Tag Archives: Art and Crafts

Reflecting On Reflections–the stories inside the shine

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I love things that shine, sparkle, or shimmer, just because they are beautiful. I also love anything that holds secrets or points beyond itself. Some things, in reflecting light, do both.
Recently I was fascinated by the way people incorporate drawings of cabochon-cut gems into Zentangle-inspired art. Cabochons are rounded and polished, not faceted, like smooth blobs of glass. In looking at demos of how to draw them, I was puzzled by the white highlight. Should the white spot be round, or a long bar? Where should it be placed? I looked at photos of cabochon-cut gems, using Google images (so useful for things like this!), trying to figure out how the bright spot works. In the photos, I saw reflections in the gems of… their light source.
Purple cabochon gem with reflected window.
Gem reflects window and potted plant.
Duh!
Some bright spots were shaped like windows, some like bars of overhead fluorescents, while others were merely a round bright spot (an incandescent bulb? the sun?). And sometimes there were multiple bright spots, because there were multiple sources of light.
But it wasn’t just the light source that I saw reflected in the gems. Was that the camera apparatus making the dark square shape? And the shop where this other photo was taken must have a whole bank of windows. In one gem, I even saw the silhouette of person sitting nearby.
Purple cabochon brooch with reflected trees.
Outdoors, you can vaguely see the trees as well as sky.
In each case, all I was looking at was a photo of a single gem, but the reflections told me more.
This shouldn’t have been news–we have mirrors in our cars precisely to give us information about things out of our line of sight. Reflections sometimes play a role in stories, too. I remember an Ellery Queen mystery (the TV series) where the lack of a reflection, where one was expected, revealed something important. And in Bladerunner, a reflection in a photo gives the detective a clue (at least, I think it was a reflection—it wasn’t entirely clear in the movie). A painting that includes something shiny, such as a silver teapot, might make a good clue in a mystery novel– the distorted reflection of a face could reveal that a third person had been present at the sitting and perhaps even who it was (by their distinctive hat, say).
Silver teapot with reflection of kitchen including two jars of peanut butter.
What kind of peanut butter do we buy? Two jars worth.
Reflections also show up in mysteries because of the misleading way they reverse the appearance of what they show. Someone who sees something in a mirror sees it reversed—information, and yet misinformation.
For the most part, shiny things are appealing because of the way that they play with the light, not because of what their reflections tell us. In fact, paying too much attention to the reflections in gems rather takes away from their immediate appeal. But I like knowing that if I want, I can see more than just the gem. I can see the world around it.

Till next post.

Purple cabochon brooch with reflection of two fingers.

The Reusable Fabric Grocery Bag—a quest to make the perfect bag

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I know I should bring my own reusable grocery bags instead of accumulating endless plastic ones. While some of the plastic bags have a second life as receptacles for kitty litter or as lining for small wastebaskets, the majority get one use and then it’s off to the plastic bag recycle bin.
I have some reusable grocery bags already. Sometimes they are even in my car when I go shopping. I think there are two reasons I tend not to use them. 
The first is that I forget to hand them over to the cashier before she or he starts bagging—and then it seems to be too late. Once I handed the bag over late, thinking that, well, the next bag’s worth of groceries could go in it, and the cashier actually took the groceries OUT of the plastic bag and put them in my bag. I totally did not intend that, but couldn’t seem to stop her in time. So the plastic bag had already been used AND she’d bagged those groceries twice. What a waste.
The other reason is that it seems so inconvenient for bagging. Plastic bags come with those metal racks to hold them open, and paper bags stand up by themselves, making bagging easy (or at least easier.) Reusable bags seem to come in two kinds—stiff and not terribly washable, or washable but floppy. I want a bag I can wash every now and again, but I hate handing the cashier a floppy bag because I feel like I’m creating extra work.
(Note: with the trend toward increasing self-service, at airports, banks, and now grocery stores, perhaps we will soon be bagging all our own groceries. They already do that in some other countries. I can’t say I’m enthusiastic at the prospect. And while it might cut down on carpal tunnel in cashiers, it seems more likely that it would just cut down on the number of cashiers, and so the number of cashier jobs available.)
So, regardless of who actually does the bagging, here are my criteria for the ideal reusable fabric grocery bag:
1.      Washable.
2.      Stiff enough to stand open.
3.      Folds when not in use. (Otherwise, baskets might work.)
I imagine my ideal bag resembling a paper bag—wide, flat-bottomed, short-handled. Actually, the length of the handles depends on whether you are just carrying bags in and out of your car, or having to take them on the bus. Short handles are ideal if you are carrying a bag in each hand, but no use if you want to sling the bag over your shoulder. But a shoulder bag can’t be filled quite as full, I think. Since I usually grocery-shop by car, I want short handles.
Bonus points: Can be made with materials I already have.
One way to make a bag stiff is to use stiff material. For Grocery Bag Version 1, I made the exterior from some leftover canvas (or maybe it was heavy muslin), with piping along the edges (hoping that would add stiffness.) (Pattern was a modified version of The Spruce’s grocery bag.) I lined it with remnants of a floral sheet, and put a piece of cardboard on the flat bottom.
 
