While the paint dries....

[gurdymonkey]

Woke up this morning to the twang of my left knee singing, "Get up, get me an Advil and throw those stupid Payless shoes in recycling, you twit." A few times up and down the stairs and it seems OK, but it just confirms I was smart to cut last night short.

I cut out the small overlay stencils for the Tosenin kosode.  Well, I cut out three of them which took two hours, at which point my index finger was feeling stressed from pressing an X-acto knife through zillions of tiny cuts The top two have all the white space cut out and will look gold with brown lines once stencilled. The black is cut out of the wave one, which will be brown with gold waves. The bottom left one was more trouble than it was worth and I think I'm just going to freehand spirals with a fine brush instead.

I took a break and picked up a couple of Japanese design books at Lacis in Berkeley. This all started yesterday because there's a new guy on the Japanese Yahoogroup who asked if  "Designer's Guide To Samurai Patterns" was any good for making clothes. I googled the title, discovered a description on Lacis' website that pretty much told me it was design motifs, not clothing patterns. So, I figured I'd check it out. It was cheap, so was "Designer's Guide to Japanese Patterns 3" so I grabbed 'em. I hit the grocery store to pick up a few things, including a sashimi platter which I'm going to bust into pretty soon.

Then I came back here and opened up my jar of gold paint....

Right now I have almost all of the back panels stencilled with the base lozenge pattern and am waiting for it to dry enough to shift the fabric on the table and do a bit more while there's enough light up here in my garret. It's been overcast most of the day and not as bright as it usually is. I'll have to stop soon - I don't have a decent work light up here.  

There's this desire to rush - and the knowledge that I have to go VERY slowly because these designs are more intricate and more delicate than anything I've tried stencilling before.

Comments

[kass-rants.livejournal.com]

Good music choice! ;)

Did I ever tell you that the first time I saw the Mikado, it was in Osaka. It was hysterically funny especially for being one of the only English-speakers in the room.

Congratulations on your project. Just remember -- haste never makes it better.

[gurdymonkey.livejournal.com]

I've never actually seen it in performance, but we had some sort of Best of G&S highlights thing on vinyl that I grew up with when I was a kid. Between rediscovering it via "Topsy Turvy" and the fact that PEERS is doing a Mikado/Topsy Turvy ball Labor Day weekend, I finally acquired a CD of the whole thing. In between giggling at the lyrics and rolling my eyes at the that's-just-wrongness of so much of it, the music is really finely crafted. BTW, I think the time has come for staging "Three Little Maids" as a naginata kata. Or perhaps kendo.

And yes - I virtuously went and cleaned my brushes as the light was starting to be less than optimum. I will do more tomorrow. Slowly.