Tennant to leave Doctor Who

David Tennant is leaving Doctor Who.

Someone kindly broke the news to me yesterday, but I didn't post about it because there were no words to express my dismay.

There still aren't.

I mean, Tate already left, which means I've lost Donna Noble. Now Tennant is leaving, which means I will lose my Doctor--for the second time (See Eccleston leaving)--and the Gap Year now has no purpose.

I'm going to go hide under the bed for a year or two, or maybe go out and shake my fist at the cruel sky1. Perhaps the world will look better then.

1Figuratively speaking, that is. Actually, I have to get read to go prepare for the Book Arts show, and that is going to involve more fetching and carrying than ranting and hiding.

No Books Were Harmed in the Making of This Post

I've spent the last month working on "Watch Out for Whales," a rhyme book illustrated with collage images. It started out to be a stab stitch book and ended up an accordion book because I got to liking the bright illustrations and thought they looked well spread out on the table.I've had a lot of fun and, of course, some frustration. The fun is obvious: What's not to like about painting, cutting, and gluing?

The frustration? Well, gluing doesn't *always* work as well as one would like. I've had a hard time getting the back and front to lie flat together against the joining ribbons. I've been working on is an accordion book & a fairly big one. I've been saying all along that what I really need is somewhere to spread it out flat, but I just didn't have one. Today, by co-opting the kitchen table, four tray tables, and about half the books on that shelf you see back there--the entire gardening section, several phonebooks, most of the hardcover science fiction and fantasy, numerous mysteries, plus a few "assorted," and by taking up the entire room, I managed.

I think it worked, too, and just in time, as the book goes off to the show tomorrow. There, I am afraid, it will have to go on the "Do Not Touch" shelf. I wanted people to be able to handle it, but with so many layers of paper involved, the glue just doesn't dry quite fast enough and I do not think I quite trust it in people's hands. Not yet, anyway.

This is also the anxious mama speaking: The other two books I have in the show, stab stitch books I do want people to hold, are older and I've had the chance to let go a bit. "Whales" is still new, still my baby, unsupplanted as yet by other projects.

Oh: And thanks to the careful use of the paintbrush and miles of wax paper, no books were harmed in the process. Everyone is back on the shelves and glue-free. In fact, the books may be better off than they were before: I dusted them a bit as I took them down and put them back.

Unlikely Flames and Distant Mountains

Normally, the ocean prefers curves. Strange birds come to the shores and forgotten groves come from far away to grow in the sands.

Today, though, it was in love with angles. Distant mountains, cities from far away, and unlikely flames burned on the beach. The waves sketched curious and beautiful patterns in the sands, mixing the colors just so and smoothing its canvas, drawing carefully only to erase the lines to begin again.

Patterns in the Sand

For some time now, I have been interested in the patterns formed by the waves on the shore.

Sometimes they are the shapes and curves of seaweed left behind by the water, tossed and twisted into curious designs.

Sometimes it is the sand itself, smoothed into strange and beautiful patterns. A phoenix may fly one moment or a lily bloom near my feet. Fey forests grow, sending their branches up in curious twists, reaching toward dry land. Then the wave comes in again, and a firebird forms, or a mass of feathery ferns. I can walk for hours, marveling at these designs.

Actually showing other people has proven something of a challenge. I've been experimenting with the camera, though, and calling on photoshop--just enough to make the patterns stand out in the picture the way they did on the shore--and I'm working on a gallery of those "found" patterns over at ArtID. I'll be rotating work through over the next few weeks as I work.

Stealing the Dog's Dish II

You know what?

A cast iron pan really *does* make for nice, black rose beads.

And I've used it twice now to steam the bread, and it makes a great, crunchy crust.

Cinder's never getting that pan back.

Meet the Mailbox Monster

I've been working on a lot of long-term projects lately: The Mage Trio has taken over a year, my part on The Broken Hourglass has spread over months and will likely last a few more, any applique project takes at least a few weeks, and Watch Out for Whales took a couple of months. It's only 14 pages long, counting the cover and the title page, but that's a lot of collage. Plus, of course, there was an added bit of frustration when I got the pages together, thought I had done them backwards, redid them, and realized I'd done them right the first time. I am not complaining, mind, not really. I love all the projects and am, overall, pleased with the way they are progressing.

But they do take a lot of time, and while delayed gratification is all very well, I thought it would be nice to start and finish something inside of a day.

And so, without further ado, I present to you: The Mailbox Monster!

Happy Halloween, everyone!

Collage Madness

I'm now taking the second semester of the book arts class I began in the summer.

It's driving me crazy!

It's a good kind of crazy, but it's crazy all the same.

I've always been interested in art, but in the past, my crazes have been smaller and more confined.

It's only been relatively recently that I discovered that there were things I wanted to say that I could not say with words. Photography became more and more important to me, more and more of a way of communicating with the world around me.

Then I took the book arts class and discovered that I wanted more.

First there was the sheer joy of making paste paper--something I hope to learn more about, since I've barely scratched the surface.

Then there was collage.

I did very little with it last semester; both of the books I made were photography books, and I am happy with them.

