redford touch basic

Not all chemicals are bad.  Without chemicals such as hydrogen and oxygen, for example, there would be no way to make water, a vital ingredient in beer.  Dave Barry

And it's Friggin' Friday today.  I got an announcement from UPS that they lost my latest yarn order, but found it again last night in their Riviera Beach clubhouse where the box was opened and empty so they "threw it away".  And that leaves ME having to deal with the company that sent it.  I knew it was missing because it doesn't take THREE weeks to come here from Massachusetts unless you walk on your knees. So that's my afternoon assignment.  Meanwhile I started my knitting on the Koigu finally and got addicted last night, staying up until 2 AM.  Then I grabbed it to work on in the eye doc office this morning where I discovered I had been making a mistake that had compounded with each row I finished.  So all my work was for naught, have to rip and start over, easier than trying to pick up where I started mistaking.

TY is away for a couple of days so I'll probably be trying to get back to where I am now working tonight, but at least I can not make dinner while catching up with Arrested Development on Netflix and straining for light from one bulb in the lamp that makes me so hot that I have to get up and go stand in front of the refrigerator now and then.  I suppose that'ts not a bad thing-  uncramping myself.  I only have a few days to finish all the AD episodes-  I do have to say I am enjoying the foolishness, especially after there seasons of 'Justified' watched back to back to back.

The other evening I was walking the doggies and in the back of my house there was a big white critter so I approached only to find it was a Pony, a lovely white pony with braided long mane and a platinum tail brushing the ground.  Well the doggies started barking, got all up in it's face snarling and crouching down ready to pounce on the interloper but he just stood there regally with a pink ribbon in his hair.  The dogs got up on it with their noses (Pepper went immediately for the horses ass, Molly for his face) and completely lost interest when they discovered it was plastic, much to the delight of a truckload of Guatemalan landscapers.  No kidding it was almost the same size as the dogs!  I didn't have my phone with me to take a snapshot but thought I'd check the next morning when I went by.  He was gone.

Later I drove by again and saw something flash white-as-snow up in the trees, so I scurried home for the camera and ran back to find a smaller horse sitting in the frangipani tree, not a place he got to himself as ponies are notoriously bad at tree climbing.

Who says ponies don't grow on trees?  Maybe it's a baby unicorn!

Here he is in the spot I originally saw his much bigger brother:

Imagine this pony twice the size with hair down to the ground-  it looks like somebody has trimmed this one up a little.  The Mystery of the Big White Pony.

Unicorn Lady wearing a small pony for a hat

And then I returned back home to this!

Mr. Pepper's nosy nose.

 Fold-Unfold Tablecloth   The crease lines of a folded tablecloth are highlighted by the vibrant reactive dyes digitally printed on soft 100% cotton. It’s a singular effect by Copenhagen-based textile and color designer Margrethe Odgaard, a Danish Design School and RISD alum that is breathtaking.

More kid stuff, no more ponies!

 Make your own kid-safe watercolors

Show the layers of the earth with an earth shaped CAKE!

And going from being outside a sphere to INSIDE a sphere, check out this crocheted dryer duct wedding chapel.  It loos quite beautiful when the lights are behind it and it all glows, but more work than is necessary to get married.  

Designed by DUS Architects in collaboration with ‘crochet expert’ Sandy de Lange, this beautiful structure is a six-metre-long, three-metre-high 'dome' that can accommodate 50 people. "The Wedding Chapel" was commisioned by Villa Escamp, the temporary city hall for the Escamp district in The Hague and is crocheted out of two kilometres of flexible white ventilation pipes, creating an intimate space with soft acoustics and beautiful lighting.

And finally, Famous Paintings Reimagined as Time Traveling Celebrities:

Jack Nicholson

Johnny Depp

Sting

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 And now I have to get ripping out that pretty orange Koigu knitting because for this thing I'm making I must be a perfectionist!  

