Green Glass

That's just what happens

Home for a couple days after camp and before I set off on another adventure.  I'd like to sit down and organize/scan/amend my camp journal, but too many home details to work out before I go off again.  

Also, the Euro football (soccer) tournament is going on, so there is that to obsess over.  This year I'm rooting for Italy.  For no good reason except I am.  I'm fickle when it comes to my football teams.  Having come late to the party, I flirt with them all.

Above is my favorite sketch from camp.  While I was drawing this, small girls continually walked up, took and returned vests and stopped and stop directly in front of me chatting.  Now I'm not a little woman, sitting on a camp stool with my journal open in my lap.  That's what happens when you are ten and having a great time paddling around/ talking with your friends.  

Gazing

Camp week ends tomorrow.  Too short.  Too brief.  Each year I'm convinced it goes by quicker.  Anyone out there know a way jump back into child mindset?  Or would I have to take the swim test again if I did that.  I'm pretty sure I'd pass but ...

This year I've spent more time looking around than sketching.  Not a surprise.  It's nice to not feel so frantic to capture every thing I set my peepers on.  On the other hand, I do love a good thick sketchbook when I get home.  

I'd like to say I'm doing quality over quantity.  But I'm not.  But I'd like to say that.

Honesty would compell me to say that rather than quantity or quality, I've been going for napping.  And gazing.  Yeah.  Lots of gazing.  We had a red moon last night.  I gazed on that for a while.

We'll see how it goes

We have gone on our yearly pilgrimage to camp.  There was a great deal of hectic getting ready for camp and half way through I am ready to begin.

This seems like the perfect time to whip out my notebooks and try sketching as much as possible.

Taking pictures with the intention of sketching later also seems like a good activity.

Our internet is spotty, my focus is on doing rather than reporting, and as soon as I get home, I turn around for another trip, and then another.  We'll see how it goes.

A pondering cat

So as I am reorienting myself toward my blog, and going through my recent journals, I am struck by how much the physical qualities of a journal influence what I do.  Over the last couple years I've used a complete range of commercial and self-made journals.  I hear a lot about experimenting and learning the different qualities of papers.  I have all kinds of conflicting impulses - I don't want to use up my good stuff/ waste good quality materials with just messing around/ I do buy everything that strikes my fancy/ jump from one medium to another/ continue to use things I'm not enjoying until they are used up.

Really ... if I could just get out of my own way sometimes.

I'm looking at my pages from the last year, and enjoying what I'm seeing.  I'm also noticing how much I've enjoyed working in the Stillman & Birn Journals.  I have worked in five or six in the last year.   I used my first one for my fake journal last year, as a camp journal, as a travel journal and several as my main journal.  I love the extra heavyweight paper in the Beta, Delta and Zeta series.  I love how I can work the pages or stick stuff on them.  I just do what I want.

Above is from the Delta series.  It has "ivory" paper with some tooth.  

hmm....  all of this has got my thinking as I head into our summer vacation which is when I go into sketching hyperdrive.  Or maybe I shouldn't be thinking.  I should just let myself do...

I'll have to ponder that.

 

Three wouldn'ts don't make a would

If someone asked what I'd been up to all this time I haven't been blogging,I wouldn't say I've been napping the entire time.

That wouldn't necessarily be wrong.  But I wouldn't say it.

Testing, pls sit by

It's been so long, I've forgotten how to format my pictures.  So here I am testing the size to make sure it's not too big and not too small.  Just right.

Plus as I"m trying to get reoriented to my blog, I have to go through and see where I left off posting.  Which is an excuse to go through all the old photos.  And collect camera discs.  And waste a lot of time trying to figure out what the heck I used as an organizing principle for my photos on the computer.

But mostly to admire my handiwork with these lovely fingerless gloves.  This was what I knit this winter.  Many pairs of fingerless gloves.  Because what else am I doing with my random assortment of single and double balls of yarn. 

Those are some of the questions poised to myself.