Book - Book Reviews - The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition - Caroline Alexander

I am now an ADMIRAL!

This is the last book that I read for the Seafaring Challenge, because about half of the story involves seamanship under some of the worst conditions.

This challenge is also the SECOND one that I have completed for 2008! Yippie.

The South Pole had already been discovered by Roald Amundsen, leader of the Norwegian explorers on 12/14/1911. Englishmen Robert Scott and some members of his explorers arrived a month later but never returned.

The next explorer to reach this frozen land was Ernest Shackleton, an Anglo-Irish for England. He wanted to be the first go across the Antarctica. Combined with previously unpublished pictures taken by Frank Hurley, I didn’t have to imagine too hard what was going on.

The only problem with the narrative is that I had to keep flipping back and forth to find a picture of the crew member being talked about. Since there were so many men, I had trouble keeping a mental picture of each individual. There were several group pictures, but they were from a distant, and it was difficult to see the distinctive faces.

Sir Ernest Shackleton is one of my heroes. He had grandiose ideas. He was able to raise funds to pay for the expedition. He understood marketing; he had plans to write books and give speeches about the journey when it was over, and he hired Frank Hurley, a photographer, so that slides and prints could be made.

He was known as a leader for putting his men first. In an earlier Antarctic expedition, when food rations were low and everyone ate a paltry meal of pony meat and pemmican (seal meat with fat), he noticed that Frank Wild needed more to eat and gave him a biscuit (biscuit = US cookie or actual round little bread, I am not sure.)

Wild wrote in his diary “I DO by God I shall never forget it. Thousands of pounds would not have bought that biscuit.”

The expedition left on Endurance, a wooden ship on August 1914. Shackleton received special permission from King George V to proceed, despite the start of WWI.

Unfortunately, Endurance got stuck in the ice. In mid-December 1914, Frank Hurley writes in his diary, “We admire our sturdy little ship, which seems to take a delight herself in combating our common enemy, shattering floes in grand style. When the ship comes in contact with the ice, she stops, dead shivering from trunk to keelson; them almost immediately a long crack starts from our bows, into which we steam, and like a wedge slowly force the crack sufficiently to enable a passage to be made.”

Many attempts were made to chisel the ship free. Everyone stayed on board but lived in the safer sections and took shifts in bailing out the water. Eventually, it sank, and the expedition became a fight for survival, not for exploration.

Shackleton wrote about Endurance, “To a sailor his ship is more than a floating home..she is slowly giving up her sentient life at the very outset of her career.”

For awhile, everyone lived on Patience Island, a piece of ice about 350 miles from land. The temperatures were -15F. The sailors were given fur-lined sleeping bags, while the officers slept in wool lined ones. Everyone had Burberry tunics to wear (but without the now popular pattern). It was the Gortex of its time.

Shackleton averted a mutiny early on by promising all the sailors that they would get paid, despite the fact that Endurance was gone. Naval custom dictated that as long as a ship existed, then the sailors would receive pay, but if the ship sank, too bad.

The three rescued rowboats were refurbished by the carpenter, McNish to make them sea worthy. On April 1916, the expedition sailed to Elephant Island, a miserable trip of about 500 miles and seven days. Luckily they landed on clear day. Everyone was hungry, cold, and exhausted. It was difficult to sleep due to all the waves in the sea and the lack of space.

After a few days of resting, Shackleton decided to continue on to S. Georgia Island, a whaling station. He took Worsley, McCarthy, McNish, Crean, and Vincent on the James Caird rowboat to make the 600 mile journey. They started on 4/25/1916 and landed on 5/10/1916.

The James Caird voyage is considered one the most spectacular sea voyages of all times. The men survived a hurricane that sank 500-ton steamship. If Worsley miscalculated the latitude of S. Georgia Island, then the James Caird had to cross 3000 miles of ocean to the next settlement. Steering at night was difficult, because the stars were not visible. All the reindeer skin sleeping bags were shedding, and the hair got into everyone’s food and mouths.

Worsley wrote in his diary “Going below was a dreaded ordeal. The space amid the increasing water logged was only five by seven feet. The men had to line up one behind the other and crawl, in heavy wet clothes, over the stores and under a low twart to reach their bags. With the boat rolling and shipping water, entrapment in this narrow space held all the horror of being buried alive.”

Because of the weather, they landed on the wrong side of the island. Shackleton, Worsley, and Crean then had to walk 22 miles over mountainous terrain and uncharted valleys to the whaling station. When they finally arrived, all grody from not bathing or washing clothes for about two years, they terrified two children.

