From "Darwyn Cooke" to "Steampunk Bureaucrats" - Happy Friday!

A colleague's son is attending Fan Expo in Toronto this weekend, and visiting the website to check on the guest speaker list led me on a wonderful wander of weirdness through the web today.

First I noticed that Darwyn Cooke was listed - and after i finished cursing like Captain Haddock for realizing that I'd missed a wicked opportunity to see him in action [he's doing a how-to workshop on page construction and composition] - I drifted through the rest of the site and ended up on the Sci-Fi guest list page.

There among the famous names - William Shatner, Adam West, James Marsters, Felicia Day, Julie Newmar, Peter Mayhew (CHEWIE!)...there was "Daniel Proulx - artisan - Steampunk Jewelry". His blog link was blocked while at the office...but a lunchtime search on Google led me to to Beautiful Life, which supplied a link to Proulx's  site on Etsy: http://www.etsy.com/shop/CatherinetteRings?ref=top_trail. Some seriously cool gear...and some serious creep factor supplied through the ingenious use of taxidermist lizard eyes. Want. :)

The Beautiful Life site also featured articles on Bjorg, a jewelry designer from Norway (check out her Forest collection...the rabbit and fox are brill) and a page on a sculptor from Belgium, Stephane Halleux...   

Halleux created the nattily dressed gent to the left, called "the little flying civil servant" as well as numerous other crazily creative and evocative characters. You can see more of his amazing sculptures here: http://www.beautifullife.info/art-works/remarkable-collection-of-steampunk-sculptures/.

And should you perchance have some euros floating around that you would like to put to good use, check out this site: http://www.mrhublot.com/index_gb.htm. ZEILT Productions is trying to get a short animation made featuring models based on Halleaux's sculptures. You can sponsor a frame or a few frames and help make it happen. The site features a short animation test that's well worth a viewing. I for one would love to see all seven minutes of the short film they are proposing... 

Somedays I love the web.

Now I'm off to see what the exchange rate is on the euro... :)

(picture copyright Stephane Halleux 2010)

Brain old...learning hard.

Have reached a plateau in my French learning...can barely form a complete sentence in either language without some odd and awkward intrusion of a word or five of the other official language.

It hurts, too - parce que mon cerveau est en ébullition, I guess. I assume this is a side effect of the formation of new synapses...or possibly just un signe de l'implosion imminente. :)

Every now and then it seems that progress is being made and then my poor brain sets its heels in and devient très têtu. Il ne sera pas absorber any additional information, nor permettez-moi d'accéder anything I've worked so hard to learn. Mauvaise brain. Bad cerveau.

Hey! Wait a minute - it DID absorb something new today - our french teacher taught us the "mon cerveau est en ébullition" bit today! Hooray! Now....puis-je me souviens how to log off? :)

Key Priorities

Mr Wodehouse's key priorities for this quarter: food; napping; ambushing siblings; drinking water; napping; ambushing pet human; forming mats; more food; napping in water dish; watching squirrels raid pear tree...

...and apparently my key priority this quarter is...Mr. Wodehouse. Just look at his little eyes!

Simon's Cat - animation...or line-drawn reality show?

Simon's Cat is wonderful. Here's a link to his latest animation: http://www.simonscat.com/thebox.html.

There's something very comforting in knowing that someone else has experienced the "dash/crash/zen sigh of acceptance" state of being...many, many times.

The soul of a bureaucrat...Le Douanier (the customs officer)

I like Henri Rousseau's work: http://www.henrirousseau.org/. It isn't groundbreaking or technically brilliant or filled with clever post-modern, pop-cult, meta references...but I find it satisfying in much the same way that I do the works of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

Rousseau, who had no training in the arts, served in the army and then worked for more than twenty years in the Paris Customs Office. Though his nickname in the arts community was "Le Douanier" (the Customs Officer), he never actually attained that lofty title in his workplace. He fell in love with painting and, at age 49, took early retirement from his position as tax collector to pursue art as his career.

