Of easels and dyes and other things

Giving away the easel, weighed a ton, reminded me of the brief period as a teenager when I tried oil painting and, being broke, needed to invent a cheap easel.  

I found three bamboo canes, used a rubber band to hitch them together at one end,  then splayed them to stand in a triangle, one pointing forward at the top to hang a canvas or whatever I found to paint on.  Weighed a few ounces.

It worked fine until I moved on from oils, partly because of allergies, partly because it's such a dull, plodding old artform. I got much more into drawing and when I could get the paper for watercolors, did them. The spontaneity appealed to me.

And many years later I had an interesting experience with dyeing yarn. The indigo picture reminded me. I'd used beets, notoriously fugitive color, to dye yarn I'd spun, to see what would happen. I'd used a mordant, forget what, maybe alum, and the red color seemed to be, surprisingly, holding up.

Then I hung the skein to dripdry over a container. As the dye dripped out, the color went with it until I had a container of reddish liquid and -- a beautiful hank of green yarn! Natural dyeing is full of surprises. 

This saori weaving detail has some of that green yarn, faded from being in strong light. The yellow is probably onionskin, and the blue possibly Kool aid, good dye material. I wouldn't drink it.

Rainy Sunday came with a discovery of Ustinov playing Poirot on Freevee 

Look at that cast. 

And there's the Funeral Ladies book, a Foyle series 

And there's stick weaving and knitting also in progress. Plenty to do.

Here's the progress of the stick weaving, embroidery floss on darning needles. Reading left to right, you can see it's improving 

Getting the hang of sliding it off the needles, the hardest part, a bit tricky for my fingers. The trailing ends would be threaded back into the weaving but I left them out, to show the stages of learning.

9/11 is coming up and I registered for an online evening meditation session. That seems an appropriate way to observe it and the current state of the US.

And lunch notes: I roasted the rest of the carrots and potatoes with olive oil and the last spicy sausage fritter. Good discovery, long red pepper ground over carrots is very good. It's a fruity sort of grind, and is really interesting with the sweetness of the carrot. Noted for future reference.

Happy day everyone, resist and cope is the goal. And make things.

Billie agrees 

Amateur music, string and Oresteia

Yesterday I was in need of something quick to cook in hot weather,  and made pasta with a simple sauce of crushed tomatoes, basil picked right before, olive oil, butter, red pepper flakes.

Pecorino romano sprinkled on. Sprig of fresh picked Italian basil.

Later I tried a bowl of butternut squash carrot soup made with home chicken broth, but cold., a heatwave not being the time for hot soup. It was surprisingly good,too. Noted.

And since I'm hors de combat for cording right now, I dyed my current output in a black walnut, red maple, turmeric mix dye I had in the freezer.

Here with a glass bottle keeping it submerged, because it wanted to float

And here after overnight soaking, nice warm color interesting for future reference. Now hanging to drip dry over the sink.

Meanwhile back to reading, I thought this enforced indoor period might be a good time to read a classic and downloaded the Oresteia to my Kindle .

Tigger, get F to look here. You're right in there! 

I hadn't realized it's a trilogy. Anyway it's a rsttlin good story, starts at the fall of Troy , dramatic message passed across land and sea by beacons, and very readable, too. 

In translation, my school days of translating Homer being a bit behind me. Nausicaa doing the laundry, even in ancient classics it's always danged housework.  

Moving along from a misspent youth with Greek and Latin and other languages, to music and what I've done about it.

I always wanted to play violin but piano was available, so I trudged off at age six to learn, gah. I also took singing lessons then, mainly because my wise Mom thought the breathing might help with ny severe asthma. Turned out I had a decent voice, and wasn't racked with stage fright performing.

I performed in various local festivals, terrified at the piano performance -- Town Hall, grand piano, hundreds of people, big deal, and much more confident and successful with singing. 

I have what's called relative pitch, vital for a singer, meaning the ability to hit intervals correctly, such as eg singing one octave higher than the prompting note. It means you can reliably sing the tune as written without missing notes or needing an accompanying melody to copy.

I don't have perfect, or absolute, pitch, which is the ability to identify a note with no context.  Not many people do, and it's a good question whether it's useful or not, but that's a debate for another time and place. 

Anyway, violin had to wait till midlife when I had the chance to try it. I rented a great German violin, 200 years old, mellow, and a friend's daughter lent me her excellent bow, light enough for my hand. 

Finding a teacher took a bit of doing, since they usually don't teach adults and are a bit unsure about it, but I did eventually, and became a modestly proficient player, able to be in the second violin section of an orchestra. 

My colleagues were kids! They were very kind and encouraging when they realized I wasn't some teacher, but playing at their level. There's no hierarchy of age in the arts.

I played for several years until my body rebelled and the pain pushed me to choose a physically less demanding instrument. 

That's when I found the recorder

I've played, and still own, all these except the top one.  You have to learn several in order to play in groups. Such happiness, making music together with new friends. 

Mainly it was early, medieval and Renaissance, favorite periods. At school I'd sung a lot of medieval plainsong, that being a big deal at a convent school with a built in chapel where mass was said.

So finding recorder was such a return to music I loved. Playing as an adult beginning amateur only requires enthusiasm and the willingness to make a total fool of yourself at regular intervals. 

I was also given (but I insisted only long term loan) a very good orchestral level silver flute and taught myself that, too. Gosh that takes some breath though.  

After a couple of years' joy, it was needed by a promising young student so I sent it back willingly, having had my share.

I got a bit of voice coaching in older age, too, from a retired opera singer and teacher. This was an exchange for teaching art to her severely autistic son. It was great for a while, i learned a lot about voice production and preservation, then I had to move on, life making other demands, ss it does.

About reading music -- it's simple if you learn it early enough! I learned to sightread bass and treble clefs for piano, and it was so much easier to play other instruments later,  where you only had one line to play at a time Plainsong I learned to sightread at school. We all did. It wasn't considered anything special. 

I wished I'd learned more clefs though. The viola clef is different and it's really harder to do as an adult. Your brain doesn't want to stay with it.

So that's my life in amateur music to date. I've outlived a lot of my consort friends, the demographics being against us. 

I can still play solo, and now I think I'll dust off my recorders and do that. The bass is too hard on my gnarly old hands, but the others will still work.

Blogistas, your comments have got me here! Translation: a fine mess you've got us into, Ollie! But thank you.

Happy day everyone, make art and music, read, enjoy, fight the good fight, too. Let's do it all!