Will There Ever Be a New Post Here?

Yes!  My excuse for such lame updating is that I've been traveling as well as having guests for the whole month of September, AND I didn't bring my laptop along when I traveled.  I did bring my journal, though, and have many pages to use as blog fodder.  This one is from the ten days I spent in New Hampshire visiting our son and his wife and three little boys.  On the day shown on this page, we were visiting a fine little museum in Windsor, Vermont-- The American Precision Museum. It's a collection of early machinery and pictures of factories.  It has a nice collection of primitive sewing machines, and the one I drew here was a pre-runner to the sewing machine called a revolving looper. 

After we visited the museum, we were looking around the grounds.  The building is mid- 19th century brick and is situated on a small river (which was close to flood level that day due to recent floods in that area), from which the machinery in the original building was run.  Most interesting to the boys and me were some chunks of old bricks scattered around the parking lot in the weeds near the banks of the river.  We decided they were old bricks as they matched the bricks in the building perfectly.  So we collected a few chunks and took them home to grate on a paving stone in order to make paint.  The kids and I took turns grating the brick chunks and then carefully brushing the brick dust onto sheets of paper to transfer to a container.  After a long afternoon of grating (which was very satisfying and during which the boys actually had little fights over who got to use the stone when) we had collected enough pigment to grind with a mortar and pestle and some gum Arabic from an art store in Hanover.  We added a drop of maple syrup to improve the elasticity and wetness factor of our paint, and the resulting paint can be seen on this page.

We also mixed some of our red orange paint (Windsor Red Ochre) with some white gouache that I had in order to make a pretty apricot colored pastel, also shown here.  Stay tuned for more pages from New Hampshire!