You Can See

 Last week sometime?

 Physical therapy this morning, more neck stuff.

After, I came home and changed back into my pajamas and worked on some embroidery. I've let go of my collection of pre-printed, iron on patterns for the moment and instead am going through my grandmother's collection of embroidery patterns. Like me, she also collected the Aunt Martha patterns and we have some overlap (though not much, as many of the patterns she favored are now out of print). I also have a small collection of things she drew herself (or traced) after she was dealing with macular degeneration and her eyesight was going. Those are the patterns I am focusing on at the moment. 

Many of those are drawn on tracing paper, bits of scrap newsprint, bits torn from a faded yellow legal pad, or on scraps of tissue-like pattern paper. I photocopied those and used the photocopy and my own tracing paper.

My own time:

I've finished with the patterns I prepared from my grandmother's drawings. There are still a few more that I want to prep and embroider, but I moved on to a second embroidered portrait of her, with bright red lips and bright red hair. After I started, I pulled out her own embroidered self-portrait (which I had avoided looking at so as to avoid its influence on my choices of colors and stitching). It had brown hair, something that I don't associate with my grandmother, as she had naturally auburn hair that she dyed red throughout most of her life. It's a hard color to match. My grandmother's choice probably would have been between brown and orange and straight up orange would likely have been too Ronald McDonald-y. Unlike my grandmother, I have the world at my fingertips, art supply-wise, as the internet will ship anything--hundreds of shades of embroidery floss, for example--to my door within days or at the very least, let me know that a store will have what I need before I expend time and energy going there.

So it came about that Dave and I braved an evening trip to Joann's to ransack their stock of embroidery floss. I came home with perhaps forty or more different colors (as well as a large pack of variegated floss), among them a burnt orange/dark ginger that closely approximates the color my grandmother's freshly-dyed hair is in my memory. (I also picked up a dark mossy green that is the color of her eyes in my memory.) It is all very bright, especially stitched against the pale blue cotton background.

Yes, it is boring to just read about colors, so I also got online yesterday and ordered a new point-and-shoot camera to use for blogging. When phone cameras got better, I thought I'd never have to own a camera again--that it, until the lens on my camera smashed after I dropped it. Now I have a phone with a camera that takes shitty pictures. So pictures are coming.

What else this week?

Dave and I got together with my mother and brother and had dinner in Kelly and Kevin's backyard, sitting at their table shaded by the big elm tree. We're all vaccinated (which doesn't make me any more comfortable about going maskless, to be honest). We ordered subs (Dave had pizza) and sat and chatted for an hour. It was nice to do it at this time of year, because in few weeks, it will be too hot to sit outside in the afternoon (for me, at least).