Cartooning

This year I somehow managed to get a few more illustrations done in the spring section of the Nature Poetry book.  This first page was done a while back in Three Rivers, if not in a covert then certainly in a meadow after walking over a clear stream strewn with mossy stones.   And there were birds singing.  2 out of 3 spring-ish poetic allusions covered, not bad.  Unlike Christina Rossetti, I am averse to sitting in coverts and lingering near mossy-stone stream beds with the ticks, mites, fleas and mosquitos.  Decidedly unpoetic of me, I know.

Nature Poetry illustration 2

 

The second is of our olive trees in bloom.  There will not be follow-up illustrations depicting the development of the fruit since we (again, most unpoetically) sprayed the trees shortly after I finished the drawing below to prevent a crop from setting.

Nature Poetry Illustration 3

Like most commercial orchard crops, olives grown in a backyard are not properly cared for to produce anything that will rival what a pro who knows how to control the critical variables can grow, but that doesn’t mean the crop won’t be abundant and cause no end of nastiness come fall.  If you want to press olive oil, you must withhold water for 3 weeks prior to harvest.  I expect some similar admonition applies if you are trying to create olives with interesting flavor profiles for curing whole.  Well, the rest of your landscape would not appreciate the stress this watering strategy causes and your HOA association might call on you to make sure you are not neglecting your landscape in violation of the CC and R’s.  So, no olives are to follow the bloom.

Many years ago, I had an old olive tree situated between my garage and the adjacent orchard that must have been treated with just the right amount of benign neglect because come fall, the elderly Armenian ladies I didn’t even know would come knocking at my door toting buckets and asking to collect the olives from my tree.  Silly me, I didn’t even think to request a lesson in the processing of olives from them back then and now, of course, they are all gone and their descendants never learned the fine art of home curing olives.  There just might be a poem hiding in that situation.

Any road, the olive drawing really belongs thematically (for me) to the poem on the facing page where it would not fit visually:  In a Spring Still Not Written Of, by Robert Wallace.  So, at “double nickels,” I guess I have become one of those he mentions who has time for poems that really are not written for me, sigh.

Why do I refer to these illustrations I’m doing here as “cartooning?”  One of my instructors in the Filoli Botanical Illustration Certificate Program refers to the linework in drawings like these as “cartoon lines” in a very dismissive way and points them out as something to avoid at all costs.  That certainly doesn’t stop me from doing work in this style of colored drawing I enjoy so immensely, it only stops me from showing any of the work to them, ever again.

High Anxiety

Just a few thoughts on why it is that I’m always feeling anxious when working at the computer, and why I’m not alone.  I thought about this quite a bit recently when my trusty laptop died and I had to upgrade to a new version of Sibelius music scoring software, a program I’ve been using for years, because the old version on which I am quite competent just doesn’t run on the Mac platform. With the death of the old laptop, we are now all Mac, all the time with a new MacBook Pro Retina 15″ laptop replacing the last link to the PC world in our little world of computing.

Consider knitting for a minute.  I learned to knit when I was 10.  I wasn’t very good at it at first, but I got better through practice and now I feel confident I can knit anything if I just follow the instructions.  There are new and better tools now and lots of interesting techniques out there of which I was completely unaware back when I learned, like circular needles, Entrelac and Moebius knitting for example, but if you gave me those same needles and yarn from 1968 (or 1668 for that matter), I could still knit with them successfully and make something useful.  Also, after a knitting interregnum of almost 20 years, I was able to take up my needles  and start knitting again as if I had never stopped.  K2tog still means knit two together.

How different with computers:  I first started working with computers at 16 in high school and did some simple programming, first in Fortran on CARDS and then Pascal in college.  The language, tools and techniques I used then are of absolutely no use to me now and probably would be unrecognizable to anyone under the age of 50.  After I took about 8 years off from computers between college and working in a library, I was unable even to start up a computer and make it run a program, much less do anything useful.  Unless you use computers every day, you are constantly out of date.  Even if you use them every day, you are out of date if you don’t upgrade every program at every opportunity. The new skills required don’t build on the old skills in the virtual world in same way they do in the analog world.  Old tools have no utility.  There is no mastery built of long experience, there is only the constant fear that the small world of utility you have created for yourself will collapse at any minute if your computer crashes and you will be starting all over again at ground zero in a new world that is several magnitudes more complex than it was last time your computer crashed, taking with it all of it’s comfortable software.  This creates a sense of dread looming in the background at all times as you work with the certain knowledge that your skills are woefully out of date and when the inevitable crash comes, you will not be able to do at all what you can easily do now.

This is one of the reasons I prefer knitting, which, by the way, I often describe as the original binary code.  Just knit and purl.  That’s all there is.  Everything is built upon a base of knit and purl, from the simplest cotton washrag to the most complicated Estonian lace shawl.  So, I’m going to take a deep breath, shut down the computer, and go finish my latest knitting project, the instructions for which I admittedly downloaded from the Internet, and very easily from the lovely Ravelry.com site.  Slip one knitwise and call me in the morning.

Celtic Braid Mitt

 

Sweet Violets and Healthy Vegetables

Sweet Violets

One of the requirements of any new home was that it have a place to grow violets.  I guess the new house passes muster.  This is the second display of this magnitude we’ve had since we moved here in February and some of these plants are still sending up new blooms stalks!

Another requirement was a place to grow tomatoes, cucumbers, green beans and zucchini.Zucchini Sprouts Garden Boxes 2014

Check, check, check, check and check.  As you might guess, there are a few other things to check off the list, but vegetables and violets are a very good start.  We got the white raised planter boxes from New England Arbors.  We’ll see come July how they perform for raising vegetables.  We know the Tomato Boxes  can raise great tomatoes because we’ve used them before.  And there’s always the Farmer’s Market in case of crop failure on any front, but I do love putting vegetables on the table at noon that were still growing on the vine at half-past 11.

Forbidden Fabric

plaid crop photo

These new crops could use a press, but I just pulled them out of the dryer after wearing them today and it’s late and I’m lazy, so there you are.  You’ve seen this top before.  Now there are crops to go with.  Really, this is a test of a Burda pattern that I want to use for some nice solid twill in a deep khaki/taupe from the ever-diminishing stash.  Okay, I confess I bought some t-shirt fabric when I went to buy the zipper(s) for these 2 pairs of crops, but that’s still an overall reduction and if I sew the t-shirt fabric right away, it won’t ever add to the stash.  And it’s so rare to find a decent t-shirt knit at a local fabric store I buckled under the pressure.

The reason this post is titled Forbidden Fabric is that when I moved and sorted the stash, I had help and my help declared this fabric out of bounds and tossed it into the charity box.  In fact, the last two projects I’ve sewn are of rescued fabric I was forbidden to sew/wear.  Since the garden of Eden, forbidden things are the hardest to resist.