opened up another one or two slots besides. Talk about luck for me... wish me some, if you would.

***

Finally, in addition to the van, we're very sorry for breaking much of the rest of the Lafayatte area earlier today. The van broke down on the access drive to Wolf Park, where we had been planning to observe their weekly wolf-bison interaction, only it got cancelled for the first time in pretty much ever due to the potential for more storms (yesterday's were "apocalyptic" according to Amy Prettybaby) and the heat index heading toward the ridiculous zone (kind of like Ludicrous Speed in the movie Spaceballs).

Once we got the van towed, the husband's car acquired, and the rest of us collected from the park premises, it was time for an early dinner. So we headed to Pizza Hut, ordered our meal, and watched over drinks while the lights flickered impressively for about half a minute before going out altogether. The manager came out and told us he was very sorry, but the transformer out back had just shot "really kinda beautiful" sparks and lightning into the air in all directions, caught fire, and fallen into the street, and he hoped we wouldn't be too upset that our dinner wasn't going to be happening there that evening.

At this point, after starting as, "oh, bummer" and progressing to, "eh, it's a nice day to be stuck at a nature park, and hey, y'all are really nice people", the day's catastrophic failures became completely hilarious. I'm still chuckling as I type this, to be honest - I mean, what are the odds of all this happening at all, much less happening all on the same day, back to back, while my father-in-law is in town visiting? Plus there wasn't any reason to actually be upset - we weren't in any hurry, no one was hurt, and it really was a nice day to be stuck at a nature park with really nice, gracious, and extremely helpful staff. While we were trying to see if we could fix things ourselves and/or jump-start the van, my daughter and I got to check out the nature along the side of the road, in the form of wildflowers and a whole crowd of butterflies and other harmless bugs. She was an angel the whole time and thought that riding in the tow truck with Daddy was cooool.

Anyway, after everything else, we were almost afraid to go to the next-closest Pizza Hut, since we weren't sure what other damage might be caused just by us being near the place. Luckily, nothing went wrong (except that their cable and radio had gone out shortly before we arrived, though I don't think we can really claim that as ours), dinner was yummy, and we had a good visit with my father-in-law after all.

Our motto for the day: If you know where you're going, it's not an adventure.

Hope to see you at the Farmer's Market if you live nearby, and if you don't, then maybe some other time.

Cheers!