Hurricane Irene has just departed our part of the country and folks are out and about and assessing the damage. From where I sit, there seems to be little effect other than debris and some flooding. I was reminded of the one storm we experienced in our July holiday in Hull and this poignant reminder we discovered on our early morning walk on the beach the next morning.
This is the universal gesture meaning “We made it” upon arriving at Hull for our three week sojourn.
So it seems that there are many blogs–primarily from France–in which literally hundreds of images have been removed from their backgrounds, edges fuzzed, and offered for the use of all and sundry, and perfect for Polyvore sets. These are called Tubes and have been made using a program not available to MACs. As anyone who has used it knows, the program (dare I call it that?) inside Polyvore for the purpose of background removal is less than useful. So what is a perfectionist to do? This is my first attempt. I first tried by clipping the image to Polyvore, then making a screenshot, taking it to Photoshop, removing background, fuzzing, etc. The results were OK but with much reduced quality. I then went to the original image (before clipping to Polyvore, dragged it to my desktop and dropped it into Photoshop. I will need to keep playing but this seems to be a solution.
So BW finally accomplished his goal. He challenged me to create just one set on polyvore… And the rest is history.
There will be more about shibori and silks and kimono, but I thought I’d give some space to BW’s obsession. These are just two of his set on Dante’s Inferno. Catch him on Polyvore.
Taisho kimono The beautiful kimono that has been hanging on my wall since our return from Japan had lately been enticing me more and more to deconstruct it. In my mind I was sewing marvelous scarves with the large areas of vibrant red-orange shibori and the black shiboried pine trees against the swath of white, the delicate passages of gold seigaiha waves. It was not until I received a spectacular vintage Taisho kimono (from 1912-1925) that I could not ever imagine altering in any way that these scarves became reality and my wall has a magnificent new hanging. I think you can see in the details that the rinzu woven into the silk is an exotic pattern of cranes. I really have neglected this blog for far too long. I promise more words of wisdom–of sorts–for my not quite new year’s resolution. I have been tooling away on my sewing machine hoping that my beautiful Japanese kimono scarves will make a big splash this Christmas season. Etsy tells me I can embed some here in ubaguito.us for the perusal of anyone who visits. And Voila! Another Voila! Teaching Children to Draw is finally out. Here is a picture of the star of the new edition holding the book with her (slightly) younger self on the cover. According to Wikipedia, Music of the spheres or Musica universalis is an ancient philosophical concept that regards proportions in the movements of celestial bodies as a form of music. Considering that my first memory of the telephone was a simple black object with a dial on the bottom and a receiver that hooked onto the body of the phone and music came out of a huge unreliable box called a radio or a phonograph that you wound by hand so that it would play “Rosemarie” or a favorite, “Yes, We Have No Bananas” albeit generally ending in a slow-motion version of itself, I don’t think I have ever been so much in awe of any of the wonderful things that have been developed in my nearly eighty years as I have of Ocarina an app for the iPhone by Smule. The fact that someone could conceive of an app that transforms the iPhone into an Ocarina that can be played as a sophisticated instrument is amazing enough, but the fact that, at any given point in time you can hear someone or several someones on the other side of the globe playing this marvelous instrument simply blows my mind–truly Musica Universalis, the Music of the Spheres. As if I needed further proof of the absolute genius that is iPhone, here are at least two or three more reasons to love it. And, of course, without the WordPress app, I couldn’t have posted this blog. WOW!
Taisho Kimono
Where have you been?
Music of The Spheres
Catching Up
My friend, Marjo, who evidently keeps up with my ramblings from the Netherlands, reminds me that I haven’t added anything new for nearly two months. One reason is that I have been laboriously re-editing our 1980-something book, Teaching Children to Draw, for Davis. They worked with one manuscript which I then checked and reworked, but Brent kept saying there were missing pieces. Since it has been ten years and many computers since Brent submitted the manuscript to them, and he had no idea where the manuscript could be, I finally managed to locate his ‘final’ draft on a remote hard drive in a file that somehow managed to survive. The production process was halted while I tackled this whole other manuscript, and with much painful rewriting and re-editing, I am beginning to see the light at the end…. At one point, I voiced my extreme frustration to the nice folks at Davis who responded the next day with this beautiful orchid. Almost makes it all worth it.About, updated
When we were in Hull in June, we contracted for a week at a new place in September. On Friday we met with our publisher at Davis in Worcester which is on the way. Our new landlady whom I had contacted about the uncertainty of our arrival time on Saturday was concerned about being at the house when we arrived. Because she didn’t have my cellphone number, she sent me an email. The iPhone in my pocket pinged, I read her message, then called her with our eta, all within a few minutes.
Last night her wifi went kaput and Brent couldn’t get his daily dose of news so who do you call? IPhone! The NewYork Times app gave him everything he needed.
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