my art

new camera

girl, Leave a comment


Test photo: our dining room Buddha.

By hoarding my personal money like one of my young cousins and pooling all of my birthday and Christmas cash, I was able to buy the new camera that I’ve been lusting after! (At least no one had to drive me to the mall to do so.) I’ve wanted a digital SLR for years, and finally took the plunge. After getting over a few new-toy hurdles (such as running out to the store since there was no memory card in the box, the adult equivalent of “batteries not included”), I took a series of test photos and proclaimed the camera to be “really nice” and to have “a much better flash than the old one.” To which my partner replied, I SHOULD HOPE SO. Did I mention it was pricey? Yes, but it’s so nice to have a real camera back in my hands: I had no idea how much I missed looking through a view finder. (And yes, I realize it’s odd to illustrate a post about rewarding your material cravings with a picture of a buddha, but what can I say? It’s pretty! And, the camera will feed my creativity, which is an important part of my core self and brings me happiness. Or something.)


Test photo: Ellie the elephant, part of our newly-accessorized living room.

In addition to the better flash system, the big improvement of the new automatic settings (for my purposes) of this camera over my little point-and-shoot one (which is and was a good solid little camera in a fully-metal body that served me well on an AIDS ride and numerous vacations; it’s not the camera’s fault that I deleted all the Maine photos before we got it home!) is the ability to take decent photos of small things up close and personal. Yes it’s dorky, but I can’t wait to be able to get better pictures of everything growing in the garden come spring. I don’t have any truly artsy photography plans at the moment, I just plan to take the same pictures I’ve been taking and have them turn out better. Food photos that don’t all look shiny (for example). Photos of the interior of our house without the colors all washed out. Pictures of the baby where he doesn’t look like a red-eyed demon. I’m confident that as I use the camera more, more shots will occur to me. I’m less confident that my brain will be alert enough anytime soon to go back to manual shooting with any degree of success, but there’s plenty of time for that.

new camera

home : sewing machine

girl, Leave a comment

In addition to all the other things that happened the first weekend of June, I scored a sewing machine at a yard sale in Takoma Park. The machine is five years old, but unused: the cord was still secured with a twist-tie and little plastic cover on the plug, and the accessories were still sealed in a plastic bag. While Singer doesn’t make this model anymore, it appears to have been replaced with several in the $200 range; I bought mine for $70! I say this not to gloat, but because this is the kind of thing that never happens to me, the finding of something I’ve been waffling over getting because of the cost for a totally affordable price at a yard sale that I wasn’t even planning to visit (my partner saw the machine when he passed the sale to go to an appointment, and alerted me to it when I arrived to pick him up). I hope that the person who sold it to me is as happy to have the $70 as I am to have the machine!

Following this exciting development, I was able to return the loaner machine to my neighbor across the street (just in time for her grandchildren to insist on using it when they visit this summer). I now have all the quilt blocks squared up, and just need to cut the on-point triangles and then the top will be ready to be assembled. I have several ideas for the next quilts I want to make; first, however, I need to come up with a plan for the back and decide whether I want to try actually quilting it myself. Having a machine that I’m not concerned about breaking that comes with the necessary accessories goes a long way toward that option being an actual possibility.

home : sewing machine

National Novel Writing Month strikes again

girl, Leave a comment

I wake up, look around, and it’s November. October got away from me, I confess. I made absolutely no headway with regard to book reviews, and posts about walks to the pond and adventures in cooking are hanging around the back-end of the site only half-conceived.

Unfortunately, they are likely to linger in that state a bit longer, as National Novel Writing Month is once again upon us. This will be my sixth year of participation, and while I’m pretty much over the official organization, I still enjoy the challenge. I have a core group of far-flung friends rounded up to type away with me, and I’m glad to resume my unofficial role as cheerleader on our little message board. This year I hope to get out and about with my wee clamshell and join some locals in coffeeshop meetups.

Either way, I’m going to be head down and fingers typing for the month of November. Don’t despair: I’ll be back in December with an updating vengeance, to ring out the year with a posting bang! Or something.

National Novel Writing Month strikes again

Icemakers of the Revolution

girl6 Comments

‘When the puppets cut their strings / there’ll be fireworks for the world to see / when the puppets cut their strings / there’ll be hell to pay in the ghettos of the whole damn world.’ — Icemakers of the Revolution


Diane, Tammy, and Shawny, at a show outside the Union in 1991.

I’ve referenced the Icemakers of the Revolution in passing, but they really deserve their own press. Fuzzy and Stephen were kind enough to collaborate and make available two of their albums in digital format, the first of which contains the aforementioned ‘Upset With The Set-Up.’ It also includes another of my favorites, ‘Panama,’ and the ever-popular (and still timely) ‘Growthrough,’ a protest against the Gulf War (I).

It would be fair to say that the Icemakers were one of my favorite bands. They were a local band when I was in high school, made up of Purdue students of various stripes — undergrad, grad, and alumni. Their sound varied from full on rockin’ out to an a cappella style. I saw them in just about every venue in town that didn’t require you to be 21 (or even 18): inside the Union, outside the Union, behind Von’s, in the Armory, and innumerable times upstairs at the Wesley Foundation. Despite carrying my camera with me nearly everywhere at that time, I only have half a roll of film of them, some 10 photos in all.

The members of the Icemakers were something like angry folk rock gods to those of us who were then 5 or 10 years younger (a span that is meaningless in my adult life). They were smart, funny, biting, and they trusted us to watch their cat when they went out of town. They were also unequivocally anti-war, pro-vegetarian, anti-racist and feminist, the political fathers and mothers of the kids who warm the cockles of my heart when I see them at protests with ‘no war but the class war!’ banners. In our small town, where the most successful college programs depended on big industry and government funding, they were a sign to me and my friends that we didn’t have to grow up and buckle under, that we could be only just beginning.

Being able to continue to see Icemakers shows was one of the few things I envied the people I left behind when I went away to college. I took their cassettes with me, but it wasn’t the same as their live shows. Since then I’ve grown away from folk as a genre, but I still pull the cassettes out from under the bench in the living room every once in a while, dust them off, and rock out.

Icemakers of the Revolution

oil painting class

girl, Leave a comment

The next step in my art-making plan is to learn how to use the oil paints that my grandfather gave me 18 months ago. After nearly forty years in their house, my grandparents moved into an apartment, and my grandfather passed along his easel, paints, and brushes to me. Since I haven’t had a painting class in over 15 years, I decided to find a beginning level course to sign up for.

The course I decided to take is through The Art League, which teaches out of The Torpedo Factory in Arlington. It’s quite a hike from my house, but it was the best option accessible by public transportation (oil painting classes at the county community centers in my area were all accessible only by car). The location is lovely, right on the river, with spacious and airy studios. An acquaintance took classes there several years ago and was quite pleased with the artists she met, so I’m looking forward to having a positive experience.

Of course, I’m experiencing the standard nervousness associated with starting something new, but I’m sure that will abate once the class starts next week. In the meantime, I’m gathering the required supplies. I’ll need to supplement the materials I have with some new ones, and I’m hoping to be able to find them all at the campus bookshop (much more easily accessible than the in-house store at The Torpedo Factory).

So, in a couple of months, I expect to have two small still life oil paintings on canvas, of which I also expect to be inordinately proud.

oil painting class