Nerd delight, stealth art and the intersection of art and cooking

 I thought if we have any number nerds among us, you'd like this

And, before you say nobody puts the date year first, in fact people who work with big databases do. It's just a fun thing, like Pi(e) Day and May the Fourth be with you.

Earlier today I seized the day to catch the fall Japanese maple in sunshine. 

It clouded over soon after, but I made a composition here, indoors.

I like the contrast in shape and direction of the ginger foliage and the oak grain. Color too. Not that color matters here. Shapes and relationships are what this composition is about, not what it depicts. 

All my photos are carefully composed and cropped to say something beyond what they're showing.  Just a word to the sharp of eye!

Then, since some of the tips I've been getting about the little derm surgery next week, talk about soft food, to minimize chewing, the stitches being on my  face and better not disturbed, I thought soup.

The sugar pumpkin you last saw outside with the wooden cat, is now soup, along with cashews, lentils and celery, using up the vegetables before tomorrow's Misfits box arrives.

In the course of boiling it to make easy cutting and seeding, the long stem broke off and it's so pleasing a grainy shape, that I thought I'd do a bit of handmade paper molding.

I have quite a bit of cotton linters pure white paper, and I sprayed a thin sheet arranged over two bits of stem with clear water. 

It will be a few days before it dries completely, at which point I can lift it off and see how it worked. Material for future composition maybe. This is how I molded those earlier gold pieces you saw on one of the now completed figure series.

And since we're in the neighborhood of outdoor art and natural materials, here's the finished exhibited work from the rock filled cherry tree caper 

It's a triptych, said the gallery manager grandly. All framed on one backing.

Center is an ink drawing mounted on an image transfer, left and right are image transfers of my film photos of the rocky tree, left just of the tree, right the tree in context. 

And while I'm at it, here's a work to which I added bits later, designed to hang outdoors unprotected on the fence, for birds and squirrels to play with. 

Carolina wrens had a grand time climbing in it and swiping bits in spring for nest material. Squirrels climbed and yanked and chewed and had a good time. It's knitted, using several techniques, the light part parcel string, the dark part garden twine. 

It lasted about three years before weather and wildlife reduced it to rags, at which point I hung it in the woods.

And here's an indoor piece, exhibited years ago in some show or other. 

Twining, knotting with lark's head knots, a favorite, knitted using both string and copper wire, handmade beads. It's built on my late beloved cockatiel Emily Hope's swinging perch, that shape you see, a kind of shrine to her. 

So that's where we are, after I got up feeling glum, nothing to do, nothing to write about, before a nice chat with a neighbor and her dog, a brief encounter with a ladybug in the kitchen, now resident in the houseplants, and a good walk, set me up much better.