Back To Drawing

I've started drawing, again, and I'm starting with the basics. Hatching and crosshatching continue to baffle me. While it might not be the most exciting goal ever, I am going to focus on this for now, by working on giving volume to a shape and not worrying about the aspects related to convey value. It just does not come naturally to me. Last night, I spent some quality time with an alma papricka pepper from my garden. I sat there and looked at it and tried to think about how to add crosshatching. The proportions are a bit off. The drawing should be wider relative to the height.

Next up might be working on thumbnail sketches.

Knitting Hats During The Pandemic

Throughout the pandemic, I've been more than a little all over the place, doing a bit of this and a bit of that. I've been great at starting various projects, but not so great about finishing any of them and, as I've mentioned before, I've really struggled with keeping my art habit going. Throughout all of this, the one constant source of sanity has been stranded color knitting.

One day, early in the pandemic, I decide that hat knitting was a good way to cultivate some happiness. The plan was to keep it simple. I was not knitting hats for any particular person, so I didn't have to worry about the size or pleasing anyone. Instead, I was just going to knit one hat after another with no regard to how long it took me to finish one. Rather than getting caught up on selecting colors, at first, I started out matching yarn colors to different fabric pieces found in a quilt that a dear friend made for me. It helps that I have an almost endless inventory of my favorite yarn in almost all of the different colors it came in over the years. Sadly, it's been discontinued. While the mix of 50% wool, 25% alpaca and 25% mohair is glorious, there certainly are other good options in worsted weight yarn. For the few colors that I am running low on, I've decided to use 'em up and I'll find a substitute at some future date, if needed. 

I decided that I had the time to experiment more with adding embroidery and I also decided to use motifs in several hats where the yarn floats would be very, very long as an inducement to tackle and relearn the invisible stranding technique that I learned several years ago from Susan Rainey. Finally, I decided that I would knit at least one style of each hat in Kristin Nicholas' patterns for Moroccan Fedoras and Wild and Wooly Headgear. 

Actually, Kristin's influence was behind much of this project, since it was her patterns, her instructions about adding embroidery to knitwear, her discontinued yarn, and finally many motifs from her book, Color By Kristin.

Since I don't like to post pictures of people on this blog, getting a good picture of a hat can be a bit difficult. This morning, I nominated the wooden man on the front porch to be my model. Many moons ago (so many ago that it was before we met), my spouse performed as a juggler and included some other circus and vaudeville skills in his act. The wooden man was his assistant for part of his act. 

The takeaway from trying to set up a simple photo shoot is that I like taking natural pictures better. Trying to set up decent pictures is hard! I wish I would have started earlier in the day, so I had more options in the yard, where much of the greenery is not looking so good, and the decent parts were getting too washed out by the direct sunlight. 

With the help of a fairly cooperative model who didn't move, except for blowing over once in the wind, and needing a lot of adjustment to get the arms to stay up, I got some decent pictures. 

Individually, here are the hats.

I gave away this one before I took a picture. The "price" of the hat was sending me several photos. Like I said earlier, I'm not knitting these for any particular person. For this one, I knit the medium size, but my gauge was a tad tighter. I had to think of someone with the smallest head amongst all of my friends (not the smallest brain, by the way) and I gave it to her. This is a good hat to wear around the house if you are cold. It does not cover the ears. 

MF - close fitting hat

The pillbox hat is probably my favorite shape , so I've done two of them so far. If you want to see the side of the second one, it's in the second group shot above. It's the one to the left. 

MF - pillbox hat 1 - sideview

MF - pillbox hat 1 - top view

MF - pillbox hat 2 - top view

This is another one which turned out on the small side. 

WWHG - easy 4-pointed hat

I used a different quilt for the color inspiration for this one. 

WWHG - flat hat

I brought over the hat collection to a socially-distance event with my hubby's family and told my niece I would make her a hat. I figured she would want to try on the samples and we could figure out which shape she wanted. I had just finished this hat and she decided that she wanted it.

WWHG - stocking hat
 

This bottom "panel" of this one is two layers, so it's a bit more knitting than most of the others. My hubby likes this feature in a hat, so this is the only one that I've made with the intended recipient in mind.

WWHG - spiral decrease hat

For most of the hats, I've been adding embroidery and it really adds a lot. The hats are fine without it, but the embroidery is like the icing on the cake. You don't have to be perfect with your stitches, in fact I think it looks better when there's a little bit of wonkiness to them. Pillbox hat 1 is actually the first hat that I knit and the circles which were knitted in the hat became so much more interesting with the embroidery.  I did not take a close up of that example, but here are several others. 

I'm not done with the project. I still need to knit a Peruvian 4-cornered hat and a mushroom hat. If anyone is keeping track, there also is a beret in one of the patterns. I completed one of those, but gave it to a friend this weekend and I didn't want to be pushy about getting pictures in time for this post. 

I really like the beret, but decided to not block it as a beret. The hat has a nice shape without blocking it into a beret. More importantly, it's like a not-so-close fitting hat, which also covers one's ears. When you live in a cold climate, I think this makes it a better hat.   

Some of these have found homes so far. Some have not. I'm giving them away slowly over time and deriving a lot of enjoyment from that, as well. 

Some Second Layers

 I haven't been writing. I've been off experimenting.

I've been job hunting.

I've also been painting the stairwell and stairwell ceiling (with white on the ceiling and only one color on the walls, in case you are wondering).

