Owners of an outdoor rock shop on Oatman Road in Golden Valley, Arizona let me have some of the wire they use to make pendants out of pretty stones they dig up, cut, polish, and sell. This is a rhodonite cabochon that I wanted to hang. I think it may have been beginners luck, but I really like how this turned out.
Here I am playing around after learning how to divide a circle into 6 equal parts in order to make hexagrams. These interest me because I have been seeing Star Tetrahedrons everywhere. Seriously, I had no idea that these geometric solids have gender.
Presumably the Light Body with the wide top (the blue and purple on I have drawn above) is supposed to spin counterclockwise. The brown and gold one (which is he "boy") spins clockwise.
After taking an eCourse in Sound Healing almost two years ago, I started seeing some geometric shapes in my mind's eye while appying the sounds to the requisite meridians. This prompted me to look for some of these ideas online and it seems to be a case of "when the student is ready the teacher appears" because I am suddenly finding blogs and videos on sacred geometry, a topic which has always interested me, but which until recently I never seemed to have time to explore.
I made a tile design to decorate one of my folders and posted about it here.
After visiting this blog about once a year for a decade or so, I've started thinking about drawing again. Well, I've thought about it a lot, just haven't done it. But a few good apps on my smart phone may change that. I did not draw these grapes. They are from a website called EasyDrawingTips. I wanted to practice using the blending brush on Corel's Painter Mobile. I haven't started on the leaves yet.
This is a screen grab from my Journi account.
I have been using Samsung Note phones for years without having bothered to check out the menu that pops up when you take out the pen. Then I decided to learn to use the translate option because I got a DuoLingo subscription for my birthday and thought it would be fun to make a little sketch of various new words I am learning. I had no idea that the Samsung Notes program was so robust. I can't find a fill option, but one remarkable feature that it does have is called "Neat Shapes." You draw a shape and the app evens it out. Perfect for making all these grapes perfectly round in the first draft.
After using Painter to fix up this onion, I inserted it into Samsung Notes to add the horizontal and vertical lines. Fun. Another drawing app I like is called Polish, which has some really interesting drawing tools such as dotted lines, hearts, and crushed rock. I bought a Lifetime Upgrade for $8 to make collages, after deciding to cancel my PicsArt account, which is up to $55/year now. Polish has some very nice features and although it is not as slick as Painter, it does a whole lot more than collages and text overlay.
The $$ I'm saving by not renewing PicsArt have gone to a subscription to a remarkable photo album called Journi. Pinterest is a good photo database especially since it added Sections, but it has a few limitations that make it impossible for me to use it exclusively:
1) Pinterest do not like long descriptions. It repeatedly tells me to cut it short! I don't want just a photo album, I want a photo journal. Pinterest also wants to be a social network, which does not interest me in the least. It is quite intrusive that way.
2) It is also cumbersome to get more than one photo per pin.
3) An account is limited to 200,000 pins.
My Journi upgrade gives me a whole T of storage, and instead of nagging me to keep the word count down, Journi's reminders reassure me that I will not run out of space. Write more! So I am much more inspired to make sketches on a daily basis if I have a place to store them alongside a story about each sketch.
Eat first, then draw.
This light snack features my squash bread plus two items from the indoor garden. The green sprinkles are diced leek scapes, and the star of this show is a pollen-filled squash flower.
The flowers started opening 37 days from when I started the seeds. Each one lasts only a day, so until there grows something on the plant to pollinate, I will eat them.
This shows the pollen-covered anther.
Interestingly, fresh squash flowers are selling for about $1 each on Amazon today (minimum quantity = 100).
Wow!
Yesterday I actually sat down at my drafting table and picked up a charcoal pencil for the first time since the 2020 Pandemic was announced. You would think that with Shelter in Place in effect I would have had some time before this to do that. But with supermarket shelves empty I have been fussier about my baking. In truth, since acquiring a 19-function bread machine (used price on Amazon was $42) I have not bought a loaf of bread.
But I have always been an "I hate to cook" kind of person, and especially since this machine did not come with English language instructions, it took me a while to streamline the process.
For some reason during this pandemic I am hungrier than before. So my new regimen is "Eat first, and then draw!"
These are sea glass refrigerator magnets from an Amazon seller called #Mymazn. I have to say that in addition to selling beautiful things, Mymazn has awesome customer service.
I took the picture of these #Fridgemagnets in low light to avoid reflections, and because I love the understated colors. It is impossible to look at them without thinking of the ocean.
Card weaving and locker hooking are two fabric arts that, frankly, most people never heard of.
When I started to learn card-weaving I suddenly found myself with a whole lot of little lengths of different colored yarn. I wondered what I could do with them, because I like to repurpose things and not throw anything away. I have been learning to weave rugs from scrap fabric, so it occurred to me to see if it would be practical to use up the bits of yarn by hooking a rug. That is when stumbled across a post about using the locker hooking technique with fabric scraps. So for my first project I decided to combine both yarn and fabric scraps to make a small pouch. The sides and handle of the pouch are card-woven.
Shown above is my first locker hooked project, a pouch to protect one of the looms I bought on Etsy. Most people who locker hook (and there do not seem to be many of us) use a standard sized rug hooking mesh, which is rather expensive and does not come in a lot of sizes. Therefore, the tools needed for locker hooking do not come in a lot of sizes either.
Before buying anything I wanted to give this craft a try, so I looked around the house for some kind of mesh. I found a little circle of the non-skid material that is sold to keep bowls from sliding around when stirring in the kitchen. Then I carved a double ended crochet hook out of a chopstick. Well, when it worked, let's just say I was hooked on locker hooking. Now I have another way to make all sorts of custom pouches to attach to my card-woven straps.
It took me a long time to cozy up to crafting with vinyl, but I'm finally hooked on it.
Today I was putting together some weaving kits to have ready for camping trips or just a day at the lake.
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