Holiday Catch-Up

Just before everyone arrived the evening of the 23rd I went outside in the gloomy dusk and saw that our Lenten Rose/ hellebores was blooming away as though it were February.  A bunch of them made a beautiful centerpiece.  Earlier in the day while doing a little last minute cleaning of the bathrooms I had decided to dump the ancient seashell collection into a sinful of water to spruce it up a little.  Fun to find some from the mid-eighties when we went to the Outer Banks.

I didn't do any drawing on the 25th, but on the 26th while we were all having a great and beer-filled lunch downtown at the Biergarten I sketched parts of people's lunches.  Excellent walnut, pear, gorgonzola and carmelized onion pizza!  

Some attempts at drawing my twin brothers while they were eating/talking/looking up at a TV screen.

After lunch we all walked around downtown, and in Sensibilities I found the scent I've been searching for since I first smelled it in 2000.  This luscious silky rosemary and  eucalyptus soap brings me right back to the day we arrived with students in a little village in Tuscany and I went up to our bedroom in the large villa we were renting and stood on the cool terra-cotta tiles in the shade of the shuttered room at bright midday and opened the top drawer of a very old, heavy, wood chest of drawers and smelled the fresh linens in that drawer.  Nothing has ever smelled that good and full of promise.  This soap comes very close, so of course I bought it.

The next morning we all went walking through the golden bamboo grove, and one of my brothers and I sketched the grove details.  Shortly after that we checked out the chickens.

Yesterday afternoon those of us who were still together went to the Folk Art Center, and I had a great time drawing in the archives/museum section while everyone else wandered around the place.  At bottom left is a dress made of homespun linsey-woolsey.

My favorite thing in the museum-- this gate with five roughly-carved figures.  The whole holiday was spectacular!