back, at last.

i sit here in my new residence room, nothing unpacked except my computer. it's great to be back, even though i haven't even seen any of my friends yet. it's just a great feeling to have my own room that i can fill with whatever i'd like and not have to worry about a stranger showing up later and claiming half the space. the single life is good.

a goal:
actually meet people in harper and not be that girl again.

i am so excited for class to start, i need to get back in my art vibe. especially photography, i'm looking forward to that. even though thaddeus will probably make me cry.

les macarons!

everyone gets baking urges once in a while. my sister is the baker in the family. she makes cookies or pies, or a cheesecake for a special occasion. i get a baking urge now and then, but i'm never satisfied with chocolate chip cookies or an apple pie. no, i make the complicated things.

that's why tonight, i had an urge to try macarons.

after i got over the initial disappointment that it was not possible to make one in each flavour (i tried that with icing on cookies once, it was much more time-consuming than it was worth), i settled on a nice, easy chocolate-mint. the pastel colours are, after all, the thing that attracts me most to the art of macaron-making. i was too impatient to pay attention to the finer details (measuring by weight rather than volume because i don't have a scale, sifting twice because i don't have a sifter, aging the egg white for three days because i wanted macarons NOW), but they still turned out okay.


a little brown around the edges, but my oven does that to everything. they also baked up taller, but flattened a lot when they cooled. this could be a result of my using fresh egg whites, or too-coarse almonds, or simply not being careful enough while taking them out of the oven. i've left out some eggs and i'm going to try to find some almond flour, so i'll try again in a few days. i think i'll try lemon next time. mmm.

other than baking, here's what i've been doing for the past few days:
that's my baby-painting setup, horrible lighting included. there's not much open space in my house, so i've taken over the living room. which has lots of good window-light in the daytime, but only one lamp at night, which is when i do most of my work. but the babies are coming along nicely. i have two dresses pretty much done, one about halfway, and one that i have yet to start (i need to get the measurements of the guy who will be wearing it). in addition to that, i have a scarf, a tie, a pair of shorts, a bedspread, and a bassinet to make. this is turning out to be quite the commitment.

costumes.

i'm now unemployed. i have three weeks or so before going back to school. i have found one thing to do to amuse myself until then.

a friend is directing a play, "baby with the bathwater" by christopher durang. a very absurd piece of theatre, and it needs costumes to match.


yes, i'll be painting the babies on the fabric. it looks like in addition to those two dresses and the tie, i'll be making one more dress, a pair of shorts, and a bassinet that can hold a teenage boy. and maybe one more dress and a few aprons. i'm quite excited for it, really. i just need to get some fabric and paint.

also, i still do that knitting thing every once in a while. i stopped at a couple of yarn shops last week while we were in cape breton. i got a book i've been eyeing for a while, "boutique knits", which features a lovely cloche-like hat pattern, for which i picked up some teal alpaca. i also experienced, for the first time, malabrigo. i got two skeins of lace in "water green". i've been loving this colour lately.

and a few things from my sketchbook lately:

one week at work, i only had one kid sign up for class, so we did some more involved things, like making dolls. that's what i made. no, the kid didn't know who liza minnelli is.

and a little stamp i carved from a piece of linoleum:

i'm going to do a series of posts of things that make me happy. i'm really a pretty materialistic person deep down, in a way, and i love buying things. i'll be posting some things i own that make me happy.

note: future project.

i only have two weeks left of work. after that, i still have a whole month left before i'm back to school. therefore, i am going to force myself to do some art.

today, while cleaning the third floor of the gallery where i work, i found a bag that contained some fabric. i wanted some fabric to cover my sketchbook with, so i looked through it and noticed some that was white, with very faint traces of where there used to be small purple flowers. i thought it was a bedsheet, but it turned out to be a dress. with several holes in it.

i want to collect a bunch of old clothes in an extreme state of disrepair: dresses where the fabric is thinned and falling apart, jeans with holes everywhere, moth-eaten sweaters. and repair them. patch the holes, maybe embroider the faded prints.

finding the old clothes is the hard part.

fashion, day two.

i'm liking the big-ass sketchbook, but it's bigger than my scanner. this almost didn't fit.

acrylic, watercolour, and ink over a magazine cutout. i like doing this.

summer photos.

