This is where the 'N more comes in

I just got home from the Opening of the watercolor show and I’m surprised, astounded and, frankly, a little bit in shock that one of my paintings won an honorable mention. Out of about 50 or so paintings (some of which were breathtaking, by the way) there was 1st, 2nd and 3rd and then about 8 honorable mentions. One of those was mine. I still can’t fathom that that happened. I’m really anxious now to see the notes from the comments made by the judge. They’re being transcribed and I don’t know when they will be distributed but that’s really the reason I entered the paintings I did – to get the feedback from an artist of the caliber of Tom Francesconi.

The show will be at the Chase Bank lobby in downtown Springfield through October so go have a look.

I'm still spinning...

It’s been rather a busy day, even though I had it off from ‘work.’ (Don’t worry, it was legitimate – I didn’t call in sick!)

I’ve been really on a spinning jog lately and have spun almost a full 8 oz of the lovely green roving I bought a few weeks ago in Wisconsin. This is the Lincoln/Coopworth roving that is being so much fun to spin. I’ll post a picture once I get the first skein plied.

I also spun about 172 yds of black alpaca the other day which also turned out quite lovely to spin. With that one, I was trying to do a 1-ply at a certain thickness to match some wool that I want to use for a design idea I’ve got. I just don’t think it’s going to be enough yardage for the project I have in mind. My friend, Karen, from Karen Poulakos Fiber Arts Studio has some lovely ‘Colonial’ wool roving that I think will be a perfect match for the other yarn I’m going to use so as soon as she gets in some black, I’ll be good to go. I just want to make sure that I have enough. Nothing worse than running out of yarn and not being able to buy more! Maybe I can get more of the green done while I’m waiting. Well, I do have some maroon ‘Colonial’ so maybe I’ll work on that for a while!

The great Cricket Wars of 2008 are in full swing. Living on the ground floor, this time of year I get invaded by those nasty black crickets. Five a.m. Sunday morning found me stalking the critters as they mocked me from their hidden positions. Somehow, at least one of them got into the cabinetry in my kitchen where I couldn’t get to them but their noise echoed as loudly as it possible could. I did, however, get in some hits to one that was in the open and took some others out later in the day.

I’ve reinforced my perimeter and it seems to have worked for most of today but I can hear them encroaching from the outside so one never knows when they’ll strike next.

By the way, if you're in Springfield in October, go by the Chase Bank building. I will have 4 watercolors in the display there during the month. As I mentioned before, I've just joined the Sangamon Watercolor Society and this is part of their on-going display at the bank. But this month, they have a special artist who will be in town to do the judging and will give feedback on each of the paintings. I'm excited to have some impartial feedback on my work (unless he says it sucks then I won't be so excited!). Hopefully he'll be more constructive than that!

I did finish the sketch of my Great Grannie and will post a picture once I get the mat cut the right size. This is the one that I finished all but the face on and it took me forever to get up the nerve to try the face. There are flaws but I'm very happy with it overall.

Happy Anniversary

I wanted to take the opportunity to wish my parents congratulations on 25 years together. I well remember the day they got married in a quiet ceremony. For making the commitment to each other, sticking through the hard times and always encouraging and supporting each other I have to say I’m humbled and honored to be your daughter. I love you both.

In other news, I finally got my latest watercolor framed and I’m very happy with the way the white frame sets it off.



One other thing I got on my recent jaunt was this pattern and the Berocco yarn in charcoal. I can’t tell you how gorgeous and sensual this yarn is. A fairly chunky yarn in half superfine alpaca, which gives it weight and softness, and half Peruvian wool which gives it some loft and memory. I’ve got the back and the left front done. The right front and sleeves should go quickly (on size 10/6mm needles) and then all I have to do is wait for the cool weather!

Relaxing

What a nice, long weekend. Of course, it’s never long enough – I’m just beginning to wind down and get the things done I wanted to get done. But, nevertheless, I’ve had a good time.

One of the things I wanted to do was get my hand in with some watercolor projects and I’ve had a lot of fun with it. Here’s one of the projects:

Now that I see it like this, I realize there’s still some work to do on the flowers but I’m pretty happy with it.

I also had the opportunity to spend some time with Mary Salinski, a local watercolor artist and long time fiber artist. She had some fiber stuff she wanted to clean out and invited me to come have a look. Not only did I end up with a back seat full of stuff but I got to see some of her beautiful, beautiful cross-stitch and weaving work. What a lovely lady. I’m looking forward to her watercolor show that will be opening at the Hoogeland Center for the Arts next weekend.

Yupo, Ipo, Wepo

I had my last watercolor class on Tuesday – which ended with us being in the basement of the Hogeland Center for 30 minutes with the rehearsing cast of Hello, Dolly. Very cosy.

But before the tornado sirens started, our teacher brought samples of a new sort of ‘paper’ being used by lots of watercolorists right now. It’s called Yupo and it’s basically like a thin plastic sheet made, I believe, from recycled goods. The thing the artists like about it is because it doesn’t use any tree pieces. Which means it also doesn’t soak up the paint which means the paint just gets sort of pushed around the surface which is a whole new way of working with watercolors.

