Night Kitchen, August

I am sitting on the stool at the kitchen bar eating scones while Jesse chows down on whatever is in his bowl and katydids sing outside the opened porch door in the dark woods out back.  I decide to draw whatever is in front of me;  hence the scones, a basil leaf, Jesse and his bowl, a pretty accordion folded booklet from my friend in Italy, written in her handwriting in what seems to be Dante's Italian.  I will need a dictionario.

Creepy Little Toy Shop

Nate likes mummies, especially mummies with bandages.  When we saw one at the Met last month, he borrowed my phone and carefully took pictures of the bandaged mummy.  Maya likes sculpture, and she told me the other day about some air-drying clay that she uses to customize her Littlest Petshop animals.  We went to AC Moore and bought some for us, and we decided to make a toy mummy for Nate.  At the top are some preliminary sketches based on Nate's photographs from the Met.

Above are drawings of the two mummy starts that I made today.  The air-dry clay is quite wonderful: it's nice to model with, and it dries in about 24 hours to a kind of instant papier mache-like quality.  The figures that I made are supposed to be the mummified body with a few bones thrown in for verisimilitude.  The clay is terra cotta colored, sore of like mummified skin.  I used acrylic to paint the mask, using gold and cadmium red medium.  Nate loves gold, so the outer case, not yet made, will have lots of gold designs.  We are going to sew a bandage-like shroud out of scraps from the garden trellis seat cushions, which are off-white cotton, when Maya comes to spend the night this week.

Okra Explosion

Okra is coming in!  I picked about ten large deep red pods and one fat green one, as well as a chubby little cucumber,  late this afternoon just ahead of a tremendous downpour.

Let's Celebrate National Left-Handers' Day!

 My immediate family is slightly more than half left-handed-- of the five of us, three of us are, and I suspect Jesse of being left pawed.  And today I learned that one of our daughters-in-law is left handed!  Alas, of the nine grandchildren, only Jacob is a lefty as far as I know.  So the score stands five to seven, with disturbing evidence that Abby is not left-handed.  So in honor of all of us who use the preferred and esteemed left hand, here are drawings of:  Jesse's left front paw, my left foot, my left hand (badly drawn by my right hand)---

and then three drawings from old photographs:  David's five-year-old left hand, Erik's three-month-old left hand, and my eleven year old left hand sporting a garnet ring while playing the role of a praying angel in a family xmas pageant.

Meeting Notes

Four friends at the BPAC meeting tonight.

Seed Factories Gearing Up Again

When M and I were walking last Friday morning we cut through the college garden and I spied a Mexican sunflower plant on fire with dozens of vermillion flowers.  I usually have a couple of these in my garden, but this year the Rudbeckia overtook everything, and the Mexican sunflower seeds never sprouted.  So I searched the bottom branches of this plant until I found a single almost-dried flower.  The birds usually get all the seeds from these flowers, but I thought an underneath one might have a few seeds in it.

It has been sitting on my drawing table for a few days now, and I started loosening the dried up flowerets.  I was happy to find a few of the little torpedo-shaped seeds.  They seem small, but maybe if I sprout them in the garden under a glass bell I can get a plant or two next summer.  Love it when the flowers start turning to seeds.

Late Night Jesse

 Maya is spending the night and we are not sleepy.  We worked a lot on our giant print;  Maya sewed a toy dog bed completely by herself, on the treadle, her design; and we cut out and pinned two seat cushions for the garden trellis.  On top of that we made a trip to AC Moore for air-drying clay and Velcro.  Then we watched a movie, and then Jesse settled down on the bed curled against Maya, and I sketched him while she watched a few episodes of cupcake wars.