A quick trip to Asia

No airplanes or ocean liners involved.  Just a dozen-mile drive north on Greenville Avenue takes us to the Tian Tian Supermarket which shares a strip with a bevy of assorted Asian restaurants and little shops.  The statuary alone is worth the trip!  After lunch at the Jeng Chi restaurant (where almost everyone was wielding chopsticks), we headed to the treasure trove of the supermarket. There are unusual fruits and vegetables, fish and meats, as well as freshly prepared foods, and I like to peruse them all.  But what really delights me are the jars and cans and packages with their colorful labels and intriguing ingredients.  Flavors of countries and cultures that have traveled across oceans, ready to take the senses on a exotic journey while we're seated at our Texas table.

Illustration Friday - Yesterday

It ws a day of golden sun, the meadow purple with larkspurs. She sat with her sister on the grass, both young and eager and laughing, summer in their hearts.  And all those long years later she could remember that charmed moment as if it were yesterday.

I was inspired by this lovely, evocative photo which I found on Flickr from Robert & Suzanne Pittenger's album, dating from the 1910s on.  A simpler time, although not a gentler one, despite all the smiling faces in these photographs.  But perhaps a more optimistic time.  And I hope these people were as good and kind as most of them appear to be, that their lives were as full and rich as in these brief glimpses. Thanks to Paul-W for making it available via Creative Commons. I used Topaz Simplify filters on one copy of the image, as I also did on one copy of the background image which is one of my own photos. Nothing too complicated here, just several copies of each image with different blend modes, some masking and some color adjustments, all done in Photoshop, of course.  A pleasure to compose.

Trials and Tribulations

It was way back in November when I began on this seemingly simple jacket, and come February, I was beginning to feel like Sisyphus, rolling his rock eternally up the same hill.  Or perhaps a better allusion would Penelope with her endless weaving that she unraveled every night, because I was certainly doing a whole lot of unstitching.  

HP 1031

So, why so much trouble?  You can read my lengthy account of the problems I encountered with my first HotPatterns pattern on Pattern Review.  Only the fact that I so love this beautiful heathered violet and could not bear to waste it, as well as a determination not to be defeated by what I had begun, kept me plugging on.

I finished the jacket about three weeks ago, and my frustrations and irritations have faded.  I have found it to be a great little jacket to toss on and go.  Sometimes it helps to simply distance yourself from the details, especially if you tend to be a perfectionist.  After all, how closely do you examine a bought garment?   How perfectly does it fit you?  You don't know all of its intimate details as you do with a garment you've made, so you tend to be less critical, at least that's my thought. 

As I said, this is the first HotPatterns pattern I sewn, and I'm not ready to rush out and buy another one, although they certainly seem to be have garnered a following, judging from all the reviews on Pattern Review.  A comment by Sew 4 Fun about how "...Hot Patterns seem to draft for a tall, plus-size woman so when the patterns are graded down to the smaller sizes the proportions aren't always 'right'."  reminded me of a session I attended at a sewing show on independent pattern designs. In it Bobbie Bullard talked about how independent patterns are often created by the designer with herself and her proportions in mind.  Thus you'll find the flowing styles that complement tall, willowy women designed by Linda Lee for The Sewing Workshop.  While The Cutting Line patterns designed by Louise Cutting help to camouflage a thicker torso and improve the shoulder line.  By that criteria, it seems that HotPatterns are made to flatter the generous form of designer Trudy Hanson. While this doesn't mean you should eschew patterns by designers who have a very different body type from your own, I think it should alert you to certain aspects of fit and styling to take into consideration when you sew one.

I'm amazed by all the independent pattern companies that are out there now, such as Collette Patterns, Style Arc and Christine Jonson Patterns, to mention just three.   I've only dabbled a bit in independent patterns: Loes Hines Designs, Silhouettes by Peggy Sagers and The Cutting Line Designs. Usually I find just about anything I want from Vogue, as well as from McCall's and Simplicity, but I have a few interesting independent patterns that I'm hoping to get around to one of these days..

Acting on Impulse

Channeling Cleopatra as she mourns Antony's death

 Admit it, all of you who secretly believe that you could have been an actor (or actress, as I also admit to liking the feminine form of the word).  So perhaps it was that tiny, deep-buried germ that brought me early in February to the Exploring Shakespeare class at the Skillman/Southwestern branch of the Dallas Public Library.  A free class for seniors (alas, c'est moi!) meeting for two hours twice a week. Did I want to invest that much time in something so removed from all my other interests?  Did I need something more to do?  I thought I would just go and check it out; I could always choose not to return. 

Hassan with Sharon and Renita

Well, I had so much fun that first session that I couldn't wait to return.  Hassan El-Amin, the instructor, was enthusiastic, encouraging and amusing as he had us all performing warm up exercises, both vocal and physical, then playing interactive games to get us introduced to each other as we mingled.  Indeed, Hassan, who is a member of the Dallas Theater Center's Brierley Resident Acting Company, was key to making this class a success.  I was constantly impressed not only by his acting expertise but also by his teaching skills and his ability to deal innovatively with some of the impediments that a class of individuals who were both older and mostly total acting neophytes sometimes presented.  We also got to see his professional side performing as the Duke of Kent in the Dallas Theater Center's production of King Lear to which we were all given complimentary tickets. Do check out his website, The Dream.

