Shopping day

[altivo]

So I was sorta naughty and spent money. It's not that I can't do that, but I'm trying not to do it too much. This is a tight time of the year, equivalent to early fall when the tax payments, hay bills, and home owners insurance all fall due. Now it's the horse vet bills (paid a year in advance to get a discount,) auto insurance, and possibly income tax (since we haven't done that yet.)

I have some art items back ordered but they should be shipped this week, including a small sketch book and some markers. I found a good idea in one of Claudia Nice's books on how to make a compact and portable carrier for sketching supplies out of an old pair of jeans, taking advantage of the hip pockets. Looks too cool to pass up, and we have lots of ragged jeans stashed away. Some of her ideas on perspective and composition involve using a small transparent plastic ruler, and I wanted one of those as well as a mechanical pencil to include in the pack. Turns out Gary wanted some office supply stuff from Sam's Club so we went to Crystal Lake where I bought lunch to celebrate yesterday being pay day, then stopped at Sam's for his things, and finally at Hobby Lobby to look at art stuff.

It turned out they had a 30% off sale on all artist pencils, markers, pens, and pastels. That made it much harder to be selective and thrifty, but I got away for $20 after a lot of browsing. Pentel 0.7mm mechanical pencil and HB leads, some blending stumps, the desired plastic rule, a Pitt medium point India ink marker so I can compare it to the Prismacolors I got last week, a spray can of Krylon fixative for pencil and charcoal, and a bonus: a set of 12 soft pastels. I used to work in pastels as well as watercolor, and had found that I no longer have any. With the sale price, it was all a good deal.

I resisted high quality handmade paper ($10 a sheet, but I touched and admired it) and a nice ready-made carrying bag with a drawing clipboard and two sketchbooks inside ($29, not on sale.) I admired lots of bright colors (always my weakness) in markers and pencils and paints, and a couple of cute fold-up watercolor paint boxes with halfpans and collapsible brushes. I may yet break down and buy one of those, but I have a couple of the old cake style sets like school kids use that are sufficient for outdoor sketching right now.

I find I'm lusting after Rapidograph pens but at $20 apiece, I told myself "not now."

Sooo... time for projects. Little ones that get finished quickly and boost my self-confidence. I could do this once, I can do it again. I have a pack of postcard size pieces of 140 lb. watercolor paper. I think perhaps some people are about to get the proverbially infamous "gift art."

In other news, it's almost spring. Temperatures above 40F two days in a row have melted a heck of a lot of snow, leaving dirty slush piles and mud. Still freezes to ice on the surface, but the liquid water keeps running underneath all night, draining away to leave floating ice plates that crunch underfoot in the morning.

RikkiToo, our ex-barn cat who has taken over the house, has been gimping around on three legs since Thursday night. We couldn't find anything wrong, and he didn't fuss about letting us handle the paw and leg in question, but it looked swollen so he went to the vet this morning with Gary while I bought groceries. Diagnosis was an infection, probably from a bite. He has scratch marks elsewhere, and has always been prone to fighting other cats and sometimes larger critters like raccoons. Prescription is a course of antibiotics, so it was less expensive than if he'd needed a bone set at least. He's very tame and easy to handle, so giving him meds isn't too bad, thank goodness. This is liquid, squirt a dropper in the mouth stuff, which he has taken before without too much complaint.

Guild newsletter needs to be edited and posted this weekend, and hasn't yet been started except for the monthly statistics sheet.

Comments

[avon-deer.livejournal.com]

Art supplies are always expensive. I cannot get over how much pastels were when I last visited a stationary shop.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Things like pastels or paints can vary quite a bit depending on whether they are "student quality" or "professional grade." For most of us, the student version is good enough much of the time. This set was $5.99 before discount and $4.19 after. It has 12 colors, which I find to be plenty since pastels blend so readily.

Large sets with 36 or 64 colors can be quite expensive, of course. The same is true of colored pencils and watercolor pencils, and I make do with twelve of each. Now for expensive, you need to look at the colored ink markers, like Copic or Prismacolor. They can run $6 or more for each individual pen. Very nice, but OMG expensive, and you'd need at least six colors to do much color rendering.

By comparison, ordinary watercolor paints, especially the cakes or half-pans, can seem quite cheap. Student paints in 8 ml tubes can run as low as $2 per color. A half-pan set with metal box and mixing trays can be as cheap as $20 for 12 or more colors, and a 16 color cake set (considered "kid stuff" by most artists, but perfectly serviceable) can be as low as $6 or so. Of course the brush included in a cheap set like that isn't worth a nickel so you need to buy at least one decent brush to use with it, and some good paper which is where the expense can pile up.

