happening now

Inside (from where I sit drawing):

Outside (from where I sit drawing):

gobsmacked by leaf

Fall slapped me in the face today. Like, literally. On my morning walk this very leaf fell from a tree and coincided with my face on its way to earth.

I think it was trying to show off. It's a pretty fancy-looking leaf.

You can feel autumn's red-orange creeping in from the edges while you slowly relinquish your internal summer greens.

I love this time of year for its wistfulness. Content with already-sun-fading memories but remorseful for the shortening of days. What hasn't been done will remain undone, trips untaken and songs unsung.

Relieved from too much heat and bracing for the long bundle-up.

water related

I just felt compelled to post one of my favourite pictures I've taken. This is my husband on his aunt's dock in BC last November. The sun was starting to set and it was in a perfect line with the dock.

This one I took out my window on the weekend. It was the first time I'd seen sailboats on the little lake across the road. I think they were Sea Cadets just learning to sail. One of them (on the left) was good at sinking and had to get towed.

No Quilt is Complete Without a Beer-Drinking Tiger

What follows are pictures of the patchwork quilt I finished yesterday in the delirium of head cold.

I actually made the top of this quilt and put it all together about 2 years ago - I've even used it from time to time - but I never finished top-stitching it. This is because I planned to do it by hand (before I knew how time-consuming that would be... it is King-Sized!)

Well, that wasn't happening and since I have this super-fast, industrial Juki sewing machine now, I decided yesterday it was time to blast this project off the To-Do List.

ALL the patchwork is old material I already had: old shirts (mostly the husband's) and pajamas, old bed sheets and some vintage material I had collected over the years. The bottom and inside are flannel sheets from Value Village.

So here it is:

It's intended as a summer quilt - quite thin, no stuffing.

But it is BIG!!

It is thin but vast...

This is the back.

Here you can see a few of the hand-stitched lines done before I went crazy with the machine.

The "Aloha" was from one of my nephew's shirts which he wore to my wedding.

The Superheros are from old bed sheets that first belonged to my brother and then to me. They are from 1978 (a good year!) and have been put to several different uses over the years - but I'm getting to the very last remnants of them now.

I like you!

No quilt is complete without a beer-drinking tiger.

I was thinking about the ocean when I made this section of blue.

Thank you for looking!

Ottawa Swans

Late Edit: I just discovered there is an Aussie-rules football team in Ottawa called the "Ottawa Swans" and while I am enamoured with their jersey, this post is NOT about them. Look elsewhere if you want to find out more about the footballing variety of swans.


*****

I've got a bit of a thing for swans. These artifacts were collected a few years ago in Halifax but there is other stuff around the house...

I guess it all started with visiting those crotchety old (gay?) swans in the Public Gardens in Halifax. They had a lot of personality. Nelson died while we still lived there and I just read that Horatio died shortly after we left. Are there no swans in the garden anymore?

Anyway, upon arriving in Ottawa and driving over the Rideau River on Bank Street I kept seeing big white blobs in the water out of the corner of my eye.

Sure enough, I looked it up on the interwebs and it turns out Ottawa has a rich, swan history going back to 1967 when Big Liz gave us 6 pairs of Royal (Mute) Swans for our 100th birthday!

I love spotting them whenever I'm crossing the Rideau.

You can read all about the Ottawa Swans HERE.

This pair that came over in hopes of a snack when I ate dinner down by the river one evening.

Then this fella did a little dance for me... and so I gave him some lettuce.

This guy, a solo Australian Black Swan, did a swim-by as well. He had cool curly feathers on his bum.

Grimm Reaper

I'm struggling today with some kind of cold virus so it was OK to not do "real work". Instead I played around with this flash sheet (mostly re-drawn from Bert Grimm flash). Slowly but surely I'm getting better but I still have much to figure out about working with the ink - especially in the large black areas.

I also finished a quilt today that was mostly completed two years ago but never top-stitched. I had been planning to top-stitch it all by hand but it was obviously not happening and I really wanted to start using the thing - so today I sewed all over it with the Juki and it's finished. I'll try to post pictures tomorrow.

Not bad progress for a "sick day".

U.S.N. gal based on Bert Grimm

Here's a piece of paper I'm painting on these days.

The "v" from a couple days ago, the U.S.N. lady from this morning.

(I didn't stain the paper this time - it's just the bad lighting in the picture that makes it look aged.)

This girl is based on the flash of Bert Grimm (which you can see in the photo below - from the Book Vintage Tattoos).

I wasn't trying to make her look exactly the same - if so, I would have traced her (and I would have painted her in blue). I was curious to see what happened if I drew the same elements without trying to duplicate them precisely. I allowed myself to draw the way I normally draw.

I like the look of the original more. Mine looks a bit "Disney-fied". The eyes too large. The hair overly cartoony. The lines so "flowy". The original is rougher around the edges. It's just... well... it's "cooler".

But I think it's better for me to do it the way that comes naturally and not try too hard to push it to look like something else.

If you do something enough, it will start to look more like what's in your mind eventually... but it will get to that stage gradually, through effort and trial and error. Meaning you will end up with a look that is influenced and molded by the things you like (i.e. what you look at and aspire towards) yet it will be your own thing because it has had time to percolate or be channeled through you.

