Real Thing

The form of an egg has been a theme in my Friday morning design class. Yesterday one of my fellow students brought me two eggs from her chickens. She lives on a farm a few hours from Melbourne.

This particular breed of chicken lays "duck egg blue" eggs--really they do! There's no need to verify the genuiness of these particular offerings. The colour is not quite even and the shape is just a bit imperfect. That's perfect really.

My plan is to blow out the eggs. Two benefits: fresh egg for me to enjoy in an easy meal and eggshells for me to keep.

Egg Essentials

I continue to be intrigued by eggs--those little packets of incipient life! And yet they're a simple household commodity. There's been a fair bit of controversy lately about the genuineness or otherwise of the "Free Range" labelling in supermarkets. I have to confess to feeling just a bit cynical when I came across this:
In a carton of a dozen free range eggs, each a uniform warm brown colour, beautifully clean except for one little feather clinging to the top of the first one--just where it would most likely be seen when checking for cracks before popping into a shopping trolley. It's a lovely thing in its own way and at the same time as I felt a warm fuzzy pang for the mother hen, I wondered whether there's just a worker at the processing plant with a pile of perfect little feathers, dabbing one onto a representative egg in every dozen. Oh well!

Egg again

Our Colour Theory subject has two strands--no pun intended:)--one is mixing colours with paint, the other with embroidery threads. It seems that the sub-text is to make sure that we all have some basic skills in hand-stitching. We're tackling a couple of different stitches each week: seed and running stitch the first week, chain and blanket stitch this week. I'm not finding colour blending with six-stranded embroidery cotton very satisfying--especially not on such small samples. It difficult to get a real blend given the limitations of the medium. I keep thinking about how I could blend the colours using my spinning techniques or my dye pots, but that's not on the agenda just yet. Meanwhile, making a small, quick design using variations of only one embroidery stitch is an interesting challenge in itself.

Exploring the Egg

I managed to get most of my set homework for Friday's class done on the weekend. That gave me time to play. The idea of the egg has stuck with me. I decided to give my imagination a bit of help and constructed an egg-shaped spiral out of beading wire.
Looking at the 3-D form in reality made it easier to explore the lines which might represent it--especially when the form was already indicated by what is essentially a line. The shadows are something else again. And of course the wire is three dimensional, so reflections off the curved surface add another layer of complication.

Egg

Our topic in design class on Friday included exploring 3-D structures and ways of depicting them in a 2-dimensional medium. In one exercise we attempted to describe an egg without using shading--or language. The idea was to use the pencil tip to traverse the terrain of the egg's surface--in our imagination of course.

I found myself continuing to think about the form of an egg. Coincidentally, I have a frittata on my agenda today. I need to re-stock the easy-meal-supply in my fridge. I saved the last egg and blew it out rather than cracking it into the bowl. A good rinse with a couple of syringe-fulls of water and it's ok to keep for a while--though I will need to be careful to put it in a safe place. Now before I spend too much time exploring, I will need to finish off some of the more defined homework exercises, then I can get as engrossed as I like and I'll still be up to date come next Friday.