My pretend daughter is going to have a baby girl...

and since I know she doesn't read the blog, I can show you what I made for her shower next weekend.  I can't be there in Atlanta but this has been a real labor of love.  She says "We are staying away from pink" and I follow directions at least marginally.  Coral is NOT pink.

It is from Mason Dixon, their Modern Baby Blanket with the modification shown by JMKB and others of the charcoal line between the colors.  I am in love and I was obsessed by finishing this blanket.  It has haunted my waking hours and seems that I spent every minute on it because now I am wandering about like a lost soul.

For those of you who know the size of my yarn stash, NO I didn't do it from the stash, I DID buy new yarn and now I have almost a full ball of each color left over... and it is Aran weight, not blendable easily with the tons of sock yarn stashed all over the apartment.  Something will occur, I am sure.  I actually started to make a striped (random) blanket and I may keep it up.  We shall see.  HOWEVER the next task is to get it wrapped, into a box and mailed to Atlanta before the shower.  That is, for me, almost harder than all the knitting.

I found a way through, I think

It needs to be seen close up, clicking should biggen it.  Who she is, I do not know.  Another one of the million photos my dad saved without any notes on the back or anywhere else.  She might be his first wife, about whom I only learned when my mom died and then he denied having told me she existed, so who knows?  No one to say.....Maybe she was there at the mystery party at the Berlin restaurant ...

anoither journal page

I found, after my father went to assisted living, that there was a HUGE trove of saved ephemera in boxes stashed all over the house.  As my son will now attest to, the apple does not fall far from the tree.  But here I am, many years later, going through some of it.  This is an amalgam of old envelope stuff and a menu from a Berlin restaurant.  The date on the menu is 6 August 1929.  Why he saved it I don't know, and there is no way to really find out.  He was 19 at the time and probably about to set off to sea as a steward on a ship.  I have his steward's book and a lot of sea connected things, but this is definitely Berlin in 1929.

As a page goes it is OK, but needs something, I am not sure where it is going.  it is interesting only if you know the story, I think...

A quick note to mention how quickly the world moves....
a while ago I posted a note about something that caught my eye.. paper that could be shipped flat that would, when heated, become 3 dimensional..

The idea intrigued me, and this is now an example of what it all leads to..
the NY Times today published this article about how Origami had facilitated the creation of a self folding robot.  The bot itself is flat and would arrive attached to two motors, two small power cells and a mini flexible controller.  When told to, from a remote controller, without any assistance, it folds up into a mini robot and ... at the pace of 2 inches a second... scuttles off on its mission.

What fun!

This is reporting on a moving target sometimes....

This page was ok, as it was on Monday... but nothing exciting was going on, to say the least...

 I got interested in how the lines interacted and ended up here, with the window flap

and here with the whole page.  I really like this a lot better...There is some green in the lines too, but it is hard to photo and have it show, so this will have to do..

Journal Contents Part 5

This spread without the small page flap started out long ago as a sample of different media I was using, just little strips of color on the left page.  I just kept going somehow..

and I continued the geometrics on the opposite side... 

Journal Contents Part 4

This spread started with an old photo I found in my "tearout" file, from where I do not know.  It is of Atlanta's Rich's department store, the downtown store, at street level.  One thing led to another and here is the full spread:

This is another of the small/large page combos, so here are the closeups:

I treated the photo with blue wax and with red paint and some white ink

With the small page flipped over, it looks like this
and the other side of the spread is this:

 and with the page flipped, like this: