March Sketch

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Spring has sprung!

Although you’d never know it from the weather lately. My plan was to use peach blossoms for my sketch this month and the blossoms were making me a bit nervous because they were not opening due to all the cold weather. Finally they did open but they immediately got battered by yet another storm. Still, I was able to find these sprigs and get them staged and photographed. Let the sketching begin.

But here’s something new. Because of the transitory nature of blossoms and the poem I wanted to include this month, I wanted to trace my sketch onto the paper. I often work this way, but rarely in journals. Surprise, this book has sketches on the other side of the paper, making tracing with my trusty light box a bit tricky.

Peekaboo! I see way more than I need to trace.
But I was able to get the essentials nailed down.

Many people seem to think it’s “cheating” to use any mechanical or optical aids to begin artwork. Tell that to Vermeer and all the other masters who used camera obscura to trace images on to canvases. What’s cheating is using someone else’s photos. I selected the subject, staged it how I wanted it and photographed it myself. So I own it start to finish.

Getting there…
Done!

Only April and May are left and then I will get my own book back. It will be like Christmas in June!

The Fix Is In

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Or I should say on because I’ve just finished spraying this little journal entry with fixative.

I’ve had that same can of workable fixative since 1990-something and it’s still going strong since I don’t use it for most of my drawings that will be framed. But in journals that will be hauled around and handled, fixing graphite or colored pencil is essential or they will smear and/or imprint on the opposite page.

The subject of this drawing is an oak gall found on a local walk. Even folks who know about oak galls are usually not aware that there are so many different kinds. I’ve started a little series to document the ones I find. This one I call a brain gall. For obvious reasons. That’s not its real name, because I’m no expert on the 90+ different gall wasps endemic to California’s native oak population. I call them as I see them if I can’t find out the real name.

Graphite is a medium that always circles back around in my art practice as drawing has always been my first love and pencils are such familiar, reliable, predictable, accessible, controllable and correctable instruments that they are irresistible to me. Sure, everyone wants to paint and watercolors sparkle with personality, but the humble graphite pencil can really shine as an art tool.

Here is the development of the oak leaf:

It’s all about that gall, baby!
But the leaf it’s sitting on deserves some attention too.
I could keep going, refining the shading and tidying up, but I’m calling this a sketch and leaving it as is.

Here’s a snapshot of the stars of the show. I use these clutch pencils each loaded with 2mm leads of various hardness and a rotary pointer. These old line drafting tools are getting a little hard to find in the computer age, but they are my favorites from way back. I don’t get many comments here, but if anyone visits and asks for it, I’ll do a post dedicated to the tools and techniques I use for graphite drawings.

I’ll leave you with my other entry in the Oak Gall series, Red Cone Galls plus a few Silk Button Galls for good measure.

Next up, this month’s sketch for the Sketchbook Exchange Project, then I’ll come back for a few more varieties of galls. The Spiny Turban is a fun one.

To ink, or not to ink…

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This month’s sketch was a response to the comments made at our recent Zoom meeting about artists not using this sketchbook exchange opportunity to experiment with tools, techniques, etc.

As with most of my sketches, I began with a rough pencil drawing which I then inked with an 005 micron pen. Then to add the color I used water soluble pencils. That’s the experimental part. I’ve used these pencils before, but not in quite this way and I like the result, especially on this cold press watercolor paper that doesn’t take straight colored pencil well because of the rough texture of the paper.

Now I’m just trying to decide if I should ink the lettering. I’m leaning toward not, to fit in with the rest of the artists in the book, although normally I would ink letters like this.

Below is a picture of the book to date. We only have 3 more illustrations to add: March, April and May, and then we look ahead to round 2. But everyone agreed a break would be nice so I’m thinking of starting the next one In January of 2024.

I can’t wait to get my book back at the end of May!

Minestrone, lots of it!

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This is my most requested recipe.  I have codified it since my previous post and updated it since I had to double everything because you can’t get 8 oz. cans of Garbanzo and Kidney Beans anymore.  It makes enough to serve a very large crowd, or to freeze.  It freezes pretty well for a soup with potatoes in it, but when you reheat it, you have to make sure to keep stirring it as you reheat it or the tomato base will separate and be unsightly.  

