In the works ...

I've been collecting stuff for junque robots for years. I am getting it all out making what I want and getting rid of whatever stuff is left. Rosie, on the right I made maybe 3 years ago. Betty on the left is new. Almost done, she may get a base. Harold is about half done. All very, very different. Hoping to do one a week. I'll share more as I go on.

 

I want to design fabric. Am going to start by making some tea towels using elements from Wilderness Doodles. And then doing a collection of fabric. To warm up and work my way through the technical part I made some recipe tea towels using some of Mom's recipes. I created 4-up art using Spoonflower's linen tea towel fabric. I was extremely pleased with both the quality of the fabric as well as the printing. I will still need to hem and press these. But what a wonderful keepsake with a loved one's handwriting. Here is a how-to link from Spoonflower.

 

While I work I watch movies or listen to books on tape. This is the genre we listen to in the car. And I am finishing it as I work. I was really surprised that Hugh Laurie can write.

British actor and comedian Hugh Laurie's first book is a spot-on spy spoof about hapless ex-soldier Thomas Lang, who is drawn unwittingly and unwillingly into the center of a dangerous James Bond-like plot of international terrorists, arms dealing, high-tech weapons, and CIA spooks.You may recall having seen Laurie in the English television series Jeeves and Wooster; Laurie played Bertie Wooster, the clutzy hero of the P.G.Wodehouse comic novels that originated those characters. The lineage from Wodehouse's Wooster to Laurie's Lang is clear, and, if you like Wodehouse, you'll probably love The Gun Seller.

Did you ever wonder what House did before he became a doctor or even a TV doctor? Well clearly he was Thomas Lang, rumpled former officer in the Scots Guards, counter-terrorist operative and gentle, chain smoking tough guy. The book's dialogue oozes the cutting wit and self-deprecating self-awareness, self-destructiveness and self-centeredness of the good doctor in the TV series. Presciently, Thomas spends the last quarter of the book speaking with a vaguely Minnesotan accent in order to persuade a bunch of terrorists-for-hire that he is one of them. I cannot tell whether I am reading House into the pre-Housian novel or Hugh Laurie has successfully embedded his novel's dialogue into the television scripts. There is also more than a smidgen of Black Adder and Monty Python floating about. It is all highly amusing. As suggested by the dust jacket art, the book is really a graphic novel without the pictures. With plenty of action, clichés, beautiful women and rather unpleasantly evil bad guys, the plot manically twists, jumps and leaps. The abiding persona of Hugh Laurie, aka Gregory House and aka Thomas Lang holds it together. - Scribd