In Sociology Section we all had to say why we were wearing what we were wearing. (wow, that was fun to type!) and I had nice nail polish but basically I was just dressed in stuff that wouldn't show charcoal and graphite. That is stupid, it is warm weather, and I own kind of a lot of pretty clothes, but somehow the same few things get in rotation and everything else stays in my closet.


That made me want to go shopping, at least thrift shopping, but I haven't any spending money, so instead I went through my bag of mending and clothes I never wear because they do not quite suit me (or what i am trying to convey, as we talked about in soc) and I altered and mended things. It was not a good substitute for shopping but it was nice to get to use these clothes again. This is cute, right? But I wear skirts to get sunshine on my legs. I do not wear long, flowy, heavy skirts. I do have a few flouncy heavy skirts, but this one is too draggy.
So I cut off the bottom (there it is around my neck) and actually I would wear this skirt now. Just that little bit more movement, and I like it. But I have a variety of skirts that are a little longer than knee length, and what I reach for all the time are little short skirts. So that is what I made it into.
In this picture I just tucked it into the waistband. But it looks pretty much like that once I gathered and basted and stitched while watching House on the television. I am thinking about daily outfitblogging, um. possibly. in which case you can see it then.
I bought this skirt for a few dollars and it has no zipper or buttons, so it can't be worn. I bought it to make it a dress, but then it was too cold and i forgot about it.


See, the sides of the V neck are wear a zipper used to go. Isn't that cool? I just sewed on some ribbons, and I have a flouncy white dress. I am worried it will get dirty... but it cost $3 and I spent 10 minutes sewing on ribbons, it's not an heirloom. Also, I have never bought bleach, but when I was shopping for a wash for my car I saw that bleach costs only $2. I think Mom gave me this belief that white clothes are about to get completely, permanently ruined, and she has a point. I am not going to give up crawling under a fence or painting or eating to keep something pristine. But that's not a reason to avoid white. I will probably wear it with a ribbon sash, because I like sashes.
Um. I took picture of this to illustrate... um... how ridiculously instant this process is?
hiked up and ribboned, I would definitely wear this as a dress.

So. Yeah, I think I will start taking crappy yellow pictures of what I am wearing every single day.

Self Portraits

Oh man. If you've met me, you know that mirrors are really interesting to me, the movement, the complete and subtle reversal, the duplication of light... If I were on a desert island, and I had a mirror to talk to, I would be pretty happy alone. And, ugh, people think it's tied to vanity but it's not. It's more of an interest in the unique meta awareness of a situation that you can glean quickly and effortlessly by checking it in a reflection. 1st person POV (visually, obviously) is very, very valuable, but there is another level of info available if there is a mirror, or a non-backlit window, or something.

I am kind of really over mirrors right now. We had 3 weeks to do 3 self portraits: One gestural, one contour, and a large tonal one. I stared at myself for. so. long. Probably 10 hours over the course of a week. By the time I got to the tonal one I was working from a photo for the rough shapes, which of course worked horribly as I then had a reversed image from what I can see in the mirror.
I am just happy and dreamy in this one. At in class evals everyone said I looked dreamy and childlike.*
We were required to do a 3/4 turn pose. Many of the 3/4 poses got called "glamor shots" when we did the critique, including mine. It is not supposed to look glamorous, but it is supposed to show off my tiny tooth, which I have on only one side.
The more I look at this the more I like it. It is honestly my 4th version. I liked it because I often use line in kind of a fluid, messy way to convey something, but in this I was really precise. Even my eyelashes are individually in the right places.

I did kind of enjoy working on these. Self portraits are interesting to do, and frustrating. I would have liked to do only closeups with the help of a magnifying mirror, but that was not the assignment.

Craft Swap

One of the neat things on the internet is Craftster.org. It is a website of neat arts and crafts that crafters make. There are tutorials, and people ask for feedback, and it is just fun. The funnest and most stressful thing is craft swaps. In a craft swap, 20 or so people say they want to swap, and then they are matched into 10 pairs, and they get a list of one anothers interests on a topic (harry potter, say, or france). I joined the She Blinded me With Science swap and was instantly outclassed in geekery. I found Look Around You (visit youtube, it is a joking british science lesson), water bears (omg. They are teeny tiny, and they look like bears/moles. Ask google. It is 6:19 (thanks, can of dr. pepper I drank at 9pm!) and I am too tired to open a new tab, type what it is, highlight the link, click the link button on blogger, and do it over for the other link.
Here is what I recieved in the swap (Another girl made these, and mailed them to me for me to love and use)
Giant Scarf--> the knitted emission spectrum of argon. Just. That is making me geek out. I can't believe I never thought of it, and I can't believe someone made a 12 foot long scarf for me.

yeah, I can rock a 12 foot long nerd scarf. Man. I kind of wish I could give these two pictures to my trying-too-hard-and-rather-failtastic 15 year old self. Like: "Hey, just hang on a bit and you'll have an art couch, a knitted emission spectrum of one of your favorite elements, your own apartment, and bangs. The uh, the bangs are because you need botox already. but you can still rock them." (Nick is 15 today, is why it is on my mind.)Dinosaur bones in sand strata preserved under resin. They are coasters. I coast, but I can't really say I coaster. Ah well, they're gorgeous and a use will suggest itself.

