blankey update!

I have finished the 35 rectangles! Going to buy some fleece today for the backing. It measures 163 x 94cm, approx 3 x 5 feet, and used 1kilo and 50 grammes of yarn. I've really enjoyed the blanket/throw/afghan process and am planning the next couple. I fancy a small alphabet one for my friend's baby.

blanket update

Only 10 to go! I'm doing 35 now: 5 across and 7 down.

ursine making and mending

i have managed to make my first bear with articulate joints. I decided that as my confusion over 2D drawn diagrams of parts and 3D stuffed animal toys was so great that it threatened to paralyse the entire Anderson Articulated Animal empire before it was off the drawing board, i would find a good pattern and follow it from start to finish and see what happened.
 

The Gibbs' book is gorgeous and perfectly easy to understand. The bear i made does not really look like the pattern i followed but it does look like a teddy bear so i'm celebrating a Good Start. 

The original body was far too small so i made larger and longer templates. However i went too far - his body is a little too long and i had to make a tummy tuck. I think his legs should be longer. Also i have plans to make changes to future bears' front paws.

The bald patches on his forehead are where i had to move the eyes. Twice. I'll patch him up. The less said about his chin seam, the better.

Before i embarked on the jointed bear, i took some time to mend poor Pinky, a bear i was given as a baby in 1969, which i found in January, spread over one of the eaves in the attic, a victim of the dog.

Pinky was in a coma in plastic bag intensive care for 10 months.

Linen skin-grafts from the work box.

I had to completely re-build the muzzle.

Once that was accomplished, re-making his face was  pretty quick to do.

Although Pinky's own eyes and nose were eventually found at the crime-scene, they were too badly chewed to be used so he has new eyes and nose from the Fred Aldous surgical supplies department.

bears and squares

I am toying (sorry) with the idea of going into mass stuffed animal production for the craft-site market to see if i can earn a few quid. It's about time i stood on my own two feet again.
I seem to have problems with 2D to 3D visualisation. I struggled all of last week, looking at patterns on the web, studying bears (real beautiful brown ones) and teddy versions of my own. Eventually i came up with this creature - only the head so far, more canine than ursine:

I shall have to be careful about the inevitable cat hairs when i go into business.

Also, i've begun another knitted bear. It's a pattern i used before for a bear for my friend's baby. This one is bigger as i have used bigger wool and bigger needles - just wanted to see if it grew larger proportionately. 'Real' eyes, noses and, most excitingly, cotter-pin joints are on order! I have a lot of strong opinions on teddy bears and one of them is that they must be articulated if they are to do their job properly.

Presumably there would be copyright issues if i used somebody else's pattern? I'm keen to make my own modifications anyway.

....and finally, 4 more pieces for the blanket:

lino print

I've finished part 3 of the lino triptych (always wanted to use that word) that i began last year. It's the square one in the middle, 30x30cm. Needs a bit of tidying up.

My lino-cuts are gradually getting neater but something's gone very wrong with tools lately; mine were all blunt so i ordered some more from ebay - what i thought would be years' worth of size 1's - but found the wings of the blades were sort of facing forward instead of backward. So i returned them saying they must be seconds, then bought a box from Fred Aldous. But these were the same. I think a different company is making the blades and they just don't cut. At great expense i bought a 1mm, wooden handled gouge from GreatArt made by Dastra. This is a joy to use but doesn't cut as finely as i'm used to. Does anyone know what happened to the old cutters that fitted into a red-plastic handle? I used to put the 1's and 3's into a vice, heat them up and squeeze them with pliers to get fine cuts. 

blankey update

Here are 4 more rectangles for the blanket. The plum coloured creature is supposed to be my old beloved dog Daisy (who passed away last year). She was black and not exactly this shape but the resultant intarsia being has it's own charm. My rectangle-a-night progress was held up by the ginger cat which i was determined to get as right as i could and took 3 evenings; it's Boris, my 3-legged ginger 1-year-old.

moth macro

Over the Summer, i fell back in love with photography as more than merely a means of recording personal landmarks (such as building the greenhouse) or 'it shouldn't happen to a dog/cat/John' type of event. I am particularly enamoured of the close-up at the moment with true Macro being the ultimate, glittering prize.
Luckily i had a good compact and managed some nice close-ups of flowers and garden spiders. Then i used the catalogue to buy my first digital SLR. I found a lovely Russian 50mm lens on Ebay and today i made a huge leap closer to the goal by using some cheap tubes. I'm really pleased with these photographs of a dead moth which i've kept in my subjects-for-the-microscope jar for years.

