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Tuesday, January 10, 2006

A Little Heavy Shopping, orGood Things In Threes.

Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time. That' s my excuse, and I'm sticking to it. I had to go to the doctor, and thought, well, since I'm out, I'll go visit my friends at the art shop. Deadly. I'm not buying cloth, at the moment, but somehow, a ball of wonderful rich purple yarn fell into my bag, along with some gutta, some Golden acrylics (wonderful paint...) and, well, err.... a large bit of metal.

What's with the metal? Well, it's a palette for encaustic working. You stand it above a heat source, it heats up and melts your medium and encaustic paint, and away you go...instant bliss. Encaustic painting is painting with wax, if you haven't come across it before. The effects you can get are *wonderful*. I've wanted a palette like this for ages; I've been using sundry domestic appliances, and none of them worked terribly well. There was the famous day, for instance, when I blew up the deep fat fryer I was using to heat the wax for batik... flames galore, lots of heat and a terrible smell... I do defy myself to do anything really wrong with this new palette...after all, you don't plug it in anywhere!

But this wasn't the end of my extravagance, though I can't say that the following purchase was anything other than reasonable, and serendipitous. As I crawled around the floor looking at the acrylics, a very nice lady approached the desk and asked the owner if he ever sold second hand easels in the shop. Well, no, he said, they come up occasionally but... why, were you looking for one? It turns out that she wanted to sell two wooden easels. I found myself standing up asking how much! Not much, she said, I just want to get them out of the house. To cut a long story short, I'm now the proud possessor of two beautiful, and extremely well priced, easels. No more tipping over my work...I can actually work in safety...and I'm soooooooooo pleased. And perhaps now I can get some decent photos of my work...we'll see.

And I was asked about teaching, too, today. Clearly good things come in threes, too!

How was your day? Hope it was as successful as mine.

3 comments:

Joanne S said...

Hi! My blog is Wednesday's Child. I like to think I'll have one of those great shopping days. I've also seen that Lurador? mentioned in several blogs outside the US. what is it? How do you use it.

The heated wax sounds wonderful! I'll look up the process and give it a try!

artmixter said...

Hi, Joanne,
Lutradur is a non woven polyester fabric, which is meant for industrial usage, from agriculture to road mending, apparently...just the thing for a textile artist. It is strong, semi transparent even after colouring, and works well in both textile and paper art. With my friend and colleague Dijanne Cevaal, I'm putting together an initial worksheet on lutradur, which will be followed by a workbook, as it's difficult to get information on just how to use this stuff. Let me know if you're interested, anyone.

Anonymous said...

Lurador is intriguing me. Please, more.