natterings of the k, v2.0

books

2011-12-13T15:31:00.000-08:00

Some leather books for etsy- I am very proud of them, and they've been selling! Woohoo :)

The last one is a planner, with a different calendar drawing for each month every 20 pages or so (the rest of the pages are blank). The stitching along the spine spells out "MMXII" (2012 in Roman numerals, ya know?).

---

Don't expect much from this blog in the coming months. :) I mean- :( I'm working on developing a plan for a blog that chronicles only my art adventures and that is more "professional" in general. In the works also is a website, which may or may not even involve a blog section.

Poems!

2011-10-03T15:15:00.000-07:00

The poems that I printed last year for the CGU conference "Religions in Conversation" are now available for purchase through my etsy site! Aren't you excited?? Yay! They're $20 each, or $120 for the set (collect them all!); this is seriously a good deal.

interesting artworks

2011-09-21T09:18:00.000-07:00

I discovered artist Jim Kazanjian last week and am in awe of his "photographs". I love their dream-like quality, their mysteriousness, their impossibility and their realness (after all, they are photographs...right?). This is where I found his work: http://www.23sandy.com/kazanjian/catalog_kazanjian.html. Here's his website: http://www.kazanjian.net/ (the red magnifying glass takes you to his bio). The top image here is my favorite (Untitled "Chateau")- I'd love to live in a hand-made, cobbled-together castle over a waterfall. :) The other two are "Untitled (Outpost)" and "Untitled (Backyard)".

next project...

2011-09-14T15:30:00.000-07:00

My next project involves this:

It's a page from the Book of Kells featuring the writers of the gospels in their symbolic forms (clockwise from upper left: Matthew the man, Mark the lion-yes, that's a lion, John the eagle and Luke the calf). The art in this masterpiece is utterly stunning, but I also have to include part of an email from my pa that perfectly encapsulates some of the more unusual stylization methods the artists used:

"I did have one observation. Didn't anybody back then know how to draw eyeballs?? The pictures are all great, but then it looks like they needed some coffee when they got to the eyes, and called over their 4 year old kid and said:

Gawain: would thee likest to scribe some eyeorbs on yonder face?
Yes daddy! Should I make them widest open?
Sure lad...
(Goes and gets coffee...)

(Comes back...)

Look daddy look!!!
(Dad faints...)"

- - - - - - - -

I've noticed, and come to embrace, some things about my "process" of artymaking. I often start a new project with serious zest and energy and focus, and then hit a wall (I get sick of it, run into some sort of issue, etc.) at full speed and completely abandon working on it for weeks, or more likely, for months. The piece mentioned in the previous post is an example, actually. I think I started it around the beginning of the year, got tired of poking holes (gee, I wonder how that could've happened), and filed it away. I'd actually forgotten about it until organizing my studio a couple months ago. Then I was like, "Oh yeah! I should finish this!" and dove in once again. But it's rare for me to finish projects on the second go-around - usually I have to rediscover something every four months, work on it for a few days or weeks, and then abandon it again, over a period of a couple years before it's finally finished.

I used to feel really guilty about this, but now I realize that it's important to give pieces (and ideas) time. Most of the time I abandon a piece because I hit a problem and can't figure out a solution- often I can't figure out the solution because I'm already thinking about the piece constantly. But if I set it aside, my brain can continue to process ideas consciously and subconsciously while I throw myself into another piece, and then I'm able to think about it without any sort of stress.

So all that to say that I spent a couple weeks engrossed in this project and have since abandoned it. :) Hopefully I'll pick it up again soon, but I have five or so other projects that I can work on in the meantime.

Illuminated Manuscripts

2011-09-09T09:40:00.000-07:00

So I finished this piece a while ago: “Fruit of the Spirit II” is the title, I guess; it’s 19x24 inches, made by poking holes in paper with a bookbinding awl.

Bart and I have been thinking about ways of displaying it with some sort of backlighting. I think that would be cool!

Here are some of my thoughts behind it.

This is one interpretation of “illuminated manuscript” I’ve been thinking about recently- a literal interpretation.

There are a few characteristics about God and the Bible that have drawn me to creating images this way: The word of God is alive (Hebrews 4:12); God is beautiful (Psalm 50:2); God created the world and the universe and it follows an orderly pattern. The description of Scripture as being alive and God’s beauty and sovereignty spurred the idea to make images out of the individual parts of the text. In their symmetry and complexity they resemble snowflakes, flowers, microscopic organisms, galaxies; they are orderly without being static; they tumble and spin. With the added light, they glow like stars and other sparkly things (sparkly things!).

It is not immediately obvious that the shapes are words, but I think the intricacy of the piece may draw people in to explore it and try to figure it out (I strive for this in all my work). In a sense it forces the viewer (this is all hypothetical, since the only viewer other than myself to see the actual piece is Bart) to engage with the image because its meaning is not immediately apparent; we are also invited to engage with God and Scripture, to search them and to think about them.

As an artist who is a Christian, I want to present the Bible and the Gospel in a new way, focusing on the characteristics above: life, beauty, order. Because I don’t really enjoy drawing things “realistically”, and because I’m not really an abstract person either, and because I do love to use text as image, this seems like a good method for me.

I would be so, so honored if you left comments about this piece. Please feel free to ask questions and critique it. People rarely see anything I do if it isn’t a commission, and although Bart is super thoughtful and insightful in his observations and ideas, I would love input from others as well.

Book arts exhibit!

2011-08-18T14:13:00.000-07:00

I’ve been helping set up an exhibit that will accompany this fall’s Goudy Lecture at Scripps College, presented by the Scripps College Press. The exhibit features over 140 artist books by around 40 women letterpress printers who have been in the business for at least twenty-five years. There are also some historical books. The books are incredibly beautiful (unfortunately, you don’t get to flip through them like I did :) ); they range from “normal” book shapes and sizes to large, sculptural pop-up books.

The lecture, which is followed by a panel discussion and the exhibit’s opening reception, is free and open to the public and takes place on Saturday September 17, starting at 1:30.

I've enjoyed learning about how to set up an exhibit. It's a lot of work, but very rewarding because you can see your progress so easily. On the first day I worked, we had to rearrange the shelving in thirteen cases in order to fit the books that Professor Maryatt (director of the Scripps Press, who is curating the show along with Judy Harvey-Sahak, the Special Collections librarian at Denison Library) chose and assigned to each case. That took all day. Then came figuring out how to display each book, which ones needed stands, which ones needed special treatment, etc. Most just stand up, so I picked a nice spread in each book and "taped" them open. That took two days. Yesterday we worked on all the labels, one for each artist, which feature a brief bio for the artist as well as some information about their books on display in the exhibit. We also put up five broadsides (posters). The show opens in a week and there is a lot left to do. I'll try to take some pictures when I go in on Tuesday.

In other news, I had four cavities filled this morning. It took two hours and my face feels ridiculous. Actually, the right side of my face is starting to feel more normal, but they had to give me extra numbing-juice in the left side, so it’s still all weird and numb up to my temple. Although painless, it was a procedure I hope never to repeat. I went eight years without going to the dentist, and now I have been once a week for the past three weeks. I am so ready for a break.

