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I haven’t posted for a while, and since Jeremy comes home for the summer tonight, I thought I should write something quickly. I did take some photos of knitting projects, but they are out of date already, so I’ll just say in passing that the Polka Purl Dot tank is complete except for belt straps and blocking, and my dad’s vest is making good progress, almost to the armholes on the front.

Weekend Update
The past few weekends have been much more action-packed than I’ve been used to of late. Last weekend I went out for a long trek around town: I finally visited the public library, explored a bit downtown Salem and saw an old steam engine train by Riverfront Park, and then wandered around Saturday Market and bought some plants.

This past weekend, I went to a small Sheep to Shawl Festival at Mission Mill Museum, and got to meet sheep, goats, llamas, alpacas, and an angora bunny that made me miss Baron Von Fluff. I watched a sheep being sheared, and saw a whole bunch of people spinning yarn, but exercised a great deal of restraint and bought nothing. On Saturday evening I walked to the Reed Opera House downtown, in the pouring rain, hoping to go see a play through the Salem Repertory Theater. It turned out that show and all the remaining ones were sold out, but by hanging around, I managed to get ahold of a Sunday evening ticket via cancellation, so the next day I walked back downtown in much nicer weather.

The play is “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged),” and I saw it performed once before, in my senior year of high school in Denver. I remembered it as being the funniest play I have ever seen, and it didn’t disappoint the second time around. It is put on by only three actors, at a frantic pace, as you might imagine: dressing up in one costume after another, condensing and combining 37 plays. The play does have a set script—I remembered the history play football game, the 14-in-1 comedy, the Othello rap, and the Titus Andronicus cooking show—but the actors clearly had a lot of room for improvisation as well, making comments relevant to Salem and tying in current pop culture and news references. They even mentioned the Desperate Housewives finale, which was airing during the performance. The second half of the play is entirely devoted to Hamlet: fast, faster, fastest (they all immediately fall down dead), and even backwards. The actors did a fantastic, frenetic job, and it is a play I would highly recommend to anyone who has the opportunity to see it—I only wish Jeremy had been able to come home before its run ended here.

Sunday was spent with Tara and Loren at the local, er, excuse me, The American Museum of Natural History, a truly monumental five-floor building with ties to Teddy Rosevelt. We spent over five hours at the museum, but much like at the Met, that is only enough time to see a minority of what is housed there. We timed the event to catch the tail-end of a butterfly exhibition and the start of a new dinosaur exhibit.

This was the last weekend of a butterfly conservatory exhibit. Like an aviary, it was the sort with two sets of double doors leading into a walkthrough room filled with tropical plants, 80-degree weather and dozens of (mostly tropical) butterflies and moths.

Would I were a closet lepidopterist—I’d be able to tell you a great deal about these particular lepidopteras, but alas, even the handout I got from the museum fails me. Apologies for the lack of info; if anyone out there has a name, please add it to the comments.

This one is also not listed in the handout, but I overheard the staff talking about them. Apparently these are the largest moths known to man—well, not these particular individuals, but the species. The heroic Atlas Moth.

The American Museum of Natural History has an extensive set of dioramas, displaying animals from all over the globe. We only made it to a portion of the African exhibit, but even that was a giant room with 20-some displays. I thought it was impressive to see four heavy-cavalry knights in the middle of the Met, but that is nothing to seeing a dozen life-sized elephants taking up the center of the room (told you it was a big room).

All of the classic safari wildlife was represented in force; frequently they had whole familial groups of each species. Here are a couple of shots of the lions. You’ll perhaps notice, as I did, that the taxidermy seems quite exceptional. Well, the reason is that it isn’t exactly taxidermy. I learned that they created scale clay models using field measurements which were then cast. After that, the animals were skinned and the skins streched over the models. Please bear in mind that all of this was done well before the days of PETA. They did look fabulous.

