Cactus with Water Drop

Handheld, macro extension tube.

A belated birthday present from Devra. Thanks! The little chicken stuck in the pot was also cute but not quite as photogenic for a macro shot.  Somewhat splintery.

Mobile Tefillin Intensive Care Unit

Only in Israel.

You know the story. It’s time to have your mezuzot checked and you’re just too busy to take them to your local sofer (scribe). Fortunately, there’s a solution! Wait for the mobile tefillin intensive care unit to come to you.

This guy parks  his van outside synagogues, posts a huge sign announcing that he checks and sells mezuzot and tefillin, and waits for the men coming out of the morning service. The back of his van looks like a travelling hardware store.

I love the signs on the front of the van. The one on the right side  is a take-off on signs one sees on ambulances  (“Mobile intensive care unit for tefillin and mezuzot”). The sign on the left says “G-d’s Security Vehicle” (I presume the cellphone number is his local number).

Sky Streaks

Handheld, polarizing filter.

I got this shot when I came in to work this morning. It was a “good cloud” day in Jerusalem. It was a good thing I took the photo before I checked my email. Work was insane.

Pastry Mixed by Hand?

Is this for real? No knives, no pastry blender, no careful tossing of crumbs with drops of water? I have to check this out. I am the world’s worst pastry maker. Unless I use a food processor, my pie crusts could be mistaken for disposable aluminum pie plates. But, hey, I own a dough scraper and I even have a cold counter. The results couldn’t be worse than my normal pie crust, right?

The Kichn Blog has a few comments on fine-tuning this technique and mentions that Ruhrman’s book, Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking, uses the proportions 3-2-1 (flour – fat – water) for pastry. I’m going to engrave that information somewhere handy, like my tiled backsplash. I really prefer using weights to volume measurement for cooking.

White Lilies Update

I’ve still got a cold. This is a good day for dragging out a mindless project, my never-ending White Lilies from Golden Kite. This pattern, which I won in a trivia contest when I belonged to a cross-stitching list, is a “mini” version of one of their larger designs. It is 90 stitches wide, 130 stitches high, and has 98 colours and blends. Yes, 98. It requires quite a good system of floss organization. DMC floss on 18-count Aida.

I thought it would be a fairly quick project, but often weeks go by when I don’t look at it. I’m finding that it’s much faster to work now because the colours are paler and the watercolour original is a wash. The detailed areas with the flowers required a lot of confetti (isolated stitches of a single colour) stitches. This was before I’d figured out how to work them by starting the thread in the square to be stitched and ending it in an adjacent square where it would be covered by a different colour.

When I finish this piece, the next one in the queue is Lady and the Unicorn: Sense of Hearing. I chose the smaller version (318 x 410, 133 colours) so that I would have a chance of finishing it in this lifetime. It’s a good thing I like red.

• Pin stitch tutorial, parts 1 and 2

Book Review: Melichson, Art of Paper Cutting

Henya Melichson, The Art of Paper Cutting (Quarry Books, 2009)

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Henya Melichson brings years of art experience to her book on paper-cutting, recently published by Quarry Books. Her background in painting and drawing is evident in her detailed, almost three-dimensional, quality of her paper cuttings. In fact, she likens paper cutting to drawing with a knife.

Born in Tel Aviv in 1953, Melichson worked in oils, aquarelles, and sketching until 1984, when she turned almost exclusively to paper cutting. She is a member of the Guild of American Paper Cutters.

Her book begins with general instructions for paper cutting. The body of the book is an extensive  selection of paper cuttings that she has made over the years. They are stunning. Her style ranges from classical to folkloric to art deco, with many cuttings devoted to Jewish themes. These photos provide a sense of her intricate and versatile style. (Note: if you want to see higher resolution versions, click the photos to go to the Flickr page. Click “All sizes” to see a larger size.)

I think my favourite is this paper cutting of a woman in a window overlooking a garden (below). The alternating positive and negative borders around the window are striking and unusual. The woman’s face is rendered in a 3/4 pose, much more common in painting and drawing than in paper cutting.

Jerusalem is a perennial favourite among Jewish paper cutters. Here, the feathers of the doves surrounding the city of Jerusalem are in the spiky style of Polish paper cutting. Melichson’s more  elaborate cuttings are often accompanied by details with notes.

In the lower right corner, she shows layers of bricks cut in positive. If you look at the buildings on the left page, you can see bricks in the negative. The juxtaposition of positive and negative creates different values of shadow, a subtle means of conveying depth in a flat medium.

The heart with animals (below) is a common paper-cutting motif in Europe, especially Switzerland. The tip on the facing page is to draw the “hidden” animals before the foliage.

If you want to see an extraordinary use of positive/negative, see how the vines cross the cherubs’ bodies at the bottom of the composition.  It’s almost subliminal.

Now look at the top of the trunk of the heart-shaped tree. The positive and negative elements are so evenly balanced so that you can’t tell where the trunk ends and foliage begins.

The book concludes with a section of templates for simpler projects.

In all fairness, I should point that this book will not teach you to make paper cuttings like hers. The templates are, however, suitable for a beginner. If you have never attempted paper cutting before, this is something to bear in mind before you rush out and buy the book. If you already have paper-cutting experience or are an ambitious beginner, keep reading.

Most of the patterns in the main part of the book could well have the following directions:

1. Fold paper in half.
2. Draw insanely intricate drawing.
3. Cut.

In all fairness, most of her paper cuttings are too large to allow the inclusion of templates in a small format book. She would have to put them on a CD. Besides, the goal of a good how-to book is to inspire you to branch out in your  own directions, not to copy the work of the master. Her patterns are not patterns in the conventional sense. The value of her book lies in where it takes you after you’ve mastered the basics.