On 5/20/1916, the three other men from the James Caird were picked up. But, because of WWI, the British government did not have the resources to rescue the men on Elephant Island. Shackleton finally succeeded in having everyone else rescued on 8/30/1916.

Because these were different times, no one sued anyone else. Most of the men went to fight in the war, and no one really whined about the situation.

Some of Hurley’s pictures and maps on the voyages can be seen on this site!

Take a peak and be amazed at these heroic men.

Books - Book Review - Haiku - Everyman's Literary Pocket Poets - Peter Washington (Editor)

I just made the deadline for the
The Japanese Literature Challenge and I have completed the

challenge! Yeah! I hope that I win THIRD PRIZE. (because I already read Blind Willow, and I want someone else to win first prize.)

Many traditional haiku were translated by Mr. Washington and placed in various categories: Buddha, Nature, Happiness, Phases of the Moon, Birds, Creatures, the four seasons, and New Year. He also included some poems by Western poets.

If you write haiku, it will give you a flavor of how it’s done in Japan. If you like poetry but are too tired to read really long ones, this book will fulfill your need for poetry.

Here are some of my favorites:

Happiness

How lovely
Through the torn paper window
The Milky Way

by Issa
****************************
Phases of the Moon

Carrying a girl
Across the river;
The hazy moon

by Shiki

****************************
Birds

Sneezing
I lost sight
Of the skylark

by Yayu

****************************
Spring

The violet:
Held in the hand,
Yet more lovely

by Kosha
****************************
Spring

White plum-blossoms;
In a tea house of Kitano,
A wrestler

by Buson

(This has a surprising twist)
****************************
Summer

The shell of a cicada:
It sang itself
Utterly away

by Basho

(In my part of the word, I hear a lot of them in the summer evenings. I feel that they fall apart after the song.)
****************************
Creatures

On the low-tide beach,
Everything we pick up
Moves

by Chiyo-Ni

Books - Book Review - Good Women - Jane Stevenson

This is one of my Oxfam - Bloomsbury buys from last year’s vacation to the UK.

Jane Stevenson’s work is about three people in modern day UK, who live normal lives, but one event happens to change the course of their lives.

The first story is about an architect in Scotland who has a mid-life crisis. David’s practice takes a dive when he leaves his family. Only then does he realize how much of his work came because of his wife’s connections to the community.

He and the new wife try to rehab an old farmhouse. It’s like an HGTV remodeling program gone bad. He tries to make the least expensive changes look like gold. And it almost works.

The adventure of remodeling is hilarious! Plus, Stevenson’s Scotland such a village, that David’s ex-wife probably hears of the fiasco and laughs a bit.

The second story is about Wenda, who works part-time at a drug store. She takes care of her husband, Derek, an engineer and keeps a perfect house.

However, she discovers that she has a gift to help people and wants to start a business. Her co-worker, who is not getting any intellectual stimulation from the drug store job either, helps Wenda with marketing and business plans.

Despite the lack of support from her husband and her family, Wenda goes on with her plans to start the business.

This story is interesting, because it shows that the English can be entrepreneurs and the process that is needed to start a business.

The last story, Garden Guerillas, is my favorite. Alice, a widow who lives in the Kew Gardens section of London, is being encouraged by her son and daughter-in-law to move to an old folk’s home. Alice is upset by her son’s behavior and her daughter-in-law’s greed (all she talks about is how expensive it will be to remodel Alice’s home) that she plans revenge on them.

She starts to plan a garden made of innocuous-looking plants that could ruin the home’s foundation and invade neighbors’ gardens. The damage won’t be noticed until it’s too late.

Once she receives the order, Alice knew that she “had committed myself to leaving, and I also had declared war on Karen, even if nobody but me actually knew it, or ever would. Traditional notions of vengeance always involve an actual moment when the victim suddenly comprehends what has happened to them..but I had spent my life among plants, and I had come to understand something of their methods which are quiet, subtle, and infinitely tenacious.”

She meets a college friend, who didn’t know her in her wife and mother phase of life, and he encourages her in her final decision to buy a new home. ”If I dropped dead tomorrow, you would still have reasons to be here…Face it, darling. Life is uncertain. That’s why it’s important to have fun.” Wise advice from Martin!