It is interesting to see how different the two ladies look actually, considering they contain the same "ingredients". Something I draw will probably never look especially rough, crude, or "cool"... because that's not how my brain/eyes/hands work... or who I am as a person.

Anyway, I think it is more important for me to develop a body of work and to see progress over time than to get hung up on one or two images - as "precious" as they may be at the beginning - when they are so few in number...

Ummm... don't know how or why I got off on that tangent. Ah well...

Lesson learned today:

The only answer to dissatisfaction with your artwork is making more artwork.

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victory flash

I repainted this Bert Grimm flash this morning.

I wish I hadn't painted the leaves green. I don't like the leaves at all actually. I made them the shape of the original but I wish I drew them in a way that felt a little more natural to me... I'm learning though... getting more used to the spit-shading.

The original is really loosely drawn, messy in fact. I tried to be messy and loose but my brain wouldn't really allow it to happen... maybe I should've thrown a bottle of ink all over it like what happened last time I painted...

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stuffy

I found this cool/tacky thing depicting the Musicians of Bremen - an old folktale. (Click here to learn more about it.) I'm not sure if I'm going to leave it as is or maybe spray paint it a fun colour - like florescent pink or orange or something...

The purple Basil has gone to seed. Quite pretty.


A Cicada on the porch screen.


Found this game downstairs in the laundry room. Brought it up to show Husbo because he's into the stock market.

Maybe it should have been called "Nose Picker" (see the guy at left).

This is what the board looked like... snore. It was too boring to play - even for Husbo and he is passionate about charts and graphs!


These dice were awesome though. I kept them and put the game back in the laundry room. I felt a bit bad about that but I figure there probably isn't anyone in our building who will actually want to play this game... but maybe someone else would want to take the box up to their apartment for laughs like I did.

Silver Down! Gold Up!

RRR Matey

vaRious Rs fRom aRound the woRld:

trial and mostly error

I started a little painting of my own tattoos quite awhile ago and promptly failed to finish it until yesterday when I had some spare time.

All was going well, i was enjoying the results of my labour, until tragedy struck in the form of a loose-lidded ink bottle.

I soldiered through to completion anyway - though hurriedly - and doing so allowed me to get beyond the preciousness and restraint I'd been applying to the piece. (It was already ruined anyway so I couldn't hurt it any worse right? If I failed horribly now, all I had to do was throw it in the garbage.)

In the end, (I'm not saying I'm terribly happy with the finished product) I'm glad I tried to make something of it because I learned some things... maybe I should intentionally throw a bottle of ink on all my drawings when I'm halfway through... just to stir things up.

I rather like this rope.

I liked how it was looking right before "the incident". I had been planning to leave things more plain and open (without all the yellow and filler stuff) but once the red got everywhere I just started playing around. I suppose I could have played even more, gone much crazier... but I wanted to move on to something else.

Main lesson learned: ALWAYS screw down the lids of ink and paint bottles!!

Here's my arm, where the images all came from.

In less frustrating news, I have this completely "volunteer" tomato plant growing in my garden. I guess there were seeds in the compost from last year.

I've done nothing to help this tomato plant along except give it water....

...but it's actually bearing fruit... and lots of it... soon I'll have some ripe cherry tomatoes!

Knife Sharpener

I'm trying to figure out how to find the knife-grinding truck that I saw in my neighbourhood one day when I first moved here (about 3 months ago).

I found an article from 2006 that must be about the same guy - it says his name is Carlos.

The truck looks A LOT like the one below but this picture was taken in Toronto and I found it on this blog.

Do any Ottawa-people know anything about this truck?

I wonder if he can sharpen skates too? Probably not...

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heavenward

A couple of pointing hand pictures taken in the last few weeks.

fun and games and corn

First the corn.

Sweet corn season is upon us. This display in Toronto sure was pretty - the most organized corn I've ever seen.

And this is my new "Fun and Games Cart".

The fun is on top and the games below. The cart was in the trash at Husbo's place of work. It was covered in rust but I had a feeling it might clean up nice - and it did.

I added the red wheels.

hold the fleas please

"Flea market" has got to be the worst name for a second-hand-sale... no one wants fleas.

Hopefully my new NON-Hudson-Bay-Blanket doesn't have any...

It's got the classic colour scheme but was made for Eatons - so it only cost 15 bucks at an antique store (in an upscale, Toronto neighbourhood to boot!!)

That's pretty darn cheap for a queen-sized 100% wool blanket without a single hole or stain!

I got a neat old medicine cabinet to hang above my sewing machine. It was still in the original box.

And here's what the sideboard looks like these days. I missed taking pictures of several in-between variations but the biggest change is that I got rid of the lamp. It was a useless place for a lamp (no chairs nearby that needed reading light). We never turned it on - so it has gone to another good home.

I brought the paint-by-number-horses out of the stable.

The fun, new additions to the sideboard are this old tray with sparrows, an old toy horse and a beautiful Amethyst crystal (my birthstone) - all obtained for only $8!