Fantasy with Anole

 “Wild: Perspectives in Fiber” was the theme of the 2024 Dallas Area Fiber Artists annual show which was exhibited from July 1 to August 10 at the C.C. Young senior living community where our meetings are held. I reworked an image I had created many years ago for Illustration Friday, consisting of a photo taken in my yard of a Fatsia japonica plant with a background of ferns, plus a photo of a Texas native green anole. 

 

After a lot of experimentation in Photoshop, I sent the image off to Spoonflower, as I had last year, and had it printed on cotton/linen canvas. Once again, I have to rave about how beautifully all the subtle color and texture of the image is reproduced. I then embroidered the outlines and veins of the leaves with several colors of embroidery floss, using mainly stem stitch and back stitch. I also outlined the anole and gave him a gold bead eye. Mr C made the fame, and I painted it with the same metallic green paint as last year. 

I didn't really break any new ground creativity-wise here, being, for one thing, pressed for time. But I enjoyed making it, and I was glad I participated in the show. Next year I'm promising myself to do something totally different. Well, we'll see...

Still reading

And still here. How can it be that an entire year has passed since my last blog post? Is time actually speeding up? It certainly seems so, since I can't believe that I am slowing down. At any rate, I have not abandoned this blog, which, according to Blogger stats, still attracts some readers, although I admit that I write it primarily for myself. The fact that it's “published” also motivates me to continue.

 As I have been doing since the first year of this blog, twelve years ago, I'm sharing the books that the members of my long-time Foreign Authors Bookgroup have chosen for the year. The group goes back much farther than that, and there have been some departures as well as newcomers. We have changed from evening to an afternoon meeting time as most of us are no longer constrained by a work schedule. But our criteria remains the same: fiction and non-fiction by foreign authors or about foreign lands and cultures. 

This year we have more non-fiction than usual. Our August book is one which I am reading for the second time. No prior interest in hieroglyphs is necessary to enjoy The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode The Rosetta Stone by Edward Dolnick. It is a thoroughly entertaining book. As the author says “...the saga of the Rosetta Stone is as far as could be from a narrow tale of arcane scholarship in musty libraries.” There are “...stories of archaeological swashbucklers tumbling through ancient tombs; peeks at the first-ever attempts to set down words in writing; excursions into big subjects like the struggle against death and forgetting – and it would be a mistake to forgo those adventures in favor of sticking to hieroglyphs alone.” The wealth of content in the book is presented in such a lively style to make it a real page-turner. I'm looking forward to the bookgroup's discussion next Tuesday.