More Leaves!!!

Once upon a time, my housemate Riv and I painted a mural on my wall. It looks likes this:

From hobbit room

and this:

From hobbit room

and also this:

From hobbit room

This was the beginning of August, and I completely forgot to blog about it. Probably because I was then moving into the new room, and that took a lot of time and energy.

Anyways, as we were painting the mural, we decided that if we messed up, say, the trunk or branches, we could always put more leaves over it. “More Leaves!!!” we said, and this was the solution to everything, clearly.

A couple of months later, or rather last week, I dyed a bunch more roving in fall colors. And of course, I had to name the colorway after the mural, “More Leaves!”

Here’s all of them hanging out:

From roving

Here’s a close-up of the roving, pre-braiding:

From roving

The braided roving looks like this:

From roving

Also, the batch previous to this one that I put in the Etsy shop is dry and braided and looks pretty. I even named one of them after HRSFA, since it was purple and green:

From roving

So yay for roving. Now I just need to learn how to not get my hands dyed in the process.

Also, yay for having a cool mural on my wall. It made the room infinitely cooler than it had been (it had sad fake wood paneling on the side and the slanty roof, and the walls were white and boring, and the room is small, so this makes it look bigger). Also, it’s a show piece for when I have people over. And I get to say that I live in a forest!

And I dyed a bunch of roving for myself on Thursday, so I might post those when I take photographs of them. They are green and blue and purple, and are very pretty and soft.

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Autumn Leaves at Albany Airport

I was walking through the Albany airport a couple of weeks ago, when I looked up and saw one of the most brilliant artistic concepts I’ve seen in a while.

The artist cut maple leaves out of gold foil and suspended them from a skylight by transparent threads. Since each leaf was only attached to the ceiling by a single thread at its center of balance, the leaves rotated in the slight breeze generated by the airport’s air currents.

The effect of autumn leaves slowly fluttering down from the sky was altogether convincing (and all the more striking for occurring in the middle of a sterile modern airport). But it’s the simplicity of the technique that I find the most striking. No virtuosic skills would be required to make something like this–any of us might easily replicate it with scissors, nylon thread and gold paper. The genius of the artist rests almost entirely in his having seen that easily acquirable materials might so easily be combined to create this evocative natural effect.

Here are a couple of pictures, courtesy of the Albany Airport website

So…does anyone have a suggestion of another exquisite application for these effects?

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