This or This.

If you're around Houston this weekend and like creative stuff, you should take part in Art Workshop: Dyeing in America at Bayou Bend. Make your own organic pigments with textile expert Katie Knowles! Ever since my short stint at the Fabric Workshop and Museum where I created unique chemical dyes in the dye lab, I've been interested in mixing colors. Our summer adventure included a trip to Ikonium, a felt making workshop, where they also make their own organic dyes for wool and silk. The end results are gorgeous. I'm totally going to start doing this on my own. Look at these colors made from onion skins!

Oh man I really wish I were going to this dye workshop (go for me and report back!), but instead I am fulfilling a long standing dream of attending this...

Fourth Annual Anne d’Harnoncourt Symposium - The Art of Sculpture 1100-1550: Sculptural Reception.

Yes! Two days of medieval madness. 
The University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia), l'Institut national d'histoire de l'art (Paris), and Philadelphia Museum of Art announce a series of conferences and study days organized over the course of 2012 to advance the study of medieval sculpture:

1. January 2012: Paris, Institut national d'histoire de l'art (30-31 January) (with study sessions at the Musée du Louvre)

2. May 2012: Kalamazoo, Medieval Institute Annual Conference

3. November 2012: Philadelphia, Phila. Museum of Art & Univ. of Pennsylvania(with study sessions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Glencairn Museum)

I didn't make it to the first two conferences, but the third is the most interesting to me anyway. 

I'm especially excited about this lecture: They Are All the Work of Artists (Jer. 10, 9):  The Romanesque Portal as Liturgical Performance, Manuel Castiñeiras, Professor, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. I can't wait to hear what this Catalonian scholar has to say regarding the expression of liturgical performance in Romanesque portals. I wonder if he will mention my beloved Ripoll, which has sadly been ( temporarily!) abandoned by me. I have very high hopes for this conference as it, in many ways, falls in line with my QP topic from Tufts. Now that my library has arrived from Boston I can get back into inspired research and finally open that major book I actually bought at Ripoll.

¡¡Me at the Ripoll portal!! September, 2011.

To get in the medieval spirit and because it's Halloween, we watched Army of Darkness last night. It's fantastic and Bruce Campbell is dreamy.

Army of Darkness, 1992.