All right. Here is the complex bit: These things, below this sentence, are the things I made to send to my swap partner.
The pics are good bc she took them. Set of 4 notecards.
Hat of her favorite molecule (DNA is a molecule? I marvelled upon recieving her survey of interests. Out.Classed.)
And then (and these are pics I took) I made a PMC pendant.



I have a lot of freckles. Thank you, Panasonic Lumix DMC-LS70, I definitely wanted an extreme closeup of my sun damage, not a clear picture of my fine silver pendant.
It looks like this it is a radiologian or something. it is a plankton. it is real small. I am really tired of blogging all of a sudden

See, I'm not getting botox until bangs go out of style, which will be never. My forehead crease could at least be a little symmetrical.
I did a pendant of the middle one in the bottom row. They are all so gorgeous.

Art Lately

Here are some of my recent artworks for class. Today I found out I am so far getting a B+, which will be higher when I submit a few sketchbook exercises I missed. (There is no penalty for late work, and ugh, my copy of the book never arrived so I have to use the library copy, which I do like doing, but it requires planning and I messed up one day.) Then it will either go up or down based on whether my final project is higher quality or lower than the rest of my assignments. Also, we can do revisions to the assignments when we turn them in for the final portfolio. I plan to revise my enlargement drawing, and other than that I have revised 2 of mine- one the landscape pen and ink revision, and one that I ruined the white pigment by spraying it with fixative (which is only for black and grey media, it turns out).
I forget if I posted this. It is a bosch giraffe being investigated by bosch swine. It is on a background made of a cannibalized children's book. I tested my charcoal on one of the pages and it marked it, but after i assembled the collage i tried to sketch in charcoal, then in sepia stick, then in compressed charcoal, then in charcoal pencil, and it did not work at all. I could get the conte to show up but i only have colors, so i did red. That is why it did not show up very well.
This one is a surreal/distorted exterior. We could either use proportion perfectly, or do it entirely, entirely wrong. If you do little tweaks it will look accidental. That is really how the building looks, with the center bridge that looks essentially like in the picture. It is this crazy cement building that is like a fortress, with walls that slope back, and a funny little second story bridge entrance. (the other sides all have big proper entrances.) The bridge in the foreground is a distorted Oakes bridge, but IRL there is a bridge located in the area that is the background of this drawing. But, I do not know what it looks like, even though I walked all around it, because there are a lot of trees in the way. Here is a photo of a different side of the building. My batteries died before I took a picture of the view I drew.
Oh, figure drawing is weird. We have to look at someone naked, which normally I never do. I sometimes see people who are naked, and it is fine, but I do not look really hard at them and depict their curves calligraphically in 30 second studies, because that is not Gym Etiquette.
These are all of the same girl. But, okay, it is my least favorite medium, and I only got 30 seconds, and it is less than that really because it includes the time the model takes getting into the next pose, which is easily 3 seconds. When we walked around to see everyone's work, some of them were just awesome. How can people do that? Just: swish, tada! Our professor kept telling us economy of line. I think if I had greater control over the thickness of the line while using a calligraphy brush it would be better. I wonder if other people are using higher end brushes? I have one that cost around $3 but the shop had some for $24.
Then we ended with a 45 minute extended pose. (The model got a break. what a difficult job. I can barely hold still at all. She got right back into it perfectly as well, except some people thought she did not. Maybe her face moved? We all sketched in a circle and I drew her back, so that would not affect mine) It's amazing to me that I did these 2 pages in the same session. (The second one had to be a blend of charcoal and ink.) There's something a little too bendy about her right thigh, and I would have made her hand regular size except that ink is rather final, but this still actually looks like a human person.

Next up? Self portraits. Face, 3/4 face, and head/shoulders (extended tonal). I am really excited about my Face Contour one, it is an extreme close up of one eye. It is forbidden to work from photos but it was neccessary. I was really straining my eyes trying to make them open really far and also peer at something to one side (bc in the draft where i was staring at something right in front of my eye it looked very weird, like i was going to get a beetle on a pin stabbed into my eye. So I offset it, am looking sideways, and I switched the beetle for a sheep. And instead of on a pin it is in tweezers.*) I just took the picture and roughed the lines and then used peering at the mirror to get the details. My 3/4 face is so bad. I do not know how to look at the mirror and also have my head turned and also draw. But I showed the prof and told her I was thinking of scrapping it, and she told me to repair the nose and move the mouth up and it would look fine.