Here’s the first thing I did with it. One of the fun things is that, if you don’t like what you did, you can just take it over to the sink and wash it right off! Yep, wash it right off with the water and the soap (I believe the Windex worked, too). Can you tell it's supposed to be dark waves crashing on a rock shore?

You certainly can’t do layers very well and you have to work with much less water than you might otherwise do. I liked just being able to go over and over it until you get the interaction of the colors right.

Evidently watercolor painters are doing weird and wonderful things with it. I don’t know if I’d like it for a steady diet but it was certainly fun to play with. It also comes in transparent form which could be very, very interesting, don’t you think?

On the knitterly front, my fingers haven’t fallen off since finishing the Balmoral so I’ve got the border started on the Saltire and Thistle Shawl. I bet you don’t even remember it. Well, it’s back up to the top of the list and the pattern is working out terrific. I’ll soon be starting the little leaf pattern for the corner sections and the thistle leaf border pattern is working out nicely. After I fixed the western side, that is. I started out with 101 stitches on each side, as I should, but somehow by the time I’d gotten to the 3rd round, I’d inherited 3 extra stitches. Don’t have a clue where they came from, just showed up for the party but I dealt with them (after I’d counted 8 times and redone the section 3 times and finally realized that I hadn’t counted the actual total number of stitches – 104. Yeah, that’d be it.) But now it’s working along nicely.

I’m also about 1/3 of the way through my ponchette. I’ll post pictures of that tomorrow but changing the pattern to stockinette stitch created some space I hadn’t anticipated but I couldn’t bear to tear it out again so I’ve just soldiered on. I did decide that I would embroider some beads onto it and I have some shell beads that I think will look fab. I’ll get those out for the pics and show you on the next post.

For Mom

It's not finished yet but I've been trying to describe this project to my mother. It's one of my watercolor projects from my current class. I think I'm kind of liking it. The scanner pulls the colors apart a bit but it'll give you an idea of what we're doing. This is all done with just 2 colors - yellow gamboge and thalo violet. Interesting.

Knitting in the park

I think I mentioned before that I’m not doing so well with my watercolor class this time but I was rather pleased with this. It looks a little wonky just because it’s from a photograph, not a scan. The exercise was to do the whole painting using just 2 colors.

Today at our fiber arts guild meeting we’re going to have a lovely lady who owns a shop in Urbana, IL. She’s going to get us started on a shawlet project that we’re going to finish together as a knitalong. Since, theoretically, it’s supposed to be warm this time of year, we’re going to have the knitalongs in area parks. One of our board members, Cindy, did a great job getting this organized and I think it's going to be a lot of fun.

Don’t know if they’ve decided on a specific park or if we’re going to move around but it sounds fun anyway. Our local spinning guild has our monthly meetings in a park and we had a lot of fun meeting local people last year.

Of course, all is subject to change since just a few nights ago the low was 42 degrees and we were back into our winter sweaters. But we’ve had several days of 70 degrees so maybe we really will have summer. (You know it’s bad when I’m ready for warm weather!)

Still Knitting

I'm taking another watercolor class this spring but for some reason I'm feeling really stifled this time around - it's just almost overwhelming to even start something. It feels a lot like writer's block - is there a painter's block? Guess it's sort of the same thing. Anyway, we've had 2 weeks between classes and I started a couple of things that I'm actually happy with so far so maybe that's a breakthrough. Of course, I never did like to do things that I wasn't pretty good with from the beginning but I'm hanging in there with this because I really love watercolor painting and I really do want to get better. Ain't gonna happen without some practice though, that's for sure.

I was going to start the Balmoral Thistle Dinner Cloth with the size 30 thread this weekend but I decided to work a little more on the size 10 just to give it a fair chance. I’m just getting the head of the thistle and am only about 20 rows from the “Coffee Cloth” size. I really don’t think I’ll go further than that with the size 10 but at least it will give me something to show for my effort. Actually, now that it’s big enough to put on the circular needle, it’s been a lot easier to work, although it still looks too chunky to me. I also realized that, for some reason, I was working it really tightly on the double points (not like me at all) so I calmed down, loosened up and now it’s going a lot better. You can see the thistle leaves and the head beginning to develop here.



I’ve also made it almost to the end of the black/grey Dalek and I’m totally digging the color combination. It was an absolutely gorgeous day on Saturday so I spent quite a lot of it sitting on my porch knitting and listening to the birds. One of the cardinals was getting really brave, hopping around and shouting just about 4 feet from me. Mighty fine. Didn’t even dampen my spirits to see rain all Saturday night and all day on Sunday.

Of course, we’re counting our blessings seeing what so many others went through this weekend – between tornados and earthquakes. So heartbreaking to hear about all the people, mainly children, who were lost in the earthquake and right on the back of the disaster in Burma.