I loved the description of Alice’s first drive to northern England. It’s so true to life; when I was up there last spring, I missed one train and had to travel part of the way (from Carlisle to Preston) via bus, and I saw the same things that Alice saw. However, Alice thought that the freeways in Manchester and Birmingham were terrifying; she needs to come to Houston during rush hour and try to drive then!

All the stories were about ordinary people moving toward another phase in their lives. The process was difficult but worthwhile. And, it’s good to read that not everyone who makes a decision can execute it all at once.

Stuff - Illustration Friday - Tales and Legends

This week's theme is Tales and Legends.

My depiction is the story of the Cinderella story from the prince's view.

He travels far searching for the lady who will foot fits the fancy slipper.

Check out other ideas at Illustration Friday.


I used altered book techniques:
Gesso on paper
Watercolors
Face of a prince from an Italian nougat candy wrapper
Portion of UK map
Stamp of slipper

Books - Book Review - The Victorian Chaise- Lounge - Marghanita Laski

This is one of the first books that I selected at Persephone Books on Lamb’s Conduit St (don’t you love the name?) in London.

If you buy directly from the bookstore, you not only get a great novel, but a lovely bookmark and a postcard painted by David Gentleman, which shows Fife Terrance, a mansion in Islington, another section of London, which I would love to live for a few months, when I win the lotto.

This is a creepy novel, initially set in the 1950s London. Melanie, who just gave birth and is recovering from tuberculosis, is being attended by Dr. Gregory. He observes, “..she is simply the purely feminine creature who makes herself into anything her man wants her to be. Not that I’d call her clever, rather cunning .. to know that Melanie was loved and protected and, in so far as anyone could possibly be sure, safe.”

In her modern home, the Victorian chair was the only antique. The doctor gave into Melanie’s pleading to spend part of the day there as part of her recovery.

A little later, Melanie woke up in the chaise-lounge in the same house but in another time and another body. “I don’t like her hands, whispered Melanie to herself, and as she thought this, she slowly lifted one hand .. she was flooded with that same memory that had stirred in her when she first saw the chaise-lounge off Marylebone High Street, only now it was a deeper, truer, and intolerably painful, a memory of a passionate love of a body that crushed and broke into hers, pressed down on the Victorian chaise-lounge.”

She figured out that she was trapped in another body in the 19^th century. She tried to prove to others that she was from the future. “Wireless, she screamed in her mind, television, penicillin, gramophone-records and vacuum cleaners, but none of those words could be words could be framed by her lips.. Can I introduce nothing into this real past? And if I cannot, then even these thoughts I am thinking, has Milly though them before?”

This work is a modern day gothic novel. It doesn’t have overt violence but it’s still creepy to read. Read this work in the day and not close to Halloween!

Books - Book Review - The Soloist - Mark Salzman

I love reading books by Mark Salzman. He immersed himself in Asian cultures and writes about his experiences.

I heard him speak when I lived in CT and he was at Yale to talk about his first novel. He is an engaging speaker.

In this work, we enter another world, the world of musical child prodigies. I also learned more about the structure of classical music.

Renne Sundheimer, a former musical prodigy, who now teaches at a university in California. He has accepted the fact that he will no longer play at concert halls anymore and breathes but is not really living.

He is somewhat forced to take on a small, Korean boy prodigy. As he spends more time with Kyung-kee, he reflects on his life and thinks about how he can influence his student’s parents to allow Kyung-kee to have a well-rounded life.

Renee lets the reader know what is a true prodigy. “..someone in whom the emotions of music actually resonate and find expression at a very young age – is rare…I know from my own personal experience that the emotions in music are musical emotions, and develop according to their own rules of chemistry and experience. They resemble and strongly evoke the emotions we associate with profound life experiences, like sexual love or the death of a parent, but you don’t need to have those experiences to ‘feel’ the music properly.”

Renne’s last teacher was rather philosophical and the statements went over Renne’s heads. He tried not to teach Kyung-kee in that matter. Renne showed his student a book of buildings, and Kyung-kee exclaimed, “..Batman wouldn’t (play the cello) in the Batcave .. but he could have played cello when he was Bruce Wayne!..the Wayne mansion looks like music. It has candles and old rugs and shining armor in it!..Like Mozart! Fancy, with a fireplace! And your house looks like Bach,” he added. In the matched pair of bookcases on either side of the door, he was apparently reminded of the harmonic symmetry that Bach had perfected.”

There are other intersecting threads woven into this novel which adds many layers. It also reminds us that people need time to recover from a disappointment but that human interaction is needed to really live and not exist.

