This is how a spend a lot of the time between holidays

Maybe it is the solstice, maybe it is some sort of muscle memory in my brain from when we all were hunter gatherers, but this time of year always inspires me to ponder what the next steps will be on everything I am doing.  As you can see, I have company while I do this.  What you can't see are the two on the floor who are hoping that despite what it appears, there are food crumbs about to land near them...

 

Out there somewhere is a bridge

and right here is a small pile of snow..... SNOW people, there was supposed to be maybe rain, MAYBE rain, and maybe not even that.  I swear that to be a weatherperson in NYC all you have to do is pretend and wave your arms in front of a blue screen.  THIS IS SNOW!


with two dogs, this is a major event, and since it is the first of the season I really don't know which shoes/boots are the least slippery in snow and still have not figured out how to get two sets of 4 each of those little booties things that keep their feet out of the salt.  I want you to think how I am going to get 8 of these on paws, as well as shoes on me and a coat and a scarf and mitts and keys etc etc etc when Tinta is just barely making it out the door without peeing in the hall.

I am especially fond of this particular listing on Amazon because it says the original price for these suckers is $1700!

My latest Sketchbook, Journal... whatever

My favorite enabler has talked several times about her wire binder, the Cinch.  I finally fell off the wagon and got one.  I was having a crisis because I had a LOT of sewing to do and I wanted some of it to happen really quickly.  When I say sewing I do NOT mean clothes.  (Something for which all who know me are happy.)  I mean sewing coptic stitch binding that I have used on my Music Journal. 

My pages there are made by scrapeing acrylic paint deeply into paper and then adding more and taking some of it away.  The lovely thing about the method is that the pages do NOT stick together and the paper has a great feel to it.  I learned this from L. K. Ludwig in my favorite journaling/bookmaking book  Creative Wildfire.  Her other books are really good also, this is just my favorite one for this kind of journal.  She is really one of my art heroes. You can see some of the pages in my music journal here....  The link is to my Pinterest Board, just for variety.

OK, so you can see that these are densely colored pages and the whole book is very richly colored.  I played around with some acrylic inks the other day and because they soak into the pages very quickly I had a lot more white space on the page than I was used to and they didn't fit with the pages I had already made for another journal like the music one.  Those are the pages are sitting around waiting to be sewn. 

That enormous digression is to explain what led me use the acrylic ink pages to make a Cinch journal with a leftover binder coil from an old journal that I dismantled the other day.  It AMAZES me that the Cinch people do not include even ONE binding coil with the machine... NOT ONE!!!


front cover


other cover

some sort of random pages

 

Now I have to decide what I am going to use it for!

October Calendar

I started doing something in this calendar every day back in January.  I did sketches for a while of what I saw out my window, which is the Hudson River just above the George Washington Bridge.  January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September and now October.  As you can see, I have moved a long way from what I see out my window....

I divided these day spaces in half and did 2 little drawings, doodles, whatever you call them, every day.  

So far, this is Hurricane Sandy up here

This is the Hudson River, about 8 miles from the ocean!  I have never seen whitecaps like this on the river.  We get a few every now and then, but this is pretty roiled up.  The wind out of New Jersey is really blowing.  Fortunately, though my windows face New Jersey and they are wriggling in their frames, where I have to get out of the building to walk the dogs is on the other side, so the wind is blocked by the building.

Interesting to note, the Sanitation dept. picked up all the trash cans, so I had to bring "the evidence" home with me!  Living in New York City is a new trip every day.



 This is what the river looks like on a "normal" day...  

Somedays, after dark

 my neighborhood looks a lot like Paris, doesn't it?

 

Only in New York City

can you come up out of the subway and encounter a fashion shoot on the corner...