Not a crown

Some friends were over and Buddy boy and his friend made these.  All the kids were playing dress up.  The girls were playing princess so I thought they were making crowns.  No...

the princesses (and one prince in pink)

Does this give you a clue?

Yup, it's a Calvin wig.  He loves Calvin and Hobbes, including their duplicator.  There are days when he wants to be called Duplicate #5, usually when there is something he doesn't want to do.  I'm OK with that.  If the duplicate comes and cooperates it's all good.

a day out

I had a day out, out of the house and out of town.  With the help of a friend and Grandad the kids were taken care of and I spent the day having fun with the women of the family.  We had lunch at the Rotunda restaurant on the top floor of Neiman Marcus on Union Square.  The stained glass rotunda as beautiful and the food was delicious.  We then stopped in at Britex fabrics.  There were lots of gorgeous silks and wool fabrics, but the prices were definitely luxurious as well.  It was fun to shop, but I didn't bring anything home.  I've had some good luck with the remnant selection on the top floor in the past, but there wasn't anything very interesting today.

Then on to the SFMOMA.  Their main exhibit  (reviewed here) features the collection from the Stein family which includes a lot of work by Matisse, Picasso and their contemporaries.  It is always interesting to go to a museum and see what makes it in to the exhibit and what catches your eye.  Even work by celebrated artists isn't always that interesting.  This piece by Matisse was very popular and was quite interesting, and I generally like his work, but not everything was that great.  There were some that I really liked, but it seemed like this exhibit could have used a little bit more careful editing, but who am I to critique their curatorial eye.  One thing that I really liked was the blown up photographs showing the paintings in the exhibit on display in the various homes of the Stein family.

 Matisse - Woman with hat (31" x 23")

Some of my favorite pieces of the day were in a different exhibit that was selected from the museum's permanant collection.  I've seen prints of Mark Rothko's work on posters and in books and it seems a little muddy and dull, so simple, not at all interesting.  It is completely different in person.  Part of that could be the scale.  This piece is HUGE and the layering of the colors is so interesting, rich warm purple, bright tomato red and vibrant blue.

Rothko - No. 14 1960 (114" x 105")

There were several pieces by Clyfford Still which I really liked.  This one was my favorite.  Yellow has always been my favorite color.  Once again, HUGE.

Clyfford Still - untitled (113" x 148")

I like the way Andy Warhol uses color in his portraits.  It is pretty interesting to see him use the same image with different color schemes and see how it affects the overall look and feel of the work.

Andy Warhol - self portrait (72" x 72")

There was also a portrait by Chuck Close, whose work I've really liked for quite awhile.  This isn't the portrait that was on display, but I wanted to show what his work is like.  Once again it is really big.  The images are pixilated and each pixel is a carefully chosen swirl of color.  I watched an interview of him once and he said that doing a portrait of this size is too overwhelming so he just does a square at a time.  So interesting.  Each little square is it's own work of art.  He talked about how he decides on the orientation of the grid, diagonal or straight, and how that influences the end result.  I'd like to hear more about his process.

Chuck Close - Robert (102" x 84")

I did have favorites that weren't enormous.   There are just too many good thing to talk about them all.  In the end it was a great day.  When we got back home Grandad was painting in the back yard with My Girl and Buddy Boy was contentedly reading comics.  Everyone was happy and I hadn't been missed at all, or so they said.

images from http://www.sfmoma.org/

It's a....

It's a two-headed-panda-boy!

Buddy Boy and Teddy Panda have spent a lot of quality time together this summer playing with Legos.  They are both very happy.

End of Summer and the Farm Report

School starts tomorrow.  Summer's over and it seems like it just started.  As soon as school was out we took off to see the Utah family.  Once back it was hard for me to find my daily rhythym for some reason.  Several days of migraine headaches every two weeks that were worse than usual didn't help.  Neither did a mild case of shingles.  Yes, shingles, the old person's disease, wierd.  I don't even qualify for the vaccine for another 10-20 years.  I didn't really realize what it was until it was over.  So, I'm sorry if anyone got chicken pox as a result.  It's just been that kind of a strange summer.  Things finally fell in place a couple weeks ago and now it's over.  Time to shake it all up again.  I'm looking forward to it even though Buddy Boy isn't at all.

And now for the Farm Report:

It has been great to have a bit more garden this summer.  We planted tomatoes, zuccini, and cucumbers in the raised bed and beans and sunflowers along the back of the house.  The sunflowers were just for fun, not for the seeds.  I thought that birds would eat the seeds, but it turns out that little birds have been eating the leaves.  I thought it might be bugs, until I saw the little birds pecking away at the big leaves.  I don't feel so bad about that.  They can have the leaves, and the seeds for that matter.

