Summer Continues Apace
It’s nearing the middle of July, somehow! Summer is zipping by this year, and I have mixed feelings on the matter. On one hand, the faster the hot weather goes and is replaced with something cooler, the better, as far as I’m concerned. But on the other hand, it’s still a little alarming sometimes how quickly the time passes.
This month in particular I feel a little overwhelmed with how much I still have left to finish before turning the page on the calendar. I generally try to front-load my months, if possible, so that there’s free time at the end (and less worry that I’ll run out of time for something). This July, it’s feeling reversed, with too little accomplished early in the month and a lot still left to do as we approach the mid-point. We’ll get there in the end, but it may be a little more hectic than I’d like, at times.
Part of the reason things feel like they’ll be busy later in the month is that July got off to a slow start due to the holiday weekend and taking some time off for that. It was worth it, though, of course. We went to Mom and Dad’s house for Independence Day this year—had burgers and hot dogs and chocolate pie and more—and got to visit for a while. Afterwards some of us marked the country’s 250th anniversary of independence by going to the local fireworks display. I haven’t gone to that in years and years, but it felt good to do it this year.
I mostly just enjoyed them “in the moment”, but I did snap a few photos toward the end, to remember it by. The photos didn’t turn out that well, but here are a couple, anyway:
Random Photo of the Frodog
Board Game Pix
Kimberly had taken some time off this week, so yesterday we also took the afternoon off so we could meet up and play a board game.
This is one of hers—Horrified: Universal Monsters—and it was everyone’s first time playing it. It’s a cooperative game (meaning that everyone playing is working together toward a common goal rather than competing against one another). It came down to the very last possible move, but we defeated both Dracula and the Creature from the Black Lagoon! (Phew, it was close!)
It was fun! We ought to get together and play games more often, really.
More Handbag Doodles
Last time, I had doodled a page of purses/bags and gone back over it with watercolor. The next thing I did was reverse the process—paint the shapes, then add the lines on top.
I do this fairly often—try the same type of subject twice starting from different directions just to see what difference it makes. I like both approaches. Some subjects seem to work better one way or the other.
Anyway, here’s what I ended up with:
I think I liked my first try better, but that may have less to do with the order of materials (paint before ink) than with the fact that I’d already started to get a little bored with drawing bags (and was running out of ideas). Still, I had fun with this topic and wouldn’t mind returning to it another time.
Face Doodles
I felt like doodling pages of faces again, so I started out the way I usually do: Choose a single color per page. Mix up a big puddle to last the whole page. Alternate hair and face shapes. Allow to dry, then go back with a pen to add the details.
For the first page, I used purple. After the first face, I watered it down a bit to make the faces, because I was worried the ink details wouldn’t have enough contrast with the full-strength purple.
After adding ink details, I wanted to try something slightly different, so I found an acrylic marker in a similar shade of purple and added a few touches here and there. I also wanted to add a bit more of the purple watercolor to tint lips and ears, etc. that I’d added with the pen. The only problem was that I ran out of the original puddle, so I had to mix a bit more, and the color isn’t exactly the same. That’s fine, of course, and if it mattered, you could mix more precisely (or just start with a bigger puddle of paint to be sure of having enough).
For my second page, I chose a bold red-orange—and again I took some of the orange and diluted it to make a softer color for the face blobs.
This time, I took a photo immediately after doodling the details but before adding any more watercolor:
And then I took another after adding a little more watercolor:
I wouldn’t want to do only face doodles, but they can be fun to play around with, from time to time.
Beachy Doodles
I saw an ad for a line of quilting cotton with a beach theme, and that inspired me to make a page of beachy doodles. I started out with some sand castles, seashells, and sand toys, then branched out to include a variety of other things. Maybe pizza and hot dogs feel odd here, but they’re the kind of finger-foods that are easy enjoy at the beach.
This isn’t one of my favorite doodles—at least partly because I don’t adore the color palette, honestly (a bit too primary for my tastes)—but it was still kind of fun to do. It’s nice to try some new (to me) subjects and just see what you come up with.
Cake Doodles
I wanted to use some quinacridone coral watercolor and try mixing it a bit, and it felt like a natural fit with another idea I’d had—lots of cakes and cake stands.
In the end, I only mixed a few colors for this page (and one of those was just the color itself, diluted). I didn’t want too much chaos after the beach doodle color scheme. The pretty purple is what I got from mixing quinacridone coral with cobalt teal blue (one of my favorites for mixing). I love how that turned out! Actually, the slightly darker pink is also those two mixed in a different ratio.
(I guess if I want to do color mixing, I need to just focus on the mixing. Maybe blobs and then doodle on them later with less of a set subject in mind from the start.)
I painted first, then doodled on top with the ‘Smoky Mauve’ Diamine Forever Ink in a fude nib pen. Not much to it, but fun!
Hydrangea Doodles
I think I just wanted to use up some paint from my palette when I started this one… I didn’t have much of a plan. I painted three circles with pink and purple, added some green leafy-shaped blobs around them, then roughly added the background with a greyed-down greenish mix.
After it dried, I used the same ink and pen as mentioned above to add the details. Not going for realism (when do I ever?) but just a simple and playful illustration-style doodle…
I was mostly happy with this, but then I made the mistake of taking it a step too far. I added some light circles in a couple of places and instantly regretted it. I thought I’d used a white gel pen to cover them and tone them down, but I didn’t care for that, so I tried covering more completely with some white color pencil, then some white ink and white paint pen. I guess it helped, but I still wish I’d just left it alone. Oh well!
I also added white dots to the hydrangea blooms. For that, the gel pen worked perfectly.
Mixed Media Crazy Leaves
This next thing started when I watched this video on YouTube. I thought it looked like something fun I could do while watching a TV show. I started with watercolor pencil on some paper that’s thicker than printer paper but not full watercolor paper (though that could work, too). I believe I used sulphite paper. It can’t handle tons of water, but it’s okay with a little.
Anyway, I started by just adding blobs or thick stripes of color to the page using watercolor pencil, followed by a little water to activate the pencil marks… and maybe some watercolor, too, in some cases. Just anything you like to create a base layer.
After it dried, I cut out some simplified leaf shapes, then I went back over them with acrylic markers to add my details. I don’t know what I’m going to do with these, but it was fun to make them.
I thought it would be fun to do the same thing, but to make feather shapes instead of leaves. This time, I took a couple of process photos as I went.
Here, I just used watercolor for the base layer, but I tried to create more texture in some of them.
After that dried, I drew rough shapes for guides when cutting. I didn’t bother with this when I was making leaves, but I thought I might need the help for feathers. I was careful to cut inside the lines to leave the pencil on the background.
I did go ahead and cut out the “feathers”, but that’s where I left it. I’ll probably pick it back up sometime, but I’m not feeling as excited about this any more, so it may be a while.
DIY Ephemera Sketchbooks
For some reason, I watched a video about making your own watercolor sketchbooks, which lead to me watching several videos about simple sketchbook bookbinding, including some about using all sorts of paper. Those looked like a good place to start, because you can use anything at all and not worry about ruining “nice” paper with your amateur efforts. I drew from a variety of videos on YouTube. This one inspired me to get started, though I didn’t use the stapler method demonstrated. Instead, I sewed my booklets together.
Here are my first three attempts:
I think the most enjoyable part of the process is probably gathering your pages. I’ve been amassing a collection of old books and interesting papers for gel printing, and it was fun to look through them and choose a good variety. I added pages from old books/dictionaries, gel prints I made myself, tracing paper, decorative papers, a blank greeting card, sheet music, a word search, math textbook pages, ruled notebook paper, graph paper, coloring book pages, pattern book pages, decorative note paper (intended for correspondence), and more. For many of the papers, I added a deckled edge with some deckling rulers I own.
For covers, I went through a stack of lesser-loved watercolor and mixed media paintings. I found a few abstract pages that would work. (I may still add more things to some of them, too, when I start actually using the booklets.) You could also make something especially for the cover or add a blank piece of watercolor paper or cardstock and add the decorations after constructing the book.
Some of these papers are very thin and won’t hold up well to water at all, so I’m not sure what I’ll do with them, but even if I never touch them again, I had fun making them and learned about the process of binding a simple booklet—and as I only used things I already had, it was an incredibly cheap activity. This would be great to do with kids, though you might want to have an adult to handle punching the holes in the papers. That part can be challenging and slightly dangerous for younger children to do themselves. (It’s not too easy for even adults, if you don’t have the right tool!)
I definitely see myself making more booklets, at some point in the future.
Flipping Through Vintage Pattern Booklets
When I was gathering papers for my booklets, one of my sources was some vintage pattern booklets/magazines I’ve been given over the years. I don’t really want to use the patterns, but the booklets themselves are fun to look through. I love seeing the old ads, the retro font choices, the photos accompanying the patterns—the prices. It’s just a fun thing to flip through, so I decided to snap a few photos as I went through a couple of the booklets/magazines, to share here.
The first one is The Workbasket and Home Arts Magazine from August 1984. I would have been five years old when this was published, just getting ready to start Kindergarten, I think… Life was good that year!
This next page has an ad for Tupperware, including something called Tuppertoys, which I have no recollection of at all. However, when I searched for them, I found a “Shape-O Sorter Toy” that we definitely had. I never knew it was made by Tupperware! (Maybe there were multiple makers of that type of toy.)
It’s kind of funny that this ad is squarely aimed at empty-nesters with grandchildren. I guess many of the magazine’s subscribers would have been “women of a certain age”, but I’d have thought that there would also be a lot who were young enough to have small kids of their own at home—and don’t people of all ages use food storage?
Then we get this ad appealing to jolly grandfathers with a bumper crop of grandkids to cart around the back forty.
