The Age of Digitalis

Or: It’s all natural and plant based!

Wild digitalis is blooming in the woods all around and the family tradition of warning the kids away because it’s fucking poisonous keeps living on. “Keeping away” fortunately does not mean “do not take pictures”, so you get some treats. Sadly I think it’s a plant that defies photography: Take a pic of the whole plant and the beautiful individual flowers don’t show up right, take one of an individual flower and the beauty of the whole is lost.

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©Giliell, all rights reserved

©Giliell, all rights reserved

©Giliell, all rights reserved

©Giliell, all rights reserved

The bugs apparently don’t mind.
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I also found a white one. While there are bred white garden varieties, I don’t think that this one is, since it’s a far way form any garden and in the middle of a sea of purple ones.

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©Giliell, all rights reserved

©Giliell, all rights reserved

The gendered nature of public space: this is all shit and I’m pissed.

Public toilets have long been a battle ground of women’s fight for the public sphere: from the fact that back in the 19th century there simply weren’t many public toilets for women, making them dependent on how well they could hold their pee to leave the house, to today’s fight to make sure trans women can safely use the right loo. The very private act of relieving oneself was always very public and very political. Another dimension (no pun intended) is space, and I rarely found a better example of how space is allocated to cis men than today.

I went to a meeting in a public building today, and when it was over I went to the visitor bathroom because I learned that if I don’t go the Autobahn will be closed and I’ll piss myself before I get home. So everybody who drove the same direction should thank me.

The sign at the door said “men, women and disabled”, making me wonder whether disabled people are suddenly no longer men and women, but then I went inside and came upon this:

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Snug, isn’t it? With the bin being so close to the loo and not much space on the other side I had some difficulties to move my butt far enough to the back of the toilet to actually hit the bowl. How this should be managed with a disability is a mystery to me, but if you think “maybe they only had so much space available”, let me tell you, they didn’t. To the right of the toilet is another compartment, about 50% larger than this one, holding two urinals. Hey, at least it had a door so you don’t need to see somebody waving their dick around, I go to Twitter for that kind of thing. Yes, that’s correct: 100% of the facility meet the needs of able bodied cis men, with 60% being reserved exclusively for them, while women, disabled people of all genders and probably most trans men all need to share 40% of the space, which is actually not enough space and which is also available to cis men.

And you want to hear the joke? The public building was a youth office, where the overwhelming majority of visitors is female…

At least I had a pretty break

Hello there. I know, I’ve been very absent recently. Work was pretty demanding, the Damokles’ Sword of not knowing whether my contract will be renewed hanging over my head* and life being busy as usual.

Last weekend we first had #1’s “culture workshop”, which is an evening when all the groups in her school can present their projects, including her class. It was an amazing evening and the kids are really damn talented, from the chubby boy with the glasses doing a kick ass rap presentation to the Syrian girls reciting poetry about their home town Aleppo.

The next day was the little one’s school festival, which usually means the very same people working a lot. It#s the same everywhere. My colleague was totally stressed out because she was organising things for her kid’s festival the same weekend. Or as Pratchett noted: if you want to get something done, give it to somebody who is already busy.

And the works in the garden have finally begun. There’s nothing like coming home with a migraine and having people use heavy machinery around the house.

As a result, we used this long weekend (holiday on Thursday, “bridge day” on Friday) to lick our wounds and recover and spend some very quiet time together, going for walks etc.

But I also got some resin art done over the weeks, especially after Marcus’ latest parcel.

Some of this will be up for sale/auction for the FtB legal defence fund, so if you set your eye on something, just let me know.

*I’m pretty positive that I won’t be unemployed come next term, but that’s not the same as knowing and I’ve noticed that it has been slowly wearing me down.

First of all, this is what the garden looks like now:

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In tearing down the old stuff they found tons of unreasonable concrete which they have to get our somehow.

First project: tealight holder:

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These look very complicated but are actually dead easy and I’d say the perfect project if you want to do something with resin but not invest a lot of money in moulds and stuff: Just pour your resin onto wax paper, let cure for about 12 hours, fold over a glass, fix with a rubber and cure completely.

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©Giliell, all rights reserved

The fish are printed again, though I bought the sheet this time.

Next projects are under the fold:

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Teacher’s Corner: The Girl who Cried Wolf

We all know the story of the boy who cried wolf, which, in one version or the other is something adults tell children to warn them about the danger of lying or making up emergencies when there are none. The adults never bother to sit down and think about how fucked up the story and its message are, because if they did, they’d tell it to adults to warn about a different danger.

The boy who cried wolf is sent out to herd life stock, but children aren’t meant to be alone al day, they need company, they need intellectual stimulation, so the kid makes up stories to get people to pay attention to him. When he does so repeatedly, none of the adults asks “but why does he keep calling us, what does he actually need?” I know, the story is supposed to play in olden times when people didn’t give a fuck about the needs of children, but it’s told by adults today so I think the criticism is fair.

Instead, the adults decide to no longer pay attention to the kid at all, with the catastrophic result that we all know, and then the blame is put on the kid and not the adults who failed to keep him safe. This thinking has consequences, and it can have catastrophic consequences here and now. Slight CN for predatory behaviour.