The Art of Paper Cutting fills an important gap in the available books on the subject, most of which teach the craft at an extremely basic level. Stewart Walton’s Craft Workshop: Paper Cutting is a representative example. Walton provides templates for a range of projects that are generally not too difficult. After you have  mastered greeting cards, shelf edgings, and a few bookmarks, what’s next? There are almost no books for the intermediate level of this craft.

If you have some paper-cutting experience under your belt already, study Melichson’s treatment of hair, facial features, architectural details, and perspective.  Her background in painting and drawing distinguishes her paper cuttings from most other artists’ work.

This book reinforces a notion I have long suspected: If you want to take your paper-cutting skills to the next level, you have to develop your sketching and drafting skills. Cutting paper is not a difficult skill to master, provided you have adequate coordination, eyesight, and a supply of fresh blades. The real test of skill lies in designing a balanced and effective composition. Melichson’s short section on negative and positive design in paper cutting is one of the few discussions of the problem of portraying three-dimensions in this most uncompromisingly two-dimensional  of crafts. She succeeds in creating a world of perspective, light, and texture, with tiny holes in paper.

I will leave you with one tip: tracing templates is tedious and inaccurate. It’s much easier to photocopy or scan and print the template on white paper and staple it (through areas that will be cut out, obviously) to your cutting paper. The stapled areas must be cut  last to ensure that the layers do not slip.

Finished Yoga Mat Bag

I’m home sick today. Not swine flu but definitely something. I had some soup, crawled into bed for a few hours, emerged, and worked the final stitches of my yoga mat bag. Of course, it’s doubtful that I’ll be well enough to go to yoga class tonight! But at least the bag is finished and even the leaf points are tacked down. You may wonder, why Irish crochet? It started out as a plain mesh stitch and I thought it resembled a plain Irish crochet ground. So I added a few traditional flowers and leaves, then some tendrils (Bosnian crochet, tacked down with a running stitch).

Here’s the finished mat:

Close-up of one of the rose and leaf clusters:

Drawstring closure (tie in Bosnian crochet — chain 1 row, slipstitch 2nd row) and loop securing carrying strap. As I posted earlier, the carrying strap is looped around the circumference of the mat for added support and the end is sewn into a loop so that the strap fits tightly while the bag is being carried:

Fricassee of Food Critic

I’m addicted to restaurant reviews. I think I’ve discovered an antidote.

The Jerusalem Post’s restaurant reviews have been going downhill for a while. The newspaper has no budget for reviews. In this country, a review is written exchange for a free meal from the restaurant. When the JPost started hiring college kids to write the reviews, the food section started sounding like a campus rag, heavy on the beer, hamburgers, and pretense. Lately the writing standards have slipped even lower.

Review of Toto in Billboard, Nov. 6, 2009:

Should have expected but nice to be caught off guard and very tasty. [I presume the reviewer is the subject of this sentence. Was he on the menu?] The veggie medley was sufficient but mundane and the mustard seemed out of place, though did suit the meat.

Gack.

We started with the Catalonian gazpacho … which was both tasty and spicy, an all-too-unique combination when dining.

Could this be the explanation?

We started with a glass of the 2008 Vitkin Riesling (40 NIS)… I had the Flam Sauvignan Blan/Chardonnay (NIS 35)…. I also had a martini cocktail (NIS 60).

But the cubed pineapple with yogurt ice cream [huh?] and a coconut twill [?] with mango sauce, cubed mango and raisins, which we took off the specials menu, was spectacular. We accompanied this final course with a round of grappas and finished with two short espressos.

The JPost should consider re-assigning this writer to the bar and pub circuit. His talents are wasted on mere food. If you’re a glutton for punishment and wish to read the entire review, the on-line version should be available for a little while.

Tonight is a good night to crack open M.F.K. Fisher’s The Art of Eating again. That woman could write.

Basket-Weaving Class at the Belly-Dancing Studio 3

Finished Egg Basket

Last night we finished the egg baskets that we started in the second class. In the end I was happier with my basket than last week. I still have to wet it, shape the bottom, and burn the “threads” off the reeds.

New Basket Started

We began a new basket with wider reeds, building just the base. An example appears in this photograph. Although the basket looks round, it actually has a square base.

First we wove a square, with filler reeds between the reeds that will form the upright supports. The filler reeds are only used to space the support reeds so that they will be far enough apart when we weave the walls of the basket. They’re cut off close to the base, split up the middle, and each end is inserted under a weaving reed. Such an elegant finish!

Afterwards the ends of the support reeds were stabilized by twining a round weave around the base perimeter. This photo shows a few of the bases (carrying one home on a bus wasn’t a lot of fun, even with the support reeds tied into bundles). Mine is in the foreground. Tamar chose similar colours (to the right of mine), except that she used white filler strips where I used dark brown.

• First basket-weaving class
• Second basket-weaving class

Looking up

Yesterday was a “good cloud” day, something we don’t see very often in the desert.

I took this photo when I stepped out to get some cash from the machine. I used a polarizing filter.

Clouds flying south for the winter

I was a bit late for the sunset photo because my window faces east, not west. One person emailed me about the sunset and another person called me. The caller claims that his view of the sunset was more spectacular than what I captured in my photograph, so I was probably late. Also, it’s hard to capture with a camera what someone else sees. Colour and light are very subjective. With a wide-angle lens, one gets too much of the boring parts of the sky. Using the telephoto zoom, which is what I used for this shot, cuts out a lot of the interesting bits at the edges. What can I say — cameras just aren’t the same as the human eye! Getting a sunset at all in this part of the world is a challenge, unless one lives near the coast and the season is right.

Sunset

I have another basket-weaving class tonight. At least I should be able to post a shot of my finished basket tomorrow morning.