Daily Adventures

I feel a little like I'm slipping sideways instead of moving forward or back. I'm still gaming, but in different venues than just TF2. I'm now playing Terraria, Civ V, CS:GO, Overwatch, Payday 2, and, most of all, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege, mostly because I get to play with Jet, and he and his friends really like playing with me, no matter how good or bad I might be. I'm helpful, I cheer them on, and I usually do something smart in a game where there are so very many ways to die by being stupid.

Still, I've decided that I'm out of competitive, and that's been a good decision all around.

I am painting, spinning, and even dyeing again. There have been some fun things in the past few months, and the bees are still doing quite well. There are mites, but I think I'll just treat them this fall and it might help with next year. I've been getting through a huge volunteer work load for the Longmont Studio Tour, and a lot of it has been for the marketing side of things, rather than just the art. But I've been painting again, backing things, and trying to figure out matting and framing as well. And, of course, John and I just had our 30th Anniversary and it was a good, quiet one, with the annual Boulder County Fair ferris wheel.

( Some of the pretties... )

I don't usually dye lace yarn, as it muddies the patterns, but... I wanted to try a few new things yesterday.

( Busy days and a dyeing technique new to me. )

I should probably cross-post there... hm... been a while...

( Cut for the graphic pictures. )

For reasons unknown to all three of us, Jet has picked up an Outrageously bad British Accent. He's clipping his words and turning them and he's doing it without even being entirely aware of it until we start giggling.

I'll blame the Monty Python Fluxx and the fact that we played it with three different groups during our trip and whenever the "Outrageous Accent" card came up folks would enthusiastically bound into doing really, really bad accents. *laughs* But even Jet says he has no idea why he's doing it.

( Cut for visuals of other things and a huge Jet Burp. )

Jet and I are done with Sakura and it was very satisfying to see all of it and understand that CLAMP can, indeed, write happy endings, too.  I was too traumatized by X1999, I think, and by some of the things happening in xxxHolic and Tsubasa RC.

I'm finding that Death Note is also a slower read.  I need to think through some of the things that happen, what I really think about them.

Watching Samuri Champloo is a kick. Thank you, r0ck3tsci3ntist, for introducing me to those two swordsmen and the wonderfulness that is Fuu. She's so sweet and strong and funny and smart. And, wow does Jin make a beautiful woman.

I've been watching Mushi-shi in slow, thoughtful pieces.  I can only handle one or two at a time. And they always make me want to paint again, as the backgrounds and villages that Ginko goes through are always so beautiful, so picturesque.

( Meanderings about painting and dyeing ideas. )

Transformation is always the most interesting part of this fiber art stuff... I love how things mutate simply through what work I put into the item rather than any particular property of the item itself.

I did a dyeing and spinning thing just in the last week and I love, love, love the results... even as I'm kind of in the midst of them.

( Cut for pictures. )

Today was Super Errand Day. We did the following:

• Stopped at the bank.
• Dropped off books at the library.
• Got propane and seeds at the locally owned hardware store.
• Stopped at Luna's for an extra long wait for coffee.
• Arrived at the diesel testing station 15 minutes late, but the guy running it was running 17 minutes late on everyone (it is good to be lucky).
• Went to Pho Duy for big bowls of good, hot pho.
• Went to the Pacific Ocean Market for Jet's hairy sprinkles (no MSG!) and a few other things.
• Went to Duart's garden center, a locally owned garden shop for potting soil and a few other things.
• Went to King Soopers for our weekly stocking up.

What's more interesting yet is that ( yesterday was even more busy. )

It's interesting to see just how much Jet can do now.

On Friday, the two of us were putzing about the house, playing video games and eating cinnamon rolls and watching a little TV when I was struck with pure ambition. John was going to be back home around 1 and we were going to go out and see Flushed Away (which is quite a lot of Aardman fun, by the good way), so if we were going to do something it had to be before that.

So I got out just four ounces of medium, white Corridale (a soft wool that isn't super fine nor super dense or hairy for those not into technical fiberese), and soaked it in a bucket of soapy water. Then, I got out the breathing masks and the latex gloves, and Jet cheerfully put his on, while I poured 8 ounces of boiling water over .5 ounces of Jaquard "Turquoise" and stirred and stirred well past when Jet was bored and I got bored. Then I capped that, put it on the old wooden table on our back porch, and got out a pile of newspaper, which Jet very, very carefully, laid out to cover the whole surface.

I then laid out and taped down two lengths of plastic, and we laid the wet wool on it. Then I mixed some powdered dye with some hot water and poured it into a squirt bottle and Jet painted the wool with, mostly, colors he picked.

His favorite color is turquoise, which is why the special effort. He also likes blue, pink, green (light and dark), and purple... but I said that the pink and any of the blues would make purple, so may we leave that out? We started with a Gaywool cornflower blue, which is a very nice, light blue, and he dutifully tried to fill a whole area with it between two rather jagged blue lines, but when I asked him to fill in the verticals, he did what he could. I then mixed a bit of "raspberry" and he loved the "magenta" and poured it on diligently, but complained about there not being enough Mom!

But I then mixed the turquoise, which turned out MUCH thicker than the others. Oops. Still, he happily covered a whole couple of sections with that, and by the time we got to the dark green, Jet said, "We ran out of wool. Can you get more, Mom?"

"Uhm... no, Jet, I... uhm... I don't have any more. Yeah. And there's just this little bit of dye left. How about you just fill in the white bits left?"

"Moooooommmm... you have three whole BAGS of white wool in the living room."

"I know, Jet, I just don't want to use 'em yet." Honesty is best policy, right?

"Oh. Okay, Mom."

This whole time Jet was wearing his mask and gloves and didn't complain about them at all and he even reminded me to put mine on whenever I dealt with the powders. I was very impressed. I think that a story I told about an LJ article titled "I'm SO Dead!" in the handspinning community about a girl that breathed in the powders made an impression on him and it stuck. So he was very safety conscious about the whole process. I know adults that wouldn't live with that in order to create. He did that all for over an hour in his pajamas out on a not-that-warm porch.

I rolled up the roll of wool and dye, added another layer of plastic, and dumped into my "for dyeing only" steamer, and let it cook for an hour.

The results were very ocean, mostly green and turquoise with patches of pink and sky blue.... I'll have to put a picture up when I'm home. And there's a whole quarter pound of it, so I can easily make Jet socks and a hat and mittens or something. Or add to it to make him a sweater if he really wants that.

It's not something I'll recommend for other moms to do with their kids, as the dye stuffs *are* irritatingly toxic. But we had a great time doing it. I might set up two, next time and let him really do his on his own without me nagging him a little about where to put the colors. And then I'll just do my own, too. *grin* The Jaquard, for all that it was more of a bother to mix, turned out just gorgeous, and I'd bought the 'beginners' kit from KnitPicks, so I pretty much have every color I need to mix any color I can dream up.

Now, if only I can figure out which is the "warm" and which is the "cool" red or blue? :-)

I'm tired.

Spent the whole morning learning how to do silk painting and then trying to figure out a common vision of what it was we wanted to do. With six creators, it gets interesting trying to create something common but not too regulated.

The process involved mostly using acrylic paints for resist affects on the silk. Just painted, stamped, and dabbled on. Our common structure had some big, angled 'windows' painted onto it. They asked me to put the first strokes on each piece. The big, angled lines. It was scary to always be first on every silk, but so it was.

When all the detailed bits were put on, then we did a pretty structured painting job on top. Just deep blues at the bottom, shading to medium and light blues and teal. The light blue went up the sides and at the top, and then in the middle we used a fairly wild combination of red, green, purple, and apricot to just splash in color. Washed it with a pale blue wash to get it to bleed into the rest of the cloth, and then topped it off with salt. The salt leaves spots and the kosher salt leaves little comets. It's kind of cool.

The painting after the resist part is wild. There is no real way to 'control' where the color goes if you do 'too much'. It's like water colors on rice paper. Sploosh, woosh, and it's better to just reliquish control and let it Go. It's weird and stressful and also familiar for me, given that I try my test to control those affects when I do calligraphy or Chinese brush painting. You use those strokes to form the picture. It's odd to just give up completely on the control aspect and just try to get an overall Effect.

It was fun. It was a lot of work. And I'm feeling pretty empty now that it's done. Depressed a little. Tired, very.

There were five of us, and six banners to do and then we each got to do our own scarf. Mine was very regimented by that point because I was so tired... But so it is. What I am comes out. I like my neat bands of color that shade nicely between them, it was easy to do and easy to think of when I was tired. And I loved the colors. I liked the stenciled smiling, leaping frog and the rippled gold of a tiger. So it is. I should like me for what I am, but I couldn't help but envy the mad scarf that had red and teal in big swirls with enough green and red between to make a nice brown that calmed parts of it down, but then swirled into fractals along each of the bright parts. *sigh* I'll have to try that next time, I think. I loved how that worked.

I am not sure I liked how the banners turned out. Everyone else loves them, but I'm kind of bemused by that. They seem so... chaotic... so it is.

I signed all the banners with a tiny, smudged print of the Chinese character for 'courage' and that was good enough.