Those of you who also follow me on facebook, will already have seen the first part of this: On the first of April, while tidying up my studio in preparation of packing it up, a crochet hook crossed my way and I thought I’d try and see whether I can remember how to crochet. As the image shows, the answer is “sort of”. I immediately fell in love with this horrible and wonky assembly of loops, and decided to mount it on some board and see how it will print. And this is the result:
I find the result completely underwhelming, although I cannot really say what else I had expected. I’ll see whether I will add something more to it to make it interesting.
In the meantime, I window is being added to the outhouse (which will host my studio). The back of the outhouse shows, that I am not the first to add or brick up windows and doors.
The main building itself is looking more and more like a construction site. The flooring is gone, the kitchen is gone, and everything looks like it is getting from bad to worse. Hope fully, once we start putting things in, things will begin to look better. On an interesting side note. The removal of the kitchen has exhibited some remnands of old wallpaper which I found quite interesting:
With so much destruction going on in our house, I needed to do something more constructive, and I gave our formerly red folding chairs a new lick of paint.
And I sketching a little to maintain some sanity. Here is my penultimate (31 of 32) page in my beach findings sketchbook, more images can be found on ipernity. I also have been drawing some fish. But I don’t know, maybe with 346 slowly coming to an end, I might be done with drawing fish, at least for a while. I do have a bunch of fish and feather prints which I always wanted to bundle up somehow. Maybe I’ll make something small from them. I don’t know yet, and I currently have a lot of time to think about these things. Today the kids went back to school, and I start packing boxes for real. At the same time, our likely moving date is not coming nearer, so that makes things on that front a little easier.
Ooo, the house renovations and studio alterations look exciting. We’ve had builders in twice now, so I know what it’s like to have chaos before you get order reestablished. Hang in there!
The printing is interesting…. I wonder what you will end up doing with it? And drawing is a good way to switch off and relax for a while.
Hope it all keeps going well.
Hello Lizzie,
thanks for your comment! We tried to avoid moving in while the builders are still working because living on a building site with small children, ugh! I do look forward to the day where they start putting things back in and it starts looking better than it does now!
It’s encouraging to hear that you think the print is interesting. I think I would just plain go crazy if I couldn’t do anything for myself in this time. What was supposed to be 4 weeks will probably stretch to 12 at least, so I just got to sketch at least.
Thanks for the good wishes. I hope you and your family are well, too!
In house renovating it always gets much worse before it gets better again!
I think the wonky crochet print has potential as a background for another image, though I am not sure what. That part is up to you! Glad to see that you have found some constructive activities to occupy yourself. (Besides packing boxes, that is!)
I am looking forward to the day when we finally start putting things back in! I’ll have to wait a couple more weeks, though, and it is still to get worse before it gets better: We have old cracked artex ceilings in some of the rooms which will get removed from next week on, and everything will be covered in plaster dust, I guess. (Luckily the asbestos test came back negative!)
I am happy to read that you think the crochet print has potential. I thought to use it as a background, yes. Although I might have printed it too dark for that, I’ll have to see. Maybe it will end up as a fish caught in a net or something.
Hi Hilke, I have a routine for cleaning out the fine sawdust from my workshop before I start varnishing an instrument; it works for plaster dust too: on a not-too-windy day open the doors and put the biggest fan you can find in the doorway, blowing _outward_. Reverse the hose on your vacuum cleaner so that it’s blowing too, then (wearing a dust mask) use the vacuum cleaner to blow the dust from all the surfaces towards the door with the fan. Whoosh!
You might need to damp-mop afterwards, but it’s surprising how much dust the fans can eliminate.
~ David
Hello David. Thanks for the tip. Mhm, somehow I doubt that the neighbours would be happy with such a solution, although the “whoosh” sounds tempting 🙂
Our workers are supposed to get rid of the dirt they are causing, I hope that will work. We had in workers before, who removed the plaster from walls and then put new plaster on. Up until now, mopping (again, they obviously did that already before me) did the trick. I’ll see how it goes when whole ceilings are being skimmed.
Maybe if you did the “whoosh” jeu before it rains, no one would notice?! ; ]