Dahlal Internationale

Wow! I just saw this tonight! I'm going there next weekend while we're in St Louis to buy things and I'd love to get at least the hip scarf. Assuit is a material made in Egypt on the Upper Nile in a small town by little old ladies. It is a cotton net fabric with German silver threads woven into a pattern and beaten flat. I want to take a seminar on a form of folkloric dance called Raqs al Assaya, a cane dance, in Lawrence in August and the scarf would be a nice compliment to it. I'll be picking up a couple of other things while I'm there, too; a set of cymbals and something else nice.

EDM #24 - Fruit

Fruit
Originally uploaded by SideShowMom.

The kids woke up just as I finished the fruit and wanted it for breakfast! I had sketched the plate and shading on it but couldn't get the right colors easily, it's a celadon blue, so I did the plate and background in PITT pens. The peach and bananas are watercolor.

Karma

Karma
Originally uploaded by SideShowMom.

For Illustration Fridays: Karma. Watercolor and ink in Moleskine. Who says you can't watercolor in them?

"The great spiral of life weaves its way from birth the source of all sacredinward as life quickens toward the first breath of life at birth and spins itself back out along its path learning what is there in this lifetime to death and rejoining the Great Wheel"

My Foot, Again

7-17-05
Originally uploaded by SideShowMom.

A more refined ink drawing. Pigment liner on moleskine. Will paint later...

EDM #23 - My Foot

7-16-05
Originally uploaded by SideShowMom.

A blind contour drawing of my foot for Everyday Matters Challenge #23. I was trying to steal time to draw all weekend and this is what I squeaked out last night between putting the kids to bed and my heading there, too.

EDM #12 - Draw What You Ate for Dinner

7-5-05
Originally uploaded by SideShowMom.

I ate chicken planks, hush puppies and fries with root beer and lots of malt vinegar at Long John Silver's.
Not one of my better efforts, I've been working on this small painting for about a week and a half and decided it was getting worse and stopped. The chicken was getting to be a muddy mess and the fries disappeared. If we don't make mistakes, we don't learn. So, I'm sharing my mistake.

Home Show

Driving down Ward Parkway, there are some homes that are just my favorites. This one was built by Boss Tom Pendergast, one of the first in the area, for his wife after their trip to Europe. They were especially impressed by the architecture of Provence.



This is supposedly the home of Len Dawson, former Chiefs quarterback and TV sports anchor. It was built in the last 5-6 years.



The Country Club Christian Church is a lovely compliment to the homes in the area.



The Meyer Circle fountain, known as the Seahorse fountain, was damaged by vandals several years ago, the top and upper bowl were shipped to Italy for repairs and returned to grace our city once again.



My favorite is a Japanese style home with shoji windows



that I didn't get in one shot.



A few days later, I saw this pooch cruising Shawnee Mission Parkway. Notice the owner's posture.

White Tigers and Bagpipes

We (the kids and I) went to get Aunt Sarah and took her to lunch at Applebee's. She wanted to go to the zoo to see the white tiger. Strenuous enough for an able-bodied mom with two little ones...Sarah's 70 something. So, I get on the cell to see if I can get Ron to talk us out of it with something. He says "It's hot," and "do you have enough money?" I have $40 to pay for our lunch. Sarah wants to pay. So I have $40 to pay for the zoo. So much for that. She needs to stop at the store for some personal things for the trip. We circle the lot in the car, and circle, and circle...time to launch the rescue party. She's got the object of her trip in the cart with several more items, none essential, including a small watermelon, a pound of butter and an aromatherapy kit. I remind her we're on our way to the zoo. "Will this stuff be ok?" No. (butter?) We can take it by your place on the way. I'll run in and put the cold stuff away. I do. And find out she has a UTI. We have two liter bottles of water, suggest she drink when we do (often). And her medicine will be there when we get back. She later told me she had had the infection for 10 days. (!!!! Ladies, you know what I mean) So, we're on the road to the zoo. We get in and see an IMAX show, "Mystery of the Nile." Magnificent! This planet we spin around on has some of the most beautiful, and dangerous, places on it!! Go see this expedition from the birthplace of the Blue Nile to the Mediterranean. Well done! Now, out into the zoo itself after a potty stop (all but Sarah). The goal of the day is to see the special white tiger on loan from the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha. We make the trek on foot (Sarah, the pillar of politness she is, asks a woman at the grocery store who has asked if we're waiting for the handicap space she is in if she looks like she needs a handicap space. No power chair for her.) the entire way to the Great Cat Walk, some 50-75 yards from the theater.



We see the white tiger, "Silver," walk across her enclosure and lie down for a nap.



We then proceed to breeze our way, at Sarah's painstaking pace, through the rest of the Cat Walk to the train station. Geordan is ecstatic, this is what he's waited all day for, the train ride!! He's all about trains right now.



Clickity clack, down the track.