Lights!

2011-07-29T14:16:00.000-07:00

A while back I mentioned a project I was working on to create a covering for the not-so-lovely bare bulb in the bathroom. I thought I could make something out of sea glass and translucent shells, inspired as I was by a light fixture available in a local store. Something like this. I bought a couple spools of fine wire from OSH, as well as a thicker wire that would hold a circular shape, from which I could hang the shells and glass once I had wired them together beautifully. The result was not so beautiful (nor is the picture...blah):

I tried adding more shells and glass, but all I could see were wires and the ugly bulb, and I couldn't figure out how to hide those things while bringing out the awesomeness of the shells and glass. I devised a plan B. Here is finished plan B:

A bit simpler, a little bit less of a "home-made craft" feel. Unfortunately, it used a whole lot less of the materials that I was trying to use UP. Le sigh.

Another project involving light- one that is up there on the list of my most labor-intensive projects...A hole-poking project! It's a variation on a piece I did a while ago featuring the Fruit of the Spirit. Here's the piece on my work table/light box. I trace the images with pencil, and then stab the paper along the pattern with an awl (with a cutting mat underneath).

A close-up (below): Gentleness on the left, Peace at the bottom, and Joy above it. It's a pretty neat effect, I think. Once finished (and properly installed...hmmmm), it could be quite striking.

Without the back-lighting: Initially I erased the pencil lines after poking the holes (as in the design on the far left), but I kind of like the added dimension the graphite gives the patterns, so I've left it on most of the others.

Another close-up of the same spot as above, without the back-lighting.

I worked on "Goodness" (the one on the top right in the first image) this week, taking an hour to an hour and a half each day. Poking holes is laborious and tiring, and you have to be precise; it's really hard to work on it for extended periods of time. Ack- I just noticed that I'm missing one of the "fruit"- kindness. Oh goodie- I'd better go figure out how to squeeze that one in...

Happy Friday!

Bread Machine!

2011-07-26T11:14:00.000-07:00

My early birthday present from Bart- a Breadman Ultimate 2500BC! It is beautiful. We baked a loaf on Saturday- just a simple whole-wheat from the instruction book's recipe section. It was very tasty- we had it with blueberry jam and with eggs for breakfast. It was dense and chewy, but not at all a jaw workout. I have very fond memories of the bread my dad used to make with his bread machine several years ago, and have always wanted to be able to make fresh bread for the two of us on a regular basis. I have attempted many loaves of bread by hand and it’s never worked well enough for it to be worth all the kneading, watching, waiting, etc.

Bart did some estimates and we figure that a 2-pound loaf of whole-wheat bread made with organic flour cost about $2.50. Ezekiel bread at Trader Joe’s costs $3.50, I think, and it’s not a 2-lb loaf. Anyhoo, here’s the loaf. It collapsed a bit, so it's little flat on top (not enough gluten? Not enough flour?), but the taste wasn't affected. And nothing beats that fresh bread smell!

The instruction book came with lots of recipes, but I was wondering- Do you have any awesome bread machine recipes that you’d be willing to share?

Vigilante Gardening

2011-07-22T12:20:00.000-07:00

Bart and I have claimed another patch of dirt as our own!

Several weekends ago we paid a visit to the Theodore Payne Nursery in Sun Valley. They specialize in native California plants, which is the route we’ve decided to take with our vigilante gardening. It was sort of a hard decision to make- the climate here being desert/chaparral, it really doesn’t make sense to plant big, green leafy plants that require tons of water (and apparently about 70% of the water used in this area goes to landscaping- ick) and can’t take the heat, but it’s hard to shake the idea that gardens are supposed to be lush and green with big leaves and flowers. Native plants tend to be sprawly, with smaller leaves and flowers, and aren’t so much green as dusty sage in many cases. But part of what we’re after is hardiness- we want these plants to survive even after we leave (if we ever leave), when they will probably receive no care whatsoever.

Anyway, we found several cute plants at the nursery. More than we needed, in fact, buuuut…what the heck. We got seven plants: a pretty orange monkeyflower (Mimulus ‘Robin’), seaside woolly sunflower (Eriophyllum staechadifolium ‘compacta’), Margarita BOP- I have no idea what this means- foothill penstemon (Penstemon heterophyllus ‘Margarita BOP’), California hibiscus (Hibiscus lasiocarpus), California buckwheat (Eriogonum fasciculatum), apricot mallow (Sphaeralcea ambigua), and island pink yarrow (Achillea millefolium ‘Island Pink’).

The monkeyflower (orange) and sunflower (yellow) went into the garden that we’ve already taken over. Now it looks nicely balanced, and has some more color (purples, white, pink, and now yellow and orange).

There is a patch of dirt to the left of the door to the laundry room that looked pathetic: It's kind of funny how someone dumped a houseplant there and then it proceeded to grow into a tree...but no one ever thought to remove the pot!

Last weekend I hacked at the dirt for a while and eventually dug down about a foot and loosened up the soil. You can tell that this patch has lost a lot of soil (leafblowers!) and has been tamped down considerably over the years, since the dirt level is about five inches below the level of the concrete. We added some topsoil and compost to bring it up a tiny bit. Into this space went the hibiscus and penstemon. Huzzah! (There was indeed much rejoicing.) Both are fast-growing (good thing- they look rather puny), and when they bloom, the hibiscus is white with a pink/red center, and the penstemon is purple. In the fall we plan to sprinkle wildflower seeds we collected - poppies and the like!

The buckwheat, yarrow, and mallow await their plantings in a few other bald patches of compacted earth. We should probably do that this weekend. After this, I think we’ll be done with gardening for a while…unless you or someone you know needs a visit from the vigilante gardeners! Hehehe :)

home fix-it adventures

2011-07-11T10:46:00.000-07:00

Way back in May, over Memorial Day weekend, Bart and I finally tackled an issue that desperately needed to be addressed: the absolutely nasty sealant around our bathtub. I apologize to anyone who had to use our shower in the two years we've lived here. It was nasty- cracked, peeling, and stained black and other interesting colors. It was cusscusting, as my family would say.

So, as is practically tradition on Memorial Day weekend, we went to the hardware store. Three times, actually, over the course of the afternoon, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Actually, I don't really need to write any sort of tutorial- the interwebs are full of them. We used one. So here are the pictures. :)

Here is the tub being scraped. Ew!

After you scrape out the old caulk, you need to thoroughly clean the empty gap with bleach and let it dry completely (hairdryers are recommended, but I don't own one).

Then you have to tape off around all the edges that are going to be caulked. I am bad (lazy) at steps like this - Bart did an awesome job.

The fun and exciting part! Applying the caulk (wearing gloves!), and then smoothing it out - have to move fairly quickly if you're using a quick-set caulk (which we were, since it was late afternoon and we needed to be able to use the shower in the morning). Be sure the room is well-ventilated. That stuff is stinky. It is also very sticky and blobby- the tape is absolutely necessary.

The beautiful finished product! So shiny and white! Yay!

