Unexpected Interesting Day

It's been a typical week for me, stupid busy. Yesterday was Cooking Day for Kate's social group. They meet in the basement of a big old church. There is an old graveyard next to the church that I have been wanting to explore. Yesterday, in the two minutes I have before arriving home from work and jumping back in the car, I grabbed some muslin, some pastel chalk, some charcoal and a fat lead pencil. I decided to try to do grave rubbings on fabric.

Results were mixed. First of all I am uncomfortable doing that kind of thing. I don't really want anyone to see me. They might say something like, "Excuse me, what the hell are you doing?" and I will have to tell them and then I will have to endure whatever reaction they might bestow upon me. Yes, yes, I'm weird. I know.

I suppose you have to do things wrong to learn how to do them right. Next time I will get someone to come with me to stretch the fabric around the stones. I tried taping the fabric, but it was a joke. Try taping fabric to crusty, lichen-covered stone, you'll see. I discovered that charcoal is useless, and pastels are only a little better. All of the rubbings you see were done with the fat lead pencil. I discovered that the stones I most wanted to rub were too rough. I got the best results from granite stones, but they tended to be newer and were less likely to have a poem or quote on them. (I'm particularly interested in that.) I did get a half-decent rubbing of a small tombstone. I'm not even sure what I am doing with all this, I think really I just wasted some cheap muslin. We'll see.

One other thing about my cemetary tour, I came across a rather worn American Flag in a bush. It is tattered in a way I would dare not do myself. I want to use it in a quilt, and I don't think it would be considered disrespectful. I will consult my son, who is an ex-Marine. He is in charge of the flag we hang from our porch. He is very serious about flag etiquette. Did you know I have a son? I talk so much about Kate. I will tell you about him sometime.

OK, final cool thing that happened yesterday. When I was finished with my cemetary exploits, I went in to the church to wait, and it was all set up for a rummage sale the next day!!! I love rummage sales. Pretty much everything in the sale is .50 or .25; that's my kind of price. I scored some cool lace, wine glasses, a tiny twig chair, excellent old utensils, a ceramic butter dish, and an old Cha-Cha album that looks like it was never played. The cover graphics alone were brilliant. Kate copped 2 expired calendars with pictures of old European advertising posters.

Thursday was a way better day than I ever expected!

What Day is It?

LAMBS!

Three in a row

I'm real busy, what can I tell you? It's definitely cutting into my posting time. I used to squeeze in some blog prep in the morning before I left for work. I'd write the post and e-mail myself the pictures (They upload much easier at work) Recently I decided it was in my best interest to begin exercising in the mornings again, now that the weather is less obnoxious. This morning it was in the 20s, so I decided to not walk just this one day. So, I am posting.

I got over to the cemetary in Clinton finally on Sunday and found myself some excellent lamb tombstones. I also took the time to observe and record a situation that I find in nearly every old cemetary I see. That is the presence of similar gravestones, as if it became all the rage to use a certain type when a loved one passed on. The trend in this cemetary was markers that look like beds. I think I'm going over in a month or so and plant some flowers in those lamb beds. They are all from one family and none of those kids made it to 5 years old.

I was fooling around in Photoshop and isolated just a lamb image and printed it onto fabric for my quilt. I had been making my own printing sheets using unbleached muslin with crack-n-peel sticker paper adhered to the back. At first it seemed like a miracle just to have an image on fabric, but really it doesn't come out very clear, and I was treating the fabric with bubble jet set, so it was time consuming. I splurged on some fabric printing sheets. I was trying to avoid the expense, but the results is much better. So now I've got me a nice lamb plus I printed a larger lamb to use for some future project.