Books - Book Review - The Hunt for the Red October - Tom Clancy

I found this hardback copy of the Red October when I moved to my new home.

This counts for both the Seafaring Challenge and Russian Reading Challenge

I found out two interesting facts in this thriller. The subway system was used as a bomb shelter during WWII, in the same manner that the London Tube became a nightly home for its citizens. And on a spur, that was later cemented in, there was a secret room, where the Politburo could survive and still rule the Soviet kingdom, in case of an atomic crisis.

A second interesting fact that I discovered is that the Russians refer to WWII as THE PATRIOTIC WAR. And the different branches in armed forces dislike each other, as do armed forces in the US.

An angry 62 year old mail clerk, who had to work on Saturdays without any overtime, was working in the submarine base. “He had been a tank rider serving in a guard’s tank corp attached to Konve’s First Ukranian Front (in the Patriotic War) …When something needed to be done against those slugs (the Germans), it was done. Now what had become of the Soviet fighting men? Living aboard luxury liners with plenty of good food and warm beds. The only warm bed he had known was over the exhaust vent of his tank’s diesel – and he had to fight for that!”

When Lt. Williams was shown around the Red October by Karmarov (on Day 14, Thursday, 16 December), he was impressed with the submarine. “The deck was tiled. The hatches were lined with thick rubber gaskets. They hardly made in the noise at all as they moved about checking the watertight integrity.”

However, Captain Ramius was not so generous in his thoughts. On the day it launched, he thought “..the October’s crew accommodations would have shamed a gulag jailer. The crew consisted of fifteen officers, housed in fairly decent cabins aft, and a hundred enlisted men whose bunks were stuffed into corners and racks throughout the bow, forward of the missile room… Perhaps the men didn’t need proper bunks. They would only have four or six hours a day to make use of them.”

All Soviet submarines had an arsenal of missiles that could destroy entire cities. This gave the captains of submarines a lot of power in their hands. “..missile submarines were by definition beyond any control by land. Their entire mission was to disappear…The crews of such vessels had to be trusted. And so they sailed less than Western counterparts, and when they did, they did it with a political officer aboard to stand next to the commanding officer, a second captain always ready to pass approval on every action.”

Clancy made interesting comparisons between the US and Soviet submarines that operated during the Cold War. “Unlike surface ships, which changed their clocks to conform with the local time wherever they were, submarines generally adhered to a single time reference. For American subs this was Zulu or Greenwich mean time. For the Red October it was Moscow standard time, which by normal reckoning was actually one hour ahead of standard time to save on utility expenses.”

And, “an American ship was ship was a she; the Russians used the male pronoun for a ship. And the intelligence community usually referred to a Soviet ship as it.”

If you saw the movie, the book has a lot of differences:

1. Jack Ryan didn’t speak Russian, jump from the helicopter to the Dallas, had two children,
2. Jack goes on a British ship to inform them of the plans to capture the Red October.
3. The British forces helped in capturing the Red October.
4. Tyler did extensive analysis on the capabilities of the Red October and came up with the idea to hide the sub in an American river.
5. The President was involved more with the final decisions; Pelt was not as forceful as in the movie.
6. All the US Armed Forces cooperated more than in the movie.
7. Everyone on the Red October called each other “Comrade rank”.
8. Captain Ramius didn’t defect because the Red October was a killing machine. He had more personal reasons and if you want the real reason, write to me and I will tell you.

This novel was a fun and quick read. Even if you have seen the movie, you will enjoy reading it.

Books - Book Review - South of the Border, West of the Sun - Haruki Murakami

This book counts as both for the Japanese Literature Challenge and Expanding Horizons Challenge.

This novel is an earlier work by one of my favorite authors, Murakami. He writes about 30 something people in modern-day Japan.

The protagonist is Hajime, an only child (which was very rare) in the 1950s and 1960s. He meets another only kid, Shimamoto. The teacher assigned Hajime to guide his new classmate and tell her of school rules. They become chums and spend a lot of time together after school.

It was LOVE for Hajime. Shimamoto’s 12 year old hand “.. those five fingers and the palm were like a display case crammed full of everything that I wanted to know and everything I had to know. ..I became a tiny bird, fluttering into the air, the wind rushing by. From high in the sky I could see a scene far away. It was so far off I couldn’t make it out clearly. Yet something was there, and I knew someday I would travel to that place. This revelation made me catch my breath and made my chest tremble.”

