Travel-Lodger and The Other Old Codger

Wonderful work from artist Judith G. Klausner.

(from top to bottom: cross-stitched cereal, embroidered toast and oreo cookie Victorian cameo.)

More Newfoundland posts to come later... I've got lots of stuff to post and not a lot of equipment to do it with (but I'm working on it).

In very recent news: I just acquired a very beautiful, mint-condition 1970s turquoise Brother knitting machine.... be still my heart.

The Wild and Windy Side of Newtown Road

Here are the tracks I recorded a couple of weeks ago, engineered, mixed and mastered by the fabulously lovely Ivan Klipstein. He also played drums and features on one of the tunes. Lately I've been playing around with some jazz ukulele covers taken from various sources like The Boswell Sisters and other jazz swells, and I wanted to see what they sounded like. Now you can too.





On the newsy side of things, I am comfortably settled in my summer home here in St. John's, Newfoundland, where I plan to be active in all things artsy and fartsy (more of the first one, though). I'll be posting adventuring pictures and artwork throughout the summer. I've already got one project on the go: an itty-bitty canvas contest put on by this wonderful place.

Mr. Big Stick is surely the most popular guy in St. John's

More to come soon!

Insert Face Here

Next I'll be working on filling out my orders for machine-knit onesies for men ("mansies").

pictures are from this website

Fun with Bureaucratic Wormholes

Guess where I was today?

Higher lurnin'

Notes taken in class yesterday (History of Craft and Decorative Arts):

Some other artists we've looked at that have struck a chord with me:

Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Sonia Delaunay

Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann

The Last Painter of Happiness

"La vie ne m'a pas toujours sourit, mais j'ai toujours sourit à la vie."

-Raoul Dufy

I saw this beautiful and charming cartoon one day in university - I was escaping a very boring art history class, and I discovered that a class on the History of Animation was being held right next door. That's where I first saw 'The Invisible Moustache of Raoul Dufy' (from UPA studios):

Dufy was a perfect mix of craftsman and artist - he started out making paintings at the beginning of the 20th century but branched out into ceramics, textiles, set design, commercial illustration, interior decorating and printmaking. He's had a huge influence on me in more ways than one.

 I was lucky enough to see a small exhibit of his ceramics at a design museum while travelling in Belgium a few years ago:

L'artiste lui-même.

We don't call women 'stout' anymore, dear

I now have a Tumblr account which I am using to build a portfolio website (which is still under construction). You can view it over here.


Some images from the small yet incredibly amazing haul from my visit to a church basement bazaar this  morning in Petite-Patrie:

I now have more doily books than one person should own.

 I couldn't not buy a macramé instruction book with a title like this...

...and then I looked inside and saw these.

Some of the advertisements in these "ladies' craft journals" are downright odd.

  

          Yum yum, lard icing! Thanks Loretta!

This one was in the classifieds of a 1962 issue of 'Workbasket'. There was an episode of Wiretap about mail-order monkeys on CBC recently -  it seems they are not as sweet and docile as the one depicted in this advertisement. (Thank goodness the monkey comes with instructions.)

I also picked up an assortment of cassette tapes purely for their aesthetic flair and because cheeseball country music is awesome:

One more button!