Rolling On One

A week ago I brought in the Sunday paper (this was in Pocatello), looked at the front page, and said, “That’s my mom!”

She had told us that someone had interviewed her for the newspaper, so I shouldn’t have been surprised. The piece on the front page, was just a pointer to a big article in a human interest section.

It included a picture, taken by a New York Times photographer, of her when she was 30, my sister Sarah was an infant, my sister Helen when she was three, and me when I was five.

Here’s the full article, now that you’ve been stuck downloading it all:

Yesterday (Nov 19)’s Boston Globe had a full page ad with a graphic of a wishbone and  a star, and the following text:

Let’s redefine Christmas.

By putting more Thanksgiving in it.

No sooner does Thanksgiving end, than the loathsome shopping season begins – a month-long compulsion to buy something, anything, for everyone. We’re pressed. We’re stressed. And our money is wasted. But we can change all that by focusing on the giving. And redefining Christmas.

Give people donations to their favorite charities.

And request that they give donations to your favorite charities.

A lot more money would go to people who need it. Shopping would be easier and tax deductible. And our giving would be more in keeping with the Christmas spirit.

The sole purpose of this message is to facilitate charitable giving. Please pass it on.

Sounds good to me. I’m passing it on.

Ha, that should confuse search engines when people are searching for trading cards with pictures of baseball players.

OK, so here are scans of a couple of postcards I’ve sent out recently. Firstly, this is one of four cards I stamped on cardboard cut from beer six-packs. Contrary to the impression the first recipients seemed to have, I had only consumed enough beer over the last couple of months to have two empty six-packs to use for making cards.

Secondly, during the last game of the World Series I carved a broom stamp for the Red Sox sweep of the series. I made an edition of two or three dozen cards (they’re not a numbered edition like 1/36 or anything, certainly not a limited edition but in fact now that it’s old news why would I stamp out any more?) of postcards to celebrate the victory. Here’s a good one:

My mom said, “Have you ever read Stickeen? It’s a really short book, it’ll only take you an hour, here.”

Where has this book been all my life? How come I had never heard of it before? Is it too controversial because of saying that dogs are people too? It’s on the web at that link. Either read it now, or bookmark that page and go read it when you have a spare hour. The author is John Muir, one of the founders of the Sierra Club, an amazing outdoorsman and naturalist. He was instrumental in getting the national parks system going, and in particular in getting Yosemite to be a national park. That’s part of the Sierra Club web site that I linked to. You can find more about Muir there.

We got up early, by which I mean at a time that would only be oversleeping by a single hour on a work day, this morning. We wanted to get to Bridgton at 10 for a guided walk in the area that Loon Echo Land Trust is hoping to turn into Pondicherry Park. We did get there by five past 10, and there was only one other person there, not the guide but an older woman who wanted to join the tour like us. So we missed that.

We drove down to the Bridgton Community Center, because one of the entrances to the park is going to be in that area, but all that seemed to be going on there was a barn sale across the street. It was in a real barn, not a big barn but a lot bigger than a garage. The previous owner of the place had been a dealer of industrial antiques. There was lots of strange stuff, a couple of old electric motors, a woodworking vise, test tubes and other laboratory glassware that I didn’t want to get involved with, metal stampings, a cast iron pigeon, in general some of the stranger stuff I’ve seen. Then we noticed a cardboard carton with some big pieces of leather. Just a couple of weeks ago I threw out a belt that I had made years ago that finally wore out — I mean, I finally had to admit that the holes I wanted to use were so torn that the buckle just wouldn’t hold any more. I had been thinking of ordering a belt blank or two from Tandy Leather and making a new one. This carton seemed to have a belt blank or two, plus lots more leather. For $20 it wasn’t a snap decision, but it was probably going to be less money than ordering from Tandy; so we took it. When we got home and looked through it, we found not only several belts but what seemed to be most of the parts to three handbags, two complete kits for wallets, and lots of scrap. Maybe some future mukluk soles. So we have to review what we have in leatherwork craft books and tools and bring them to Maine. Because although I can probably make a basic belt, I really don’t have any idea how I’d lace a handbag up without the original kit directions.

I think I’ve talked before about indexing stamps. The batch I did last night was so big I couldn’t resist taking a picture. It was only seven designs, but they’re big sellers, so I did quantity 25 of a couple of them

Here’s the setup. I use a soy oil-based printer’s ink, something like Hi-Tech Tack 12 Intense Black from Great Western Ink in Portland, OR. That’s a one pound can of it towards the right rear. To the left of the can of ink is a medicine dropper which I use to spread a thick orange oil cleaner on two Bounty paper towels each folded in half and then in thirds on its own styrofoam meat tray. I use a lot of cleaner on the front towel and just a little on the second one. There’s a dry third towel on another tray in the back. Then there’s a putty knife for getting the ink out of the can; a palette knife would work. I roll out the ink on a piece of plexiglas with a small Abig brayer and ink my indexing stamp on the brayer.