 

Minestrone Soup

 

Base Ingredients:

1 onion, diced

1/4 c. olive oil

2 c. chopped celery

2-4 cloves garlic, chopped 

1 large can S&W ready-cut tomatoes (28 oz. size)

1 can tomato sauce (15 oz. size)

1 can garbanzo beans (15.5 oz. size), undrained 

1  can kidney beans(15.25 oz size), undrained 

Seasonings:

salt to taste (3-4 tsp.)

dash pepper

6 bay leaves

2 tsp. oregano

1 Tbsp. dried basil

The Secret Ingredient:

 1/2 cup barley

Vegetables:

2-3 chopped carrots

8-10 small red potatoes, chopped into 1/2 inch pieces

1 1/2-2 cups green beans, fresh, cut or broken into 1/2 inch pieces or frozen cut green beans

Greens:

1/2 of a head of finely shredded green cabbage, or spinach, or any other green you prefer.  I use 2 of the regular 10 oz bags of spinach from the grocery store or an equivalent amount from Costco.

Pasta:

1 1-2 cup noodles of choice I prefer orrechiette or rotini 

 

The Method:

Sautè onion and celery in oil until soft and fragrant.  Add tomatoes, tomato sauce and canned beans, seasonings (I know that seems like a lot of salt, but it’s a LOT of soup; definitely adjust to your preference) and 4 quarts water and bring all to a boil.  Add barley and return to boil. Cover and simmer for approx. 1 hour.  Add chopped fresh vegetables (but not the greens yet!) and return to simmer. Cover and simmer soup until vegetables are thoroughly cooked, another 45 minutes.  Keep stirring periodically and adding water as needed during the cooking process.  15-20 mins. before serving soup, stir in spinach or other greens and return to simmer, then stir in raw pasta and cook at a slow boil until noodles are thoroughly done.  Stir and check frequently at this point as you may need to add water. Serve when noodles are cooked.  You can keep this soup on the back burner for quite a while and it just improves as the flavors meld.  This can resemble anything between a thick vegetable stew to a broth-based soup depending on the amount of water used.  You will also have to adjust the seasonings depending on the amount of water.  Keep in mind that the barley and the noodles will absorb water and salt like mad.  As you might guess, it’s even better the second day, reheated.

This is a good recipe to get 10 year-old boys (or vegephobes of any age really…) to eat their vegetables.  Especially if you offer it with freshly baked bread.  A little freshly grated Parmesan or Romano cheese on top doesn’t go amiss either.

 

Seams Great by Dritz

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Seams Great is a product for encasing raw edges of fabric to prevent fraying.  It has sadly been discontinued, but there are some alternatives:

  1. You can make your own.  I’ve got some 15 denier nylon tricot fabric on order to do this.  All you have to do is make a continuous bias tape the width you want.  The original was 5/8 inch.  You’ll want to determine the direction of the curl so you can place seam allowances of the joins on the side you prefer.  The nylon curls so that the right (public) side is on the outside. There are many tutorials online describing how to make continuous bias tape.
  2. Buy a similar product from Farmhouse Fabrics, which is selling it as “Seam Finish.”  They are still offering it as of February 2023.
  3. Try to buy some on Etsy or Ebay, but as of February 2023, there was none available.
  4. Use an alternative seam binding product like rayon seam tape.  Not as easy to apply, but very pretty.  Wawak offers it in a slew of colors.

What makes the original stuff so great is that curl I mentioned in option 1.  As you apply it, you stretch it just a bit and it wants to curl right around the raw edge you are finishing.  It’s also extremely lightweight and doesn’t add bulk to the raw edge and is a very sheer light gray color so it doesn’t visually stand out. I could not find that gray color in 15 denier nylon anywhere so I settled for natural/cream.  It’s always so sad when a favorite crafting product or sewing notion is discontinued.

Plan ahead, or…

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You’ll have to be really creative to solve the problems you create for yourself. Many, many moons ago I started this oak and berries appliqué quilt top. I did the appliqué on the center of the medallion style design. It’s easy to cut your fabric a little larger than you need it to be, then do your appliqué and after it’s done trim and true everything on a small block like this center piece.

So far, so good.

But then come the borders. And the design for the large appliqué border that comes next after the flying geese and solid borders cannot be done in pieces because the design travels across the corner miters. Without pausing to think beyond that insight, I sewed on those borders with mitered corners, traced the design on and started doing the appliqué. Then this started happening:

Hmmm, that’ll eat up a 1/4 inch seam allowance in a hurry and I’m only about 1/4 of the way through the appliqué work on this border.

Well now, this border pretty much has to be done this way. I suppose you could do it in pieces all except for the corners, then construct it, then finish off the corners, but that method has no appeal and I’m sure it would have presented equally thorny issues. So since we’re on this path, let’s go to the Internet and see what quilters recommend for stabilizing the raw edges of hand appliqué projects…

  • Starch: too messy and can discolor over time and attract pests.
  • Making the background bigger and trimming later is the standard advice but we already rejected that because of the design.
  • Folding the raw edges and basting them down; that idea has merit, but the raw edge is still somewhat exposed plus that fold is going to get abraded and dirty and will never press back out.