The young couple didn’t go to high school nor college together. Many dull years pass for Hajime. “I felt like I was chocking, like every day I was shrinking and someday I would disappear completely.” He finally meets and marries someone nice, and his father-in-law buys him a nightclub and then another. Hajime pays off the loans and has a unique jazz bar.

One night, Shimamoto walks in. What will happen now? Can the lost time be made up? Does the older Shimamoto have the same feelings and personality as the younger one? Was Hajime idealizing her too much?

Murakami examines the lives of modern day Japanese very well. He captures their loneliness despite the fact that they are surrounded by so many people. We are also witnesses to small business practices and home life.

Murakami’s characters approach their lives differently from people in the US, but it’s interesting to note how they live their lives and how personal relationships does matter in their society.

Books - Book Review - Silk - Alessandro Baricco

Silk counts as a work for the Japanese Literature Challenge.

Herve’ Joncour is a French, young man in the 1860s who likes “to be an observer a their own lives, any ambition, to participate in them being considered appropriate. It will have been noted that such people observe their destiny much as most people tend to observe a rainy day”

One day he was selected to travel to Japan to buy silkworms. The European silkworms have a disease that has affected worms as far as Egypt.

The trip is long, dangerous, and lonely. And when he arrived in Japan, he would be committing a crime: exporting the silkworm.

His first trip starts in October 1861 and ends in April, just in time for Easter Mass. He makes the trip 4 more times and is successful in finding the silkworm. Every time that he passes Lake Baikal in Siberia, his observations change. In 1861, Herve’ calls it “the demon”; 1862, “the last”, and 1864 “the holy.”

He falls in love with an young lady. In each journey, he tries to see her. He doesn’t leave his wife, but he can’t forget the exotic girl he met in Japan.

After the crisis is over, he is richer, but he doesn’t travel anymore or do much of anything. When his wife dies, he learns a secret that she kept from him, and he becomes more of a hermit.

This book is quiet, calming, and short. I learned a lot of early silk making and the difficulty of making a journey from Europe to Asia.

This book will be made into a movie. I don’t know how the script writers can stretch the story for 2 ½ hours, unless the trip takes up most of the drama.

Books - 8 for '08

I made up a meme. You can participate if you want.

1. What would you ask an author about his book or characters?

To Jonathan Safran Foer of Everything is Illuminated
Why is the female dog called "Sammy Davis Jr. Jr." ?

2. What interesting fact did you learn from a novel?

In Joseph O'Connor's Star of the Sea, urine is used to wash clothes. Soap doesn't react with seawater to clean clothes and is too expensive in the 1800s.

3.If you could tell an author what to write about in the next work, what would you like to see?

I want to read about the young women in Japan who don't want to get married and have children. What do they do for a living or their free time? Are they lonely or enjoying their lives? I would like Haruki Murakami to write about them.

4. What recurring dreams or nightmares do you have about a book?
Whenever I have a fever, I dream about a highway full of cars with skeletons. When I was a teenager, I read a post-nuclear about how an former Air Force officer would scavange for clothes, gasoline, and food in the cars. I don't remember the name of the novel, but I did learn the word mutant from it.

5. Which book do you re-read and why?
Every summer, I reread Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller. It's a post-nuclear novel, very Catholic novel, set in Texarkana.

I try to see whether I still remember some basic words in Latin and I also try to find the current names of cities mentioned in the book. Every year, my personal notes on the Texarkana Kingdom map get filled.

I need to buy a new copy of the book, because the pages are falling out.

6. If you had $5000.00, what book related item(s), would you get?

The sitting and book shelve piece of furniture that I blogged about here. I might need more than $5k, though.

7. What literary even will you attend or would love to attend in 2008?

The Tennessee Williams Festival . This happens in March. I met Barry Unsworth a few years ago. He has the same voice as Sean Connery.

8. What literary treasure would you like to be unearthed?

Let's pretend for this one. I would love to see an experimental work by one of the classical authors. For example:

1. Jesus' diary
2. Homer's sci fi novel about present day Greece
3. Jane Austen writing about a prostitute living in Bath
4. Charles Dicken's novel about happy children
5. Edgar Allen Poe's haikus
6. William Shakespeare's short stories
   

Books - Book Reviews - The Gathering - Ann Enright

BooksPrice asked me to let bloggers know about their price comparision service, and I was able to select a book for this favor.

I selected The Gathering, because I had read the other books on their list. I also received lots of pretty bookmarks.