The zuccini have been great.  I've been able to get my fill of the little guys right off the grill.  They are so good that way.  Unfortunately the cucumbers haven't done so well.  Oh well, maybe next year.

The grapes along the side fence are doing well.  They seem to have enjoyed the harsh haircut they got last winter.  I was a little worried, but I think it worked well.  Since I don't do the wierd pucker face anymore when I try one they will soon be ready to pick and dry.  More raisins.  Yum.

I've enjoyed watching the beans grow taller and taller and wind themselves around until they now reach the roof.  I didn't have any bean poles, so I tied twine on nails under the eaves then tied the strings together in a sort of loose net.  I weighted the bottom down with some big rocks since I didn't have any stakes either.  It seems to have worked great.  I planted tri-color beans, really just three different beans in one package.  They haven't all come on at once.  The yellow beans were first, then the green, and now the purple beans are coming.  Purple beans just make me smile.

The tomatoes are just starting to ripen.  It's been a cool summer so far.  That isn't a complaint, but the tomatoes like a little heat.

The figs are also doing well.  I picked about 8 yesterday, the first of the season.  There are lots more, but we'll see what happens.  Last year I had big plans, but thanks to the squirrels I only got a handful for myself.

So far, so good.

Girl Camp

Last week we had Girl Camp.  My Girl was feeling bad that she couldn't go to camp this summer like her brother.  So while he was at Lego camp we had Girl Camp. 

A friend came and played a couple of days and since no camp experience is complete without a commemorative t-shirt, we made one. Yes, it's one more T-dress. They have been very popular around here this summer. One day we cut it out and sewed it and later in the week we did the stenciling on the front. I love my digital cutter.

Oakland Temple

I finally figured it out.  Just like most things, once you figure it out it isn't that difficult.  I was trying to make it too complicated before.  The tricky part was trying to work in the details of the towers.  I can only cut holes so small.  Some of the details are individual lines instead of cut out shapes.  You can't see them well in the photos, but there are there.  It is a little bit difficult to photograph a sheet of white paper.  I like the frieze of Jesus and the twelve apostles on the front.  It really stands out.

Angry Birds

I saw the Angry Bird sandwiches on Pinterest and so did the kids.  Buddy Boy wanted to try it.  So we did it.  Bagels, salami, cheese, olives.  They were less excited about eating it than making it, but it was still fun.

Take the Pinterest challenge and make something.  Then tell me what you do.  I need to do more of this.  Not exactly this, but you know what I mean.

Growing crystals

Buddy Boy is interested in crystals this summer so we grew some.  There are instructions for the salt sculptures and rock candy and a lot of other things as well. 

It was fun to watch the salt crystals grow and spread.  The salt water traveled up the string and dripped down on to the plate.  The crystals grew on the string and spread on the mug as well.  I hope that he will recognize the process when we visit caves later this summer or fall.  There were very few large crystals, mostly crystal fuzz, but you could watch them grow and see the process as the water dripped off the ends of the string. 

Here we have a few sugar crystals.  There are a lot of rock candy tutorials out there, but there are a few key things that made it work for us.  The first is that you need to have a syrup that is concentrated enough for crystals to develop.  The typical 2 cup sugar to 1 cup water didn't seem to be enough.  I used about 3 cups of sugar in 1 cup boiling water.  You also need to dip your sticks in the syrup and let them dry completely to get seed crystals that the candy can then grow on.  We used big popsicle sticks.  I added a little color and peppermint flavor to make it a little tastier and waited... and waited...  This is a week or so and it is still going.



Sadie the four headed dog

My Girl wanted to be in the picture so I took one of her with Sadie, the four headed dog.  Sadie doesn't really have four heads, but I did do a four headed paper cut picture of her.  Sadie is my friend's aging family member and she wanted a portrait of her for her home. 

I had been thinking of doing something a little bit Andy Warhol and she loved the idea. Most of my paper cut work has been pretty monochromatic so this was something very different.  Sadie is basically a black and white dog but I like to keep the art all about light and shadows so I had a highlight and shadow for both the black and the white parts.  That made four colors, except that each dog has a different shadow color for the white parts, so that's seven, eight when you add in the eye color, and twelve including the different background colors.  That's a lot of different colors that each had to be just right.  We spent a fair amount of time picking just the right paper for this project, but that's part of the fun.  Unfortunately the photos didn't really capture the true colors.  So imagine the white actually white, the black dark, and the rest warm bright earthy colors.  The dog on the upper right should be sagey green not khaki.




Sketching it all out, choosing the colors, and the first dog or two were fun.  Then it started to get a little tedious.  I think the end result is good, but I don't know if I'll have the patience for another repeat picture like this again.  Maybe if it was my own dog, but I don't have a dog so it's not going to happen.

Mind the gap

It was fun to watch the teeth move apart before the baby tooth fell out to make room for the big new tooth.