Wednesday wonderings

Tom is at the railroad today, training a new conductor. This guy already has experience and can probably be certified by tomorrow evening and start working on Friday. If all goes well, that means Tom will not have to keep working Fridays (and some weekend days/hours) to cover. That will be good. We recently had to cancel a dinner engagement because he had to pick up hours at the railroad. Perhaps now we won't have to do things like that.

I have been doing a bit of cleaning. One unfortunate result of having D-Square do such a good job on the floors is that I see how messy other things are!

This afternoon is my collage class. I have been working on finishing up a book cover project. I took a proof copy (meaning an early version I had to use to correct typos and such) of my mystery and played with it.

Here is a copy of the original cover. That photograph, by the way, is of a Carmelite monastery in Spain that I visited and photographed in the summer of 1978. The basic cover design is a template. For my other books, Tom designed the covers and did the art, resulting in much more attractive books.

Below is the collaged cover. I washed over the cover with some white acrylic to tone down the colors and glossy shininess, which may not be all that apparent in the above photograph. I cut out the daylight sky behind the monastery and inserted a night sky. The icon of St. John in the lower right hand corner is holding a small book. The handwriting, much too small to see here, is his actual writing. Across from the icon is a copy of an autograph signature. Around the edge of the book  as a sort of frame, I have written in Spanish the first couple of lines of the poem "En una noche oscura" (better known in English as "One Dark Night"), which poem serves as a framework for the story in the novel. I inserted a tiny replica of the icon in one of the windows of the monastery, to represent John looking out. And the eyes in the sky are a bit of humor. By the title I placed a small scapular medal of Our Lady of Mount Carmel.

It's relatively simple but meaningful to me.

I finished up the bird/music collage pictured on my July 4 post. No changes in appearance, just getting things glued down and sealed.

My active project how is a small piece what will be attached to an old book. It has a Dodd family theme, but I will wait until I can take a photo before trying to explain it.