Saturday, Oct. 21, 2023 - 7:34 p.m.

The veggie market yielded, for $20, a box of cucumbers, a box of mixed squash (zucchini and yellow and gray), bell peppers, small sweet peppers, lemons, and tomatoes and tomatoes. I don’t have enough room in the fridge for it all. I made 2 quarts of pickles but that only did for 2 of them and I have like a dozen more. Gazpacho will have to be made, I suppose. I need to squeeze the lemons and freeze the juice.

Anyway, the calligraphy class was… Well, she tried to pack too many things in and didn’t give us enough time and the end result was that I hated every mark I laid down and hated every tool I tried to use to make it. I felt overwhelmed, incapable, dejected. I may have had a mini-meltdown in the middle of it, which made me glad my camera wasn’t working (again).

It was good information, and a lot of good exercises. But I just needed more time. We drew variations of O and then selected one to be the model for an alphabet, designed the alphabet, applied it to our text, did a series of variations on it to select when we’d use for the final piece, then did (were supposed to do) several iterations with variations of type of line, color, spacing, movement, added focal elements… several of each. It was relentless and once I got to where I hated my alphabet and realized it wasn’t working, there was no time to go back.

I can do that later, of course, on my own time. But today was not joyful.

Update: eventually this evening I did come up with an alphabet I liked better and did a little of that. It looks messy and unhinged and I don’t know if that’s because I’m covering up for not being able to do it right, or if it’s because I really want it that way. Who can tell. The composition is terrible and I still have to work on that but at least I feel like I have something I want to work with now.

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