When I started the sculpture for this year’s Tiny Art Exhibit at the local library, my intention was to use some of the clay to make something that looked like weaving. As I started assembling the pieces, I changed my mind – the instructions said we could use other materials besides the ones provided, which in this case were white and black foam clay, and tan (normal?) air-drying clay. I’ve never worked with the foam stuff before, it was weirdly poofy, and I didn’t think I could replicate a weaving pattern with it. Shaping a human-ish body was difficult enough.
‘Ah-ha!’ I thought. ‘I have toothpicks and embroidery thread! And I did take like two weaving lessons in middle school.’
I was already committed to this plan before I remember that my weaving lessons involved the actual weaving rather than setting up the warp to work on. And my goodness, toothpicks are tiny. Setting up the warp was a bit aggravating, the weaving less so once I found a rhythm to it. Since my intended title was “Weaving her next story,” I knew when I started that I didn’t need to fill the entirety of the warp, just enough to show some color variations… you know, show that it’s actual weaving.
I love how this turned out and have dropped it at the library already. That said, I do not recommend weaving on a toothpick loom… pick a large template.
45 (connected) days in, I effectively have a usable shawl as I work on my temperature blanket.
I’m actually 47 days into it, but as you can see in the photos, 2 of those squares aren’t connected to the rest. I connect each square to the previous day when I finish it, and when I complete a row of 15, I connect it to the other rows.
You may be wondering why a couple of the squares have more than one color. I decided at the beginning that I wanted the blanket to reflect where I was – rather than my home address – for each day. The multi-color squares reflect the highs for travel days, where there was a difference between my starting and ending locations, with the added bonus that one of them ended up with my university’s colors. Specifically, those are for our trip to Florida for a cruise at the beginning of March. I suspect travel in winter or summer will have less temperature variance than our spring trip did.
This is Calvin. Calvin’s transmogrifier experience did not go quite the way he expected, resulting in his current bear shape with one dragon(?) wing.
Calvin is a “Frankenstuffie,” a result of a recurring event in Capricon’s makerspace using donations of damaged stuffed animals. By the time I arrived midway through the event, the rest of the winged creature was divided between two other Frankenstuffies. Coincidentally, the only damage to this bear was one missing arm – which was actually in the tub next to him – so replacing it with the (conveniently correct side) wing seemed both logical and absurd.
The naming of plush – like cats – is usually a difficult matter, but I happened to attend a Cheshire Moon concert that evening, which included a performance of Calvin’s Girl, inspiring an easy and obvious choice for the name.
What’s that? Well, crocheting is when you use a single hook… oh, you mean a Temperature Blanket? It’s when you crochet a little bit each day based on the current temperature, or specifically (in this case), the day’s high temperature at my current location. I had heard about the concept years ago, and was considering starting one this year, but the last couple months have been kind of hectic (something about co-chairing a convention…). But someone told me that a Temperature Blanket doesn’t have to start on January 1st, so when I learned that JoAnn Fabrics is closing the three stores closest to me, I rushed out to pick up some yarn.
OK, not quite rushed out. I wanted to know how much yarn I needed to buy first… we have more days in the 70s than in the 20s, and only a handful of super hot days, and I wanted to know by how much. I pulled temperature data for the last year for Rosemont into a spreadsheet, used the mround function to round up or down to the nearest 10, and created a pivot table to count the occurrences. Yes, that’s a super geeky approach to yarn shopping.
Based on those numbers, I determined to buy 1, 2, or 3 skeins of yarn, as appropriate, with some loosely set colors. I know from experience that color selection varies, especially when trying to find multiple colors in the same or similar yarns. Then I went shopping – the only change was picking up a gradient white & blue for 30, because there wasn’t a white available in that yarn, and I flipped the blue and light blue because there was only one skein available for the darker color. (Caron Simply Soft, for reference. Which is, in fact, fabulously soft.) I also picked up a joining color (gradient black & white), having already decided I would be crocheting squares.
After shopping, I grabbed a spare piece of cardboard, punched 11 holes into it, and looped a snippet of each yarn by the appropriate temperature. Because I’m using the mround function, 10 really means anywhere from 6 to 15, and so on for the ranges. I created a tracking sheet where I enter each day’s temperature, set up a vlookup against my color guide, and track when it’s done. If I miss a day or two, I’ll have the data saved and can mark as I catch up.
I picked a granny square pattern that starts from the center and works out (which is why I needed a joining yarn). While searching for that pattern, I spotted another one that starts with a more obvious circle in the center before expanding to a square – that might be fun some other year for a lows and highs temperature blanket, since we do get wide ranges some days. I also trimmed the pattern down to three rounds instead of the five it comes with, realizing that I’m making either 360 or 375 of these squares (for rows of 15)… at 3.5 inches, that builds up pretty quickly.