I had never heard of a “pregnant onion” before! I did know about “bluebirds of happiness”, though. I have something similar, but mine is a single bird, and it’s clear glass. (I think it was Granny L.’s originally? I’m not sure…)
The layout choices here feel funny to me. “Great… A Depression Cookbook.”
Also, while I appreciate that the Great Depression would have been full of memories good, bad, and bittersweet for the people who lived through it, it just sounds a bit amusing on the surface to sit and reminisce over memories of something called a depression. (Maybe that’s just me!)
“Fall Flattery”…
I do sometimes wish I had the ability and confidence to sew some of my own clothes, but these days buying fabric costs more than it’s worth unless you really enjoy the process and/or want something specific that you can’t just buy ready-made. I don’t think I’m going to bother, at the moment! It would be cool to be able to sew your own clothes, though.
This ad reminds me that I actually have the “ingenious little gadget” that you need to make something like this, but I never got around to trying it. I ought to try that sometime… It’s probably fun once you get the hang of it, but I don’t think I’d make a whole afghan of them. Maybe a scarf or cushion cover…
That extravagant wicker chair the model’s sitting in is gorgeously retro, though I don’t think I’d have a place for it in my house.
“Pretty Posies Bath Set”.
Can you imagine going into someone’s bathroom these days and seeing that they’d put a crocheted cozy on not only the toilet seat lid, but also the toilet cistern? And…what in the world is the point of a “bar soap cover”? I guess it’s the type that you’re supposed to leave on while you use the soap? (I think they’re meant to make it last longer.) Otherwise, it’s just a blankie to cover your bar soap between uses.
All this bathroom “soft furnishing” stuff is one part of the past that can stay in the past, as far as I’m concerned.
“Crochet Our Most Becoming Pullover”
Just look at the pride on the model’s face. She knows she’s been granted the honor of modeling the most becoming pullover this esteemed publication has ever come across. Word is bound to spread, and business will come rolling in. It’s not every day you’re selected to model a pullover that has a look of casual elegance (while holding what looks like an artificial flower). She has achieved The Pinnacle of Success in Crochet Modeling.
Just a couple of pages over, we find… “Sweet Violet Knit Top”.
…Is it just me, or does the model look like she knows she’s been snubbed?
Why did Alicia get the “Most Becoming Pullover” gig while she was left modeling this garbage “Sweet Violet Knit Top”? Wasn’t she good enough—becoming enough? “Sweet”, her @$*! She’d show them! The next time they saw her, she’d be on the cover of Vogue Knitting!
This next one may have come from a different booklet. Either way, what was it with clowns and kids, back then?! Did kids actually like clowns or did adults just think clowns were something kids ought to like? I don’t remember ever feeling anything other than awkwardness around clowns. They’re embarrassing at best—and creepy at worst.
Anyway, I guess there were instructions for making this creepy-ish clown decor for the cherished child in your life.
The second magazine I looked at is Women’s Circle Crochet from Fall 1983. “Everything to Warm a Crocheter’s Heart” for only $1.50! (Apparently that’s a bit over $5 in today’s money.)
“A Maze to Amaze”
This thing won first prize, so it probably has/had some merit, but I have to admit that when I look at it, all I see is a crocheted version of an old-fashioned hand-held computer game. Not a Gameboy. Maybe a Tameboy or Lameboy?
A crochet-themed cartoon panel?
(And yes, I’ve been there before!)
Next up, a feather duster witch pattern written by a crochet designer so famous she went by her first name only. ;o) Either that or she didn’t want to be associated with the concept of a feather duster witch. Rev. Daniels would be shocked if he knew that his staid church organist spent Saturday evenings designing occult-adjacent decor items.
Ick, another clown!
With the long arms and legs, this makes me think of the one that tried to kill the kid in Poltergeist.
The all-caps title doesn’t make it seem any friendlier. CLOWN DOLL.
Maybe it’s not just clowns I dislike, because these dolls… Especially the boy… ~shudder~
It was a different time. A time when middle-aged ladies liked to decorate their homes with ugly plastic baby dolls dressed in chunky worsted-weight crochet clothing.
He’s clearly a ring-bearer, which I suppose means that she’s a flower girl. Aren’t they just adorable?
Where would you put them in your home (if you had to)? And no, you can’t stow them away in the closet, basement, or garage, never to see the light of day again. Bathroom? Guestroom? Kid’s Bedroom? (“No, Jenny, they aren’t scary! Why would you think that? Just because the little boy has the glint of madness in his squinty left eye?)
“Christmas Crochet for your Bathroom”. Yes, I need every square inch of my home decorated with seasonally appropriate crochet.
Okay, the gingerbread tissue dispenser is kind of cute, but how does that towel ring thing even work? Seems messy to change it out for the seasons.
Humpty-Dumpty-style Santa toilet paper cover? No thanks.
The Christmas Tree is okay, I guess, but I’m not making one.
And that does it for this time!
