Scissors and Skeins

I have been a busy girl! And I'm tired. But it's a good tired.

Third day of classes went rather well. My wonderful illustration teacher gave us a presentation on Bruno Munari, who was a very weird, very cool illustrator/artist guy. He came up with a lot of cool stuff for children and early education, his most interesting contributions being his picture books. I highly recommend looking them up. In fact why don't you visit his wikipedia page.

Anyway, those picture books are made mostly through using cut paper, but cut paper in a sort of strange way that engages the page as part of the...thing. Um. Hmm. Oh! There's an image on one page, perhaps with  a little hole in it that is an eye or a star or a moon. You flip to the next page, and it becomes something different that contrasts in a cool way with what you saw before. He made lots and lots of these books. Our assignment today was to make one ourselves. Here's the cover of my attempt:

You may not be able to tell, but the white is the front page, and the black is what's showing through from the next page. Our theme was "travelling" -- so I did a story of a rabbit making a journey home. 

Sorry these are sideways...but you get the gist, I guess? These two are the only pages that I really like, I think you can probably see what's going on. From then on it goes downhill, mostly because...this was super difficult. You have to be aware of what's happening on the first second third and fourth pages, just so that you don't accidentally show cut out parts where they aren't supposed to be...ugh. Anyway, I have until Thursday to perfect it. Assuming I can find some scissors.

Also today I had my first Italian Fashion Design class. I missed the first session because I just recently added it -- I thought "oh hey I have space in my schedule and this looks like a fun idea", so I signed up. It wasn't exactly what I was expecting, but I enjoyed myself anyway. Along with 7 other girls, I listened to a presentation on the history of the "made in Italy" look, which actually only goes back to 1951. Huh. It was quite an extensive presentation. Ask me if you ever want to know about the early years of the White Room shows. 

The next section of the class was all about FIBERS! Natural, synthetic, artificial, mineral, animal, blue raspberry, you name it, I know...well, most of them, anyway. Then we got to make skeins. Of wool. With our hands. And some drop spindles. Here is me and my skein:

I may look a little overexcited about this lumpy rope of (really too thick) yarn, but I worked hard to make it, dammit. Those drop spindles are tricky. My assignment for this coming Thursday is to a. take 100 pictures of things I find beautiful in Florence and b. Do some sketches.
Of fashion design.
Clearly this woman has never met me. Because I have no idea how to draw fashion that isn't, not to put too fine a point on it, armor.
So I guess I'll show up on Thursday with my fantastical designs and see what she says. Maybe I'll be the next Alexander McQueen.