Author Archives: Samantha

Acanthus Scrolls, Florentine Papers, and Decorated Tuckboxes

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For the past couple of weeks, I have been fascinated by acanthus scroll designs. It started when I received some address labels that reminded me of the scroll-like design on a box of fancy stationery. I pulled the box out and started trying to imitate the design, without much success.

Box of stationery covered with Florentine paper with leafy scrollwork
Stationery box with Florentine paper cover
There is a tangle pattern (ZentangleTM) called “Icanthis”. It gets its name from the acanthus leaf, which shows up in stylized form all over the place. The design on the stationery box was a kind of leaf-like scroll, but not very much like the Icanthis tangle. So I turned to the internet. “Acanthus leaf”, “foliage scrolls”, “acanthus scroll”, and so on. There were all sorts of interesting images.
One thing I found out is that the paper I so admired is probably made by Rossi, a company in Florence, Italy. Such beautiful designs and colors! And of course, there are the accents in powdered gold—I think I may have said before that I like shiny things?
I also found tutorials on making two somewhat different types of acanthus scroll. One is a webpage on “Acanthus Drawing” by “Maitresse Yvianne”. I had a lot of fun trying out the design. I made a card and a tuckbox (photos below), but I didn’t add the turned-up leaf tips. I’ll have to try that another time. The other was a post in a blog called “The Calligraphy Pen”. This style makes a nice border.
While working on these, I drew acanthus scroll type designs all over the place, trying to find the ones I liked best.
Sheets of paper with sketches of acanthus scroll patterns
Acanthus scroll sketches
Eventually I decided to make some samples from the Yvianne tutorial, in part because it is a little easier. If you skip the turned-over leaf tips, you don’t even need pencil guidelines (though I used guidelines to get nice curves on the scroll.)
Pencil guidelines on card
Pencil guidelines
Acanthus scrolls inked over pencil guidelines on card
Drawn in ink
Acanthus scrolls on card colored with colored pencil
Colored with colored pencil
I didn’t really like the way the pencil coloring turned out. Maybe I should have used different colors, or just colored it more simply. So I decided to use watercolor for the next one and make a tuckbox (see Make Your Own Tuckbox).
Tuckbox paper pattern with pencil guidelines
Pencil guidelines on cut-out tuckbox
Tuckbox paper pattern with acanthus scrolls
Drawn in ink
Tuckbox paper pattern with acanthus scrolls and watercolor
Colored with watercolor.
Tuckbox with acanthus scroll design
The finished tuckbox.
Maybe I will use a gold gel pen on the next one and add some dots or squiggles. I like this design, but I left a lot of empty space. I think this style of scroll would look nice at the top of a letter, or maybe on a nameplate, but to turn it into decorative paper would require adding a lot of extra loops and flowers and details.
Of course, that could be fun, too.
Till next post.

"For Instant Human, Add Coffee"–are we really that tired?

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So, I’m looking at a paper napkin in a popular coffee shop and it has a picture of a mobile phone that says “Download the mobile app” and the words “Because at 7 a.m. you can barely tie your shoes, let alone count money.” I laugh at image it conjures up.
Wait, what?
Caribou Coffee paper napkin with joke about lack of sleep
Do we really live in a world where lack of sleep is so pervasive, so ordinary, that the thought of people trying foggily to count their change makes us laugh? If I were thinking straight, I would take this as a compelling reason never to drive anywhere near a coffee shop before 10 a.m., lest I run into these people (literally).
But of course, I’m not thinking straight. I’m here for the caffeine, too, albeit in the form of tea. And I already knew that we lived in this world—jokes about coffee and cranky grown-ups abound. You can find them on t-shirts, magnets, and, of course, coffee mugs.
How in the world did this become normal?
There are some people who are painfully aware of how precious sleep is—people with insomnia, or chronic pain, or perhaps a new baby. No doubt they would trade all the coffee in the world for a good night’s sleep. There are other people who can’t keep their eyes open past nine p.m. and who awaken in the morning… well, who awaken. As opposed to crawling out of bed still half-asleep. They probably wonder what the big deal is with morning coffee.
Back to the question—how did being tired become normal for so many people?
Electric lighting surely helped. It’s a lot easier to stay awake if you have bright lighting. (I was going to bring up slide shows and people falling asleep in the darkness, but does anyone do slide shows any more? I think Powerpoint “slides” might be a lot brighter than typical photo slides.)
Not only is it easier to stay awake, there’s a lot more you can do. You can easily read, play cards, make model planes, etc. That’s before we bring in television, then videos, then computer games and Netflix. Now you can be highly entertained twenty-four hours a day. If you do fall asleep, it won’t be from boredom.
Or you could work, if your work involves using computers, answering email, reading professional journals, or anything that doesn’t require you to be on site. You could try to catch up on the endless list of tasks.
Going to bed is boring. Reading or watching a movie is fun. Going to bed means putting yourself that much closer to having to get up again and go to work.Staying up playing a computer game squeezes in a couple of hours more enjoyment before the whole work cycle starts again. No one wants to let go of those precious evening hours.
The consequences are many and varied and have been written about at length (so I’ll be brief). Impaired driving. A tendency to road rage. Short tempers with family members and friends. Accidents, both major and minor. Foggy thinking, and all that follows.
I can tell I’m really tired when I hit myself opening cabinet doors and start dropping things. I snap at whoever is around. I am not a happy camper. Admittedly, I may deal with fatigue worse than some people, but the sneaky thing about being overtired is you can’t always tell how much you are affected, because your judgment is affected as well.
The point I’d like to make here is that this is not merely a health problem, or an inconvenience, but a moral problem as well. Even if you don’t endanger anyone by driving when tired, if lack of sleep leads you to bicker, yell, or fail to pay attention to your family when you should, then it is contributing to your behaving badly.
I have no solution to offer. Saying “Well, just put down the phone/turn off the TV/close the book and get to bed earlier” is like saying “Eat less sugar and starch, exercise at least a half hour daily, and drink enough water.” It’s true, but it doesn’t help us do it. By now, most people who aren’t getting enough sleep are probably well aware of the problem. We have reasons to change, but no urgency. Next week is soon enough for an attempt to change our bedtime. Or next month… And it’s hard to make any change that feels like a sacrifice (“But I don’t wanna go to bed yet!”)
Maybe the right routines would help. I know, for instance, that I shouldn’t start reading a new book after dinner, unless it is very short. It’s easier to avoid starting a book than it is to put the book down when I’m halfway through. Still, sometimes I just want to read.
Maybe we need some collective agreement, some kind of peer pressure? I don’t know. But the problem doesn’t seem to be going away.
Till next post.