This recent Booker Prize winner tells the story of a modern Irish family gathering for a funeral of one of the siblings. The narrator, Veronica Hegarty, relates the story of her family and the big secret that has affected everyone.

The story jumps around from the world that her grandmother lived in, Veronica's views of her parents, Veronica's childhood and present adult life, and some of the siblings' lives.

I read this book in two nights. The language is crisp.

I will reread this book for the International Fiction Book Club of New Orleans, where I hope to have more insights.

This book is a must-read for anyone who cares about children and how to protect them.

Books - Book Review - A Life of One's Own - Ilana Simons

My first book review of 2008! I have been reading books but have not not writing about them. My bad.

In October 2007, I received an email from Ilana Simons, asking me to review her book, A Life of One's Own - A Guide to Better Living Through the Work
and Wisdom of Virginia Woolf.

When I received it, I put down my other books and read it in one sitting. I picked it up again a few weeks later to receive more insights.

Ilana Simons gives a unique perspective on Virginia Woolf's life and writings. As both a literature professor and an clinical psychology student, she presents both as aspects in this book.

Not only did I learn more of Woolf's writing and her inspiration, this book also serves as a guide to living a thoughtful life by using Woolf's words as "advice."

A good example of both viewpoints is seen in Chapter 3 - Shut Down. In the US, multitasking is seen as a good thing. Woolf doesn't believe so. In A Room of Her Own, she writes, "It is in our idleness," she goes on "in our dreams, that the submerged truth comes to the top." Simons explains this quotation in Victorian ethics background of Woolf, "It's your right - even often charismatic - to hold a private world of your own. On the other, she was a Modernist, and wanted to set the stage for open, spontaneous talk. She valued both her parents' silence and a bolder exposure."

Chapter 13 (Read and Be More) really spoke to me. Since I have been 8 years old, people have always asked me "Why do read so much?" Ilana Simons writes, "It's a comfort and an accessible escape. Reading does seem to have shifted outside the center of today's public culture, where movies and the Internet dominate the landscape. But books have so far been able to survive the cultural shift because they do offer a game that's specific to what they are. In Woolf's opinion, novels made unique requirements of the mind, challenging us to find empathy with the author, patience with grasping tone and plot, creativity in supplying images to words, and dexterity in following the author's rather than your own, assumptions."

While trying to research a book on a study of English during the nightly bombings of London in WWII, she writes to Ethel. asking her to send her a lighthouse, i.e., encouragement to continue reading and writing. "Her reference to the 'lighthouse beam' shows how she tries to step out of her books to actual friendship in the world. She is using on of her literary metaphors (one of her main works is To The Lighthouse), for common talk.... She contrasts the anxiety of real friendship with the safety of books. The image of the lighthouse beam is her symbol for how fractured contact is..."

Ilana Simon's books has encourage me to read other works by Woolf. I have read only two of her works and felt intimidated. I know understand her background and literary views more and will try again.

I also plan to recommend this work for my local book club. It will increase everyone's understanding of Woolf. I also enjoyed reading the advice of living from her viewpoint.

Stuff - Panel for International Fiber Collective

We in the US, use too much gasoline.

To bring attention to this bad habit, Jennifer Brooke Marsh has organized the International Fiber Collective.

She would like everyone to contribute a 3 foot square panel. You don't need to know any needlework to participate.

She has permission to use an abandoned gas station to cover with panels.

Hooray! I finished my square.

I knitted most of it with leftover yarns and also experimented with unconventional materials. When I got tired of knitting, I crocheted or did simple weaving.


Top Left - bubble wrap
Middle and Bottom Left - ribbons that you put on presents
Right - plastic that you use to make key chains.





Top Left - Plastic shipping bag from Boden USA
Rest of Left - Conventional knitting ribbon

Right - Paper from a flier!









Woven telephone cord









I cut up the mailing pouches and bubble wrap in strips and then worked with them.

I also used plastic bags from Barnes and Noble and ribbons from Godiva Chocolates.

This posting is also part of Illustration Friday - Stitches. I stiched the entire panel together and the units were stitched via needlework.

Stuff - Illustration Friday - 100%

I used altered book techniques to do this topic.

When you plan a trip, you go through a lot of stages and percentages of getting there.

Materials - gesso pages with water color drip techniques
old map of UK roads
watercolor tissue paper technique or a ribbon for the numbers
marker with glitter
old document for first letter of words

So, dream about your next trip!