I will admit it’s hard to only crochet today’s square. Yes, I could look at the forecast and crochet ahead, but what if it shifts? A predicted 14 can easily become a 16, which is an entirely different color! It’s a practice in patience. I’m sure I’ll share some progress photos later in the year.
There are people – presumably with skills – that make a living from their drawings, paintings, and other artistic presentations. Some are serious, some comic, some downright absurd (especially what people will pay for them). I am not one of those people.
I have a day job I enjoy, along with assorted creative hobbies, from crocheting to writing, that I occasionally present in a way that could supplement my income. Drawing and painting, however, are activities that I do simply for fun, or to extricate a stuck idea from my head.
The butterfly below, for example, is another iteration of Andrea Nelson’s activities that present a focus image divided into smaller sections for coloring. In this particular case, drawn and painted on Christmas Eve, I decided that the butterfly should be painted in red and green. For contrast, I selected blue and purple as the background colors.
The process itself was fun, just sitting and painting for a while on a relaxing day off. The naming process can be fun too… I call this image The Very Hungry Caterpillar Who Ate the Christmas Decorations.
For myself, art is not a progression of skill – though there is a bit of that happening. Rather, it’s been a progression of appreciation for the creative process, knowing that whatever the result looks like, I had fun making it.
The search for free time is a recurring theme this year, between travel, local excursions, work, conventions… the list seems never-ending. But I have stories to write, fun things to crochet, images that need drawing and coloring! The trick that I’m learning is that no matter how enthusiastic I am about the project, I don’t actually need to do it all in one sitting. The images below are a good example of that.
I follow a couple artists on Instagram, mainly ones who focus on watercolors, which is a medium I have little experience with. This particular image came from Andrea Nelson’s account. While the basic concept is fairly similar to what she did, hers has a lot more dark space in the cloud, separating the sections more. That’s one of the fun things about working from an inspiration… I’m making my own version, not a copy. Even the drawing part was split across multiple sessions as I had time… those little circles in the cloud take a while to draw!
The next step was painting the image. I started with the background, then moved to colors for the raindrops. It’s been a busy couple weeks, I can’t remember if I actually did the raindrops in a different sitting than the background. I did, of course, have to let the background dry before trying to reach past it to the raindrops. And I had to let the raindrops dry before outlining them with a white gel pen. Like a recipe, I tried to stay true to the original art for the first iteration. The next iteration – still a work in progress – is a little bit more me, and I already have ideas for a third iteration.
That’s right, it’s raining meeple! I’m not as happy with the cloud on this one – I like the first cloud more, with more subdivisions and the patterns seeming more chaotic. I’ll keep that in mind for the next one.
That said, I definitely like having the meeple there. The drawing was all done in one sitting, and the background paint (not pictured) on its own when I had at most 15 minutes to spare. Next up is painting the meeple.
While I’m specifically taking about drawing and painting in this post, I’m really referring to any creative process you want to count, be that crafting, writing, making music… whatever! I’ve found myself needing a creative outlet a couple times recently, the first as I was preparing a bid to co-chair next year’s Capricon with a theme of Let Your Geek Flag Fly. The image below was me thinking through what could fall under that theme and which of those I could represent as meeple. It is certainly not all-inclusive, given how much different material falls under fandom. That said, if you’re not sure which fandom is meant to be represented by a particular meeple, take a moment to read through the ALT text.
More recently, our local library kicked off a Tiny Art Show, distributing mini canvas (3 by 3 inches) with a matching easel, along with a small paint set and pair of brushes. My initial plan had been to draw a person, a phoenix, and a dragon, based on a book I recently reviewed, but I didn’t really like the practice sketch I made. I didn’t even make it to the phoenix, as people – faces in particular, though hands are a difficult spot too – are not my strong suit when drawing. Then it occurred to me that I could draw something based on one of my stories. My most recently published story, “The Box”, in The Spaces In Between, provided the inspiration for this piece. The little green guy holding the sketch (second draft, I drew one on paper first) is a cell phone holder I picked up at the work conference I attended recently.
Happy with the sketch, I proceeded to attack the canvas with an eraser, reducing the lines to mere outlines to reduce how much pencil might show through in the final image. I then painstakingly painted it over three different sessions one dot at a time. It has been many years since I tried my hand at pointillism, and I’m fairly sure this is the first time I’ve tried it with paints rather than markers.