several of them. some of them got cropped on the edges, click for full view.

i have no idea why this is underlined, but it won't go away.

oils.

i made an oil painting. you may know that i'm not much of a painter, generally. i think i prefer oils to acrylics, because the colours look nicer and they don't dry before even touching the painting surface like acrylics do. my favourite part is the actual visible brushstrokes that i've tried so hard to get with acrylics, and failed miserably. though that part didn't scan well.

self-portrait, obviously. i liked it better before i added the glasses. i might be risky and try to take them off.

i return!

i kind of forgot about having a blog again.

i've decided, this year, to start applying to the national theatre school's costume and set design program (or rather, my mother has decided for me). i'm starting now because they accept a grand total of eight people each year, so maybe they'll eventually notice me if i start early. applications aren't until next february, but i'm starting to work on my fashion sketching skills.

















(they're small because there's so many, click to go to flickr to see what's going on!)

i went out and bought a fountain pen and tubes of watercolours and a huge-ass black spiral-bound sketchbook, which i'm going to paste these into. it makes me feel like a real fashion designer. it seems like they would carry huge-ass black spiral-bound sketchbooks. maybe.

these are the women i want to be.

these are my favourite three females.

1. ellen greene.

the leading lady in my favourite movie/musical, little shop of horrors. she played the role of audrey in both the original off-broadway production and the film adaptation. her voice is something you either love or hate, and while most hate, i love. it's just so faint and ditzy and annoying untikl she starts singing, then it gets so deep and soulful as she belts it out. my love of her and this musical is the sole reason i was able to get the part of audrey in out production of little shop. she didn't really do much other than little shop, until recently she played aunt vivian in pushing daisies, the only tv show i've ever really loved, which is now sadly deceased.

2. liza minnelli
miss liza is, of course, loved by many. she's now almost 65 and still going strong. well, maybe not quite strong, but she's fucking liza minnelli so it doesn't matter if she's past her prime. just think of her as she was back around 1975. i think that her status as one of the greatest broadway performers ever and the fact that she's adored by gay men and drag queens everywhere says it all. i basically have a crush on her, and that's all there is to say.

3. clara bow
it's interesting that the previous two ladies, one of the primary factors in my love for them is voice. clara, on the other hand, was a silent film star. but she didn't need a voice to get the message across, her movements and expressions were enough. she was pretty much the iconic face of the '20s flapper era, as well as the original "it" girl (the term originating from her movie of the same name). my love for her is only accentuated by the fact that she, too, had curly red hair. her red was henna, but still.

some vintage finds.

a few days ago, i went into a store in town that seems kind of like a gifts/crafts store. i've been in there a few times in the past because their back room is full of yarn- local alpaca and huge cones of undyed yarns from "henry's attic". i went in looking for some wool roving for felting, and i realized how much cool stuff they had, and really cheap.

i got a pair of gloves, i'm guessing from the '60s, in a light dusty pink colour that i love recently, for only $2.

i also picked up a magazine from 1943 and a knitting pattern book from 1945.
i love these two dresses, but i totally don't have the patience to knit them. they're fingering weight and stockinette all the way, plus they're in sizes 32-34-36. i'm sure i could fit in the 36, but i wouldn't want to take the chance of it not fitting. maybe i'll play with the guage and knit the 32 in a thicker yarn.

then, today, i went to this weird shop that sells antiques and chainsaws. the antiques were the part i was interested in, of course. when i hear "antiques stores", i always think of furniture, which is something i don't really have much use for at this point in my life. but this store has all kinds of little trinkets and things. the upper floor is like a bedroom packed full with stuff right out of the 1930s. i was tempted by a pair of silk stockings, but they didn't have a price on them so i figured i'd be better off not knowing. instead, i went with a nice pair of novelty salt and pepper shakers.

i think i'll be getting a smaller meal plan next year, so these will work nicely to smuggle salt and pepper from meal hall to season my baked potatoes or other cheap and bland foods.

they also had quite a few old cameras in the 20-30 dollar range. there were a few 35mm point-and-shoot types, but also some medium-format types. they all seemed to take 620 film, but i believe i've heard it's essentially the same as 120 but on a different size spool. i'm going to do a little research to see if they're worth it, but if i switch back into photo for next year (which i'm now fairly sure i will do), i'll probably get one.