Lookit what I found!  Fabulous glass garden flower ornaments repurposed from vintage glassware HERE.

awwwwwwww, a baybee!

al petty juxtaposition

Asking a seamstress to mend is like asking Michelangelo to paint your garage.  ~Author Unknown

Good news finally-  the second batch of yarn arrived last night so I can start on one of my projects right away.  Yeaaaa!  I'm not happy with one of them so might order another color and save the unused one for something else-  it's Koigu so I can always use it, my favorite wool yarn.  Now, I don't know where my first batch of yarn might be-  I ordered that before we left on vacation and cautioned them to send it after the 11th.  If I don't hear tomorrow I'm loading the shotguns and gonna shoot out some hornet nests.

Today's Note:  I wound all 8 skeins, though I only need 6-  backup choices!

Tuesday I was supposed to go to a local SAQA meeting down in Ft. Lauderdale but I backed out at the last minute when I realized how overwhelmed I am.  So instead I drank coffee, took a shower, picked up a bit and then headed out to lunch with some friends, and then on to the studio.  I was finally able to print the last two pages with the quotes on them, but not without a bit of frustration.  I ended up composing it in Pages which I don't ever use and that meant the ole learning curve was my first obstacle.  Then the ink situation was obvious so I went to the second printer and started again-  I was only printing black and that's archival in both printers.  I wouldn't use it if there had to be color since I have to coat the pages with gel medium and if I use the wrong printer it's nothing but a smudge.  Ask me how many pages I wrecked before I realized what I was doing...

Another note:  Got the whole Hand book together, added new titles and comments, overprinted a few light pages, and made corrections and additions.  It's finally REALLY ready to assemble, so that's today's project.

Anyway, I worked my fat little fingers until dinnertime without even turning on the radio and I think I am FINALLY ready to stitch these things together. In fact I made my dots where the holes have to be punched on the spine.  In addition I made my JetBlue plans, arranged for furniture delivery in Newton, and let my crit group know I'll be there. (Yeaaa!)  And got involved with a telephone tax issue between my broker and my accountant which involved way too many of my remaining brain cells

The 3 daughters of the guy next door to me were chalk drawing all over the driveway today-  he picks them up from school and they play on the cement until its time to go home.  Sometimes they visit with me but it takes so much time to keep them occupied and I just don't have the patience to keep them busy for their dad.  But today I gave them a box of chalk I wasn't using and told them that they can keep it if they color my little barricade in front of the car.  They have just been painted black so a bit of color will be welcome.  We'll see what awaits me tomorrow.

persistence

patience

pretty!

This is the collage, and or drawing, and or paper-cutting, and or printmaking work of California based artist Elise Wehle.  Here is a part of her Artists Statement which is so perfectly descriptive:

“I make the art I do to pull me away from the increasingly digital world that surrounds me. Every day I spend so much time in front of a glowing screen that sometimes I forget I possess five bodily senses and not just one or two. Making art makes me conscious of my hands again, and all of my work requires time-intensive, redundant movements that remind me that not everything is as instantaneous as a click of a mouse. By weaving together paper, cutting lines, and folding shapes, I manipulate drawings, photos, and prints to create new landscapes for me to explore.”

A couple of color wheels without wheels!~

So pretty when new

 And even prettier when tey are getting into each other!

And in our growing taxidermy department, I found this today.  Look closely, make it big...

two, three, four...

Yup, it's a giraffe head and neck skeleton over thee in the corner.  Are these people serious?  How hideous can you get!  And it sure looks like a dining room to me- 

perfectly gag worthy. 

hmmm, did I already post this?  It seems familiar.

OK, I'm going to end it today with this little guy who's nut slipped out of his hands and he was determined to get it even though it meant getting submerged.  The next picture in this little story is a happy dripping squirrel sitting upright and chewing away at his retrieved nut.

tapering unlikely hairiness

 Once we accept our limitations we go beyond them.   Albert Einstein

Today I have a bunch of ads that are either interesting or laughable or have soem pertinence to somebody somewhere!  I'm starting out, for obvious reasons with two Mini ads:

A Mini Vending Machine!