I put the clean stamp mount in an L-shaped wooden jig, just a corner that has two sides about one and a half times as high as a stamp mount. I hold the clean mount tightly in the corner, line up the inked indexing stamp against the corner, and press down. The jig lets me get the image in the same place on every mount. If the image isn’t fully printed, I can re-ink the indexing stamp and stamp again in exactly the same place (at least a lot of the time). When I’ve done all the mounts of one design, I rub the indexing stamp on the nearest paper towel to get off most of the ink, on the middle one to get rid of almost all the ink, and on the last one to get rid of the last of the ink and the extra cleaning solution. When I’m done, I can often clean off the brayer and plexi with the near towel.

When I first started using the oil based ink, I thought cleaning up from it was a big nuisance. If I’m only doing two stamp designs, cleanup is still a big fraction of the time I’m working, but by now it’s down to a system.

OK, so here’s the pumpkin I carved on Monday night, lit up, in action on Halloween:

Here it is, next to the magazine cover I modeled it on. It’s the hair line that makes the cover picture recognizable. The lack of it is a big part of why the pumpkin isn’t.

Last year we tried printing two T-shirts by the dye discharge method. The idea is to print with bleach so as to remove the color from the fabric where you print. Rather than using liquid bleach, which is stronger and harder to control than you really want, we print using Soft Scrub liquid cleanser instead of ink.
Last year we had poor results. A few weeks ago we tried again with fish printing, and got poor results again. On our third try, the weekend of Oct. 20, we finally got good results. Arlene thinks the problem the first time was that we didn’t let the soft scrub stay on the fabric long enough. I think that the problem the first and second times was that the dye was too bleach resistant.

At any rate, here we go the time that worked. First, we masked off parts of the shirt so we would get the design just in one band across the shirt. Someone at the NPS conference had done a garment that way and it looked great. Second, we “inked” our leaves and put them down on the area we wanted to print. One leaf has been removed in the picture below.

Here Arlene is picking up one leaf so you can see the printed area under it.

We left the shirt outside to dry in the sun. We had to leave before it was dry, so we set it down indoors and left it until the next weekend before washing off the soft scrub. It’s hard to be sure how much the dye discharges until you wash the shirt, because the soft scrub is white and maybe that’s all you’re seeing; but the orange color is really mostly the color of the bleached-out shirt. This time when we washed the shirt it came out the way we had hoped. Dharma Trading, here we come, to buy some of the T-shirts you have with dischargable dye.

For those of you who haven’t seen autumn in New England this year, here are some pictures I took at Poland Spring Preservation Park when foliage was at its peak. I think that was the weekend of October 13 this year. That’s later than usual because the weather was unusually warm for lots of October.

First, a backlit fern. I think this one is an ostrich fern, the kind whose young shoots are edible fiddleheads.

Some other kind of fern. See how some kinds stay green longer? There are even some that are green well into the winter.

Leaves bear examination at all scales, from the individual leaf —

— to a single tree that has changed —

— to a lot of trees —

— and of course if you can get a good view of a whole mountainside, that’s picture postcard material.

Yesterday evening I surprised myself by how much energy I seemed to have. I knit several (well, at least a few) rows on one sleeve of my sweater, carved an eraser stamp, and carved a jack-o-lantern.

I started the sweater in the middle of last winter and got the body done, then sort of bogged down with the sleeves. It was at a standstill most of the summer. Part of the problem is that I was doing the sleeves two sleeves on two circulars, and it’s a Fair Isle project so there were four balls of yarn to keep track of. I was spending half as much time untangling yarn as knitting. Now that I’m in the shoulder part, after the sleeves have been bound off at the underarm part, and they’re flat. They’re going a lot quicker now. Of course, having some stitches bound off helps them go quicker, too. It’s at a point where the end is in sight. Unfortunately, I didn’t increase the sleeves enough all the way up and they fit awfully tight. I’m not 100 percent convinced I’ll be able to get the thing on when it’s done, or if so, that I’ll be able to get it off. It would be sad if I have to get it off with a scissors. I guess the worst-case scenario would be undoing the shoulder seams, taking it off in pieces, and redoing the sleeves. Or, waiting until one of Gena’s kids was big enough to wear it, but I doubt they’d want it (not kid-like colors.)
The eraser stamp is a broom, for the Red Sox sweep of the World Series. Arlene thinks it’s good enough to work up to a production stamp. She says she has had African-American customers ask if we had a broom stamp, for weddings (see jumping the broom).

The jack-o-lantern pumpkin comes from Maine. We bought it Friday at Smedberg’s farm stand between Oxford and Norway. I figured I wasn’t going to have time tonight (Tuesday) to carve it after klez, and I didn’t want to leave it to Halloween proper. I tried to copy the design from a recent New Yorker magazine cover. Although the magazine cover was immediately recognizable, and the pumpkin isn’t a bad copy, there’s a lot in the picture that didn’t transfer well to a real pumpkin. Maybe if I gouge shallow lines for the hairline and jowls. Pictures to follow, when the thing is lit.