I can't remember how much we spent on the project- I know we bought more than we needed of some things (we also plan to redo the sealant around the kitchen sink), and some things we can use on other projects (like the scrapers). I want to say it was around $40 for the gloves, caulk, scrapers (we bought two or three plastic ones, and two different metal ones), and tape. It took a few hours, but Bart went to OSH twice and we took our time.

Bart and I love fixing things and have decided that we're willing to spend up to about $50 here and there to improve our apartment. So far we've bought flowers for the sad, empty garden (and recently bought MORE- bwahahaha!), a new toilet seat cover, and the materials for this project. But we would also like to paint some walls and do something about the bathroom door and our bedroom door- which don't close- as well as cupboard doors that have so many layers of paint on them that they no longer close either. What do other renters think? What improvements, if any, would you pay for yourself? Or maybe you don't have a tight-fished landlord/property manager like we do. ;) One thing that they did fix, however, to our unending joy, is the garage door. In hot weather the motor would lose power partway through and the door wouldn't open or close completely, so we had to push or pull on it to help it up or down. It had been getting really, really bad- losing power almost immediately, even when we were helping it. But they finally sent out the fix-it guy and he fixed it in like half an hour. Huz-zah!

Arty adventures

2011-07-07T17:24:00.000-07:00

Here are three recent projects!

A drawing:

The goal was to combine the text with a global theme, with the four triangular-ish quadrants representing seasons/time. This is one of my favorite custom pieces to date. It was a challenging drawing in many ways- balancing the colors, drawing lots of tiny, tiny people and trees and buildings, etc., but it was great. Moreover, I loved being able to express my love for my client (hehe) by filling the drawing with tiny details that I knew would be meaningful. I wish I knew her better so that I could have added even more!

Another drawing:

A fun little piece for some people who very important to me, though they are far away and I don't really even know them well (my mom and step-dad commissioned it as a gift for their pastor and his wife).

A guestbook for a cute couple who saw my books at a local consignment shoppe called Belle's Nest (on Baldwin in Sierra Madre) and contacted me for a custom piece:

Their colors were peach and cream. The peach-colored design is based on the floral image from their invitations; I painted a piece of cardstock the right color (because I couldn't find ANYTHING at three art stores), and then cut out the design. It was fun and exciting to create something for strangers, since most of my "clients" are friends and family. ;)

i heart the dollar store, part 2

2011-05-07T10:53:00.000-07:00

Another dollar store win: large plastic flower pots.

Bart and I enjoy growing things- I always had potted plants in my room when I was growing up and spent many months employed as a gardener; Bart enjoys figuring out how things work, figuring out how to make them awesome, and then implementing them (composting with worms, attracting beneficial insects, growing cover crops, etc.).

When we moved to our current apartment, there was some sadness because our only patch of dirt was a small triangle next to the front porch. But we do have lots of concrete-covered space, which, we realized, could be perfect for containers. Unfortunately, flower pots are kind of over-priced (in my HUMBLE opinion), given how ugly they usually are, and for a large pot, that isn’t ugly, it only gets worse. Well, I happened to find several pots at the dollar store - and yes they are ugly, but they are large-ish and they only cost a dollar! Last year we experimented with kale, swiss chard, tomatoes and some herbs. We bought a dwarf black mission fig (we call it Fenry Figgins. No, we don’t. I just made that up). In the dirt patch, which we spruced up a bit with other dirt and fertilizer from the Whittier Dirt Company or something like that, we tried peas, green beans, and kale and chard. The peas bit the dust, but everything else limped along pretty well and, with fairly minimal effort, we got a handful of pretty much everything. For two people, this was perfect.

This year, we’re much more ambitious. We started seeds in our new “nursery” in the garage, which Bart assembled. Several mystery tomatoes (that’d be my fault- I diligently collected seeds from all the heirloom tomatoes we bought at the farmers market a couple years ago, and then neglected to label them), green beans, cucumbers, a couple zucchini, basil, thyme, and oregano. We’ve been slowly transplanting them and putting them outside as they get big. Also, some ancient amaryllis bulbs that I'm trying to revive...so far, unsuccessfully. :(

Here's the side garden. A couple weeks ago we assembled a climbing structure for the beans.The yogurt containers are to discourage earwigs, which we believe were responsible for munching the beans and kale (below) and some of the herbs (above). They can't climb the slippery plastic very well. The chard is pathetic, I know.

Easter lilies!! We rescued these from a back room at church after Easter last year, but then after several weeks they died…or so we thought! Instead, they multiplied and we had to divide several of them. Here they are, about to flower again! Ah, new life :)

Here's the container garden on the west side of the house. From right to left we have Jimmy, Susie...just kidding...a tomato, kale, a cucumber, mint, another cucumber, California poppies, Easter lilies, four tomatoes behind that, then the fig and concord grape (try using large buckets as pots instead of actual pots- they're cheaper), and then in the distance are several more cucumbers, tomatoes, two pots of chard, and some miscellaneous plants (aloe, geraniums, some other succulents). All those round brown pots with the silvery decorations are from the dollar store- about 15 in all.

With all this gardening, our attention wandered to another patch of dirt in our little complex/area. An ugly patch of dirt with a cute, but frail little purple rose bush. We’d been watching this space for a while, and after almost two years of living here, have concluded that no one pays attention to it- neither the landlord, management, nor tenants who have been here longer than us- it was ignored. It was, therefore, up for grabs. So we’ve grabbed it.

At the farmer’s market we bought four white African daisies and four purple ($8, total). I’ve been wanting some pink jasmine (that’s kind of how this all started) because it’s pretty and smells amazing in the spring, when climbs up and spills over people’s chain-link fences, little pink flowers smiling up at you. We bought one in a gallon pot at the farmer’s market for $10 and cheerfully lugged it home. The jasmine needs a trellis, unless you want it to sprawl, so we got one for $10 at Home Depot last weekend. Plus we added some bags of dirt from the dirt store. $30-ish doesn’t seem like much (although the little garden still doesn’t look like much!) to pretty up an ugly space.

We still need something in the gap right of center, to balance/complement the rose. Any ideas? We’ve kind of done purple and white to death. Maybe something yellow?

i heart the dollar store, part 1

2011-05-06T12:24:00.000-07:00

Not just any old dollar store- this dollar store:

I always feel a sense of excitement and anticipation whenever I go there- because they take overstocked/slightly old items, their stock is constantly changing, and depending on what they get, it could sell out within a day. I have bought tons of awesome stuff here*- healthy, organic, name-brand cereal that costs $4 elsewhere, bar upon bar upon bar of Ghirardelli, Godiva, and Lindt chocolate bars, name-brand energy bars at 3 for a dollar, and all sorts of other unnecessary goodies (but they were only a dollar!). One time they even had one of my very favorite kinds of cookie- cookies so bad for you that I usually only allow myself like, four a year. It’s really embarrassing to admit this- this cookie that I love- this cookie that is entirely unnatural and probably does bad things to my DNA every time I eat one- the frosted sugar cookie.

So bad...sooo gooooood.

Anyway, that’s not what I wanted to write about. This post is about something else that I recently bought in abundance at the dollar store: Nutella!! A 13oz jar of Nutella for a dollar! I bought eight jars. And normally I’d never bake anything with Nutella- it’s just expensive enough to be a treat, enjoyed on toast or, yes, straight out of the jar, but with this abundance I thought it’d be fun to try something. I found this recipe on the intarwebs: http://simplyrecipes.com/recipes/chocolate_nutella_cookies/ and then modified it slightly (but mine didn't turn out as pretty). Here’s my version:

Chocolate Nutella Cookies

Ingredients:
1 stick salted butter, room temperature
1 cup sucanat
1 cup Nutella
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
2 eggs
2 cups, plus 2 tablespoons whole wheat pastry flour (I only had regular whole wheat flour, and it worked well, too)
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1 cup chocolate chips
1/2 cup chopped hazelnuts (I roasted mine whole, because the original recipe didn’t specify raw or roasted, and then put them in a plastic baggie, wrapped it in a dishtowel, and pounded them with a hammer)

Method:
1. Cream butter in an electric mixer (or with your mighty arm and a fork) for 3 minutes until light and fluffy (I managed about 30 seconds with my wimpy arm- good enough!). Add the sugar and Nutella and mix well, scraping down the sides of the bowl to ensure even mixing.

2. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating for 30 seconds between each. Add the vanilla and mix for 10 seconds.

3. Sift together the flour, cocoa, salt, and baking soda (do not skip this step as sifting eliminates clumps of cocoa). Mix into the butter mixture on low speed until fully incorporated, scraping down the bottom and sides at least once to ensure even mixing. Fold in the chocolate chips and hazelnuts and refrigerate the dough for ten minutes. Preheat the oven to 350F.

4. Spoon tablespoon-sized drops of dough onto parchment paper lined cookie sheets. Bake at 350F for 10-12 minutes. Allow to cool on the sheets for a minute or two before transferring to a wire rack to finish cooling.

Makes approximately 50 cookies.


My left hand hopes that my right hand does not know what it is doing...

They are yummy- crispy on the outside, soft on the inside. The only problem with them is that they don't taste like Nutella, exactly. Nutella has a rather subtle flavor; it's not like peanut butter where you can taste it a mile away (or whatever). These cookies are definitely chocolatey, and the chopped hazelnuts help remind you that they're made with Nutella (a LOT of Nutella, even), if you already know that they are. But I'm not sure that anyone would be able to figure it out on their own. If hazelnut extract exists, I'd be curious to learn whether or not it adds a stronger hazelnuttiness, the way almond extract does, for example.

*…and a few not so great things, too, I have to admit- some horribly powdery chocolate bars, for one, and then there was the time I felt nauseous and couldn’t eat for an entire weekend- I think that was caused by a funky energy bar.

OH YEAH, there was this project I was working on...

2011-05-05T14:47:00.000-07:00

...which I keep forgetting to write about! Silly!

I did the illustrations for a children’s ebook (for the iPad) about the life of Jesus, told through Mary’s eyes: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/a-gospel-diary/id431504351#

The project was a collaborative piece that involved several people from church who did the narrating, writing, programming, promoting, etc., and was released in time for Easter. I was thrilled to be a part of it- what a challenge to portray something of such importance, so often horribly cutesified or cartoonified in children’s books, in a simple, straightforward yet imaginative and engaging manner. And it was a challenge to figure out how to incorporate my style- how to use my strengths to make the message stand out. I am hoping that the intricate doodly style will help convey the mystery and beauty God’s sovereignty and of what Jesus did on the cross!

stay tuned...please?.......

2011-05-05T14:34:00.000-07:00

i am working on some posts!

after working several days a week at scripps and a short camping trip over the past month or so, i haven't had time to clean the house (ick), much less blog. but i did get to clean this morning, and have started typing up some posts this afternoon. i hope to take the accompanying pictures tomorrow morning, and then they'll be ready to go. :)

things & stuff

2011-04-15T12:01:00.000-07:00

I have some edits on the muffins from last week’s post. They turned out quite tasty, but they needed to bake longer than whatever the amount of time the recipe said to bake them. Unfortunately, I discovered this only after removing them from the oven, allowing them to cool slightly, and sampling one- the inside was still gooey (this could be due to the fact that I don’t really know how to cook amaranth…I mean, is it supposed to turn into a gelatinous glop?). So then I tried “fixing” them by turning the oven back on and baking them longer- always dangerous. In the end, I ended up slightly burning the bottom of one pan’s worth of muffins. Overall, however, I declare these a win.

A friend loaded me up with a giant bag of oranges from their tree and it made the freshest, zestiest, pulpiest orange juice B and I have ever had. We drank it from tiny tea glasses, and I don't think I'll ever be able to drink orange juice from concentrate again.

That little circular vent there above the stove goes up to a little chimney on the roof. On occasion birds will sit next to the chimney and sing- and the sound travels right down into the kitchen. It’s pretty fun.

My favorite lunch of late- Trader Joe’s black bean dip, smashed avocado, and a dollop of cottage cheese on a piece of toast or two. (You can tell I had to force myself to put the toast down and grab my camera...)

2011-04-06T11:15:00.000-07:00

Something Bart and I had a lot to learn about when we first got married was how to budget for, buy and use all the food we bought. Later in college, and then for two years after, Bart lived with several guys and the two of us did a lot of grocery shopping and cooking for the group. Buying food and cooking for seven young people with hearty appetites is a lot different from shopping and cooking for two. While I quickly learned how to gauge how much fresh food we could actually eat before it went bad, I am slightly embarrassed to say that many of the dry goods (we are the type of white people that can’t get enough of the bulk bins at whole foods) we bought while dating--even while in college-- still exist in our now combined pantries. There’s the soy beans Bart bought in a case from Bob’s Red Mill in 2006 or so. There’s the final remaining half-bag of corn meal from another bulk-buying spree that has been around for almost as long. Buckwheat flour. Wheat bran. Millet. Amaranth. Things that are wholesome and cheap and awesome…but that I discovered are kinda difficult to work with if you find out early on that you don’t really like them. But, being cheap, and maybe feeling a little guilty for not liking such amazingly healthy fare, we’ve been slowly whittling away at most of those ingredients by sneaking them into soup or chili or muffins or whatnot. The attempt at baked beans with the soy beans, however, ended up, largely uneaten, in the trash. Soy beans, being mostly protein, don’t really soften- the result is fairly unpleasant. I think Bart originally bought them to try making soy milk and/or tofu, but we never got around to it (after making seitan once, I think we realized that there’s not much of a point to making something that's quite labor-intensive from scratch that already only costs a dollar per package). The remaining soy beans have been soaked and shall be devoured by the worms in our vermacompost bins.

Anyway, I think I’ve found an excellent recipe for using up the remaining amaranth, which I am in the process of trying right now. My notes are in parentheses.

Blueberry-Amaranth Muffins – makes 12 muffins (I somehow ended up with 20)

Ingredients

1/3 cup whole amaranth

½ stick butter

1 cup whole wheat pastry flour

1½ teaspoons baking powder

1/3 cup flax meal

2 eggs

½ cup sugar (I use sucanat. The original recipe calls for maple syrup- but that stuff’s expensive)

½ teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 cup fresh blueberries (I’m trying frozen)

½ cup whole walnuts or almonds, chopped into smallish pieces (I’m trying the walnuts)

Procedure

1. First cook the amaranth in a pot with 1½ cups water for 20-30 minutes or until all the water is absorbed. (An important rule about cooking amaranth- do not turn on the stove to heat the water and amaranth and then leave it to start writing a blog post. The amaranth will boil over and create a huge mess.) Let cool almost for about ten minutes before adding to the batter.

2. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Butter and lightly flour a 12-muffin tin. (I used paper liners.)

3. Melt the butter and let cool to room temperature.

4. In one bowl, combine the flour and baking powder and stir well with whisk. (I added a couple Tbsps wheat bran…couldn’t help myself.)

5. In another bowl, combine the eggs, sugar, butter, vanilla and salt, stirring well to mix. (This is where I added the flax meal, too; the author seems to have forgotten about it.)

6. Put the batter together: Pour the amaranth into the wet ingredients and mix. Then pour the flour mixture into the wet mixture and stir just until it’s combined. Carefully fold in the blueberries and almonds/walnuts.

7. Pour batter 2/3 of the way up each muffin holder.

8. Bake for 30 minutes or until muffins are browned on top and firm to the touch.

Gloria in excelsis Deo, etc.

2011-03-16T14:49:00.000-07:00

Here are some pictures of a commission I finished recently for some friends. They wanted an illuminated/calligraphy-ized version of this prayer to go in their prayer/devotions corner. It was a fun and challenging project- we exchanged tons of emails and design ideas before settling on this one. I think it turned out pretty well, and best of all, they love it. Yay!

Here are some other things I've taken pictures of...

Do you see the happy tree-gnome, too??

This is a poinsettia that Bart and I "rescued" from church after Christmas. It promptly dropped its leaves (apparently part of the problem was that it was getting too cold in our house during the night. I tried to give it some no-nonsense pep-talk: "What, you're cold? Boo-hoo, plant. Toughen up." It ignored me.) and I left it for dead in our little side room/mud room, because it looked awful on the kitchen table. Simply depressing. Anyway, lo and behold, a couple weeks ago I noticed tiny little leaves growing where the old ones had been. Yay! Now I sort of baby it. ;)

I love how the morning light looks coming in through the east-facing window in the bedroom. The window itself is horribly ugly, as far as windows go, but the shadow-effect is pretty cool. We have vertical blinds, which cause the vertical shadows. the window itself is one of those awful, inexplicable things made of slats of glass that with a little pull so that you open the whole window like a vent. And when they're closed you have a really drafty window. But what's actually causing the horizontal shadows is residue from the packing tape that the previous tenant had used in an attempt to staunch the draft (clever!).

time flies.

2011-02-24T14:43:00.000-08:00

oy- three weeks since my last post??

here are some pictures of recent happenings...

we went north last weekend to eat good food and walk on the beach. it was cold and windy and rainy and beautiful.

this seal was bound and determined to lie on the rock. it didn't look comfortable.

we bought a couch eons ago, and it was finally ready for pick-up last week. YAY! it is large and greenish-goldish-brownish and perfect.

i made a series of journals from leftover papers with cool cut-paper covers to sell here.

i'm working on a fun project right now. more about that in the next couple of months.

the end!

fakeup

2011-02-03T09:42:00.000-08:00

Wall street journal, nooooooo! This is one of the stupidest articles I have read- that makeup for tweens isn't a big deal. I think it's a little bit of a big deal. I have attempted to organize a few of my thoughts on it.

What bothers me:

The geoGirl line contains natural ingredients and is free of phthalates and parabens, chemicals many adult consumers have grown suspicious of. "In this case, we're providing something that's very natural and is more of a glow than anything else," says Carmen Bauza, Wal-Mart vice president of beauty and personal care.

More of a glow?? They're like ten years old! They already practically glow in the dark. In the paper, there's a before and after makeup photo of the same girl who's in the video- she's adorable without makeup! Why in the world would she need to wear it?? And, in my opinion, she looks like a wannabe 30-year-old in the makeup shot (she also somehow looks chubbier).

A website for girls and their parents, geoGirl.com, will provide information on the environment and tips on skin care and body care, Ms. Bauza says. "This generation is so concerned about the environment."

Oh, yeah, if they cared about the environment, they wouldn't buy this crap in the first place.

Makeup is "fun for them," says Bobbi Brown, founder of Bobbi Brown Cosmetics, owned by Estée Lauder Cos., and author of the book "Beauty Rules," which offers makeup advice for teenagers. "They like it. I think it's not a big deal. Making it taboo is the problem."

Of course it's "fun", but not in the way that waterslides are fun- more in the sense that it makes you feel mature and more attractive to the opposite sex, which at ten isn't really the healthiest pursuit, I think. And of course Ms. Brown doesn't want it to be a big deal, because like so many other people interviewed in this article, they are trying to SELL something.

In a sense, yes- making something taboo can make it mysterious and even more alluring. I definitely wanted to wear makeup when I was little. But my mother told me "no", and that was the end of it (though I remember getting to wear it on a couple of special occasions). I also wasn't allowed to shave my legs until later in middle school. Oddly, the allure of both makeup and shaving wore off, and I think that was perhaps also partly because I never got into the habit of either. Moreover, I wasn't allowed to do either when "all the other kids" were starting to do them. I survived that, and then high school wasn't nearly as big a deal (and I had bigger things to deal with by then anyway).

One of the main reasons for makeup, really, is to make you look "hot" ("hot"-ness being highly subjective). I mean, it's fueled by vanity and the fear that your own looks aren't- and never will be- good enough. If you start training younger and younger girls to think that way, you'll sell more and more cosmetics, and you'll also have gained life-long customers.

Another problem with makeup (sorry for going all femi-nazi on you...) is that it takes a lot of time- I read an interesting article about the daily (never-ending) routines women are expected to go through in order to try to achieve the unachievable "ideal" (yes, this was in a book I got while at Scripps ;) ). And think about how all this stuff- like shaving/plucking/bleaching hair in all kinds of places and exfoliating and moisturizing and putting on countless cosmetics and blow-drying, curling/straightening hair, etc.- is often marketed as a woman's key to self-actualization - "Let the true YOU shine through with our lipstick!" or something.

I don't really have anything against makeup, but I do know that wearing it now makes me feel both like a fake and like a clown (also, I'm too lazy and cheap to bother). So I don't. If I have a zit, you'll see it. My nose will be red when I'm cold. I will never have smoky eyes or inexplicably sparkly lips. SORRY.

Also, if you don't want your ten-year-old (or eight-year-old, cripes) daughter wearing makeup, tell her "NO", for crying out loud. Ultimately, tweens wearing makeup isn't going to bring about the apocalypse or anything, but seriously, WHY should they? And why do parents feel like they have to give in to their kids' every whim?

