new images

Image from Through a Glass Darkly, pages 78-79

Here are two images from my journal, a jaguar and Abner. This is me messing around with photo transfers, gold leaf and crayons. You can't really see the gold leaf, but it's there, in the eyes.

I put a lot of goopy stuff on the page, shoot, I don't know what all... Light modeling paste among other things.

small joys...

Spotiswode, on the stove...

Shit. You just cannot be excited - about the weather, anyway - when it's 37 when you wake up and the high expected is 38, AND the fucking bouncy stuff is bouncing off the frozen grass in your back yard... Alternating with freezing raindrops... They're not actually freezing, they just feel that way when they slide down the back of your neck when you're out feeding cats. Nope. Just not very exciting weather.

It's a good thing I'm working on the beadboard panels today for the house, because flinging paint around IS exciting. And I'm mostly flinging around red and yellow paint, so it's primarily exciting. The baseboard trim is mostly done. It's not nailed in because I don't have a nail gun, but I'll borrow one soon. For now it's in place and looks like it's been put up and gives me a feeling of small joy and accomplishment every time I walk in the house. I'd take a picture but it's nothing really, a truly small joy. 

On top of that, it's Thursday, the day Mi Madres has tortilla soup. The special is a huge bowl of tortilla soup and a beef taco, which I always get to go. They have good hot sauce. Today is a perfect soup day. Plus, I have a cat on my lap, one who looks up at me every now and again with a look that says - to me - "I absolutely positively adore you." It probably more accurately is saying "When are you going to feed us our warm cat food?" but everyone needs their little illusions to get by.

From that, you can infer that the cats are in the house today, or in and out, as they choose. It's too cold on the porch to leave them there all day, although some of them like it. That, too, is lovely, if you like cats.

Abner goes away

Abner!

I had to have one of my favorite cats, Abner, put to sleep today. He's been diabetic for about 3 years and was having a lot of bad days recently, days where he wouldn't eat. But he would purr for me, and talk to me. Saturday was a bad day, and, if the vet had been open, I would've taken him in and had him put to sleep. As it was, I went out and lay down in the grass in the backyard next to him and talked to him. It was a beautiful day. No rain. Warmish and a blue sky with nary a cloud. Yesterday he perked up and ate some of my special food for him: canned salmon (people salmon) pureed with water. I had a heating pad and blanket rigged for him and made sure he was sleeping there. Went out a couple of times in the night and moved the other cats so he would have the prime spot. But sometime this morning he got down off the bedding and snagged his claw in it. He couldn't get it loose and lay on the deck in the rain until I found him. I don't know how long it was, but, in his condition, any time was too long. He meowed several times when I picked him up, and I took it to mean that he knew it was time and wanted me to know. I put him back on the heating pad and wrapped him in blankets and fed everyone and called the vet and off we went in the rain.

I had to wait almost an hour at the vets. I didn't want to wait inside with the other animals and cheeriness, so I sat outside on a bench with him, cradling him and talking. The sun came out and I held him so that it shone on him. I called jc and put him on speakerphone so he could talk to Abner and tell him how much he meant to him. And then they came and got me and we did it and it was over.

It was the right thing. I know that.

Abner was one of those cats who establish a mind communication with you. I've only had a couple in my life that I felt that way about. I could tell Abner, who lived on the front porch, to 'bring' me another cat, a standoffish one, and Abner would siddle up to him or her and head butt them and start working them over towards me, rubbing his head against theirs, but looking up at me every so often to make sure I knew they were coming.

So I'll miss him very very much. 

New stuff

Pages 46-47 of Through a Glass Darkly

I had been meaning to write about how I bind the split boards books, but somehow that hasn't happened yet, so I thought I'd show you some of my recent pages.

I went to NC just after xmas. I had to go to Barnes and Noble to buy a gift certificate for my sister-in-law, and, of course, I got sucked in by the bargain books. (I always do, I always do...) This time it was The Tudor Chronicles by Susan Doran for only $19.98! t's a coffee table book with lots of pics that goes year by year through the reigns of the various Tudors. There are a lot of cool examples of calligraphy, but, most excitingly, this is the time of the Northern Renaissance, and there are a lot of Hans Holbein the Younger's portraits illustrating the book.

Just seeing them put me on a Hans Holbein kick, so when I got home I had to get a couple of books on him from the library and one on the Wars of the Roses, which preceded the Tudors. It's the most amazing thing. The pictures of all the kings before Henry VII (the first Tudor) are caricature-ish stick figure Gothic things...  And then blam! Along comes the fine, realistic portraits by Hans Holbein!

I decided I wanted to do a portrait like one of Hans Holbein's. And who would be a better person for me to do a portrait of than my Dad? There are only a couple of problems here. One) I can't draw portraits. Two) I can't paint like Hans Holbein. But I'm not going to let little things like that stop me...

Here's another image. This one came to me in a dream. It wasn't part of the dream story, it was just there. It lingered when I woke up, so I decided to put it in my journal.

Speaking of dream images, here's a detail from the first image, another one that came to me while I was dreaming but not part of a story. It's a cat's eye on a pedestal. Does it mean something? Who knows?