This semester, however, I find myself combining my interests, mixing words, photographs, and paper into a single unit. In other words, I've discovered collage, a form many of you are familiar with but which I had not worked in since, well, I can't remember when.

I've spread the floor over with paste paper, gotten gloriously gluey, grumbled as I overcut with the exacto knife (a new tool to me, by the way), and generally been busily, happily, confusedly, maddeningly occupied.

You can see from the included images--photos, by the way, since scanning would involve removing the originals from under their weighted barriers--where both interest and frustration lie.


Interest: It's fun. I can illustrate my words! I can combine mediums. I can do this.

Frustration: I still overcut. I didn't think to measure the pages next to each other when I made them, so I don't know how well the oceans are really going to match up in the end. Glue and I do not always get along (though I just opened a new jar today and it is working much better than the older jar was). The pages are stiff and unwieldy and so I'll have to scan and print them before I can bind them. This last is not, in and of itself, an insurmountable problem, but I have yet to figure out how to photo-adjust the images once they are scanned so that they look their best and still look like they belong to one another.

Overall, I am happy with the work, glad to have the rhyme not only written but illustrated, alive in a way I could not have seen it before. But, there is always the "but"!

Adventure. Madness.

Advice?

You may care too much about your crafting if

you steal your dog's dish.


The easiest way to make black rose beads is too cook them in a cast iron pot.

We don't have a cast iron pot, but we do have old nails, so I've been using those. It's a bit of a nuisance keeping track of them, though, and they never really seem to get the beads truly black. Still, we don't have a cast iron pan.

But our dog does. She's been eating out of it for the last thirteen years.

Nah. I'll just keep using the nails. It is the dog's dish, after all, and who steals from their dog?

The best way to get a really crisp loaf of bread that rises just that extra bit is to steam the bread. The best way to do that is to put ice in a cast iron pan in the oven just as you put the bread in.

Still, we don't have a cast iron pan, and it's not that big a deal.

But Cinder has a cast iron pan.

It's dirty.

I can clean it, boil it, run it through the diswasher.

But what kind of a person steals her dog's dish?

The roses all bloomed this week, probably one of the last big shows they'll put on before fall sets in and I prune them.

I just started a new batch of sourdough starter. In a week, I can try some of those lovely recipes in the book I checked out of the library Monday.

The dog used to have a cast iron pan.

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, a book review

Ah. Good stuff.

The luxury, the beauty, the lists!

I mean, I want to leave the world behind while taking a fully stocked library full of all my favorite books, comfortable chairs, reading lights, and out-of-date newspapers. Consider:

High pieces of furniture, of black violet ebony inlaid with brass, supported upon their wide shelves a great number of books uniformly bound. They followed the shape of the room, terminating at the lower part in huge divans, covered with brown leather, which were curved, to afford the greatest comfort. Light movable desks, made to slide in and out at will, allowed one to rest one's book while reading. In the centre stood an immense table, covered with pamphlets, amongst which were some newspapers, already of old date. The electric light flooded everything; it was shed from four unpolished globes half sunk in the volutes of the ceiling.

According to Captain Nemo, there are twelve thousand books in there. It's a bibliphiles dream!

Then there are the staterooms (Nemo's "sparsely furnished" one, and a spare handy for any stranded marine scientists he happens to scoop up), the stewards to bring breakfast, and the mini-museum stocked by an artist, and all the wonderful meals everyone is always eating. Nemo knows how to desert the world in style.

There are some gorgeous descriptions in there, too, as the captain takes his "guests" on tours of the ocean floor, showing them wonderful coral forests, sunken cities, and brilliantly lighted iceburgs.

And then there are the lists. Oh, how the man loves his lists. I estimate that I made a good mile on one catalog of fish--and that was ambling along with an elderly dog and stopping to take pictures every now and again.

Of course, there's the little matter of the Captain being quite mad, but everyone is due a character flaw or two.

I stand by my recomendation of the Librivox recording, too. It was quite good. The variety of readers didn't distract me the way I expected it to--in fact, it added to the charm--and all of them were quite good as readers. One or two had a couple of stumbles, but overall, they're about average for recorded books, and these are all volunteers.

Yet *another* lolcat

more animals

Another Old Radio Site: OTR.Network Library

Not one I've explored yet, but just the length of the list is making me happy: the OTR Network Library

Another lolcat

more animals

More from LOLCats

more animals

LibriVox

I wrote about discovering LibriVox earlier, but I hadn't actually downloaded anything from it. Having now looked at the catalog and started listening to one of the books, I'm hooked.

The catalog is huge: 1639 items finished and more in progress. The books cover a tremendous range, everything from the Bible to Edger Rice Burroughs (of Tarzan fame), and if the one I'm listening to now is of any indication, they're quite good quality.

Also, I love the scope of the project. The folk at LibriVox want to record every single book in the public domain, and the readers are from all over. So far, Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea has at least six different readers from at least four different countries (the U.S., England (I think), Canada, and Turkey. Not everyone identifies their country when they start.) Oh, and it isn't just books in English that they are recording.

What's not to like?