I deviated by making the unicorn pink with a purple mane and tail; she’s specifically mentioned as white in my story. I thought white would look too much like unfinished canvas.
Overall, I’m happy with both results, acknowledging that they’re very different stylistically. What’s your current creative outlet?
As Billy Joel says in You’re Only Human, “You’re not the only one who’s made mistakes, but they’re the only things that you can truly call your own.”
Everybody makes mistakes. Unfortunately, as a culture, we tend to spend a lot of time looking for someone else to blame instead of just owning our mistakes, learning from them, and moving forward.
This is the result of a mistake I made last week while crocheting. I’ve been working on a series of “Duplo” bricks – rectangles with bobble stitches in a two by three pattern. I was super excited about it, since yellow was the last color before I started assembling my various pieces. Then I reached for this piece, already tied off, and realized that I had left off a pair of bobble stitches. Whoops! I grabbed the yellow yarn again and made a replacement, which is easy enough when I’m crocheting something small.
But that left me with a crocheted brick that had no purpose, a waste of yarn if you will. It’s too small to take apart and reuse, particularly knowing that I’d be a little short on yarn for assembling a brick.
I initially flung it to the cats to play with, and they weren’t particularly interested in it. Then I realized I could improve on my mistake by folding it over, filling it with catnip, and crocheting it shut. I’ve seen three of the four cats playing with it, so I’d say that solution worked.
Be creative, if it’s an option, and turn your mistakes into something that makes you smile.
It seems like we’ll be wearing masks for a while, since studies have shown that the the Coronavirus is primarily transmitted through airborne particles. Wearing a mask primarily protects other people from particles you emit, but can also help protect you from theirs. Given the sudden need everybody has for masks, lots of companies are now featuring them on their websites, in stores, and in online ads. Some of them look quite lovely, given the variety of fabrics involved. Even political campaigns have jumped on the bandwagon, even those where the candidates disavowed the pandemic or refuse to wear masks in public themselves.
But I don’t really want a mask that says “Keep America Racist” (OK, it may say great, but it means racist), or any other mask that makes me a walking political advertisement. I’m fortunate to both know many crafters and own a sewing machine myself. Early in the lockdown, I ordered a couple masks from a friend, and grabbed some of my spare fabric to make some masks while waiting for those to arrive. Since then, I’ve purchased more fabric, including snagging some Avengers fabric in the remnants bin, and received a couple masks as gifts.
I find the different styles fascinating. My masks are all using the same pattern from CraftPassion.com, and were initially made with elastic – yes, I had spare elastic lying around. It’s like spare fabric or yarn, it just happens when you craft too much. The masks we ordered have ties, which are easy to maneuver, and bypassed the sudden rush on elastic everywhere. The masks from my sister-in-law, which includes the chibi Harry Potter one, all use cord and have beads to adjust the tightness. Cassandra and I both prefer those, and the pattern I’m using is flexible, so I’ve adjusted to something similar, just with a thick yarn. (Did I mention having spare yarn?) And my one mask with cats on it is also my only mask that hooks on the ears.
On my morning walks, I prefer elastic, so I can wear the mask around my neck except in the rare cases where I cross paths with another person. For grocery shopping, any of the styles will do, though I try to save my cat mask for vet appointments. As a fringe benefit, the masks can also be worn while cleaning house… it helps suppress the bathroom cleaner smell, which is quite intense.
I suggest finding a style or two that suits you, and definitely a color or pattern you like, since it seems masks are going to be around for a while.
Sometimes it’s fun to blend my hobbies. Over the years, I’ve crocheted assorted images into pillows or towels, and even coasters with Space Invaders aliens. You can see some of them here. Some of the fandom-related items have appeared in art shows at local conventions, looking for new homes.
The karate ones have only been created as gifts and donations. I carry a crocheted karate towel in my sparring bag, and a matching one was donated to the raffle prizes at the 2016 World Championships. (I have no idea who it went home with.) A karate scarf I made with all of our belt colors was auctioned off at a holiday party a few years ago.
When Eagle Academy, the karate school I attend, announced that they were going to have a Casino Night with raffle prizes and a silent auction, I crocheted a pair of karate pillows with flying sidekick figures. The Casino Night (21 and over, of course) is a fundraiser to raise awareness about human trafficking. It’s paired with a Parents’ Night Out event, so kids can play in the awesome gymnastics area across the hall while parents play games in the dojang.
If you’re free tomorrow night (Saturday, February 1st, 2020), considering attending the Casino Night in Aurora from 6:30-9:30pm. The address is 881 Shoreline Drive.
