Cimorene

Speaking (as I did yesterday) of calligraphy practice, here's a quote from The Talisman that's funny, but not because it's homoerotic.



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Final emphasis mine.

Lettered in modified Carolingian (or "Caroline") style in Diamine Jade Green with 1.1-mm oblique stub nib vintage Pelikan 400. Heading in Rotunda (aka southern european Textualis or gothic). Atribution in chancery cursive.

(Knowing Walter Scott's feelings about the famous flaws in medieval Catholic doctrine, I thought at first that this was deliberate. But it's highly unlikely, since The Talisman was published in 1825. That Austrian guy who noticed that deaths after giving birth were associated with doctors delivering after autopsies and famously got hounded out of medicine for advocating handwashing was not until 1847.)

And another calligraphy unrelated to germ theory or medicine:



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Top: Humanist majuscule+minuscule in Sailor Yuki-akari ink with Lamy Safari 1.1-mm stub nib.
Bottom: Chancery cursive in Diamine Jade Green with Pelikan 400 oblique stub nib.

💚 I mailed the first 4 post cards this morning! Sorry if a card with nothing on it but a quote from my list of favorite quotes seemed a little abrupt. I didn't have much room left after the quotes. I tried to start with an intro once and ran out of space for the quote. 😅 And bearing in mind that I periodically see someone ask who on their flist sent a card, they're all signed "Cim" or "Cimorene" for the sake of recognition.

💚 Turns out that getting very stressed and distracted by Anubis and Tristana's detente and forgetting to groom Rowan for nearly 20 days was bad. There were lots of incipient mats, which means when I finished with him Monday evening he had several conspicuous nearly-bald spots! (No painful ones though.) I already knew that every two weeks is manageable but really a bit too much. He hates being caught to groom him so I always feel bad, even though he enjoys it once you get going.

💚 The Feliway is here, but it can take quite a while before any effects are seen, so no news on effectivity. However, Tristana still growls a lot but she seems less scared and more annoyed and they've both taken to taunting each other through the various gates and bars. She seems genuinely annoyed and he seems to be having a great time, as if she were a young and earnest Twitter progressive and he were a troll. Even when she's free to do what she wants in 3 rooms with play structure, food, beds and people and bunnies to interact with, she'll choose to crawl into the little corner where she can see him rattling the bars on the other side just to growl at him.

💚 I finally have started a project I've been meaning to make for YEARS, an oversized thigh-length "grandpa" Aran cardigan (refers to the oversize fit and deep V neck) in black tweed with Saxon braid cables, inspired by this stranger's project (ravelry members only link). I picked my own source pattern and chose the yarn to match, only I didn't get gauge, even going down a whole mm in needle size; so I had to completely redo the math and also remake the charts from scratch. I've been in a cable haze for about five days.

See, I strongly believe that a sweater should have continuity in cables. It looks stupid to have one cable on the back and sleeves and then a different one on the front. The best Aran designs use multiple cables on front and back and then repeat some of these on the sleeves, but a lot of people (unwisely, IMO) make cardigan fronts without the main cable from the back because it was centered on the back, and two of it won't fit (including my inspiration garment up there). The very best Aran cardigans have a center back design that's split in half neatly down the front sides, but this only works with some motifs - you can't split the Saxon braid without cut edges. I can fit one on each side of the front, but I equally wanted the back design bigger, so I spent a long time trying to make a similar-looking 8- or 10-strand braid (the Saxon braid is a 6-strand braid variant), but I wasn't satisfied with any of them. I did get a 4-strand variant that looks quite nice, but ultimately, after ~10 hours with a pile of 8 highlighter colors and 12 pages of graph paper, decided to have the back braid flanked by two mirrored 3-strand braids instead. I will use a 4-strand braid on the sleeve, though, probably, instead of a Saxon braid.