(untitled)

2011-01-28T10:23:00.000-08:00

no time for posting today, really, but it's already been two weeks since my last post...so...

i recently finished a commission (yay!), and will post pictures as soon as its recipients receive it. i was about to start on another commission yesterday, but it will have to wait a bit because a roll of paper i'd ordered arrived and i couldn't wait to immerse myself in a different project. not a commission, not just "for fun", but, i hope, Art. stay tuned.

actually, you may want to reconsider that ("stay tuned") in light of the following...

ooh, but i do have a new "for fun" project that i'll soon start working on. it's something that those of you who know me well could probably see coming (maybe...?). the pasadena joann fabrics is closing, so everything is on sale. i went in and bought the largest sewing hoop they had (it was on sale! so in a way, it wasn't my fault...)- 23 inches in diameter. which means...GIANT BEADY!!!

yeeees...it was only a matter of time. i started small- 2 inches, then 8 inches. with countless 2-inch beadies and 3 8-inch beadies made, i knew it was time to go BIG. this will only take me the rest of my life (lord willing, i'll live to a thousand and five). but i'm ok with that. i like the idea of having a project that's years (decades?) in the making. there's no rush...and just think how shiiiiiny it'll be... :)

(the black outline represents the 23-inch hoop, with the three larger beadies i've made (argh! i need a better name for these!!) copied and pasted to fill the space. as you can see, i'll have to create the equivalent of 7+ of these. eek.)

there! now that you all think i'm crazy, maybe you won't want to see any more blog posts, and i'll be off the hook! ;)

things, stuff

2011-01-14T09:14:00.000-08:00

I meant to share this a while ago, but got bogged down in the attempt to write a how-to. Our apartment has seven rooms/distinct spaces, and five ceiling lights. Of those five ceiling lights, only two have coverings- the rest are bare bulbs. Recently I have undertaken the task of creating coverings for those naked bulbs, and here is my first project: the hall light.

I had seen things like this earlier and boldly thought to myself (as I so often do), "Psh! I can do that!" While this does often turn out to be true in the end, it usually takes weeks or months to actually do it because my over-confidence (which you can probably detect in my thought process in the previous sentence) leads me to not think through every step of the project, which leads to problems, me getting discouraged and frustrated but refusing to start over again...usually I'll figure something out (with the end result possibly not being as good as if I'd taken the time to think it through completely in the first place). This project worked out pretty well, but the circular pieces at the top and bottom, and especially the attachment piece, stumped me for quite a while.

The second lampshade I made was for the bathroom. Because we don't have any sort of fan in there (and having the window open isn't always an option), it tends to stay humid for a while after showers. So a paper shade probably wouldn't be best. Also, I wanted to be sure that whatever the shade, it didn't make the room dim. Bathrooms, in my humble opinion, should be bright spaces. Bart and I were meandering Old Town looking at couches a couple months ago and I saw a light sort of like this. I was entranced by its shiny glowy-ness. And I thought, "Psh! I can do that!" Well, upon reflection, I realized that I couldn't. But from there my thoughts went to the jars and boxes of sea shells I've amassed (and intend to continue amassing, because I loves them). I pulled out all the thin/translucent white ones, the white sea glass, and sand dollars. I bought heavy-duty wire, and some very very fine-gauge wire. I made a large ring and a smaller ring with the heavy wire, and then wired the shells to the ring. When I ran out of shells, I hung the rings from the mounting fixture in the bathroom (with the smaller ring a couple inches below the larger one). It looks a little sad- more shells and possibly a third, smaller ring would do the trick. So I need to go to the beach. My lampshade needs more shells!! Then I'll take a picture of it and post it.

Here are some drawings I finished recently. Faith, Hope, Love.

It was sunny and warm yesterday for the first time in a while- warm enough to open the doors and windows, which was really nice- somehow our home has felt really damp for the past several weeks.

We went out to Choza Mama last night. It's a fairly new Peruvian place in Old Town (replaced the Hooters that had been there, thanks be to God). We ordered chicha morada, fried plantains with custard-like coconut dip as an appetizer, and had the pulled pork (Bart) and paella (me) for the main course. There is enough paella left that I'll add more rice to it this evening and we'll have plenty for dinner for the two of us tonight.

Happy Friday!

Not conducive to relaxation

2011-01-11T14:58:00.000-08:00

Last night I was reading, curled up on a chair, wrapped in a chenille blankie, starting to fall asleep (“Love in the Time of Cholera” has not been a page-turner for me). I reached down to adjust the blanket and felt something move against my hand. Bewildered, in that state of confusion before comprehension, I lifted my hand and looked down. I saw something move like a flash and then fall to the floor. While watching this happen, I’d thrown down the book and leapt across the room. Then, crouching and twitching, I scanned the floor and located a large brown spider pressed against the wall under a small bookshelf. Cue the air-raid sirens in my head. Bart, reading his own book on another chair was confused by the sudden excitement and I got a bit annoyed with him, because DUH- what else could it be! SPIDER!!!!!!11 Bart went to get paper towels, but that is the worst weapon against large icky bugs.* I picked up Bart’s flip-flops- one for him, one for me. The spider moved FAST- from under the bookshelf to the corner under the heater, and from there, inexplicably and horrifyingly, when we had lost sight of it, scuttled around and behind the two of us, out in the open on the living room floor. Then it met its doom. And Bart’s left flip-flop.

But that’s when the horror set in- I HAD BEEN SNUGGLING, unawares, WITH A SPIDER. For how long?? Had it crawled on me?? Where the heck had it come from?? What if there more??? And to make things worse, my hand tingled where I had touched it, and every time I blinked I saw that spider crouching against the wall as though it was tattooed on the inside of my eyelids.

I was twitchy for the rest of the evening, and Bart had to help me scour the bedroom before getting ready for sleep.

There aren’t many things that creep me out (ok, there are, but not that I’m likely to be faced with in my day-to-day life), but spiders, aside from the daddy long-leg kind and ones less than 1/4 inch in size...ugh. And this one had to be an inch long.

Also, I feel betrayed by my chair and have only sat nervously on the edge of it today, and only when necessary.

The end.

* I mean, think about it- 1: you basically have to touch whatever you’re about to kill, with only a soft, flimsy cloth between you; 2: after bringing your hand down on the thing, you have to press or squeeze- either way, you’re going to feel a delicate yet nauseating crunch; 3: in order to be sure you got the thing, you have to pick up your hand, turn it over and open your fist, which puts you in a very vulnerable place, because WHAT IF IT ISN’T DEAD?? It could be waiting patiently for you to nervously open your fist...and then POW! IT COULD ATTACK! Thus, I recommend the flip-flop sandal. With the sandal, you gain speed, accuracy, a very satisfying WHAP! and know instantly if you’ve gotten it. So what if you have to scrub the floor/wall afterwards.

pesto pizza!

2011-01-04T10:10:00.000-08:00

Made this for dinner last night- it was delectable.

Makes one 16" pizza

2 whole wheat pizza doughs from Trader Joe’s (this dough is so good and so well-priced that I will probably never bother to make dough from scratch again)

1 small jar basil pesto (only a third to half the jar is needed)*

1 small jar artichoke hearts marinated in olive oil (half will be used)

1 small jar sun-dried tomatoes packed in olive oil (need several)

1 pack of mushrooms (you won’t need all of them)

Canadian-bacon-style ham, sliced (optional) (we put some on half the pizza- it’s good, but not essential)

1/2 lb mozzarella, grated

Combine the two packs of dough, stretch onto a large pizza pan. Don’t pre-bake the dough. I did this once and the pizza was very chewy, but not in a good way- it just required a LOT of chewing. Assemble pizza, according to your preference for toppings. Bake at 425 or so (the dough pack says 450, but that’s awfully high…) until the cheese melts and starts to brown. You may have observed that there is a lot of olive oil in the ingredients and yes, this is a very oily pizza. I used several paper towels to soak up the excess.