*Oh man. It is artisty to be edgy, yeah? But I can't do it. I initially was playing with the eye being close up because it is peering into a water cup with the other eye floating in, like dentures, but 1. that was not exactly the topic 2. that is so gross. So I did a thumbnail sketch of it with the eyeball replaced with a seahorse, and then both eyes replaced with seahorses, and then I replaced the water cup with an aquarium, and then I put the eyes back but made the one in the tank a spiny finned eye, and then I put it in the "does not respond to the prompt" file in my brain and let it go. Hm. Now I am moving it to the futuristic movie scene. How neat, a little bedside aquarium of brown, blue, violet eyes, swimming around lazily until the actor stirs, when they all vie for position at the top, and the actor sits up in bed, rubs her eye sockets, adds fresh saline solution to the tank, and plucks out some little gray eyes and puts them in. I have to write that down. (.... when I really want to remember something I write it on a piece of furniture. The blog just does not work like that.) I think I can do a version with translucent polymer clay and an aquarium with a filter. I am really, really taken with this.

Fridge

I have been on a bit of a boring minutiae blogging kick lately. My fingernails, all of the things I own and am inventorying, and now, thanks to this amazing photo collection about refrigerator contents- here are all of the things in my fridge.





It is a 3 student fridge, and we cleared out everything expired (mainly 6 old jars of pasta sauce) a few days ago.

Thinking about Numeracy

I am numerically literate.
Just something I am adding to my happiness list that I never thought of.

(I think I need a twitter so I can microblog, but I am not getting one.)

California Prisons

I have a research proposal paper due tommorow for Soc, and I want to write about prisons. Actually everything in the course is really interesting- eugenics, mixed race personal identity, public education, party politics, globalization, mass media- we haven't really talked about prisons so I don't know whether I can choose them as my topic. I will probably submit 2 proposals, one on a course theme and one on prisons.

Because this is really interesting. I have been making my way through the 10 article series at The Atlantic called the Prison-Industrial Complex.
"But the jails have no room, and the huge caseloads maintained by most probation officers often render probation meaningless. An ideal caseload is about twenty-five to fifty offenders; some probation officers in California today have a caseload of 3,000 offenders. More than half the state's offenders on probation will most likely serve their entire term without ever meeting or even speaking with a probation officer. Indeed, the only obligation many offenders on probation must now fulfill is mailing a postcard that gives their home address."

"Well, that doesn't sound too effective, but it also doesn't sound too oppressive" I thought. And then a few paragraphs later: "About half the California prisoners released on parole are illiterate." Well how do they send in a postcard, that is not really a fair requirement. I think the point Eric Schlossm is making is that they will have a terrible rate of adjusting to outside of prison life. I am going to investigate the meaning of illiterate. BRB.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illiteracy

maybe I should do a research paper on literacy, because that is fascinating (I love sociology, actually, I will have to take more courses.). Is it hard to learn to read as an adult, like it is said to be harder to learn a new language? I would be so frustrated by being illiterate. Not just because school would be a lot harder and I couldn't read blogs, that is not what I mean. I mean interpreting signs, and contracts, and leases, and how to manuals (by which I mean the internet), and yes, sending postcards. I am not sure what the definition of literacy the parole department thing is using, but the definition does not seem very open to interpretation.

But at the same time, they must mean something different, because that is impossible for half of people on probation to not be able to read and write.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_the_United_States

okay, I have to be productive and get everything ready for tommorow, and also eat something because it is 3pm, but just glancing at the data box on the right at the top of that wiki page, it days there is a 99% literacy rate. I mean, right? You go to school, they show you phonics (ergh!), make your parents sign off your reading log every night (which at least ensures you can do a signature :) ), the whole class has to read aloud very, very, very slowly, and it all sucks but then you can read. Although.... I must say that as I learned to read prior/independent of all that, I was not taught to read via such methods- it may well be impossible. And even if the people on probabtion we are talking about dropped out of school... you would have to drop out at the age of 8.

Here is more, from the Functional Illiteracy wiki page:

All over the U.S.A. 30 million (14% of adults) are unable to perform simple and everyday literacy activities. [1]

The National Center for Education Statistics provides more detail. Literacy is broken down into three parameters: prose, document, and quantitative literacy. Each parameter has four levels: below basic, basic, intermediate, and proficient. For prose literacy, for example, a below basic level of literacy means that a person can look at a short piece of text to get a small piece of uncomplicated information; while a person who is below basic in quantitative literacy would be able to do simple addition. In the US, 14% of the adult population is at the "below basic" level for prose literacy; 12% are at the "below basic" level for document literacy; and 22% are at that level for quantitative literacy. Only 13% of the population is proficient in these three areas—able to compare viewpoints in two editorials; interpret a table about blood pressure, age, and physical activity; or compute and compare the cost per ounce of food items.