Caillebotte Casey and Colored Pencils

James took this picture yesterday of Casey, waiting patiently in the pouring rain while we took pictures of him before letting him in. It reminds me of one of my favorite paintings, Paris Street in Rainy Weather, by 19th-century French painter Gustave Caillebotte. The Brooklyn Museum of Art is having an exhibit right now of Caillebotte paintings that James and I are hoping to see, if we can get ourselves down there between now and July 5. Until then, we have our own little Caillebotte impressionist in the house.

Last year some fabric I'd had my eye on in the store for months finally went to clearance, so I bought up all that was left—almost 6 yards. Originally I planned to use it for curtains in the basement workshop, but I have since decided that keeping that workshop heated in the winter would be too expensive and wasteful of natural resources (although if we're in this house long enough I am going to figure out a way to responsibly winterize that room so we can use it for more than storage). Hence, I had 6 yards of material waiting to be put to use. I didn't want to chop it up into a bunch of small pieces, so I kept rejecting all sorts of ideas until finally, yesterday, I said To Hell With It and cut off about a yard and a half to use as our Easter tablecloth. The fun thing about this fabric is that it's printed to look like old-fashioned "redwork"—red thread embroidered outlines on white linen. A ready-made coloring book! So I put a jar of colored pencils in the center of the table and have already completed one motif, colored during breakfast this morning.

I spent quite a bit of time on-line yesterday trying to figure out how to color it permanently, not wanting to use fabric paint because I'd have to put newspaper or something underneath to keep it from going through onto the table (not that the table is anything special—in fact, it has a scorch mark on it that necessitates perpetual tablecloth coverage—but I'd still rather not have paint all over it) and it would take hours to dry, etc. I did find a couple of ways to make colored pencil permanent on fabric, but they're pretty involved and finally I decided I don't want it to be permanent anyway. Instead, we can color it in this season, then wash it and recolor it next season… Reusable art. I love it.