I've still never met a bright color that I don't like The following one is actually brighter in person.  The other interesting thing is that the above one is hansa yellow opaque as the first layer with quin magenta on top, while this one reversed the order of the colors. You can also see that I used different techniques, but even so the difference is interesting.

I am toning some of the colors down or at least adding some areas which are more neutralized. This one is actually a first layer.

I am loving the excuse to play with color.  I have made a pledge to myself that these are not precious. They are to be used. I can always make more.

Still On Layer 1

Tomorrow, the first set of videos for working on a second layer drop. That means that I have been doing a lot of first layers. I could seriously post a lot of pictures. It’s been a joy to just play and to play with color. As I start to work on 2nd layers, I will just post my favorite experiment, since the last time I posted.

This one got made when I pressed a clean, dry piece of paper on top of another piece of paper which was dry in some parts, mostly dry in others, and really, really wet elsewhere.

This turned out pretty cool. I may or may not add more to it. 

So the other cool thing to share is a picture from today. 

A Little More Joy

 Given the news of the death of RBG, I am extra glad to have Roz's class. I need color and I need an excuse to play. 

Here are some new experiments with a toothbrush and a spray bottle. I have a tendency to use too much water. At the same time that I was coming to this realization, Roz had a post on her blog about this very subject. 

The first 3 times I played with the toothbrush and spray bottle, I used way too much water. The 4 time worked better. All of these were on 5" x 7" pieces of paper.

The 5th time was even better. I still think I could have waited for the initial marks had dried a bit more and could have used a bit less water from the spray bottle, but that is something to revisit later since tomorrow the videos drop for the 2nd week of class.

Here's one other 1st layer from earlier in the week. When I can be patient and wait for things to dry, sometimes too much water is a good thing. It doesn't show up as well in the photo, but this one has a really cool frosted effect. 

A Little Joy

 I am so glad that I signed up for the last round of Roz Stendahl’s online class called “Textures: Backgrounds for Visual Journaling and Mixed Media”. The class started on Saturday. 

My reaction to the pandemic and the aftermath of the civil unrest stole some part of my creativity. It was coming back slowly and never completely went away thanks to my knitting, but a big part of it has been missing.

In the last several days, I’ve caught myself thinking on more than one occasion, “I wonder what would happen if” in response to thinking about creating a new first layer as part of this week’s homework. It's a good place to be and it makes me feel like that part of me which has been missing is starting to return. 

So far doing a few new first layers each day makes me feel like I am a little kid playing with finger paint.

This is my favorite one so far.  After brushing some paint on damp paper, I used the rare, but very effective art tool, know as a scrap piece of plastic shelf liner from IKEA.

As class continues, my guess is that we will be adding onto our first layers and covering parts of them up. For this one, I will probably keep it "as is". 

Since I liked this one so much, I did a follow up with a rubber stamp I carved several years ago.

One thing I like about this is when I open my sketchbook, I want have this big, white empty piece of paper staring back at me. It got me thinking about my relationship to color, but that is a post for another day!

Picture And Memorabilia Project - Part 2

The first rabbit hole that I fell down involving family pictures and memorabilia relates to my adoptive family.     

Due to a strange parallel or coincidence, I was given the same the opportunity involving my biological roots on my maternal side.  I still can't believe that it happened.  While all of this immediate family has already died, my biological mother's long-time partner is still living and he contacted me at the end of March. Prior to this, I had spoken with him one time and had sent him 1 letter. I left it up to him to decide it he wanted further contact and after several years had passed, I assumed that I would not hear from him.

Imagine my surprise when he called and said that he had pictures that he wanted to send to me. Imagine my bigger surprise when 3 weeks later (on April 18th, mailed 2 days before by priority mail), I received a priority mail box from him filled with all sorts of information about my biological family, including a family scrapbook, a scrapbook of my biological mother's, and a number of pictures. The earliest picture dates back to the 1910s. 

Working with the memorabilia on my adoptive side brought a new level of understanding.  Adding the new information on my maternal biological side brought a new level of groundedness. 

If you are not adopted, it can be hard to truly fathom this. In another interesting coincidence, several weeks after I received the box, there was an article in the paper about a local photographer, who is also an adoptee and who started the Family Resemblance Project back in 2016. The newspaper article was about a book coming out about this project.  Everything on this website for his project and in this article really resonates with me, but the following quote from the article especially nails it for me. 

In the article, he is quoted as saying "I think we’re all pattern-seekers. We so want to see faces in things. We want to see ourselves in other people, and I think it’s because we all want a human connection, whether we admit it or not. And when you can actually see the human connection, I think it makes you happy. I think it gives you peace. Because it’s a visual reminder that we are indeed connected to other people, inextricably." 

When I think about this quote, it's interesting to me that in the early part of this, I experienced a pivotal moment when I could not see the patterns between my  biological mother's face and my own and I also could see them.  In the very first picture I saw of her, I really wasn't sure if there was a resemblance, but my spouse clearly saw one.  In fact, he had an visceral reaction to the picture.  In one of the next pictures that I saw from one of her college yearbooks (aside - - it's amazing what you can find on the internet), where there's an entire page of pictures of different people organized by name,  my eyes immediately were drawn to her face. Before I looked at the name, I knew that it was her.  I'm not sure it was about resemblance, but some part of me still just knew.

This is another post that I started awhile ago and decided to clean up and post.