We get to the car and take Sarah home. The kids are tired and happy and each have a souvenir. Geordan's asleep in his seat. Rianna is happily playing with her new animals. Sarah is trying to talk me into taking her to Theater in the Park tomorrow night (she won't fit in the car with us, we'd have to leave someone behind). Apologies. She's lonely. We love her. And take her home. On the way back up State Line, we see a 51 bus at it's waypoint. As I pull to the stoplight, I see the driver. It's the bagpipe player. He's sort of an institution. There was an article in the Star one year about him. He uses his time on his stopovers to practice his skirling. Lovely. We pull into the Ward Parkway parking lot to listen, Rianna climbing into the front seat with me. He's very good, I think he plays with the bunch from St Andrew's. They give free lessons. Someday... Anyway, we listened til he finished his "set" with "Scotland the Brave," stopped, received our applause with a wave, and got back on his bus. What a nice day.

Purple

Ok, I get to order my choli top tomorrow! This is what they look like, I'm getting purple. I usually like blue, but my princess wants her costume to be purple so...purple, it is.



I've decided to wait until after our St Louis trip to buy the top. I enrolled in the next session of classes instead.

My Costume

My Costume
Originally uploaded by SideShowMom.

The costume I want to put together. I already have a fuschia and silver coin hip scarf and hope to buy the purple choli top soon, then I'll make the skirt to match it, a three-panel one.

Deb Tyndall at Ragged Edge Publishing has put another poem with one of my photos from morgueFile! Splendid marriage of word and image! Thank you, indeed, Deb! 

A Middle Eastern Dance Photographer on flickr

img_4162.jpg
Originally uploaded by Woodrow.

I found Woodrow's photos in flickr by searching for "bellydance." He has thousands of photos! Click on the photo to go to his space!

EDM #10 - My Hand

7-2-05
Originally uploaded by SideShowMom.

I've recently started Bellydance classes and these are my first set of finger cymbals. I'm really not supposed to start with them yet, I jumped the gun and got a really cheap set with the thought of entertaining my kids. My next set will be Saroyan zills, the best. I liked drawing my hand, I think my hands are very graceful and I am able to do a great many things well with them--almost anything I put my mind to. One of the things my husband likes about me is that I can fix lots of things, and if I can't, I almost always know what's wrong with them. This week, I got my very dusty stereo out and cleaned all the components out, dusting, and cleaning switches and slides. It went from scratchy, static in the volume and CD player to a nice, clean sound. I have a nice stereo. I put the components together when I was working at Radio Shack in the late '80s, carefully matching the components, dual tape deck, receiver matched to Minimus 7 speakers and a 6-disc CD changer, DVD player and VCR hooked in to the system. No surround, it wasn't available then, just barely. I'll do that when I get into a house. And HD. And a new computer. And my darkroom.

Hands

This is one of the photos I have on morgueFile for people to download. I got this email the other day from someone using it:

RE: Malinda Welte aka sideshowmom @ Morguefile

Malinda -
I wanted to let you know that I am using one of your Morguefile photographs -Hands - as the page set for a poetry submission in our Ezine Ragged Edge Publishing. Your photo is wonderful. I love it. (I did tweak it just a bit to get the integration I needed.) Links are provided below so that you may see what I've done. I hope you approve, if not, let me know immediately and I will remove it from our site. We at REP would like to thank you very much for allowing us free use of your work. Without the generosity of people like you, the creativity of people like us would be greatly hampered. We are a site for new writers, as well as published authors. We don't charge for anything we do, thus we don't make any money, and in fact spend a great deal of that, and time, doing it. But, writing is the love of our lives as I'm sure the art of photography is yours. Any photo
resource available to us at no charge is worth far more than the price put on the photos at those "pay per download" sites.
Again, Thank You Very Much for sharing your art with us. We invite to come to our site and partake of ours.

With kind regards,

Deb Tyndall, Editor
Ragged Edge Publishing http://raggededgepublishing.com/
or direct to
page http://raggededgepublishing.com/BlessedPartofMe.html
If neither of these links work
please enter into your browser http://www.raggededgepublishing.com/
enter the site, click on POETRYand scroll to Blessed
Part of Me.
PS : If you would be so kind, please reply with a bit of a
bio of yourself - we are creating a special Artists and Photographers
Contributions page.

Neat! This photo has been downloaded over 100 times since I posted it May 17.

The Maya Zahira School of Bellydance!

The lovely Maya Zahira, my bellydance teacher. Visit her website for more information on belly dance in Kansas and Missouri and links to interesting sites on the web. (I like this costume better than the purple one)

Draw Daily

Here is Joyce Cole's blog, Draw Daily. She has a beautiful style and is a member of the Everyday Matters group. Click on the photo to go visit her blog!

Kathi

Rianna's latest creation. She did this last night for her teacher, Mrs Frey. I'm making a photo album of all the photos I shot at school and some of the kids at play this summer. Kathi is battling breast cancer. Go Kathi!!! We love you!!!!

EDM #4 - My Cup

6-25-05
Originally uploaded by SideShowMom.

Here's my new coffee/tea cup. I won a gift basket in the May Scavenger Hunt on morgueFile as the Grand Prize for having the most photos submitted. There were two of these cups, a matching napkin, lots of coffee and teas and cookies. Most delicious!

Pollock?

I finally downloaded ArtRage that everyone on the Everyday Matters list has discovered. Rianna had a grand time with it last night and made this Pollock homage for her Daddy.

Illustration Friday

I'm working on some ideas for this week's topic, "Black & White." There's lots of entries each week to look at from all over the world and all kinds of interpretations. Neat and inspiring!