Category Archives: art

Something to do

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A long, long, long time ago Mr. Aitch had gifted me an origami kit as I was obsessed with this cool art form using a sheet of paper.  This kit included a great booklet that showed the basics of paper folding.  The last project in the booklet was the flapping bird. This is different than the famous crane.  The crane is a stationary object and the flapping bird can move.  I still have the original kit but loaned the booklet to a friend…and never got it back.

Last October I taught one of the twins how to make an origami flapping bird as she had learned how to make some shapes. We made several birds and she got quite good at it.  So I emailed her yesterday with a suggestion of something to do every day during this unusual period in our lives.Email to granddaughter

This is the flapping bird.

You can see that by holding it at the base of the neck and pulling on the tail…

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Here is a short video of the flapping bird in action.

There are several videos and written instructions on the interwebs that you can find but I made my own instructions based on how I learned how to make it.  If you are interested, click here.  Warning, you will need some basic knowledge of origami folds that I do not provide.

Changing things up

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For several years these cards from IKEA were displayed in a long vertical frame on a narrow wall.

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But I wanted to change out the pictures for some note cards by Woody Jackson.

reframe004I didn’t want to damage the cards by taping them directly to the underside of the mat so I made picture/photo corners from some old envelopes.

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I just cut off the corners at an angle and slipped them over the corners of the note cards. Then I taped those corners to the back of the mat.

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Voila!  No damage to the cards if I ever decide to use them.

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Now the frame fits nicely above the doorway going from the kitchen into the hall/dining room/foyer area.

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Budding artists

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When I was visiting our daughter last month, the twins each drew pictures for me.  I told them I would take them to my office and put them on the wall.

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Which I did.

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E’s picture was of her Lalaloopsy doll, Jewel.  I love the detail on her dress, the big button eyes, and the stitching for the mouth.

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Z’s picture is of her (on the left) and me (on the right).  She asked me what I love and instead of picking one thing, I told her I loved knitting.  That’s my knitting in the big heart on the right.  The sky reminds me of Vincent van Gogh’s “Starry Night” painting with the different swirls of blue.

Do you take your kid’s grandkids’ art to work?  How do you display their art?

Gettysburg – Day 2

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Bike Week was winding down and Mr. Aitch and I decided to go to the Gettysburg National Military Park Museum and Visitor Center just a short ride from our hotel.

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We watched a short movie about the Civil War then went up some stairs to view a cyclorama painted in the 1880’s by the French painter Paul Philippoteaux depicting the third and final day of the battle known as Pickett’s Charge.

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This painting is 377 feet around and 42 feet high and is displayed with a 3-D diorama in the foreground full of artifacts from the battle.

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At times it was hard to see where the painting ended and the “real” began.

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If interested, you can learn more about the painting and restoration here.

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I was very impressed with this cyclorama although some reviewers were not.  Two other cycloramas still exist and are free to the public.  This one was not free and we couldn’t really linger to examine or take it all in.  Perhaps Mr. Aitch and I need to take another road trip and see the other two paintings.

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Since it was already a hot, muggy day, we decided the bus tour would be best for us as we don’t have a CD player on our Harley for the self-guided tour and preferred to be in the comfort of an air-conditioned bus with a real guide who would entertain questions along the way.

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This house was a finishing school for young women that was quickly turned into a hospital once the battle began.  There is still an artillery shell stuck in the bricks in the upper part of the house.

IMG_1708-sundaydevils-denI was very intrigued with the section known as Devil’s Den.

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And one confederate sharpshooter shown in the lower right photograph on this marker.

We have many prints in our office by the artist, James C. Groves, who currently resides in Western Maryland.  One of the prints is called “The Desecration of the Shrine“.  Mr. Groves wrote an interesting article about the sharpshooters and Devil’s Den.

Mr. Aitch and I toured the museum after the bus tour and spent more than six hours at the facility.  The museum spanned the entire Civil War not just the battle of Gettysburg.  It was a long day and we did not see everything.

As a child I did not appreciate(?) the horrors of the Civil War or understand the magnitude of it all.  As an adult I cannot imagine the loud, smoky, fearfully terrible chaos for the townspeople for this three-day battle and aftermath during the five-year course of this war.

A very sobering day for me.