Well, the Internet wasn’t much help but, wait, wait, could I baste bias tape over the edges? Yes, now I’m thinking: do I have enough purchased bias tape on hand? It would be a little bulky on that edge. Hand basting it on would be a pain. But while I’m mulling this over, I may as well go look for bias tape. On the way to the bank of drawers that houses bias tape…Hah! Light bulb moment! I have a product in there designed to stop raw edges from fraying that is 100% reversible and can be quickly applied by machine. It’s called Seams Great. And it is!!!

This stuff is the ticket. I’m using the longest stitch my machine has and I’ve loosened the top tension a bit for easier removal later.

That problem is solved. Now how to stay motivated and finish this aged UFO. I’m in a finishing mood now, but tomorrow, who knows?

Spring anyone?

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It’s quite cold here for our usually temperate climate, but then it IS winter and so many folks across the country are really suffering from the effects of winter weather that I can’t really complain.  But I do know that spring comes early and I’ve been focused on making some things that have 3-season wearability.  Here’s a recent combo.  I believe I may have gotten both of these fabrics at JoAnn’s, proving once again that you can find decent fabrics there for garments if you really slow down and look.  The pants are linen and the top is a brushed poly or maybe poly/lycra knit that is butter-soft and quite stretchy.  Once I took the pictures, I switched to some deep dark olive wool pants and a red wool jacket because it’s it’s in the 30’s outside right now and not expected to get above 54 at the highest today.  I know that’s a balmy day in Minnesota but it sure feels chilly to this California Girl.  I do love the versatility of this top.  Because of the many colors in the print, it can go with all the red, navy and olive green solid coordinates in my closet.

I don’t generally pay much attention to where design motifs fall when I sew because I don’t care for the “fussy cut” look you get if you plan where everything lands and match motifs over seams and so forth, but maybe I should plan ahead a little more when a design has perfect circles in it like this one.  I just got lucky that the prominent blue circle medallion in the design fell in mostly inocuous places and the secondary circles in the design did the same.  Lucky is often better than good.  Here are side and back views of this outfit below.  Incidentally, I can see that I need better makeup and better lighting for these photos and a fresh shorter haircut for spring.  Warning, I might go REALLY short again with the hair.  Will my electronic devices still recognize me if I do?

 

Sketching Right Along

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During the holidays it has been a challenge to keep moving on the sketchbook project, but deadlines are motivating.  Here are images from the December and January sketchbooks:

 

December in the garden doesn’t give much inspiration at first look, and Nandina is one of my least favorite shrubs, but it turned out to be exactly what I needed for this book.
And this shows how my image fits in with the ethos of this particular book. As the project has moved along, I’ve noticed that the books really develop personalities and each book needs something different to carry it forward. Often it’s NOT what I’ve planned to do for the month, but when the book speaks, the artist must listen.
Who knew that something labeled as “Christmas Cactus” at the nursery or big box store could really be “Thanksgiving” or “Easter” Cactus masquerading as Christmas Cactus? This one definitely has all the characteristics of truncata and not bridgesii, which is the traditional Christmas Cactus. This image is on cold press watercolor paper and it shows the difficulties encountered when using colored pencil on highly textured paper. You get paper texture showing through and it’s harder to make smooth transitions. Hot Press Watercolor paper is the current standard for colored pencil drawings, but I still like the Stonehenge in my homemade journals best of all for mixed media sketches like this.
And finally, this is the full book. We are officially half-way through the project. I’ve over-emphasized the fleshy raised area at the center of each leaf, well, because I can in this project and I think it’s one of the things that makes these leaves interesting. Also, I rather like the pointy projections from the leaf body.

So that brings us up to date with the Sketchbook Exchange Project. What will February bring? Ellen Blonder, who comes before me in these books, said it’s like Christmas when you get a new book every month and then it’s like finals week when you are approaching your mailing deadline and don’t have your sketch done. That describes the project very well.

Ukulele Joy to the World

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Who remembers the classic Steve Martin riff about no one being able to be sad while playing the banjo? Well I think that goes for the ukulele as well, and even more so when you’re playing along with a great leader (Andy Doub) and with a group of friends (Sounds of the Heart Ukulele Group). And it’s Christmas Songs you’re playing! Merry, merry! Truly, the weather outside was frightful, but the fire was so delightful. Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow.

Testing 1, 2, 3

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This is only a test of my WordPress App from my phone. If this were an actual blog post, you might expect to finding something amazing or amusing or faintly interesting. Sorry to disappoint.