Some kids at our school live in group homes. On Friday, those kids came to us and told us that on their way to school, three men in a red car had bothered them and talked to them and that they were afraid, with one of the girls being in tears. I called the group home to inform them about the incident and make sure the kids would be picked up after school so they were safe. The head of the home asked me which kids were affected and I told him the names, randomly starting with L. “Oh, you know”, he said, “we’re having some difficulties with L right now”. Man, do I know? I see L every day, I know she’s got her issues. “She likes to make up stories”. “I know”, I said, “but H, B and A are telling the same story.”

That was enough to convince him and they sent somebody to pick up the kids. Now imagine a world that was the exact same, except that H, B and A were with their families. In which L had been the only child those men in the car bothered. A world in which her story had been treated as “the girl who cried wolf” and they had left her alone without protection. Because she’s a kid who is in a difficult situation, who likes to make herself seem more important by making up stories.

So, dear adults, here’s the real morale of the story: When a child says they’re in danger, you run. If a child has made up stories about danger 99 times, you still run when they cry danger the 100th time. And then you sit the fuck down and think long and hard about why the kid is making up stories and you talk to the kid and try to find a way for them to deal with their issues that does not result in fake alarms. You do NOT handwave away a report about predatory men because of who made the report. If you want to talk to children about why making false alarms is bad, tell them that they’re wasting the time of the rescue services and that this may be dangerous to somebody else who is in real danger. The story about the boy who cried wolf is a story about adults failing their duty to keep children safe, so if you want to keep telling it, tell it to each other.

Nature Imitates Art

Dürer’s young hare is probably one of the best known animal portraits in the world. On our recent trip to the zoo, a rabbit seemed to be imitating the famous drawing pretty well.

See for yourselves:

 

Dürer’s Young Hare.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

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Or maybe Dürer was just pretty good at painting hares and bunnies.

Blue as the Ocean in a shallow Bay

The last resin pieces for now:

This set contains broken glass pieces, giving it even more the look of a crystal:

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©Giliell, all rights reserved

Mr. looked at the box with the glass shards and asked where I got that. It’s a funny story I told him. I turned around and then there was this strange noise and suddenly I found the glass all over the kitchen floor. Our tiles really hide the dirt well, but they show no mercy to any plate or glass dropped.

Next is a cherry flower:

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I made three or four of these and I’m not entirely happy about them. First of all, pressing seems to have destroyed some of the structure of the petals and they became see through when I added the resin. Second I added holographic glitter and a black background and that’s too much for my taste, I should have stuck with one of them.

Next one is a galaxy oval:

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Here the idea is that you cast two separate pieces and then glue them together, giving it dimensions and depth. I quite like the effect. This one is small as I wanted to practise first, but I can definitely see more of them in the future.

And last but not least a terrible photo of a pretty pendant:

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Wind came up and it kept swinging so they were all out of focus. Can you guess what’s inside?

Yep, it’s a pine cone in resin, sawed into slices. I have another block with red and yellow, but I need to cut it first.

This concludes this series of work, but I hope there’s more soon.

Eternal Flowers

Some more resin, this time with a pendant I made specifically foe all my black tops with colourful flowers (I’m a sucker for the Spanish label “Desigual”). I still need to wire wrap it because a simple hook doesn’t seem fitting.

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Some flowers react with the resin and suddenly you have a totally different colour. Here on the left is a violet, only that now it’s a yellowlet (please, nobody explain to me how to spell “yellow”, will you?). Same with the erica. The violas are holding up their colours well. I’m going to dry a whole bunch of them.

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Next one is a leaping unicorn. This took me several tries because for some reason the Piñata magenta (a stock brand for resin) kept reacting with the blue and always turned a very dark violet and I needed to get a different pink from the company that also produces my resin.

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This is one of two unfinished earrings to go with the unicorn. When I cast these bigger pieces and cut them into shape there are often interesting bits and pieces that get turned into earrings.

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The final piece is unfinished yet and more of an experiment. I used one of the burl pieces to create a silicone mould. I cast some blue resin and then put it into one of my larger moulds and added the white, only that it’s too much white here, again hiding the burl structure. Currently my idea is to print a bird silhouette and add it, because it does have a sky-feeling to it.

BTW, I totally offer to sell/create piece for the FtB defence fund if anybody’s interested.

The sad Discovery of the Existence of too much Blue

It’s time for some resin. I never catch up with posting all the stuff I create, but I’m doing my best.

I did my first tries with the burl Marcus sent and alas, there is something like too much blue.

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The structure of the burl pretty much vanishes inside , leaving only the outside visible. You can also see that I didn’t catch all the scratches, but I left it at that because they’re only visible when seen against sunlight, which isn’t something that usually happens when you wear a pendent.

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This one is smaller than the one at the top, cut from the same cast. With a lot of light you can guess the gold I added. I still love the burl and the second attempt is a lot better, but not yet cut and polished.

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These ones, OTOH, turned out exactly as blue as I wanted them. Because here the focus is on the contrast between the birch and the resin. I cut this and the second piece from one block as well, both being about 3X5 cm.

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©Giliell, all rights reserved

Awww fuck it, there isn’t such a thing as too much blue, because, well, blue.

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Here’s some trinkets that will probably get incorporated into other pieces. They’re cast in silicone moulds for fondant, so the finish isn’t glossy, but I quite like them.