coming back

My SAQA group is doing an exchange in which we each create a set of small pieces (4"x4") to swap. I was fooling with the idea of mandala a little while ago and thought it might make a good foundation for this exchange. In one of my art books, there is the suggestion that, when sketching mandala, you could draw in one area, then turn the page a quarter turn and draw in the next area. This is proving fruitful -- sometimes the smallest thing gives the best result.

I've been carrying around one of those top-spiral bound steno books with grid paper. I like symmetry, so I like having the grid underlaying the sketching. My Blogger "skills" -- which were minimal to begin with -- are rusty, but here are some of what I have so far, rendered in smudgy pencil. I think they may be stitched on a white ground, with shades of white and extremely pastel colors and some silver. I may have mentioned before that white is my favorite color. . .

this and that

Yesterday, bad: Frustrated trying to start a new Moby Dick Panel.
Today, good: Made a drawing. My local SAQA group is putting together a show with the theme of "Fiber + Thread = Art" and I wanted to do something new, but had not a niggle of an idea. This loopy drawing is an idea. I used to make these kinds of drawings all the time, usually they were h-u-g-e and on the sidewalk in colored chalk.
Yesterday, bad: Worked some more on that story I mentioned glancingly the other day. (That kind of creative writing makes me headachy and cranky and not much fun to be around.)
Today, good: Read it over and it's not half bad. I know what I need to do to finish it and I think I can get it done this week during the hiatus from work. This is a massive departure from 'normal' -- I've barely begun, and haven't finished, any writing since 1999.

As some of you know, I've been collecting the word verification words with the idea of creating a kind of language, or at least some blog slang. I have 67, I'm aiming for a list of 200.
I have a list of interrogatives:
(I may rethink these so that they all end with an "i")
scoli = who
ossesc = what
morti = when
pinen = where
ofierti = why
tayla = how
And a catch-all courtesy word, calat, which I like using to mean please and thank you, hello and goodbye. Dinah asked for a word to mean "blogging buddies" and I suggested eringla -- which she deemed "splendid" and immediately put to use. Beyond that I've been sorting things into categories depending on whether something has the feel of a noun or an adjective, or if it suggests a way it might be conjugated (tosipsyp) as a verb. The challenge has been to avoid sound-alike associations, ersads for ersatz, and thinking of everything as an exclamation: Oboli! One of my students was studying linguistics and she gave me a list of core words, words that express fundamental and necessary concepts across a wide range of languages, such as water, me, you, mother, father, etc that I think will be helpful with this project. So buff up your thinking caps -- when I have 200 WVs it's Rosetta stone time.