Eliza Holliday Letterist.com: December 2009

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Brush Uncial in Pensacola!

I got to teach one of my favorite workshops recently, for the Gulf Coast Scribes in Pensacola, Florida...a very active group of calligraphers that is going strong! This was the workshop I was signed up to teach in Minnesota, Tomatoes and Windows...which is my take on Brush Uncial & Brush Blackletter...we had some great work in class, but I was remiss in taking enough pictures...so I've included some of my own projects, and a link to Brush Uncial (Brush Lettering 1V) up on youtube!
Everyone enjoyed doing at least one project on fabric: think - Banners!
It's pleasure to teach a group of enthusiastic and well-trained calligraphers! Plus, there was the slaw at Bagelheads....

A Speech to the Garden Club of America

Thank you. I’m glad to know we’re friends, of course;
There are so many outcomes that are worse.
But I must add I’m sorry for getting here
By a sustained explosion through the air,
Burning the world in fact to rise much higher
Than we should go. The world may end in fire
As prophesied—our world! We speak of it
As “fuel” while we burn it in our fit
Of temporary progress, digging up
An antique dark-held luster to corrupt
The present light with smokes and smudges, poison
To outlast time and shatter comprehension.
Burning the world to live in it is wrong,
As wrong as to make war to get along
And be at peace, to falsify the land
By sciences of greed, or by demand
For food that’s fast or cheap to falsify
The body’s health and pleasure—don’t ask why.
But why not play it cool? Why not survive
By Nature’s laws that still keep us alive?
Let us enlighten, then, our earthly burdens
By going back to school, this time in gardens
That burn no hotter than the summer day.
By birth and growth, ripeness, death and decay,
By goods that bind us to all living things,
Life of our life, the garden lives and sings.
The Wheel of Life, delight, the fact of wonder,
Contemporary light, work, sweat, and hunger
Bring food to table, food to cellar shelves.
A creature of the surface, like ourselves,
The garden lives by the immortal Wheel
That turns in place, year after year, to heal
It whole. Unlike our economic pyre<
That draws from ancient rock a fossil fire,
An anti-life of radiance and fume
That burns as power and remains as doom,
The garden delves no deeper than its roots
And lifts no higher than its leaves and fruits.