If you’re like me, you like to see a picture of how the final product looks. Unfortunately, I am, in general, too lazy and too hungry to photograph our dinner. Here’s an acceptable approximation:

Looks tasty, eh??!

If you hate having half-full jars of random things in the fridge, you can use the remaining pesto, artichokes, tomatoes, and mushrooms on spaghetti.

* I added these notes in case you already have half-full containers of these ingredients in the refrigerator.

italy!

2010-12-27T14:11:00.000-08:00

b had to go to italy (sicily) for a project for work. i got to go with him! it was an excellent adventure. we were gone for about ten days and we stayed at cambuca. i took some pictures. it was beautiful, the food was abundant and amazing, and it was really exciting to travel overseas for the first time with my best friend.

it's that time of year again...

2010-11-17T10:44:00.000-08:00

operation christmas child!

i love this program. love it love it love it.

i thought i would share an experiment i tried this year that came about as we were filling four boxes for the youngest age group (2-4 years old). b and i usually scour target and the dollar store(s) for well-priced goodies, but this year i've felt more scatter-brained (disorganized), we haven't been able to spend as much time shopping and we haven't been able to find as many goodies as in previous years. what these boxes in particular needed was a snuggly something, but stuffed animals aren't cheap (nor should they be, since they're probably sewn by hand by someone in cambodia). at target last week, b and i, totally unimpressed by the stuffed animals in the toy department, stumbled into the pet department, where there was a huge selection of rather adorable pet toys for about $5. we considered these options seriously, though there is definitely something incredibly embarrassing about admitting that- but really, if there was no difference between the doggy toys and the kiddy toys beside intended market, and really the dog toys were cute...then why not? but we concluded that the warnings on the tags "not intended for use by children" maybe referred to there being higher levels of lead or other toxins that are strongly regulated when the toys are for children, but not when they're for pets. anyway, we didn't get any. instead, we started tossing around the idea that i could MAKE some stuffed toys myself! so we meandered from target to joann fabrics and bought some brightly colored fleece- 1/2 yard each in orange and blue (and it was on sale!). when we got home, i created a simple pattern based on the size of the lid of our shoeboxes (so that i knew it would fit). i realized that i'd be able to make 1 stuffed toy per 1/8 yard of fabric, so i had twice as much as i needed, really. also, i happened to have a lot of scraps of batting lying around (when shipping some things here from NY, instead of using newspaper/peanuts as packing material, i used scraps of batting, because hey, you never know...which is proof for why you should never ever ever throw anything away---it really might come in handy someday!!) to use as stuffing. so, here're the first couple of steps:

for eight stuffies: 1 yard fleece, one pattern, pile o'batting

i made the shape i wanted for the form of the toy, and then added a half-inch or so around it for a seam allowance.

next, i pinned it to 2 pieces of fleece, cut it out, and re-pinned the two pieces together. then i sewed them together, leaving a few-inch-long gap (along the leg/side of the body) so that i could get the stuffing in. i'm not very good at making tutorials, so i neglected to thoroughly document my process. it's really not that difficult to figure out though.

i made the one on the left as a test, and then sewed the others- adding the ears was a good idea- they're fun :)

the trickiest part was adding faces. i should have done this before sewing the two pieces of fleece together because trying to sew only the top layer of the fleece was annoying. also, it was tedious trying to fill in shapes like the eyes and noses with thread (i didn't want to use buttons), but i didn't really know what other options i had. so here they are...

...and we only spent $5.50! and really, i only needed half that amount. granted, they did take a while (maybe six hours, start to finish?), but it was worth it. i am considering the idea of making some clothes for them...we'll see. i'm done for today.

update!

2010-10-28T09:10:00.000-07:00

1: The Religions in Conversations conference was so much fun- I sat in on the poetry readings for most of the day. It was so pleasant to sip ginger lemon tea (they had a vegan/raw foods caterer called Rawmazing Food- http://www.rawmazingfood.com/- very yummy) and sit in the auditorium listening to interesting words. The poems were displayed in the lobby of Garrison Theatre – they looked nice, all fancied-up in their frames.

2: On October 2 B and I went to a lecture at Scripps (put on by the Scripps College Press, so of course we went) presented by artist Diane Samuels. She was AMAZING. Here’s her website, but unfortunately, you won’t get a very good idea of her work from it- http://dianesamuels.net/. Her work is incredibly thoughtful and detail-oriented. I told her afterward that, for me, she had really thrown open the doors to what it meant to be detail-oriented and meticulous. What also struck me about her work was her willingness to experiment with different ideas and not to worry about “wasting time” trying things that may not work. She had installations that were borne out of many, if not dozens, of experimental pieces that were themselves finished and beautiful, but that she felt just didn’t “work” perfectly.

I have had a lot more free time since the conference, and I’ve been experimenting with some drawing projects. Ms. Samuels has inspired me to just try things, and not to just try them for fifteen minutes, but to start and finish something even if I don’t know completely what I’m doing, or even if I think I don’t like what I’m doing after a couple hours of work. I went through a pile of unfinished projects about a week ago and found an idea I’d had for a drawing about the Fruit of the Spirit. I had an idea for what I thought I wanted to do, but couldn’t do that particular idea at the moment, so I decided to experiment with color and media in preparation for that idea. At first, I really didn’t like it. But I decided I’d finish it anyway, just because there were more things I could learn….and now that it’s done, I’ve really grown to love it (see below- 20x25 in, pens on paper). But that’s not all- last night I thought of another way I could to the same drawing, using a different medium, and I’m really excited to experiment with that.

3: I’m now selling work at Belle’s Nest in Sierra Madre! It’s a lovely little shop- all local artists, run by two sisters, and they have great pieces. Those little owls on the blog arrived the same day I did my interview with Gloria (one of the sisters) and they are adorable- completely impractical, but adorable. Anyway, it’s a great opportunity to get some publicity and be a part of a little community (unlike etsy). We’ll see how it goes- I had some cards in a consignment shop in Potsdam once, and I think over a period of four years I sold $10-worth. ;)

4: One of my favorite contemporary artists just published her first book! I’ve only looked at the first few pages so far and it is…scrumptrulescent. Truly.

"the secret of kells"...

2010-10-18T09:03:00.000-07:00

...was a sweet little film (and PRETTY). i recommend.

If you want to purchase a poem...