Jumping back a bit, here is a shot from the main entrance hall of the museum. You can’t quite see it in this picture, but just in front of the “small” carnivore is a rearing brontosaurus. It is enough to make any armchair paleontologist salivate in expectation of what the main dinosaur exhibits will hold.

Before we get to that, it is worth noting that there is an extensive collection of advanced and primitive mammals as well as dinosaurs. Woolly Mammoths, Saber-Toothed Tiger and formidable Cave Bear were all present among many, many other, lesser known, but equally impressive skeletons. Here is a shot of the cave bear.

On to the dinosaurs. I guess I’m a sucker for the classics. These guys need no introductions.

And of course the infamous T-Rex. This is a shot of the one they had in the permanent exhibit. The Tyranosaur was also one of the stars of the special exhibit. Computers have reached the point where they can accurately model the bio-mechanics of locomotion. This is being used to understand the skeleton and myology of all animals, including extinct ones. I remember well the toy dinosaurs of my youth. T-Rex was always depicted standing erect with his tail dragging behind. New research is suggesting that this was a skeletal impossibility. They are now depicted moving very much horizontally with the tail extended out to counter-balance the weight of the head. There was a fasinating animatronic skeleton at the musuem that walked in a very convincing fashion. There are excellent videos of this on the Apple website (links are part way down on the right-hand side) of the T-Rex walking.

The other thrust of the exhibit was to lend further weight to the current meme that dinosaurs are still extant…. they are just what we call birds. There was a fossilized nest complete with brooding dinosaur, which was presented as evidence that dinosaurs and birds share at least some form of biological behavior. There were many winged dinosaurs presented not only in skeletal form, but also as a fully-realized artist conceptual model. Like this little Sinornithosaurus.

One might be tempted to ask, “How do we know that dinosaurs had feathers?—no one has ever seen a dinosaur feather.” Which is true… however, take a look at this.

If you look closely, you can just see the unmistakable impression left by the feathers of this dinosaur. Extremely cool.

The museum also had a world-class planetarium—actually, they claimed to have the most powerful and accurate 3-dimensional star generation machine in the world. Apparently money is no object in the self-proclaimed Capitol of the World. They also have a full IMAX theater somewhere within their five floors of exhibits, though we never stumbled upon it. Definitely worth going back sometime.

– Jeremy

As beautiful as Central Park is, the most beautiful place I’ve seen in NYC has to be The Cloisters. A branch of the Metropolitan Museum, it is a building constructed from 12th – 15th century European castles. It is really an amazing thing to see. A medieval European castle in Manhattan. And people say Americans don’t know what to do with their wealth.

Here is an exterior shot of the southern wall. The building itself is just off of the Hudson river in the very northern part of the island.

Here is the eastern face of the structure. Mind you we haven’t even entered the building at this point.

The name refers to the cloistered gardens the castle holds. There are at least four, all of which are endowed in perpetuity.

The interior of the building itself is quite aesthetic.

Most of the rooms have been set up like a monastery, and though I often find myself too wound up to do nothing but be contemplative, here it comes quite naturally. In addition, there are many great pre-renaissance works of art: sculpture, painting, tapestry, stained glass and metalworks.

On such a sunny day as I happened to visit, the stained glass windows were really glowing.

They house two quite famous works at The Cloisters. The first is a set of tapestries depicting the hunting and capture of a unicorn. As an added bonus they even had a narwhale horn in the room. I didn’t get a very good picture of the Unicorn Tapestry, but you can find one on the Met’s website.

They also had the famous Merode Altarpiece there. It’s a triptych depicting the Annunciation. Excellent example of early Northern work. Here is a picture of the central panel. Northern work tends to be loaded with symbols, and you can be sure that there isn’t a single object in this piece that doesn’t mean something. I understand that even the Archangel’s garb (dressed as a deacon?) signifies that he is now a servant of the coming Christ.

I was unable to get a satifactory picture of the wings, but there is a picture of the full triptych online as well. The right panel depicts Joseph constructing mouse traps, a symbol for himself as he was the trap by which the devil was tricked. The devil was expecting Christ to be born to a virgin, and therefore an unmarried woman. The left panel depicts something more peculiarly Flemish, portraits of the patrons who commissioned the work. For some reason, there is a long tradition in the north, of showing the art patrons watching or participating in religious events, something that I find rather… well, arrogant. But who am I to fly in the face of tradition?

I was never much for architecture, but as it turns out, that was only because I had never seen any architecture that was worth looking at. NYC is litterally filled with beautiful buildings. Even in my area of Tribeca there are some seriously beautiful buildings. I can only imagine what it must be like in the great European cities, like Florence.

I will definitely be taking Julie here when she comes out to visit next semester.

– Jeremy

Now that classes have ended I have a little time to bounce around the city. I met up with Tara on Thursday and we did just that. We started the day out in the West Village and saw the Ashes and Snow show. It wasn’t really much to write home about, but feel free to check out their website if you are interested.

We then walked up to Chelsea (about 10 blocks north) and had some lunch before stopping at two of my favorite NYC galleries, Gagosian and Mary Boone. Unfortunately, the Eric Fischl show had just come down, so Tara wasn’t able to see his work; I saw it shortly after it went up.

After that we hopped on the train and went up to West 72 St. and the west side of Central Park. Most of the day was spent in Central Park. It was beautiful out and we were afforded the opportunity to do a bit of exploring. There is so much to see, it’s really difficult to believe that this is part of Manhattan.

This is the Angel of the Waters at Bethesda Terrace. This bronze statue dates from 1873.

Here is a closer picture of the Bethesda Angel.

This structure, overlooking the Turtle Pond (yes, there are in fact turtles in the pond) was originally a outpost in the early days of NYC. Now it is a weather observatory and open to the public. There are good views of the city, as well as the Shakespeare playhouse, from up there.

Here is a picture of some of the wildlife in the park. One doesn’t normally expect to see such a shy water bird in a city of 8.5 million.

Speaking of birds, we walked by a bunch of Pale Male watchers. These guys had telescopes and camera lenses to make NASA salivate. But alas, the famous Red Tailed Hawk, who lives on the edge of the park on 5th Ave just a little ways south of the Met, was apparently not at home.

We ended up walking from 72nd, meandering through the park and back out then up to 121st where Tara lives on the Upper West Side. That’s a good 50 blocks. It was a beautiful sunny day, and though Tara mocked my light complexion, by the end of the day my skin had turned a lovely (read: slightly painful) shade of pale crimson. Time for the aloe.

And a parting shot of Tribeca before heading home.

– Jeremy

I have been reluctant to post pictures recently because there were some photos of Loki still on our digital camera that I couldn’t bear to look at yet. This weekend I finally got it over with, and took some photos of a few current and finished knitting projects.

You Guessed It…

…more sock news. I posted separately about the Mother’s Day socks a few days ago, so I won’t show those again here. But I did finish my modified Diagonal Rib socks as well.

It was an easy pattern to remember, once I had worked it out for my necessary stitch count, and added a lot of visual interest to these socks.

Expect to see more socks in the future. I have a friend temporarily living in my home theater room, and his cat is way too interested in larger knitting projects, so I have been restricted to socks for TV knitting. For my next trick, I am thinking of making a pair of Broadripple socks for myself, perhaps adapted to toe-up.

Skye Vest

I’ve continued to work on my Dad’s cabled vest, though I had a bit of a set-back, wondering why the ribbing on the front piece kept measuring out larger than the back, even with the same number of rows. Eventually I realized that the ribbing was supposed to be knit with smaller needles than the body (duh), so I have restarted the front.

At any rate, here is a close-up image of the stitch pattern. The dark blue yarn makes a decent photo difficult to come by, but I think this one is pretty close.

Polka Purl Dots

I don’t think I have mentioned this project before, but back in April I started making the Polka Purl Dots vest, from the Spring 2004 edition of Interweave Knits, using some very light silvery Dale Kolibri. I’m quite pleased with the way the top is coming out so far… hopefully it will be worth the trouble of working with this very splitty (but otherwise lovely) yarn.

The pattern is a rather complex one, knit all in one piece to the armholes. It requires you to keep track of the textural pattern while working decreases at each end and simultaneous waist shaping at each of the two false seams. Since the picture below was taken, I’ve started the armhole and neck shaping for the back piece, and hopefully kept sufficient notes on where I left off in the front shaping to pick that back up afterwards. So, not a pattern for the faint of heart, but it has been an enjoyable challenge so far.

And now for a seamless segue…

Since the yarn-attacking kitty has kept me and my knitting away from the TV except for an hour or two in the evenings, I have been catching up on my reading while I knit. This weekend I finished Good Omens, an apocalyptic British comedy by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. It was so full of jokes and puns that I’m actually not sure I caught them all. In a nutshell, I’d have to say it was a bit like the movie Dogma—if Dogma had been more funny, less crude, and British, anyway.

I also read Across the Nightingale Floor, the first book in a trilogy called Tales of the Otori, by Lian Hearn. It is set in an imagined world akin to feudal Japan (think Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon on an epic scale) and tells the story of a young man, Takeo, whose entire village is wiped out by the powerful warlord Iida for their religious beliefs. Takeo is rescued and taken in by Shegiru, a nobleman of the neighboring Otori clan, who has his own vendetta to settle with Iida. The book weaves revenge and political intrigue together with Takeo’s struggle to reconcile the disparate parts of his nature: his religious upbringing, Otori adoption, and blood ties to a secretive Ninja-like guild called the Tribe. A very interesting book and a quick read; I am looking forward to reading the rest of the trilogy.

Time to grab your crayons and your pencils….

Sorry, feeling a little nostalgic there… 5 points to anyone out there who remembers the song.

Anyhow, sorry that I haven’t posted in a few weeks. The end of the semester has been particularly busy. Things are pretty well wrapped up now. And I’ll be home in just over two weeks.

This first drawing is for my Anatomical Drawing class. In addition to the anatomy notebook, we’ve been making we had a final drawing of a full cast. Didactic, not aesthetic was the rule….

I’ve posted an earlier version of this painting. Here the light mass is pretty well defined and the outer contour has been defined by painting in something of the background. Next step would be to paint in the turnings, and if that works, perhaps some of the reflected (warm) light translucently into the shadow mass.

And a figure drawing. This one was fun, lot of foreshortening.

Finally another painting. Probably the best painting that I’ve done at the school so far. Sorry about the poor image quality. It was still very wet when I took this painting earlier today. Hopefully I’ll be able to get a better shot of it before I leave. It still has some problems, mostly with proportions. The heads are a little large, particularly the female head (insert Mike Myers joke about huge head here).

Cheers.

– Jeremy

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom! Since by now you have received your present in the mail, I thought it would be safe to post some pictures. These are the Broadripple Socks from Knitty, made with a shade of Fixation yarn that my mom picked out back in March. They striped rather handsomely, I think.

The next picture is completely unrelated, but somehow appropriate for a Mother’s Day entry. Yesterday I was outside mowing my lawn in between rain showers, and when I returned to the back of the house to put the mower away, I knew immediately that something was wrong, because there were a bunch of birds chirping up a storm. Sure enough, there was a baby robin sitting in the middle of the yard, apparently recovering from a miscarried attempt to fly. I wanted to do some weeding without being scolded by Mama Robin, so I shooed the little guy off towards another part of the yard, where he stayed resting for several hours.

I checked on him from my bedroom window several times. Hopefully he’s alright, as we have several neighborhood cats running around. But I didn’t hear any sort of commotion outside, so I like to think he made it to safety. Just another sign of spring.