Rank Sentimentality: Making Time Stand Still

Please click on the picture to enjoy the details

Thanks to http://barefootliam.deviantart.com/

for making this vintage clock face available in the public domain

Pause for a SLO Sip: Drink your Milk (Vintage Style)

This picture, advertising a brand of milk I'd love to see in reality, is all my own work, except for the wonderful anonymous black and white cow. I wrote about how I found this great SLO moo drawing in a previous entry *. I'd still love to meet the person who drew this.

Please click on the picture to take in all the beautiful details.

(What I wrote when I designed the SLO SIP bottlecap)

* My daughter goes to school at Cal Poly Polytechnic University in San Luis Obispo, California. She's a student in the Agricultural College. A polytechnic is run a little different than a run-of-the-mill university. Lots of animal husbandry classes and close work with bees and buds. The university store sells a selection of university farm product, but I'm pretty sure they don't have their own milk. However, I think this bottle cap would be just great for a big glass of SLO SIP.

The beautiful SLO cow picture I used to create this cap was drawn by an unknown Cal Poly student. One of my daughter's housemates found it in their rental house, and I rescued it from the recyling bin. I'd love to know whose work this nice SLO MOO is!

Feeling Norwegian: My Grieg Connection

When I was little my older sister used to play this song on the piano for me. According to the "Singing in Harmony"* book that sat on our piano, it was the song that the sphinx sang to Peer when he went to Egypt on his wanderings away from his homeland. The book has lovely line drawings of the whole story behind Peer Gynt, and I still enjoy reading the story and trying out the right hand version of the melodies.

I learned to play a simple version of Morning Song (with both hands!), a couple of years ago, when I first took piano class at the local community college. Shortly after that, I went to visit Oslo and, my father said that he had seen Peer Gynt in the National Theatre in Oslo, at the end of the war (that's WWII, guys).

Up until then I never knew that my father had been to Norway. Turns out he went along as part of Project Norway, or as he said when I asked. "We went to take the Germans home."

That's home, as in the American troops escorted the troops who had been occupying Norway during the war, back to Germany.

Please click on the picture above to see the lovely details.

* The cover of Singing in Harmony appears in an art-journal entry I wrote a few days back.

Time Travel: A Primer, Lesson 2, Goin' for Baroque

~Please CLICK on this image to see the beautiful details~

The reason this gal is sitting down and her fella is standing, is because his clothes are a LOT more comfortable than hers. Breathing must have been really fun in that corset. Not to mention the probable height of her heels. They likely didn't make walking all that easy. Those corsets were so great for women's health :-) My Euro ancestress'ess likely didn't have to worry about that, because they were probably hanging out in the scullery or doing the laundry.

It looks like the well-dressed swell is playing a lute. The piece of music I included in this piece was written for Mozart for a keyboard, I'm sure this musical couple were influenced by it, though. His lady friend is apparently doing the singing, she has a little book on her lap.

I found this old pin at an antique shop yard sale. It's marked "Limoges" on the back, so I guess it is, though the original design is quite naive, not at all like the elegant china that is associated with Limoges. The little picture had a fair amount of missing bits and places where somebody tried to paint over some of the big scratches. When you play around with a piece this much, it takes you back to the first person that owned it. Wouldn't it be dandy to imagine that Rosine gave it to her sister Martha for her birthday? (For more about Martha and Rosine, see my blog entries for May 26 and May 27 ).

It looks like this little token of sisterly affection has been well loved over the years. The catch wasn't working any more. Clearly Martha wore it a lot. Maybe she was an amateur musician, like me and that's why her sister picked out the musical setting. Did she and Rosine play simple, parlor music like I do? Did they laugh at the artfully posed couple's outfits and compare the damsels torturous undergarments to their own modern and up to date health corsets?

It was a lot of fun cleaning up Martha's pin, then taking it from a blotchy little painting into a blurry landscape style, and, finally, securing it's place in time with a collage, using Photoshop CS4.

From Your Sister Rosine

My daughter found this card in a small local antique store for $1.50. Don't you wonder about Martha and Rosine? Did Martha tuck this away on her mirror, in a memory box or a book perhaps for years and years? They might have lived right around here. Did they grow old together?

I think they might have celebrated Martha's birthday together because it's not addressed to Martha. The ink smudges indicate to me that Rosine used a fountain pen, not a modern ball point pen.

I found several "Martha Knuth's on facebook and messaged them that I'd be glad to send them a scan of the back and front of this card. No luck.

Either

a) they're not into old

or

b) they figured I probably sold vitamins.

I did a lot of altering of the back of this card using Photoshop CS4. I extracted the flowers from the front of the card, filtered it to make it look older (!) and transformed Rosine's salutation so it's more in line with her sister's name. You can still see where she actually wrote, under the flowers I brought over from the other side.