Clockwise from upper left: Melissa, Peter & Mary, Sam, Gary,
Jeanette, and Gordon

The culmination of the class was to be a performance given at the library at the end of the month.  We each chose monologues or short scenes from Shakespeare's plays.  At the first session that I attended, he suggested Katherine's monologue from the final scene of The Taming of the Shrew, and I volunteered for it since no one else did. Then later, after having read Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff, I also decided to do a monologue from Antony and Cleopatra.  It was so interesting to watch the members of the class begin to learn how to perform the piece each had chosen.  There were those who seemed "good" to me right off the bat, but always Hassan gave suggestions that improved their interpretations.  For others who were more reticent, he continued to coax from them more and more emotion and dramatic flair.


And all the while it continued to be – fun!  For myself who spends the better part of my days in solitary pursuits, working on my various projects, this interaction was very refreshing, an invigorating change of pace, as I'm sure it was for others.  At the end there were fourteen of us in the class (but only thirteen for our grand acting debut, as the flu unfortunately had claimed one member).  Was our performance a success?  I can only relate that there was thunderous applause from the

Curtain call

 audience ...mostly composed of our nearest and dearest, of course.  But believe me, we all took it seriously and tried our utmost, while enjoying it thoroughly.  I certainly did.  We even had a little reception with refreshments afterwards where we all beamed and laughed and congratulated each other.  And, most especially, thanked Hassan. 

There's one more class and even another performance at a large senior living complex here.  And after that...well, some of us, including myself, are considering continuing this brave new endeavor in some fashion.

I should also mention that the class was offered by the Dallas Public Library in cooperation with the Dallas Theater Center, and funded by the MetLife Creative Aging Libraries Project.  Thank you all.

The Class and Cast

        

Illustration Friday - Storm

My February Illustration Friday is a kind of two-fer.  First I created the painting, joining two photos from stock.xchange and using both Photoshop and Topaz filters on several copies.  The ornate frame came from the Frames and Borders group on Flickr. And the lightning is from a set of 40 lightning bolt brushes downloaded from psdbox.com.

Then once you have a painting, well, it should hang in a gallery, shouldn't it?  And, of course,  you need some viewers to appreciate it.  So I collected some individuals from Flickr via Creative Commons and removed them from their backgrounds using a trial version of Topaz ReMask.  I didn't take much time to learn its intricacies, as my goal was to get this finished, so they aren't as good as they could be.  I wanted to create the impression that their hair and garments were being blown by a wind coming out of the painting.  I added a little splash of water also coming out of the painting onto the wall, but I'm not sure if it reads as such.  I used Topaz BuzSim filter on one copy of the group of people to try to unify them.

After spending the better part of two days glued to my computer, I just managed to finish this in time.  It was a bit complicated, but it does resemble the vision I had in my mind's eye.

Illustration Friday - Wings

One goal for 2012 that I succeeded in fulfilling was monthly participation in Illustration Friday. (Yeah!)  And it's my firm intention to continue doing so this year.  Thinking of all the ways a topic can be interpreted and then trying to get an idea, a vision that's interesting and not clichéd as well as interesting to execute really revs up the ole creative apparatus.

Fortunately, there aren't any topic police (and some submissions to IF have a very tenuous connection to the topic), because, as you can see, the "wings" in my illustration here are more or less gratuitous.  Or perhaps merely decorative would be a kinder way to put it.  I labored on a totally different concept for more than a day, finally concluding that it wasn't working and I didn't like it.  This one sort of evolved, starting with the young woman who came out of a vintage photograph from The Graphics Fairy, the best site I've found for vintage graphics and illustrations.  After making a composite of several layers of her, with different filters and blend modes, I started searching Lost and Taken for a textured background.  At this point I was simply involved in the image that was evolving, no longer focusing on "wings," although there were a couple of random butterflies left over from my previous abandoned attempt.  Then the next day I thought of adding a landscape to the background, and after much experimentation with effects, I was pleased with the result.

I couldn't let all that time and effort go to waste, could I?   So I threw in a few more butterflies, with drop shadows, of course. (When in doubt, add drop shadows.)  And, voilà, Wings!

A new year of reading

Yesterday evening as the rain pattered outside, ten of us gathered round one of the long wooden tables at La Madeleine Cafe to discuss the first book of the year, City of Thieves, by David Benioff.  As I mentioned last year when I first introduced the bookgroup, we are a very diverse group of women brought together by a love of reading, and I find we share many values while the diversity ensures piquancy in our discussions.  I look forward every month to our talk of literature and life. 

For anyone who might like to join us (in person or virtually) here is our slate for 2013.  (Our name is slightly misleading; we read not only books by foreign authors, but also about foreign places or cultures. Thus, our next selection, Cleopatra, by American Stacy Schiff  takes us to ancient Egypt and Rome.)