Elvis Jesus Perfume

Oddka Vodka in Weird Flavors

A new model SMEG refrigerator in real denim, just debuted in Milan

Tempur-Pedic Ad so you don't wake up like a bear-  'You Are How You Sleep'

     Haruhiko Kawaguchi, who goes by the name Photographer Hal, is a Tokyo photographer and artist whose project FLESH LOVE literally vacuum packs couples of all types in 100x150x74 cm plastic bags. The idea is to keep love fresh forever. Once the air is sucked out of the bag by a vacuum cleaner, Kawaguchi only has about 10-20 seconds to take his pictures. Any longer and he would risk causing harm to his subjects.

garbage cans covered in matching couture

Good Puppy, Good Dog desk and floor lamps

Corkcycle, designed to keep your beer cold by inserting a cork stopper attached to an icycle.

Genius Doll House/Coffee Table combo, great for a small house-  Oh, a small house for a Small House!

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Lucy Lippard, keynote address at a symposium, "The Feminist Future," at Museum of Modern Art, 2007 with a statement I need to adopt and adapt!:

"I've always been obsessed with the collage esthetic that defines so much feminist art -- a layered, cumulative mode.....  Collage is about shifting relationships, juxtaposition and superimposition, gluing and ungluing.  It's an esthetic that willfully takes apart what is or is supposed to be and rearranges it in ways that suggest what could be.  Collage makes something of contradictions.  It contains the possibilty of visual puns, accessible contrasts and irony.  It's also the medium of surprise, which can shake us out of our stupors."

______________________________

Compare and Contrast, then talk amongst yourselves~

 If ya can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen!

By contrast, watch this TED talk from Phil Hansen where he discovers that limitations can indeed be the source of creativity.  This is possibly one of the best TED talks I have ever seen-  if you don't read another thing on this blog, watch this!  



OK, enough fun, I am outta here!  Heck, I don't even have a squirrel today. so instead I will just close with a nice picture of my herb of the day, with thanks to Sandy, JoAnn, and Victoria for identification.  Yes, THIS is purslane (aka Miners Lettuce and Claytonia perfoliata not the pictures I found with the succulent leaves-  that's how I got confused.  Cute little umbrellas, eh?

descendent cozen muslin

Spent the day today at housewifery-  trying desperately to catch up from the vacation and the weekend and having more and more to do.  Spent $100 at Petco so the doggies are set for awhile, hit the drug store, the bank, and ran a few other errands, all in a downpour that lasted most of the day.  At my first stop I realized my portable umbrella doesn't open any longer so threw it out, then had to make another stop to grab a new one but the parking lot was flooded, all the spaces left had a foot of water in them-  I resorted to putting on my emergency pedicure flipflops and wading into TJMaxx.  Yup, in Florida the emergency flipflops are more important than an umbrella even.  Got one but it was zip-tied shut so I couldn't even use it on the trip back to the car,  grrrrrr.

By 4:00 when I dragged myself home I collapsed soaking wet into a magazine (there are hundreds of catalogs here collected from the time we were gone).  The bed is still unmade, the dogs unexercised, and woman on the verge.  No, my yarns haven't arrived, and I wanted to get going on that by now.  Also I have to get to Boston in the next two weeks or so.  Yeah, I am having an anxiety attack.  Then thee is the awful tornado in OK that has me glued to the news.  

Let's talk textiles.

Using techniques of crochet, knitting, and knotting, Orly Genger creates

monumental sculptures with ropes, transforming the mundane material into powerful yet pliable installations.  Genger's work typically takes the form of abstract cubes, columns, and piles of monochromatic colors that reference the sculptural legacy of Donald Judd, Tony Smith, and Richard Serra.  But genger transforms those static shapes into soft undulating masses that spill over into spaces of the gallery like a tsunami of tangles webs.

Her labor intensive, physically demanding practice requires her to wrestle with enormous amounts of industrial fishing or climbing rope .  Genger's hand-crocheted abstractions blanket, consume, surround, fill, swirl, and inspire—prompting viewers to contemplate the limits of their own endurance and daring them to reconsider all they once deemed impossible.

   "Waves of Color" sculptures by Orly Genger in Madison Square Park, NYC.   (Currently)

And staying in the knit vein, São Paulo based artist Rogério Degaki shows us some large-scale oil paintings that look a whole lot like some of my favorite childhood sweaters!  Look closely-  the brushstrokes are imitating knit stitches.