September Cornfields

Every week I drive to Clay City, Indiana for work and one of the things I love about the drive is the range of rural landscapes that I see through the seasons.   I'm always inspired by something that I see.  Always.

The past couple of weeks, I've been watching the cornfields and so I painted this piece.   The cornfields out here are the first things to turn colors in the fall.   From early September until late October the colors are spectacular.   I'm hoping to be painting a lot of autumn inspired pieces over the next couple of months.   At the very least I'll be taking photos for reference later.  

I'm developing a painting 'process'.  I paint like I write.   In the first draft I get down the main idea and I play with a few options.  It's messy and ugly.  Then I start refining and adjusting and trying new things in the next drafts.   I've done as many as 15 drafts of the same landscape.   I stop when I've learned what I need to learn or when I get something I really like.

This is only the third draft of this particular piece and I'm really quite happy with it.  I learned what I needed to learn and I don't need to do another draft of it.   In this last edit I made the sky a much brighter blue to really emphasize that cloud and to balance all those bright golds.   I also added a dark shadow on the road from the corn so that the day would look really bright.    I strengthened the darks in the front at the base of the corn and at the back behind the cloud of dust on the road behind the bus. The roof on the house was originally dark green.   I asked Claire for feedback and she said I needed some red, so I changed the roof to red, which made the house a better focal point and an obvious destination for the bus and the eye.

Fig, Honey and Walnut Jam

I have gotten more than 50 little figs off my Chicago Hardy fig tree so far this year.   They're a little smaller than a golf ball, but gorgeous and sweet and I'm so excited that I can grow figs here!

I knew I'd need at least 40 for this recipe, so as they ripened, I chopped them up and froze them.    Worked like  a charm and I think they were sweeter coming out of the freezer than fresh.

Notes:  I started with this recipe from Food.com.   The original recipe called for 2 cups of honey, but unless you're using really, really mild honey [not easily available anywhere], the honey totally takes over the flavor.  I wanted fig jam, not fig flavored honey.   So, here's what I did:



Fig, Honey and Walnut Jam
www.rurification.com
3 cups chopped figs [About 40 Chicago Hardy figs, stems removed]
1 cup honey
2 Tablespoons lemon juice
1 cup chopped walnuts

Directions:
Put figs, lemon juice and honey in a wide bottom saucepan.   Bring to boil, turn down the heat and simmer until thick.  45 minutes or so.   I cooked until it started sheeting off the spatula.  Add walnuts and simmer for another 15 minutes or so.   Put in jars with clean lids.  Store in refrigerator.  Yield: 2 pints.

[I processed my jars of jam for 10 minutes to can it, but I'm not a canning expert so this is me not telling you what to do, but only what I did.]

Old Front Wall Down

Eric knocked the old front wall of the house down.  

The old living room addition on the front of the house was on the left. [Original house pic, below]  We built around that addition, put a room in the empty ell on the right and built the second floor over it.  




The new front of the house incorporated the old front of the house - the wall with the old chimney on it.  The foundation under that front was the only good foundation in the original house.   We kept it.

After Eric put in the new beams, he could tear out the old wall with the window and chimney.  He did.  It was a mess.   [Top pic]

The chimney went first.   It took 2 days of sorting and chipping off the old mortar to clean it up.   We saved all the unbroken bricks and chimney liner blocks we could.    Here's the stack.

We'll use them for paths or path edges later.

We spent a day taking apart as much of the old front wall as we could salvage. I kept the window sashes for cold frame covers.  We took the nails out of the good studs. [pic, right]  Yes, it was a pain in the rear.   A huge pain in the rear.   I assume we will be thankful some day.   That day is not today.



[Today is more a day of swearing than gratitude.]


Here's what's left of the old front room.   If you blow up the pic and look to the back of the room, you can see where the old roofline was where the front room addition attached to the old house.  



Next tasks:

• Tear out old floor and joists.
• Dig out new crawlspace.
• Gravel new crawlspace.
• Pour concrete to join new foundation with old foundation.
• Build new front wall.
• New inside floor joists and subfloor.

So that'll take a few weeks. 

T C Steele September Paint Out 2016

Last weekend, Claire and I got up before dawn to drive an hour to the T C Steele State Historical Site in Belmont, Indiana [just east of Nashville, In] to participate in our first paint-out.   It was dark.   It was lightening and thundering.  It was breezy.  It was exciting.

A paint out is an organized plein air painting day.   Lots of artists participate.   This one had judging and prizes at the end of the day.

Claire and I had planned and prepped and then traveled to be there early so we could find a good spot and finish before the rain.   We had raincoats and umbrellas; our gear was packed in heavy duty tubs that we could sit on out of the mud.

After checking in and getting our paper stamped to prove we hadn't started early, we chose a spot on the hill between the red barn studio and the DeWar cabin.   I faced the barn, Claire faced the cabin.    And we started.

It sprinkled a tiny bit, but no rain.  It was an amazing experience to be drawing with Claire at dawn, painting as it got lighter, listening to the breeze, the birds, the trees.   Claire finished first.   I took another hour or so because I had chosen a complicated composition.

When we were done, we went to Nashville for lunch, then came back to have our paintings judged.

My painting had some big problems.   The right side was great, but the left bottom was too empty and there was a big black hole in the upper left.    I took an Honorable Mention anyway.   Lucky!

Claire took 2nd place in the teen division.    So proud!!

When I got home, I took another look at my painting and decided it was a good opportunity to practice fixing.   I cropped off about an inch and a half of the left side.  I lightened up the top left corner background trees a lot.   I darkened the lower left below the row of shrubs and I added a couple more big rocks.  That's the pic you see at the top.   I'm pretty happy with it.   It's an iconic view of the TC Steele property and a fabulous memento of the day.

All in all, it was such a good experience that Claire and I are planning on doing the Bloomington Paint Out on the IU campus in October.    No prizes that day, but we're dying to paint the cemetery there.   [Pun unintended.]

House Update - Support Beam

Once we got the upstairs floors done and the windows and doors trimmed out we took a bit of a break from major construction.  

Our idea of a break is to do massive gardening, thinking, hauling, mulching, more thinking, figure out how to get ductwork  to the upstairs bedrooms so we could all survive the summer, disconnect the ductwork to the front end of the house, install ductwork to the upstairs [yay! a.c.!], more thinking, more hauling, digging, canning, move the master bedroom upstairs to the guest room, move the living room to the old master bedroom including the actual furniture that almost didn't fit through the actual doors, pull up the laminate flooring in the living room, rip off some of the aluminum [!] siding on the front of the house, cut a 'door' in the old front wall of the house, seal up the old hallway to the front room to keep the mess out of the house, gut the old front room, dispose of the debris....

It wasn't much of a break.

Especially since the next part involved mixing, by hand, a ton of concrete.  Not kidding.   Eric is my hero.

The concrete was for two footers and two piers [inside the front section of the house] upon which will rest a load bearing support beam.  Load bearing is a scary thing.   It means it holds the house up.    Hence all the thinking.   This is not something that we want to screw up.

Here's a pic of  Eric in what used to the be the front room.  Piers poured.  He was just getting ready to lay the boards down to build the I-beam that will support the center of the second story.

Wait.

'But, Robin!   How?..', you ask, 'HOW is the second story staying up now if he's just now building the beam??'  

An excellent question.   There's another beam in the floor of the second story that runs the entire length of the house and it's resting on stuff it needs to rest on.  The second story is safe. Those piers are dead plumb under the upstairs beam.  Once this new beam is in and a support wall between it and the beam above, the house will be EXTRA sound.   We like extra.

Here's a pic of the roof situation in the front of the house.  You're looking straight up into the ceiling of what used to be the front room.  

WARNING!   This pic is confusing.   Also, it's blurry.  Sorry about that.  It was darkish in there.  I've labelled a bunch of stuff and then tried to explain it below.   You can click to biggify the pic.

Explanation:  Start from the top of the pic on the left side.

• See the new beam?   That beam runs the length of the house.   It's in the floor of the second story.   The new ceiling joists [which are also the floor joists of the upstairs] are on top of that new beam.
• You can see the plywood decking above the new ceiling joists.   That is the floor decking for the new upstairs.
• The blue round things are old light fixture innards on the old ceiling joists of the front room.   Notice that the old ceiling is about 2 feet LOWER than the new ceiling is.   [Don't get me started on the ceilings of the old house.]
• On the right side of the pic you see the Old Roof Decking and the Original Roof Rafters.   Yes. That's part of the original old roof, tucked under the new addition.   Eric stripped the roof when we put the second story on, but only took out the peak of the roof and enough to set the new beam and build over the old stuff.  There were excellent reasons. All that old stuff is about to come out very soon.

I kind of love this picture because it really illustrates the careful thinking and bizarre sequence of events we've had to co-ordinate to live in the house comfortably-ish while doing a major renovation.

Eric is a genius.