Photo suite 115 -- ice on parade update

Last week I took photos of ice sculptures outside the culinary school.  One week later:

As seen on TV

Seen in a TV commercial:

Daughter, 40-something, bursts through the front door, calling "Mom!  What happened?"

Distraught Mom and another daughter are already in the kitchen, worried.  Dad, wearing an arm sling and a vague grin, wanders by but doesn't speak.

Mom explains, "Well, he was up on the ladder cleaning the gutters and he slipped."  Pause, while all three women look grim.  "Thank goodness he's OK."

The other daughter looks concerned and serious: "Mom, have you and Dad thought about Final Expense Insurance?"

Sign of the week

what if what you need is a store directory?

Progress

I realized a couple of years ago that there is nothing so obsolete as an old encyclopedia.  The information is out-of-date, the pictures are dated, the books are so heavy, and you can find whatever you want on the internet in less time than it takes to take the right book off the shelf.  So I decided to donate my 1978 World Book to the cause of art, and ever since have been happily cannibalizing it for collage and conceptual art.  As a result, I look at the books more in a given week than I did in the previous decade.

I was paging through the E volume the other day and came upon the article on embroidery.  In less than a page they got it pretty well covered, and even showed how to make four common stitches.  The author of the article was Dona Z. Meilach, one of my heroes from the olden days.  I used her book on macrame as a bible when I was in that phase of my artistic development.

Turns out that she's truly a Renaissance woman, having written books not only on fiber arts (macrame, stitchery, batik and tie-dye, rugs, soft sculpture, off-loom weaving, ) and cooking (biscotti, bagels, bruschetta, liqueurs) but on other crafts like woodcarving, basketry, plaster, printmaking, furniture making,  collage and ironworking, not to mention pregnancy, belly dancing and jazzercise.  Whew.

But what intrigued me most about the article was the illustration.

Yes, she's stitching onto a commercial stamped pattern!  And not very well, either; look at all those traces of blue around the edges of the petals.

I think we've come a long way, baby.  Kits were the way people did embroidery in the 70s; I know because that's the way I did it too.  The whole concept of stitching as original creative expression was yet to come.

But it did come, and while you can still buy thousands of different kits, should that spirit move you, stitching without a pattern is commonplace today.  At least I don't think you'd see a commercial kit pattern in an encyclopedia illustration, if they still printed encyclopedias.

See, there is progress!

Dreizehn thirteens

Perhaps you remember the early years of this century, and the fascination that many people had over the dates of 1/1/01, 2/2/02, etc.  For a while there it was old hat -- heck, every year you got a new one -- but people realized that the party was going to end on 12/12/12.  So on that day, a lot of people on the Quiltart list did twelve twelves on their blogs.

After checking out several of those posts, I decided to run down to the studio and do one myself.  And then my friend Uta Lenk left a comment on the blog, "Now wouldn't that be a new Daily Art project for 2013?  13 thirteens for thirteen - what - weeks, months?"

Uta and I share an enthusiasm for daily art, projects in which you commit to following the rules every day, week, or whatever.  She has documented several on her blog, including photographing her special tree every day in different weather, light and seasonal conditions; and finding a specified color each day to photograph.  This year she's taking a photo every day at high noon.

In 2010 and 2011 Uta and I did a year-long project called Daily Mail with very simple rules: every day, each one would send the other an email with one or more pictures attached.  I wrote about that  here and here and here.  We both enjoyed it so much that her comment about the twelve twelves immediately led me to issue a challenge: we would do thirteen thirteens during 2013, posting every fourth Tuesday.

Unlike our Daily Mail project, in which the photos were frequently accompanied by commentary and discussion, here we said hardly anything.

The blog was private during the year of the project, but now that it's complete -- that's 169 thirteens for each of us, or 4,394 things included in the collections -- we'd like to share it with you.  

Since Uta lives in Germany and I live in the US, we went bilingual with the title of the blog: Dreizehn Thirteens.  Please visit us and check out all our thirteens!

(The photos you see here are a bonus -- despite lurking about in parking lots for several months, I didn't get 13 pictures until the year was over, so never posted this set.)

Photo suite 114 -- ice on parade

outside the culinary school -- when it's been below freezing for weeks on end, what better assignment than to practice ice carving?