                                

Okra, who knew?

Yesterday I had another Thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat at my friends Ray and Aline's house. They live outside of Austin in what used to be the country, although civilization is encroaching yearly.

My Thanksgiving started the night before when I cooked my own small turkey at home, just for me and the cats. I'd gotten home late from the tree lot, so I ended up popping it in the oven, going out for a drink with my daughter, coming home, going to bed and setting the alarm to get up at midnight and take it out of the oven, debone and destuff it and put the bone in my ongoing pot of chicken broth. I heated that up, turned it off, went back to bed, reset the alarm clock for an hour later, and got up and put that in the fridge. So I had turkey yesterday morning when I got up.

I made gravy and cranberry orange relish and then went and taught my exercise class at the retirement home. I teach there on Thursdays, so I always go on Thanksgiving and a couple members show up and we breathe and make room for turkey! I called family. I packed my car to go to Ray and Aline's: bread pudding and whisky sauce (1/2 a bread pudding recipe, 3 whisky sauce recipes) and an appetizer: cream cheese whipped in a bowl, a hunk of smoked salmon, a little ramekin of habañero jelly and some water crackers. Easy-peasy and yumm. My strategy was to stick with just appetizers and desserts since I had my own turkey at home, and that's pretty much what I did. Cassie, R&A's daughter, had made a wonderful corn, squash and red pepper soup. There were ten adults and five kids sitting down to dinner and it was all good and wonderful.

We did the obligatory things: a blessing holding hands, drinking lots of wine, a walk to the end of the driveway and back between dinner and dessert. A stroll in the overgrown back yard/garden between dessert and The Game. (UT/Aggie for those of you who aren't from Texas.) Their beds are full of Texas winter garden plants: carrots, beets, lettuces, broccoli, arugula, but there is a whole row of still functioning okra. I never realized how beautiful okra plants were.

My friend, Diane, says they're related to hibiscus. I picked this one and brought it home to remind me of the bounty and beauty of Thanksgiving.

Just a quickie!

Here is the next page in TAGD. Another waterish color illustration, some lettering, and a business card from my friend, Amy Nelson. It's one of those new, cool, tiny business cards, expensive, but great images and a nifty little carrier. Two-sided... But, what I'm actually writing about is the importance of always having some kind of label or sticky stuff to stick stuff into your journal with.

You can see the little bit of label in this photo. It's just an Avery mailing label that's been spattered with paint... Lots of paint. Metallic paint! Other things you can do are to run the labels through your printer. You can use any size or shape of label; the little round ones are extra cool and you can use the grid they pop out of for decorative effect, too. I also carry a glue stick with me to stick stuff down to the page, but if you want to be able to see what's on the back of a card, you'll want to use labels and some kind of little hinge.

Off to do Christmas tree stuff. I just can't resist posting this pic of a really cute little Noble fir! It's 2 ft high and 2 ft wide...

Ta Dah! The newest journal!

Yup. It's that time. I titled this one Through A Glass Darkly. There's nothing significant about the title, exactly, it's just that I planned on using a sheet of mica inset in the cover, and, well, you can see through it... Darkly. Sometimes what seems obvious is even more obvious than you thought. You might notice that the word D A R K L Y isn't on the cover. It's on the front flysheet, and you're supposed to be able to see through to it, umm, darkly. The mica came from Asheville Mica. They have a cool sample kit of 6"x6" sheets in several colors, two thicknesses (.015 and .030) apiece. I used a sheet of copper stained mica, the .030 one.



But you can't really read it from the cover, so I made a title page, too. Those are faux typewriter keys from PorkChopShow on Etsy. I just could not bring myself to buy real typewriter keys - I would've needed two sets - on eBay, and besides, I needed to be able to get them so they were the same thickness as the top board with the leather, which would have involved more engineering.



Normally book boards are just that: some kind of board - usually something resembling cardboard, although binders insist on calling it 'binders board.' It is not see through, though, so I used plexiglas for the front board, with a second, thin chipboard on top of it. It's a split board binding, meaning that the support that the pages are sewn on (muslin, in this case) is trapped between the boards. There aren't all that many glues that I know of that stick to plexiglas, but spray adhesive does, so that's what I used. The stuff you use to glue the rubber seals around car windows will work, too, but it's not clear. It's kind of a bastard version of a split board binding because of how I did the cover, and we'll just have to see how sturdy it is. Being carried in a purse for five to six months is a true test of how strong a binding is.

I actually had a page left in my old journal, but I went ahead and started this one anyway because it's November 22. My grandmother died on this date 52 years ago, and Kennedy was assassinated on this date 47 years ago just a couple of hundred miles north of here. Kind of gloomy, but there it is. BUT! My first post was from the Empty Bowl Project which is a wonderful thing.

I went there with my friends from my Sunday morning tai chi group, Ladies League. You buy a bowl for $15 - which goes to the Capital Area Food Bank - and then get it filled with soup from a local restaurant. You're limited to two bowls, but I managed to buy three (don't tell!). I love these bowls! Some are very sophisticated, some are very plain, some are very handmade, some are very colorful. All the soups we had were good and it was a wonderful journal inauguration!