Arts and Crafts Sunday

 For a while, I've been thinking about ways that I might convert an Altoids tin into a kind of reliquary or shrine or portable diptych.  Serendipitously, when I last visited my folks, I discovered my Mom had about five hundred of the things -- she gladly donated five to me (my Dad was probably sorry that she donated only five...).

 I did some Internet research on portable altars, and lots of folks sand down and use paint stripper to prep their tins for a repaint job.  I suppose I should see if anyone pounds out the embossed "Altoids" legend, but so far folks have just dealt with the paint -- except for the one woman who encased her tin in Sculpey clay.

 Since I wasn't planning on taking my piece anywhere particularly wet, I opted for a paper liner on the inside.  For extra credit, I could maybe papier-mâché the lid, but this was more of a concept piece than anything.

The most fussy steps were figuring out the sizes of the lid and the box, which are a tenth of an inch different, so I could cut out a paper liner for them.  The compass came in very handy crafting the curved corners.  In theory, now that I have the measurements, I could use InkScape to cut out the two liner papers... I do wonder, however, how much fiddling I'd have to do have the measurements accurately come out on the Silhouette plotter-cutter.  That's another project...

 I figured I do a moon on the lid, and cut out a dark sky liner.  It felt a little pedestrian, but looking through various scrap paper shapes I had left over from previous paper art projects, it seemed obligatory that the sun be on the other side.

 The proportions of the shapes were in scale.  I wasn't sure what to do with the sun, which seemed a little lonely.  So I added some hills.  Bending strips of curve-cut green paper gave the hills some dimensionality.

So I gave the moon some hills, too.  The trickiest part was placing the sun and the moon to avoid a pareidolic face. 

At first I felt "terribly arty," and absurdly pleased with my own cleverness.  And then I realized this particular Altoids Diptych is dangerously close to Country Cute.

Oh well.

What works best in this particular example is the way the hills pop out of the box and are on both sides of the hinge.  Some other things I might try to add different levels would be making some Mucha-esque arches (the kind adorned with a frame of circles) in front of a Sarah Bernhardt figure.  In some of the Internet examples, folks had strung small beads or charms along the inside; it might be fun to try to work in an LED.   And if I were feeling intensely clever, I might figure out how construct and install a pop-up sundial...

More Jersey Shore

Monday, July 31

I woke up at 6 AM EST and crept around the kitchen to boil water for tea.  Then I wrote... kind of.   Mostly I wrote journal entries and edited them a bit to polish the prose and add Fosterian WHYs to the already existing WHATs.  I figure any writing is better than no writing, and if I can get into the swing of writing blog entries in a different time zone, I can transition into some early morning short story writing.

We went to the beach.  This time I brought along my newly-constructed shish-kabob compass, my Book of Art (with decagram design) and water shoes (because I'd sun-burnt the tops of my feet the previous day).

The difficulty with making geometric designs in the sand with a compass is that sometimes you want a straight edge.  The stakes I had were fairly good for a cobbled-together compass, but they were too bendy to use as a straight edge.  I settled on using a yard-stick, but there were none to be found in any of the small shops near the house.

After swimming in the Atlantic, I tried to make some constructions, but the tide was too high.

As I was swimming for a second time, a young man waded up and said, "Hi John!"  I thought for a moment it was someone I knew from Carleton College, but it was Connor, Mark's nephew.

"Ah!" I said, "I didn't recognize your red hair (it was longer and redder).  You've got a beard!"

"You've cut your hair," he said.

Mark swam up.  "You've finally grown a proper Kringle Beard!"

Pictures in the Sand

When I started taking these pictures, I was mostly playing around with circles in the sand.  I'd wanted to draw some straight lines, but I didn't have a good straight edge with me.

I thought I might be able to use yarn, but the wind was so strong it blew the yarn ball halfway down the beach and pulled any exposed strand into a catenary arch.  When I saw how the string's shadow could be a straight line, I tried to play with it.

Something about the conjunction of a compass, circles in the sand, shadows, string and my hand spoke to me -- I had accidentally bumped into a Greek myth with Daedalus, Ariadne and the Labyrinth.  Finding the right configuration of images became very important.

And then the sun started to set, and clouds diffused the light and I lost the shadow of the string.

If I were doing this again, I would have wanted to photograph someone else's hands, or maybe have someone photograph me because I had difficulties holding the string, holding the camera, looking through the camera, getting the strings shadow right, getting the design in the shot, keeping the camera lens cap or the camera strap from fluttering into the photo, working the rock into the design, keeping the compass in the shot, and not stepping all over the design in the sand.  All the time fighting to keep melancholy songs from Sting's The Soul Cages out of my head by singing quasi-mystic songs from We Three.

To me, the photos are trying to balance the themes of, finding one's place, finding one's way, impermanence and mortality, and the interplay between perception and point-of-view.  And I really wanted a strong image that was a self-portrait without showing my face.

But... in the end, I ended up taking a photo of myself anyway.


The whole set is here:  https://plus.google.com/photos/104081709962934753879/albums/5996810111042716385

1840 Nautical Instruments

 I was going through photos and found some of nautical instruments used at Fort Vancouver.  This first one is a sextant.  It used the position of the sun to figure out a ship's location.  I'm unsure if the user squinted at the sun through this, or if the sun's reflection was used (which would have been easier on a sailor's eyes).

I wished that I could have picked it up, but it was secured in the box.

The last photo is of a gimbaled compass.  The box sits on a table on a ship.  The ring has an axis running through the box.  A second axis, at right angles to the first one, runs through the compass.  The compass is bottom-heavy, and by having two independent, orthogonal axes, the compass is able to remain steady while the boat pitches and yaws on a body of water.

Now, of course, I can't remember if ships were getting to Fort Vancouver by sailing around the tip of Africa and heading east, or if they sailed around South America, or both.