Below is a great map for Valentine’s Day. It’s by Betsy Dorman.
I got a note from Kit Eastman the other day. She wanted to show me her 2011 lunar calendar (to the left), a gelatin plate print made with katazome (japanese stenciling). She wrote her “use of Tyvek as a stencil material for the numbers and letters on my piece started with a post you made several years ago on tyvek as stencil.” On her blog, she’s got a post showing the stencil and printing it (there are 2 other posts on the process of making the print here and here.)
Kit’s blog is full of great pictures and descriptions of making her work. To find out the basics of katazome, she suggests looking at the how to page on John Marshall’s website.
Kit is giving away one of her lunar prints, the deadline to enter is noon on Valentine’s day, Monday 2/14. Look here for the details.
Hasegawa Yosuke folds currency into little portraits with hats. Looks like he tries to match the hat to the currency’s country. And he calls it “moneygami.” For those with an iphone, there’s an app that has folding instructions and a video. (I’m jealous because I can’t check it out, as we don’t get AT&T reception where I live, so I had to give up my iphone.)
As a kid, every summer my family spent a week or so at my grandmother’s house. Then these visits only struck me as boring, but now I have very distinct memories — the smell of my grandmother’s hand cream, the pattern on the breakfast juice glasses, the special lunches with laughing cow cheese — but mostly the movies we watched. Despite a time when there were only 3 TV channels and no DVD or VCR, my father (probably suffering much more from the boredom than us kids) herded us into the living room to distract us with the Marx Bros or Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Much later, living in Palo Alto, CA, my sister and I saw Top Hat on a big screen (at the Stanford Theatre) and for the first time I could really see the feathers fly off Ginger’s dress. And now, much much later, I have a boxed set of Astaire/Roger movies on DVD — the perfect distraction when I should be doing some onerous chore.
A couple of weeks ago, I read about the reissue of dance critic Arlene Croce’s book The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book. (The mention was in the New Yorker, and the article isn’t online to non-subscribers, but see the New Yorker blog for some more info.) The article, by Joan Acocella, says the book “anatomized the dance routines … plus, it contained two flip books, including what is possibly the couple’s greatest number, ‘Let Yourself Go’ from ‘Follow the Fleet.'” Intrigued, I bought a copy. There are two flip books, both in the upper corner of the pages of the book. Flip forward, and you see “The Waltz in Swing Time” from “Swing Time.” Flip backward and you get “Let Yourself Go.” This week I’ve been very happily reading and watching…
Elsa Mora makes, among other things, minature artist’s books. There’s a couple of examples below. They are all very sweet and I especially appreciate the detail and care she’s put into them, from the structures themselves to the finishing boxes and ribbon wrappings.
![]() Winter Trees All the complicated details |