I guess I underestimated how burnt out - or just physically tired? - I was after the last work practice because I'm still sleeping extra and I couldn't really face putting on Face to go inquire after managers who might accept my CV in person. One of the stores is a 2 minute walk from home, but it's like two hours' work to present myself in social interactions like that. I did take Tristana to be vaccinated yesterday, her second set. She barely complained on the trip and was fearless at the vet. We were in there for 17 minutes, counting paying and waiting, versus 30 minutes on the bus each way and probably another 20 outdoors of walking and waiting in the sunshine (it was about 7° C/45 F, but with bright sun at this season it was definitely a beautiful day even if it was a little chilly for my taste).

In addition to sleeping, I've done a bunch of reading and lettering - not really calligraphy - this week after I was glancing through my old sketchbook and found some letter studies and notes about how much I loved the lettering of Welsh poet and artist David Jones, who died in the 1970s. To quote Wikipedia, "He is also much admired for a genre that he invented later in life, which he termed "painted inscriptions". These drew on phrases and extracts from Welsh and Latin texts, and exert a continuing influence on calligraphers.[5]" These inscriptions, inspired by Roman British stonecarving and medieval lettering, are unquestionably my favorite lettering style I've ever seen:



I also admired the work of modern calligraphers whose work the Pinterest algorithm thought was 'related' to David Jones. Here are some of the things I've doodled... with weird shadows, because I can't get the networked printer-scanner to work again:

This is an absolutely ridiculous problem to be having, but I feel like I should have an icon that's appropriate for posting about Good Omens now, but because I've been desultorily practicing blackletter much more slowly than other styles of angled pen calligraphy but have been meaning to play around with the style of illuminated manuscripts for literally years and actually bought a gold acrylic ink and a cream laid paper (although in retrospect I obviously should have bought a vellum, which looks vaguely more appropriate although modern vellum is just a type of paper and can't actually be confused with the leather kind) with that in mind and then never even tried to use them for blackletter at all (let alone illumination)... my Unfinished Art Project Guilt has collided with the desire for a thematically harmonious icon, and I now have a strong feeling that I shouldn't pursue any other, easier ways to make an (even vaguely) relevant icon because that would be somehow adding insult to injury in the category of Hibernating Incomplete Art Project Ideas and the category of Actually Engaging in One's Hobbies Regularly.

I had an icon with a snake and an apple back in the day, but when I dug it out of the subdirectory, it didn't seem satisfactory anymore (possibly the snake just didn't have enough attitude), and with no other relevant candidates in my old retired icons, the field was left too wide open and hence the calligraphy idea was able to sneak in and set up a blockade. Though maybe I'll get another idea compelling enough to get around that... .

(I do have a ton of snake pictures saved somewhere from last winter when I decided to learn a lot more types of reptiles, but however much I like snakes and spiders, I always feel a little guilty about the idea of making icons of them because of the possibility that they'd unexpectedly trigger an unsuspecting viewer. I had a spider icon that I loved fifteen years ago or so and apparently that actually happened with it. waxjism, although she doesn't have a phobia and says that she likes them intellectually, has that involuntary 'brrr' reaction to pictures of snakes sometimes - not all the time, just if they look particularly slithery, apparently.)

Besides rediscovering a bunch of my old icons, I also uploaded quite a few new ones that I've just made this past week:

a couple of Marimekko prints by Theresa Moorhouse, ( Nanuk and Cheetah in pink; ) 4 of my own doodles ( of cats and myself and of an astronaut; ) a Reggianini painting and a vintage Pelikan ad ( for tea and fountain pen matters respectively; ) a random lizard and me-in-a-sweater ( that I was just Taken with; ) 5 of my haircut idol, ( 1960s Jean Seberg; ) 3 samples of my calligraphy practice, ( context not included; ) and 2 of Finnish sheep ( for matters relating to knitting, one of which also has the perfect :|-face. )

Dry watercolors that require loading the pen with a paintbrush are way too much trouble.

I've gotta buy some sepia ink I guess.