Tindaisies

Left: Original drawing and Right: Pancake doll based on drawing

Harold Wideman

Harold is prototype number 2 in my pancake doll project. The first was Alice O’Grady.  Harold is the father in  The Widemans vs the Narrowsmiths (link this) story that I drew three years ago.

Harold went together easier than Alice.  Reasons for this include a rudimentary pattern was already made and a procedure had been established – and the Jeff Beck CD didn’t seem to hurt, either.  =D

Front

Back

The biggest change I made with Harold was opting to embroider his facial features (and the hairy chest) rather than using permanent marker.

I really like the effect of the outlining stitches, they seem more “definite” and appropriate for a sewn object. The lenses in his glasses are painted on the cloth with acrylic paint. I also elected to not sew the limbs at the elbows and knees because that seemed to stiffen them which was opposite to the effect I’d wished for.

The hair was sewn directly into the seam where the front of the head joins the back, exactly like Alice’s hair only much shorter.

Solomon Grundy

Where does the time go? Why does it seem the older we get, the faster time flies? The weeks zip by in a blink. I design a quarterly publication, three months pass by and before I know it, I am in meetings again.  I had my first meeting for the summer issue, today. As if that’s not enough, I’m staring at another approaching birthday in the upcoming week, in fact, I know a number of people whose birthdays are in April, but now I’m prattling – just practicing for my old age (which is how many quarterlies away)?

Solomon Grundy’s  entire life blows by in one short week.  The verse is  a 19th century nursery rhyme and each day represents the Seven Ages of Man. I admit, I like the Sesame Street version better:  poor Solomon Grundy washes a part of his left side each day and at the end of the week, only half of him is clean.

Solomon Grundy,
Born on a Monday,
Christened on Tuesday,
Married on Wednesday,
Took ill on Thursday,
Grew worse on Friday,
Died on Saturday,
Buried on Sunday.
That was the end
Of Solomon Grundy

This is my entry for this week’s Illustration Friday prompt “Fleeting”

So I’ve been down in the dumps lately. Well surprise surprise. Who isn’t??? When will winter go away?

Okay, I’ll admit that I also miss my job just a wee bit. I can’t help it. No matter what else is happening in my life right now, I loved my job! I worked for a biweekly newspaper that closed. I got to wear many hats there. What other newspaper is there where you’d get to make a word search, crossword and anagram puzzles for each issue?

There’s a cool little app on Facebook called MyBiorhythm. As long as you have your birth date listed, you can check to see your biorhythm charts and if your friends have their birth dates listed, you can check theirs also. Most people’s look something like this:

As you can see, they’re periodic sine waves. Much of the time they are staggered so if your intellectual cycle is bottoming out, maybe your emotional cycle might be climbing so you can count on being dim-witted but happy (which sometimes seems preferable anyway).

I swear that these days, my biorhythm charts should be looking like this:

You can dress her up but you can’t take her anywhere…
A witch by any other name would still be a witch…
A witch in sheep’s clothing…

I’ve got old sayings on the brain this morning. This is my *IF* entry for this week, “Camouflage”; I know it’s Thursday already but I thought better late than never (oops there’s another saying)

I miss participating in *IF*, so this is my Illustration Friday post: “Suit,” for this week.

This is a very quick, very silly cartoon I drew about a year ago.

When you’re a kid, you make sense of the world either by trying to figure it out for yourself, or by believing what wiser, older adults tell you…

When we were kids, my siblings and I thought those floaters you get in the front of your eyes came from eating too much cholesterol. Therefore, this drawing is a nod to all those childhood myths you either fabricated on your own, or a wives tale some well meaning adult told you.

So, here’s the story to go with the cartoon:

For anyone who came by here because they put “baked spaghetti casserole” into a search engine box, I am sorry I don’t have a recipe for you. Maybe one day I’ll even post one!

It appears that baked spaghetti casserole will never die.