Ridiculed by critics and many others in the arts community for his "naive" style, he never achieved renown during his life, and died in poverty. But he always had confidence in himself and in his work. Eventually, his paintings became accepted and even popular. Many of his numerous works were portraits and landscapes of areas near his home in Paris, but it was his paintings of jungles (such as "The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope (Le lion ayant faim se jette sur l'antilope)" ) that would become his most famous...despite the fact that he never left France, nor ever saw a jungle. Henri learned about the exotic animals and plants of distant lands through illustrated books, stories told by soldiers who had been stationed in foreign climes, and by visiting exhibits of taxidermied animals and glass houses filled with tropical plants in Paris.

[I don't have a problem with this. After all, there's a very good chance that Bruegel never had an entire passel of peasant wedding guests hold still while he captured them for posterity...or the opportunity to paint the Tower of Babel while on vacation. Nor do I think Bosch painted the myriad monsters, demons and angels (oh, and giraffe) from life. (Mind you, I'm not willing to lay any bets where Bosch is concerned - he was one hoopy frood). Just as I'm pretty sure J.K. Rowling never leaped up and down the shifting stairs of Hogwarts...though I (and just a few others) are plenty glad she wrote her imaginings about the place down to share 'em! ]

I find Henri's story - of giving up "security" to do something that he loved - to be an inspiration. A triumph of imagination over fear. Perhaps someday I'll find an avocation I love enough to make my vocation - and throw caution to the wind!

Or not. :)

African Daisies and summer dyes

This summer, I've been crocheting these little African Daisy motifs after seeing them on MinInspiration and Elizabeth Cat's blogs.

A simple little pattern, but good fun and a great way to use up some of these single skein hand-spun yarns I seem to be accumulating...and the colours make me happy.

Speaking of colours and happiness, at long last, here are a couple of the results of my first attempts to dye yarn using the Majic Carpet dyes (as mentioned in my first post).

The ball at the left was the very first one I did. It reminds me of the heavily saturated colours, hot weather and rambunctious floribunda of early summer and has been named "Go-go Gauguin".

The same colours were used to dye the skein below, but I modified the water to dye ratio.


As with many attempts at imitation, some of the carefree vibrancy of the original has been diluted.

All in all, quite pleased with both trials...and am currently waiting for a KoolAid-dyed trial skein (ratio: three Cherry to one Grape) to cool off so that I can rinse and dry it.

iHelpKnit

One of the household BYKs (Bad Yarn Kitties, this one aka Pelly), helps with the process of photographing a current project by consuming some of the hand-spun yarn.

Both the cat and yarn escaped the incident without damage...except for a certain unpleasant dampness and lingering catfood smell on the part of the yarn.

Button, button...

My brother made these buttons from some wood he saved from an old maple tree from our parent's backyard.

I loved that tree and used to climb it when I was a kid. It was cut down while I was living in Toronto... I still remember the sense of shock when I was told it had been taken down. However, Mum saved a couple of logs for me (I still have them).

I'll be using the larger buttons (the ones that look like cookies) with the knitting beneath them (which will eventually be an Audrey Swing Coat). The wool is Cascade Magnum. I'm just waiting for the rest to arrive at Wabi Sabi before I can finish it. Should be soon! :)

(Addendum: Yeah! More Magnum finally arrived! Boo! Now I've found a cable pattern I want to include in the coat so I have to frog the whole ^&#% thing and start again! Gnaarrrr...)

Flowers = good...oregano oil = foul.

Some of the flowers in my garden this spring. From left: columbine; dahlias; poppies (untouched this year by squirrels, hooray! They must have had a successful intervention and rehab...)

From left: peony bud (with ant); native geranium (with bee). Heh...Ant and Bee.

I'm going to try and base some of my yarn dying colours on this year's flowers. So far I've experimented with some red (on organic merino batting) and some more mixed (blue, yellow and green on Aubin farms three-ply yarn). Moderately pleased with results.

Will take photos of dyed yarn tomorrow.

Have started taking oregano oil on the recommendation of a colleague who is trying to help with my dust allergy at work. It is possibly the worst thing I have subjected my taste buds to. At least in the top five. Must ask what it is that I've done to him that he should wish this gustatory horror on me..

Serves me right for taking health-related advice from IT guys... :)

Continuing the "cats in (fill in the blank)" theme of the evening...

Pelham attempts to recreate the "I is a burito" (sic) lolcat.

Being Pelly, she uses a mohair sweater instead of a facecloth.