Paint

 Hello, everyone.

As happens from time to time, Ye Olde Homestead sprang a leak in the roof a little while back. The leak propagated to a ceiling below it and messed up the plasterboard.

We fixed the roof, of course, and the very amazing gentleman did tape and float work on the ceiling afterwards. We discovered that we had handed him the wrong paint can to do the final coat, so we decided to re-do the paint ourselves.

We put a little more thought into it this time. (Y'all will note the variety of paint chips taped to the ceiling.)

Then we picked another wrong shade! Sigh.

After that dried, we were looking at the various options and decided to mix the two shades half and half and try that. Success!

And that's what we've been up to lately.

If I get any of the Projects Half-Done finished, I will put them up on the blog soon. 

Israel pilgrimage, twelvth in series

Hello, everyone.

One minor note, the last post was a separate day from the prior one--the photo file dates corrected my memory. Oops!

The next day was quite busy, so the earliest visit of the day will have its own post.

We visited the church of the Nativity of Mary. As most of the holy sites, the actual architecture of the shrine is fairly new. (You may go back to the discussion of Gethsemane for a look at the kind of build-destruction-rebuild history that is common in the Holy Land. Not to mention the names, ahem, of any particular group that is all about destroying shrines that are older than their things. Ahem.)

Inside the upper church. (In background, another group at prayer.)

There is a staircase down into the grotto. The shrine custodians have helpfully placed a sign at the steps.

One of the images of the birth of Our Lady. St. Anna, top left, wiping her face after the labor is completed. St. Joachim, bottom, stewing outside and hoping all goes well for his aged wife.

This was the first time on this pilgrimage that I saw some handwork that I could photograph. (Much of the time the altar cloths were either not easily photographed or looked like they'd been done by machine embroidery.)

It looks like herringbone stitch filling on the lily and chain stitch for the monogram outline. This monogram would be the A-M for Ave Maria. The A legs are included in the M legs I think. The point on top, though, while it could be the echo of the lily, seems to me to certainly be the point of the A. The lily covers over all of the center parts of the monogram.

This looks like chain stitch used as filling for the IHS (Iesus Salvador Hominum, Jesus Savior of Mankind) and also for the cruciform outlines.

 This is not embroidery but a mosaic. I liked the way the fish and loaves and basket are made here. (The fish and loaves, being a reference to the miraculous feeding of the multitude, are a Eucharistic symbol.)

This is seen from a difficult angle. It appears to be a painted image on fabric, with pearls added, below the A-M monogram with a crown above, these either in couched-down metallic braid or actual braided goldwork stitching. The crown has a couple of gems added, too. A lovely image of the infant Mary.

This book on the pillow is likely the Gospels but it's not easy for me to tell. The image in the metalwork is of the Cross with Jesus crucified, and Mary and St John at the feet of the Cross. The pillow here matches one in a photo I didn't include, of a crown in a niche like the Infant Mary image above. This photo is included because of the lovely lace hanging from the altar. It might be hand crocheted, or might not, but it's lovely.

The story of the birth of the Virgin Mary isn't actually in the Gospel. It's in the contemporaneous works that are now lumped under the title of Apocrypha. It's a lovely story, which I heard once on a Great Courses set we listened to, but I don't recall it well enough to recap it here. I do remember that St. Anne and St. Joachim are the parents of the Blessed Virgin.

From Santillana del Mar to Comillas

Hello, everyone. The last post talked a little about the thirteenth day of walking. Today's post will go on from there--is it the fourteenth day of walking if it begins two mornings after arriving in Santillana? I can't remember any more if I counted days when we rested in Bilbao.

First, a picture of the little map the ladies at the Turismo gave us.

The top right is where the Camino path enters the village on a tiny road. The village is a very popular spot to visit, and especially on weekends and holidays many local folks drive over to visit the picturesque village and also the museum about Altamira Cavern.

When we walked on, we returned to a more coastal area. We also entered the area that many people had emigrated to Latin America from, and some of them made their fortunes there and then returned to their home towns and villages. They were nicknamed Indianos after they returned, all of this being in the late 19th century I believe, and they had a distinctive style of building.

This church showed two of the very common marks of the Indiano building style: the painted walls of the building, with the gingerbread accents, and the palm tree. It is said that the Indianos, when they returned to their homes, planted palms to remember their years in the Americas. Regarding the paint, most of the Indiano painted buildings that we saw had brighter paint colors than this. Red-orange was popular.

 In Ruiloba, we saw another style of very painted building. These folks have painted murals on both of the street facing sides of their place.

At the end of the day, waiting on the front patio--or sidewalk--of the Comillas old jail for the hospitalera to return and open for pilgrims, we saw some people working (painting? cleaning?) on an old house. I want to call it an old Victorian type house. They have brought in the power lift and the men on the basket are probably 40 or 50 feet up. The sight reminded us of the time we rented the Genie TZ50 for house painting of our own.

So I tried another Pinterest idea

Hello, everyone.

It's been purging season around here. (For non-US readers, purging means throwing away a lot of stuff.)  And purging includes trying to pretty up a bathroom.

This also counts as stash usage! The tray was lying around the house, and the cotton ball cup and toothbrush holder were already there, but not well displayed.

The swab-jar used to hold olives. I used a bit of steel wool to roughen up the paint on the lid and applied two coats of gold spray paint. The knob was floating around in my toolbox.

It really holds the swabs nicely, don't you think?

A photo from our last day of walking on this year's pilgrimage

Hello, everyone.

Things have been busy around here--not in an interesting way, just busy--and there just hasn't been much time for the blog this week.

This photo was taken, after DH injured his leg, at the parish church in Deba:

The only thing that was done to this photo was to use the color correction thingie in Photoshop...the medieval carvings are all inside the narthex (covered entryway) of the church and there is just a whole lot of color left on the stone.

I think you're supposed to read it from the bottom up: bottom row, from the left, the Annunciation with an angel, the Visitation, the Nativity, the Presentation in the Temple (these four are all part of the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary) and at the right the homage of the Wise Men. Middle row, from the right, the Dormition of Mary (when she died, or "fell asleep" in the term of St. Paul in his epistles) and apparently the whole rest of the row is about the Assumption of Mary, with the heavenly court as witnesses (?) The top is the Coronation of Mary, with the Holy Trinity represented (Jesus and the Father on thrones and the Dove of the Holy Spirit placing the crown) and accompanying angels. These last two are part of the Glorious Mysteries of the Rosary.

The figures next to the flat portion appear to be the heavenly orchestra with instruments. Outward from that, a floral row (the red part) and some other figures that I don't know.

We noticed that it was really neat when we saw it, but the distraction of the injury kept us from seeing just how neat it is until we looked back at pictures later. I have noticed that a lot of the Camino pictures have more in them than we realized when we took them--one benefit of using them for computer screen background!

Small Tree (Egg Ornaments)

Hello, everyone.

As Thanksgiving is over, and the refrigerator is slowly approaching normal (from total overload!) levels, we've begun getting Christmas things down and the decorating is slowly getting going.

The small tree is up. Next to the polyclay ribbon candy ornament is a little ceramic ornament left over from when I would give gifts to my CCD students every year. It has a painting of the Holy Family on the front. On the other side of the ribbon candy ornament is one of the ones made during the mad tassel phase: embroidery floss makes lovely tassels that are just the right size for hanging from egg shells.

One practical note: with the fake trees, the top is too floppy to hold up a tree topper of any normal kind. I had to add a stiffener to it in order to get the star to stay upright. The stiffener is wired onto the tree with green pipe cleaners and is pretty much a permanent item. Then when decorating the tree, I put the last of the white mini-bulbs up at the very tip so the star would be lit from within.

Another practical note: the small tree looks much bigger because it's on top of the coffee table. I put a table cloth over the table to protect the surface from scratching by the tree stand. This also hides at least some of the extension cord clutter.

Almost all of the eggs made it onto this one.

Some years past, when MIL would come down for several weeks at Christmas time, we would have a large tree in the living room, a 3-foot tree on top of the buffet in the dining room, and this tree in the upstairs hall. That was when there were helpers still living at home with us, of course. Now we're cutting back on the over-the-top decorations. This year I decided to put the upstairs tree in the room with the piano. (The buffet was retired to the Salvation Army with the over-large table and chairs that matched it. They weren't heirlooms or anything like that. We just felt like we were crowded out of our place a bit.) The 3-foot tree was outside in the Man Cave shelving over summer a couple of years ago and a mouse moved into it and chewed up the whole thing, so that one is gone. That left only two places to put all the egg ornaments that have been made over the years--and this tree is in better proportion for the smaller items.

The trick with eggs is to use your handy corsage pin to break up the yolk before you blow it out the holes that you carefully drilled with your Dremel. (Or chipped patiently open with the said pin and a starting hole made with the point of a sharp knife--less mess on the tools, but more eggshell breakage!) On the side, there was so much eggshell cutting going on at one point that DH got tired of finding egg white on his things and got me one of my own!

One nifty thing to do with an egg shell is to cut a slice in the shell while the egg is still inside, allowing the cleaned shell to be used to display a tiny angel or other scenic element. My grandmother's friend Mrs. Beckley was an expert at this and even made an egg shell with a tiny skating scene once. She sent us each an ornament, back when I was a child, and I still have mine.

The Beckley egg

She used graduated pearl beads and velvet cording around the opening of the egg, along with the golden fringe. There is even a bit of frou-frou on the back of the egg! She was an amazing egg artist.

(This photo taken before we stopped buying a fresh tree every year--now, sadly, we have fake. The expense of the extremely large fresh floral item over two or three years was the same as the cost of a nice fake tree which lasts for five years or more. And let's not talk about the problem of keeping smelly mold from growing in a water-filled tree stand for several weeks!)

When making Christmas eggs, I find that painting the washed and dried egg shell with gesso covers over the slight texture of the natural shell and makes it stronger. Then the shell can be perched on a bamboo skewer--one that you don't intend to re-use for food--and spray painted. That will give a smooth, shiny surface for further decorating. (Link goes to a really huge container of the stuff. My gesso is in about a 2 ounce bottle! And if you're only painting egg shells it goes a long way.)

The children and I would have "Christmas in July" over the summer holidays and make egg ornaments. They would paint words or even little scenes on the shells. They never broke an egg shell, either--they were all old enough for elementary school by then. (For younger children, I'd stick with popsicle stick crafts. There is only so much manual dexterity available before about age 8!)

Model paint works really well for painting words and tiny scenes, but requires mineral spirits for clean up. The tiny brushes sold in the model department are wonderful for the work.

Acrylic paint works well also, and is very easy to clean up, but after the paint is all dry the shell must be sprayed with sealer before any lacquer coat is added. Otherwise the carefully painted flowers or whatever will run. The tiny brushes can still be used, or one can go with a more elaborate floral kind of decoration.

Acrylic paint is also more generally available (in scads of colors) even if there is no hobby store in the area. Wal-Mart has it, Hobby Lobby and Michaels and JoAnn all have it, and if one gets into elaborate shading and such there are even blenders and extenders to give more working time. The gesso is also sold in little plastic bottles in the acrylic craft paints section of stores.