Good Children's Books–good for grown-up or child?

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This week I was thinking a lot about picture books and early reader books and what makes some of them better than others. Then I asked myself, better for whom? The grown-up or the child? Is there a difference?
There seems to be. Some of the books my daughter liked and wanted read repeatedly were not books that I liked or would have chosen myself. For instance, some of the books she enjoyed were DK board books—basically, pages of thematically related photos with captions. She had a Halloween book, a book about colors, and I just found the Baby Faces book she adored. These books were incredibly boring to read aloud. There are only so many times that I can point to pictures of spider cupcakes or pink balloons and find something to say about them. “Those would be fun at a party.” But she clearly enjoyed the books.
More interesting to me as a grown-up (though still somewhat difficult to read aloud) was Children Just Like Me. I liked looking at the children from different countries, reading the central text about them, and then examining photos of their favorite meals, toys, drawings, and so forth. Reading this book aloud still involved a lot of pointing at photos, reading the caption, and commenting, but at least it was something more interesting (to me) than spider cupcakes or pink balloons.
On the other hand, there were books that I really enjoyed but which which probably had less appeal for my daughter. In particular, there was a book called Five Minutes’ Peace by Jill Murphy, which was about a mother (elephant) who just wants five minutes to herself away from her rambunctious and demanding children. It was funny and it rang so true for me as an adult, but I always wondered what my daughter was getting from it. After all, she was a child and the mother in the story, patient though she was, really wanted time away from her kids. Did she think it was funny because parents do say things like that? Or funny because of the way the kids hopped in the bathtub with her and made waves and splashed and were naughty children? (Naughty children are the most entertaining kind.)
I also really enjoyed the Commander Toad books by Jane Yolen, but these are most entertaining if you are old enough to appreciate the puns and have enough familiarity with Star Trek and Star Wars to catch the references. Since they are early reader-type books, it seems likely that the grown-up doing the reading is going to get more of the humor than the child being read to. Still, the books have enough adventure and uncomplicated humor to be fun for the child as well, and it’s good to be dipped into wordplay early on.
Probably most of the really good books appeal equally to children and adults. I really liked Bread and Jam for Frances as a child—Frances’ rhymes are fun, and I could understand the situation of someone really, really liking a food more than anything else until suddenly they don’t. I can’t say the book inspired me to “practice with a string bean”, but I did love to hear the detailed description of  Albert’s lunch and later, Frances’s lunch. I still like this book, and for the same reasons.
I don’t remember how I felt about Frog and Toad as a child, but I love them now. The situations are mostly universal ones: not wanting to get out of bed, being reluctant to try something new, wanting more cookies than is good for one, running into unexpected problems with a task, and getting all upset about something that turns out to be silly. The characters are clearly defined. Toad is the one who worries, who is reluctant, who is sometimes quite silly, but who, it must be said, retreats with dignity when his pride is offended. Frog is easy-going and a loyal friend. He never gets mad at Toad, even when Toad is being especially silly or stubborn.
The conflicts in the stories are clear, too. Frog wants Toad to share spring with him, but Toad wants to sleep. Frog and Toad both decide to make a nice surprise for the other, but the weather foils them. Frog sends Toad a letter to make him happy, but the snail takes too long to get it there. Toad prepares to rescue Frog from imagined dangers, only to find Frog safe and sound.
And then there’s The Cat In the Hat. It has beautifully smooth rhyming, a frantic fish who is worried about the children’s mother coming home, and a mischievous cat who likes to play games—games that are dangerous in the “you’re going to break something!” kind of way, not the “someone’s going to get hurt!” kind of way.
My daughter enjoyed The Cat In the Hat, but did she like it as much as I do now? I don’t know. I do remember that she enjoyed it. Maybe part of the reason I like these books so much now is that I have gotten pickier about books over the years, so the ones that still read well (to my grown-up self) stand out as especially good.
Fortunately, we had plenty of opportunities to read aloud when she was young, so we were able to try a lot of different books, some better for her, some better for me. (Thank you, public library!!) And it’s possible that the occasional reading of Five Minutes’ Peace gave me the patience for yet another reading of the Halloween book.