wednesday, may 20, 2009
Pieces of jewelry that mimic flowers
Designed to spot colorful fruits and berries from a distance, our primate eyes notice feminine necks decorated with strings of round, pigmented beads which catch eyes and whet a desire to reach out and touch what seems to be “edible.” — “Love Signals I” from The Nonverbal Dictionary.
Etsy’s Poster Sketch feature took up a large chunk of my time by letting me make this arrangement:
Links: Squash Blossom, mille fleurs in peach, Lily of the Valley, Pink Flower, FLEUR, Garden of Joy, Hydrangea, Three snow peas in a pod, Romancing, Thicket, RED TULIPS, Bloom, Bluebell, Roses, Japanese Maple Seed, Jaded.
This set is related to a display I saw in a store window in San Francisco — I’ve also seen a similar display in the gift shop of the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden — and Etsy has more interesting items with choices in a broader price range. It’s not the kind of jewelry I wear (less delicate and cheaper), but I like looking at it. Other nice earrings by a friend of a friend: californiablue.
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monday, october 08, 2007
My classes for Fall 2007
In my Flowers art/biology class, I’m drawing and painting the Brazilian Pepper Tree. This will be my part of our illustrated guide to the campus flora.
My other three classes are literature classes:
- Shakespeare and Theory — re-reading the plays using new discourses in order to get closer to the old meanings.
- Texts in/and/of Transition: Theories of the Book — learning and talking about the form of the book. I’ve read about this before because I love it, and I made a Delicious tag for those bookmarks.
- Theorizing Adaptation: Translation and Mutation — thinking about film adaptations of literary works, among others. This class is part of the Literature and Culture of Information program in the English department, which is becoming my unofficial specialization.
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sunday, august 26, 2007
The scientific odd is another market niche
Paxton Gate is next to the pirate store at 826 Valencia, and it sells supplies for your garden and your cabinet of curiosities. So it has a lot of things I like:
- Bonsai trees, tiny succulents, fertilizer for carnivorous plants, buckets of polished glass gravel (like Vetrazzo for the ground), and a garden in the back.
- Ceramic tea cups with pretty glazes and jars of loose-leaf tea, with a little kettle and sampling cups in a corner — reminding me of the tea room at the Museum of Jurassic Technology.
- Taxidermied mice and bigger mammals, the skeletons of various creatures, and arrays of preserved beetles and butterflies.
- Trilobite fossils, sand hit by lightning (see also), railroad date nails, ammonite fossils, odd dried pods, fossilized poop, etc.
- Books about zoomorphic architecture and photography as remembrance, along with the requisite Haeckel collection.
- Shirts with snake skeletons.
The only problem with seeing a bunch of my aesthetic interests in one place is re-encountering the fact that I’m not terribly special, but I like that kind of problem. It is nice to belong to a city.
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monday, february 26, 2007
Dandelions, daisies, buttercups
A survey of common weedflowers in Isla Vista, California:
None of them are native plants. (More about buttercups.)
What are the weedflowers in your area? Show me! You have an exception from this assignment if you live here too.
