As summer winds down I am checking in with two pleasures from the past months. We had a hot summer. As I have somewhat control over my time, I enjoyed it: lake swims, gardening, rowing my very small rowboat and wearing summer dresses, or as my dear friend Catherine said: “you should call them frocks!”

Late spring, maybe sensing the coming heat, I set out for my favourite discount store: ‘Dots’ to buy a dress. I came back with a hat and three dresses– an everyday one, a green one and a dressy posher geometric one. Love them lots and wore them lots, especially the everyday one which is a kind of abstract floral. Get up in the morning and put on the frock, so simple. I felt a 1950s vibe.
Side note on that: when you watch regular folk on TV shows set in the first half of the 20th century, and they take a trip, often on the train, they have one small suitcase – that’s it. And I think the TV folk got that right: modest people did not have a whole lot of clothes and the gals had that go-to frock.

Also this summer, I kept going with my online art courses from Domestika (no offers of sponsorship deals yet.) My latest was with Felix Scheinberger, a gusty punky artist from Berlin. One of his earlier lessons was Blind Contour Drawing (a well-known technique but new to me). In this exercise, you close your eyes and with the finger of one hand, trace your face, and with the other, draw on the paper, blind remember, how you feel your face. The result is a punky kind of strange version of yourself.
I did several and had the idea of adding part of my everyday dress. I also included the hat for good measure…). I was inspired to add the dress, by Edith Carron, an artist who does art and fashion fabrics.
So here is the picture, which really does not look like me, but the glasses are there, the hat and the frock!