The result, as you can see, is still very floppy. Presumably a really heavy canvas would have given me something like a tote from  L.L. Bean, which is definitely stiff enough to stand up, but not good for washing or folding.
Grocery Bag Version 2 is a lightweight bag made just from the floral fabric with no lining. I did put strips of the muslin/canvas along the edges in place of piping. The goal here was to use a cardboard insert made from a cereal box to create a boxy shape. The difficulty is trying to come up with an insert that folds away neatly. This one sort of folds. Not nearly well enough. It might also be too lightweight when faced with canned goods. I haven’t tested it.
I also made this bag shorter, so it would be easier to load. This might have a cost in terms of what groceries it can hold—a baguette would probably fall out.
There must be all sorts of grocery bag plans out there that I didn’t find in my relatively short search. Maybe a removeable folding wire frame, or a stiff exterior with removable washable lining?
Has anyone found one that meets all my requirements? Please comment.

Boredom Is the Mother of Invention

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I’ve hardly been bored at all for the past fifteen years.

On the face of it, that sounds great. Admittedly, for the first of those years, M was very young. There were not a lot of boring moments. On those occasions when I was on my own with nothing to do–say, waiting in the dentist’s office—I enjoyed blissful peace and quiet. Enjoying peace and quiet is not the same as being bored.
But even now that M is a teenager who is busy with her own life and isn’t hanging around saying, “Mommy, play with me,”, I am still not bored.
I would like to take credit for this and pretend that it is a mark of superiority, but the fact is—is anyone bored any more?
Okay, that’s going too far. Students trapped in an unusually dreary class and employees stuck in a long meeting may indeed be bored. Various kinds of work may be boring, more or less. But is anyone bored on their own time? Entertainment is just a smartphone away.
Given a connection, the internet has something for everyone. Music. Music videos. Netflix, if you have a subscription. Youtube and a selection of TV shows from broadcast networks if you don’t. Blogs. News articles. Pretty pictures. Classics in e-book format, no library visit required. 
One of my pastimes is typing semi-random terms into Google and seeing what I get. For instance, I just tried “quilting leaf print” and got a lot of listings of available fabrics and a couple of quilters’ blogs, complete with some nice photos of their projects. “Mints garden formal” didn’t give me much of interest, but “garden mint projects” gave me a recipe for mint-flavored sugar, among other things.
black and white photo of girl drawing in the car

So I am rarely bored. But is that as good as it sounds? Perhaps a little boredom is motivating. Instead of entering terms into Google, or watching “The Finder” on Netflix, I could be messing around with actual mint leaves or working on one of my existing quilt projects. It’s just a lot easier to surf the web.

kids playing by a tree with a rope tied to itEntertainment wasn’t always so accessible. From age ten to fourteen, I was overseas with my family. There was very little available on television, and most of it was in French. I had my books, but the only real library I could use was the one at school. I read a lot, and re-read, and browsed the kids’ encyclopedia the way I now browse the internet, but I also drew, wrote, sewed, played games with my brother, tried to make moccasins out of fake leather, tried to make fake leather from cardboard and soap (remember neather, G?), and swung on a rope from a rubber tree till the knot slipped (fortunately it was close to the ground.) Sometimes I was bored and pestered my mom while she was trying to read—“I’m bored!”—and then dismissed every suggestion she made (poor mom!), but eventually I would find something to do. A kid can only be bored for so long before something starts to look interesting.
I guess this is a roundabout way of saying that maybe I’m spending too much time browsing the internet, and maybe also too much time flipping through magazines and newspapers without really taking time to digest what I’m reading.
Maybe, if I find myself opening up my browser with no real purpose in mind, I should stop and let myself be bored for a little while. I doubt I’ll be able to stand it for very long without finding something to do.
 
Boredom is the mother of invention.
Till next post.
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