36 easy pieces

I'm between Name-Cushions at the moment and so have embarked upon my first blanket. I'm aiming for 5'x4' made up of 36 10x8 and a 1/2 inch (approximately) rectangles which is 6 down and 5 across; 18 patterned and 18 plain. I can make one patterned one a night if i'm not distracted. Here's the first 3:

The purple is much more vibrant in real life - for some reason it never photographs well. The yarns are a mixture of acrylic, wool and blends. Cheap acrylics (Hayfield Bonus) are great for bright colours in bit-parts on this sort of job, 'though i did splash out in the night on a couple of bright balls of Rowan Felted Tweed to liven and class things up. I'll be on the plain rectangles until it arrives.
  When all the parts are connected, i'll sew it to a fleece backing which will hide the messy back and make it really cosy.

Yellow

Painting club is going well, i am ecstatic to report. I did blue on Tuesday:

(detail)

and yellow yesterday:

this is the yellow on canvas paper

detail of centre

edge of small yellow canvas

Painting Club!

To try to nurture improved productivity levels in the Turret (stop me, oh, oh, oh, stop me: stop me if you think that you've heard this one before) i have instigated Painting Club. Painting Club runs between 3 and 5pm every day during the colder months which gives me ample faffing on the internet time (also getting dressed etc) and ends in good  time to break off for Park Club and Shopping Club leading to Doggy Teatime. And mine too.

At Painting Club today, i worked on the Red painting.

In the abstract paintings department, there is a small Blue canvas and a small Yellow. Also a tissue-paper and glue, yellow work on canvas paper. I am thinking mostly in terms of the application of paint and of colour (though this is less important) and not at all about form. I am half-hoping no spheres or orbs appear though i am still easygoing with myself about this as advised to be by an art-therapist.

I'm using acrylic and oil on this, alternating paint with layers of tissue paper glued on. Multiple layers are built up creating depth much as glazing can. The paint, stroked and rubbed, catches on the wrinkles in the tissue paper to great effect.


Bobbie was keen that i kept an eye on the time.
I think this will work  out much better than spending 8 hours on a canvas every 3 weeks, having knife-under-the-shoulder-blade pain all the next day and harassing myself for all the days in between that i don't paint.

life-drawing

This week i have been using my self as a life model. The process was comical: running about the attic in the nip, between tripod and focal range, hurling my body into a frozen pose and holding my breath, all within 10 seconds and more often then not realizing i hadn't pressed the shutter button to set the timer going.

There were problems with the animals. Dogs often assume the naked human requires washing, and when lying down on the floor, must be ill and in need of help. Bobbie had to be shut out. (i've often thought that a touchingly helpful dog could cause serious damage to someone who'd just fallen and broken their neck. I must be careful...)

 I didn't eject Leo at first..

but then found i couldn't work with his misguided chaperoning.

The foreshortening was a great exercise. I will have to have a hand and foot day, though.

This was complicated but i'd like to try and work it up into a larger drawing. 

I don't doubt the importance of the practice of life-drawing - i loved it when i was a student, every Friday afternoon, and i can still hear Matt Alexander's voice (from 25 years ago!) telling me to drop a plumb line, watch this or that value, look at the model not the paper. I think the reason it is such a useful exercise is simply because we are drawing our own species, we know what we are supposed to look like so it is easy to gauge precision or mistake. I like drawing cows. If we all drew cows every Friday afternoon during our art education, we'd know them better but never as intimately and intuitively - cellularly - as we know the human form.

(..... a hands, feet and hooves day...)

On a personal note, I was pleased to find that i did not pick myself to pieces when i uploaded the photographs, was merely critical of the poses and the photography for practical and aesthetic reasons. When i went out to walk the dog afterwards, i had a sense of my body being all of a piece and not a haphazard composite of less than magazine-perfect thighs, waist, breasts: having seen myself from many angles and pencilled my own outline, i felt happily natural and ripply like an animal, like beautiful Bobbie trotting unselfconsciously in front of me.

what would we do without Alizarin Crimson?

a rare red canvas is welling on the easel at the moment, begun last month. When i feel like red and take part, i can never work out why i eschew it so, the rest of the time. Its' nature is to cheer and warm - it's lively. I spent most of Sunday with it and after a few hours, i couldn't differentiate between the reds, disorientating like image burn-in after looking at a bright light. What is very good about red paintings, is that they have an easefulness - i am not tempted to make them representative as happens in my blue paintings, where the association with sky is strong.

This is a nice square canvas 90x90cm and boxy - got it at the discount place over the back for 7 quid. I hope they'll get some more in! I'm using oils mostly and some acrylic with glue for texture, though now i'm using more oil with the paint, i probably won't use glue again on this.

  Also working on the middle section of a lino-cut triptych which is rather too fancy a term, really, for some scribbly abstract cuts.