#4 Birds, sisters, nature stuff, metal...
Guess it’s more of a closed square
I read a lot in the last little bit and truly by happenstance created this closed thematic loop:
Two Sisters (not a book, a story) is magic realism starring two fussy old ladies.
Gliff is speculative fiction set in the nearish future about two sisters knowing stuff about plants, living in a separatist community, and one names a horse a word that means a lot of different things.
The Hearing Trumpet is surrealist and about a little old lady living in a strange, separatist community at the end of the world.
Matrix — yes ha ha have your little Keanu joke; words mean more than one thing! — is about Marie of France building a separatist community (an abbey) and knowing stuff about plants!
I heartily recommend each. The edition I got of The Hearing Trumpet had illustrations by the author’s kid and they are phenomenal. Cf:
The birds are a shoe bill and a falcon
Ye olde brass pendant! Those cutouts (except the big one) are where I had to get the drill bits out. The little ones on the side look like the snake that ate an elephant from The Little Prince.
I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to make as a pendant/key fob so I went looking for inspiration at the reference library, specifically the image file for GOLD (this is brass though) and saw a bunch of cool stuff — Akan goldwork and Etruscan jewelry in particular — then drew what I saw and worked off that.
I was too ambitious, it turns out. After all the broken drill bits I decided against trying to drill the birds’ eye holes, though that would have looked better. After giving up on the part of the design that had another row of holes, I ended up with this weird empty space in the middle of the pendant so I wrote HAHA in it because I wanted to get some enjoyment out of my failure. A little joke for myself.
Speaking of jewelry, I was at the British Museum last fall and saw this ring which was funny to me in the same way:
