This looks like an old barn to me. Long abandoned, in any case. The weeds have had a good spring, as you can see.
Leaning just a tad
Old Barn
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Author Archives: treshabarger
Terracotta Kylix, Sketch 046
E.T., martini up!
For a long time while I was sketching, I thought this looked like the aliens in Independence Day. When I added the flower, it started to look a bit like an opaque martini glass.
Terracotta Kylix (drinking cup) with flower, ca. 1300–1225 BCE
Sketch 046: Terracotta Kylix (drinking cup) with flower, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the Greek Government, 1927
Knitted Socks
I visited the Texas Quilt Museum recently in La Grange, Texas. A while back I missed their exhibit of butterfly quilts and now I make an effort to go to each exhibit. (They change their exhibits once a quarter.) On one side of the museum is a beautiful garden, Grandmother’s Flower Garden (photos to come in a separate post) and on the other side is The Quilted Skein, a wonderful quilt fabric and yarn shop.
I met Barbara Taylor of Bastrop in The Quilted Skein, as she brought in her in-progress socks for show-and-tell. Look at those fabulous stripes! She said the yarn was dyed that way, and the stripes appeared as she knitted. Those are going to be some lucky feet that get those socks! She was nice enough to let me photograph her work. I told her I was going to post it to my blog and that she would be “almost famous.”
Knitted sock by Barbara Taylor of Bastrop
A peek into the top
My knitting skills are limited to scarves: I cast on 13 stitches, knit until I think the scarf is long enough and bind off. Usually I bind off a different number of stitches that I started with, sometimes 11, 12, or 14. I mentioned this to the women at The Quilted Skein and they said they have some beginner knitting classes coming up. Hmmm, maybe I can learn to count and knit?
And now, a confession. La Grange: I’ve always heard (and pronounced) “Grange” with a long a (ā). One day I was roaming around my French dictionary and found “la grange,” as in “the barn.” Even though I studied French (a long time ago), it still never occurred to me that La Grange was anything other than “lagrānge,” the name of a Texas city. It’s good to learn something new every day, but a little surprising to learn something now that I should have learned a long time ago.
Monday Up Close
Straw, Sketch 045
Straw decoration sketch
This sketch was surprisingly hard; another one where I just finally stopped erasing, deciding to leave it alone. I fall into the category of “chicken scratch” sketchers. I put down short, quick strokes, lots and lots of them. If I don’t like the first few dozen, I press a little harder and make them darker, as if that’s the problem. Well, that’s one of the problems, but not the problem. While I’m sketching with my right hand, I’m kneading the eraser in my left hand, getting it ready.
Straw, 1230-1250, German, silver
What fascinates me about this straw is the time frame: 1230-1250. There are a gazillion things in the world that I never took any time to consider, and straws being invented around 3,000 BCE is one of them. If anyone had asked me as to when straws originated, I would have guessed in the 20th century, after plastic was invented. Straws have always been plastic, right? I was wrong, wrong, wrong, about 5,000 years wrong.
Sketch 045: Straw, Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection, 1947
Black & White: Photography
Remember when — way back when — we used black-and-white film to take black-and-white photos? I found this box of film just last week, when I opened a desk drawer to look for staples. If I have a camera that can use this film, I sure don’t know where it is. And it’s not in the desk drawer; I checked.
Film, but no camera
Cee’s Black & White Photo Challenge: Photography-related items