I resisted a set of a dozen different size and shape brushes made of "pure pony hair" for $6.99, by the way. It wasn't on sale with a discount. ;p

[mondhasen.livejournal.com]

I find I'm lusting after Rapidograph pens but at $20 apiece, I told myself "not now

I have two of those, a yellow band and a blue (can't recall the yellow size, the blue is a 3 I think). You should get the cleaning kit for them as well. I used mine intermittently, and they would dry up between uses.

Sounds like a great day!

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Gary used to have a whole set of them in a little round plastic case. His first job after high school was as a draftsman for Great Lakes Dredge and Dock in Chicago. He still had it after I met him, but neither of us knows where it is now. He wouldn't have thrown them out, certainly, but he may have given them away and failed to remember it after all these years.

[mondhasen.livejournal.com]

His first job after high school was as a draftsman for Great Lakes Dredge and Dock in Chicago.

Ah, then you have experience to draw on, so to speak. I bought mine after using a set of disposables up. There're great for even, consistent lines on smooth paper.

One of my frat brothers worked for Great Lakes Dredge and Dock Company after HS as well. Went to Saudi Arabia for them after college.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Oddly enough my local news agent seems to have rather a lot of art supplies that they must get on clearance and sell very cheaply I don't know if they're really good but they seem to be okay.

Wow handmade paper O.O Poor RikkiToo, a guardian of the property injured in the line of duty. Its been raining here now for 2 weeks much of the inner state is flooded but the places have been drought ridden for many years so they're kind of happy and sad.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Handmade paper is the best thing for watercolor painting. I've even experimented with making it myself.

100% cotton fiber is ideal. Cheaper papers mix in more and more wood pulp or recycled paper, and aren't as durable or absorbent.

Lint from the clothes dryer lint trap after washing cotton towels or bedsheets is the best material to save up for making watercolor paper. ;p You need a lot of it, though.

[quoting-mungo.livejournal.com]

I've never seen thin tip Pitt markers, but I doubt you'll be disappointed with it, judging by the quality of the Pitt brushpens I loaded up on back when I was in sequential arts. Could be a little blacker, but it handles nicely and the tip material seems to be high quality.


-Alexandra

Purple Onions and Wandering about distractedly

[(Anonymous)]

Hello,
I'm down to the wire getting ready for the second session of a weaving class that I am taking. I took a semester long weaving class back in the 70's and fell in love with weaving, being a fiberholic. Got a loom in the 80's but experienced weaving interruptus while I was raising my kids, not being a stellar multi-tasker. I am just now getting to use my loom, now that my girls are grown and off to college. In the class I am taking, I am a bit of a renegade wanting to try more challenging patterns. I am about to embark on creating a design for place mats using the wandering vine pattern out of Davision. Not sure if it's going to work. Found your stuff on Weavolution and was inspired by your Purple Onions table runner. I am trying to use up fiber that I have on hand. I have a Lily 24/3 cotton for the warp (it's a strong fine rug warp type yarn) and I have a 20/2 cotton for the weft??? I'm thinking maybe that should be doubled, but being inexperienced, I am not sure.

Anyway, loved your purple onions table runner. Enjoyed visiting your site. I have 2 Black Angus heifers, about 30 chickens. We had horses but not enough time for them. Looking for horses again, cautiously.

Re: Purple Onions and Wandering about distractedly

[altivo]

My best advice on that combination is to weave a sample. Make sure it's going to come out the way you want. I know that's not always an appealing idea, but when you use untested combinations of yarn, it's the only way to be sure. Make up a short warp, say 2 yards, and six or eight inches wide. You may have to experiment with the sett as well, so be prepared to weave some, then cut it off and re-sley the reed at a different thread count.

The Purple Onions were done in perl cotton, 10/2 for both the warp and the tabby weft. The pattern weft is raw silk, a mill end that I can't even tell you the official size for. But typically, your colored weft in an overshot should be slightly heavier (fewer wraps per inch) than the tabby weft. Your tabby weft can either be the same as the warp, or the same color but a size finer than the warp. So in the Purple Onions, for instance, I could have used the 10/2 warp, and a 20/2 for tabby weft, which would emphasize the colored pattern more but produce a fabric with more drape.

Oh, and by the way, I tend to talk more about weaving, spinning, and art in general on my other fursona: Argos. Check argos.dreamwidth.org for that.