Month: January 2025

the worst buck ever

Last week my partner’s sister and her husband spent the night so we could indulge in our favourite sleepover pastime of getting wasted and playing Solo, a weird old German card game my family plays. It’s similar to euchre but your partner changes each hand according to the bidding, and there are funny words derived from Low German for the different bids. Players go out when they reach 36 points, and the game is played until only one person is left, which is called “taking the buck”. I had the worst game of my life, dealt terrible cards and also ending up with the least helpful partners, and at one point well into the game I still had no points and thought, I’d better take a picture of this to show my mom. So here’s a thrilling scoresheet photo for you:

worstbuck1

By the time the game was over and I was declared The Buck, I’d earned points on one hand. I’m kind of wishing I hadn’t, because that would have been a scoresheet worth framing:

worstbuck2

I still might frame it, and hang it behind the kitchen bench where we play cards, because my mom said it was the worst score she’d ever seen. In our family’s heyday there would be three separate tables of Solo going at every holiday gathering, so having any kind of superlative game in this family is kind of amazing.

Don’t tell my mom (hi, yes I’m 53 but just don’t tell my mom, okay) but I’m planning to get knuckle tattoos, in the fancy lettering from the Bicycle Playing Cards box, that say CLUB SOLO, the biggest scoring hand you can get. Even though a couple of my friends have said that everyone will assume it’s some kind of Star Wars reference.

drinks diary, 4 january 2014

This 4×6″ black hardcover sketchbook was filled between 4 January 2014 and 4 January 2015 and contains a drawing of everything I drank outside my own home that year.

sb14-1-4

I started drawing in a fresh sketchbook while sitting in the Exeter Lions Youth Centre after my cousin Jon’s funeral, watching beads of coffee leak through the side of a styrofoam cup on the table in front of me.

Drawn with blue and red ballpoint pen (0.7mm Zebra F-301, for the pen nerds).

found

I’m currently in the thick of a big studio clean and rearrange, carving out a space to set up my indigo and other dye vats in the printmaking studio where there’s beautiful light and ventilation, unlike the dark and cramped laundry area where the dye vats currently reside. Today I moved the two-tier metal flat file unit and am spending some time decluttering the drawers as I move them. I found this great drawing, done *I think* by my friend Monica’s son, from back when I had my shop and public access studio. It appears to be a jewel thief being arrested under a crescent moon by a law enforcement officer who is simultaneously pointing a gun and eating Tic Tacs. Not sure if my favourite part is the fluffy police dog that says “reeef” or the giant ghost of my trusty spray bottle of watered down Simple Green.

getinthecar

As if that weren’t delightful enough, on the flipside is this portrait of me, wearing bright green glasses and a Pugs Not Drugs shirt and drawing a dinosaur. Which is pretty on brand.

pugsnotdrugs

Here’s the dinosaur I was drawing:

oviraptor

the fencening

In early December we had a new fence installed out back. It’s a big adjustment after nearly 20 years with a backyard wide open to the alley, and feels weird not to be able to see the alley cats coming (although we’ve left plenty of big gaps for them to pass through, as the feral cat highway cuts through our property from front to back).

Here’s the view from the upstairs window:

fence

Yes, there’s a squirrel hanging on the bird feeder. There is very nearly always a squirrel hanging on the bird feeder.

And the view from the basement studio window:

fence2

Every time we plant a tree or put up a new feeder or anything I hover at the window like a hyperactive puppy, waiting to see animals interacting with our new stuff. Fittingly, my girl Shorty was the first one over the fence.

shortyfence

shortyeating

She gave me a little scare recently, not showing up here since December 17 so that I was already starting into the rationalising stage of grief, telling myself she’s pretty old for an urban squirrel (going on 4) and reminding myself this is why we don’t fall in love with wild animals and then she sauntered in here on January 3 and started pigging out on seeds like nothing had happened. I had been about to knock on the door four doors down and ask the residents if a squirrel had died in their roof recently, but since she’s fine please don’t anyone tell my 4-doors-down neighbours that she lives in their roof. She’s lived in that house longer than they have.

blue sketchbook, page 20 & 21

page20-21

Ballpoint pen, markers, white gel pen. Portrait of a random stranger, from their social media profile picture.

I remember drawing this page while working the midnight sessions at the bingo, listening to the ladies who ran bingos for various charities talking about the city’s cracking down on how many charities each of them could volunteer for. It was stupid and short sighted but, welcome to Windsor.

blue sketchbook, pages 18 & 19

page18-19

Ballpoint pen, blue highlighter marker, and crusty ancient Letraset letters. Everything else is bleed through from the preceding and following pages.

I drew this little cartoon of José Mourinho after one of his whiny press conferences where he accused the match officials of bias against his team, muttering “por qué, por qué” while shaking his head and rolling his eyes around. It may have been after the 5-0 defeat to FC Barcelona on Matchday 13 of the 2010/11 season, or after some other time Barça beat them. At one of those matches around that time, a Barça fan in the crowd help up a sign that said MOURINHO, HOY, MAÑANA, Y SIEMPRE: TRADUCTOR and I’m still laughing about it.

daily stitch 2025, day one

25daily0101

This is the beginning of my 2025 daily stitch project.

I’ll admit it: I haven’t finished my 2024 daily stitch. I struggled with doing it every day, fell behind at several times during the year and at the end of the year, despite having many days off and very few plans, I did other things instead. I’m very close to completing it, though, and am on track to be ready to baste it up for quilting by next week, if I can settle on a fabric for the back.

For this year’s edition, I’m again focusing on applied fabric pieces, as my studio is overflowing with these fabrics I block printed for my masters thesis and other projects. I’ll start in the centre and spiral outward in a log cabin pattern. I’m aware that I’m setting myself up for larger and larger pieces each day, the daily time spent growing relentlessly over the year EVEN THOUGH I failed to keep up with just the same small amount of daily stitching last year. But this is Day One so I’m brimming with optimism. It’s going to be a year of COMMIT or DIE TRYING.