2010-10-14T10:53:00.000-07:00

I don’t know if anyone was planning to buy some of these poems online—the thing is, I don’t know if they will be available for purchase after the conference (tomorrow, 10/15). So, if you are someone I know personally, and you can’t go to the conference but you’d like to have a poem or two (they’re $10 each; $70 for the set- that’s like getting one free!), let me know and I’ll get what you want, and then you will pay me back and I’ll give them to you. :)

Three more poems

2010-10-14T10:52:00.000-07:00

Prayer 1, George Herbert (Protestant poem)

I have to admit that I put a lot of pressure on myself when it came to designing this poem. It had to be awesome. Of course, pressure like this immediately sucks your creative abilities dry. My first thought was to have a praying figure in the shape of a P, like in Celtic manuscripts and such. Then I tried to unite ALL of the imagery into a single cohesive image- obviously this was impossible. Then I thought about picking out a single image to illustrate (the “sinner’s tow’r”, the “bird of Paradise”, the “plummet sounding heaven and earth”…). Nothing satisfied me, though. I did figure out three things- I wanted the paper to be white, the text to be black, and the image to be red (there was enough red imagery for it to make sense, plus red just makes sense in general, and the combination of the three colors can be found in some Bibles where Jesus’ words are printed in red). After talking with B* about it, I decided that the praying figure was actually quite appropriate. It seems obvious and derivative at first, but the simplicity of the figure balances beautifully with the rich images in the poem, which never really mentions getting on your knees.

*Bart, you have been a life-saver throughout this whole project! From editing help to thoughtful and good advice about design and layout, as well as whole-hearted encouragement…I am so blessed :)

Kapparah, Ralph Angel (the Jewish poem)

This was a tricky one. I emailed the poet to get some direction, but he emailed me back saying that he trusted my instincts and I should just go with whatever the poem made me feel. I was flattered, but it wasn’t terribly helpful. So I did a bit of thinking and research. First, one of my biggest fears with this project in general is that I'll accidentally do something along the lines of putting a peace symbol on the Christian poems- so close, and yet so far (and also obviously un-researched). I felt that the image should reflect several different aspects of the poem- 1- definitely the Kapparah ritual; 2- the Temple; 3- a sense of dispersing/converging. So the image is actually an aerial map of Jerusalem, with the darker spot (right of center) being the location of the Temple. But the red ink also makes it look like streams of blood, which presumably there were during the Kapparah sacrifices (and sacrifices in general). Bart pointed out that it looks like a heart/blood veins, which I think also works. A lot of the language in the poem made me think of the passage of time and distance, which also sort of fits with the map idea- leaving and returning.

Printing this poem was a bit of a challenge- I felt I was taking some risks in the layout, and what if it didn’t turn out quite right? With the text off-center, and the text/image unit being slightly off-center (but still maintaining visual balance), and the image so red that it could easily overpower the text…I was nervous. But B thinks it works, and now I felt reassured, too.

After printing, I also emailed my dear Marli, who has some really cool thoughts that I want to share:

My thoughts are... well, to start with, Kapparah is a ritual which asks for atonement of sins. It's on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year. By its nature (being a part of the service) it is beautiful - Yom Kippur is one of, if not the most beautiful holiday, but it's also one of, if not the most, saddest. Yom Kippur is very grey in that respect... beautiful service, including the kol nidre (which you can hear as a cello solo here), and asking for mercy and blessings throughout the year on a personal as well as a humanity-wide level, and yet, being multifaceted, it's also very black and white. There are sins. We have committed them. We must ask forgiveness of the people we have wronged, and then we can put ourselves before God, as it is ordained, and we follow a specific service to ask for redemption.

My immediate reaction to the poem was (and is again now) that there's a lot of imagery, and it doesn't seem to line up to a specific thought. It's speaking both to specific events and to a vast, overall... something.

"we'd have to undo even the hours of this room" - it seems like he's saying we'd have to take away the time spent here, but usually that refers to regrets, and he says "to make ugly" as if to say the thing is currently beautiful. So, maybe he's not talking about the sins, so much as the life we live? To take that away, we'd have to actually remove the events which have created us. This is an idea that's very important to the Jewish people, as there have been so many times when another nation has tried to wipe them out, and it is only the stories and histories being passed down which has counteracted that.

"the unsaid will flop like a fish" - no absolutes. Another big theme in Judaism - everything is up for discussion. There are wrong and right answers, but those are for God to determine. For ourselves, we can only question.

"a view much like our own" - tying the past back into the present, into what we see and feel, and how much that is exactly what our ancestors saw and felt.

The second verse seems to be describing what actually is the case, though he uses the conditional, which seems to imply it isn't currently. More specifically, he's describing what religious Jews actually do: "fail, and study constantly, and know by heart the volumes of our mingled vast migrations." And then the last part "we were holy places there," I can only assume refers to the old temple.

So the overall impression I get is likening the old temple (destroyed back in BC) to the current way of life. When the old temple existed, atonement was sought there through animal sacrifices. Since the destruction of the old temple there are no more animal sacrifices, and it has changed everything about atonement - particularly Kapparah. So I get an image of likening our modern way of life (where we do not all "study constantly and know by heart the volumes of our mingled vast migrations") to the days of the temple and the Kapparah that was.

Truly the Sea was Divided, various – based on Exodus 15 (the Coptic poem)

The last poem! The imagery was pretty straight-forward to figure out, although originally I had wanted the text to be yellow-orange (because of the part about the sun shining on the hidden earth), but that was vetoed pretty early on. Burgundy/red was suggested instead, which also makes a lot of sense, since the Red Sea was the one Moses parted, and it’s never specifically mentioned. A bright, turquoise-y blue seemed appropriate for the image of stylized waves, with beams of light shining through.

Printing was the hard part, specifically, printing the image. It was so large that I had to constantly re-ink the press (after about every 4 prints, and then multiply that by 110+ pieces of paper) and the extra minutes needed to allow the ink to distribute evenly on the rollers and on and on. Plus the paper had just enough of a texture to not print perfectly evenly, which was extremely aggravating. Anyway, it took about six hours. But at last I finished and, exhausted, drove home. That evening I showed B, and he thought they looked great. And then he noticed a problem. At the bottom, where it was supposed to say “this poem is…based on Exodus 15”, I had typeset “this poem is…based on Exobus 15”. Ouch. One stinking little letter- and a b instead of a d on top of it all- and now I had to endure another day like that one, at my own expense. Ok, so I maybe hadn’t proofread that part as carefully as I should have, but couldn’t God give me a break? I mean, c’mon! I admit it, I was mad.

Feeling dejected, I bought new paper (with a smooth texture this time) fixed the typo and got set to do the whole thing over again. Just to be extra-safe, I went through the whole poem word by word- I felt paranoid, I guess. I paused at one word, which was unfamiliar to me and therefore should probably be double-checked on the computer: “Theokotos”, the Greek title of Mary. Turns out, the correct spelling is “Theotokos”- I had had another spelling error. Suddenly, I was feeling very blessed.

Aagh- no tiiiime!

2010-10-11T16:01:00.000-07:00

Here's a link to the Religions in Conversation conference, which is this Friday: http://www.cgu.edu/pages/8335.asp If you're able to go, that would be cool! The poems will be available for purchase online as well as at the event, so keep your eyes peeled for that (I just emailed the coordinator photos, so I'm not sure when the store will be up). If I'm lucky I'll be able to write about the remaining three poems before Friday...but no guarantees.

I have several new projects that I'm working on, which is super exciting (this is partly why I don't have time to blog). I thank my Employer for providing them. :) 1-3 drawings, a thesis layout, drawing lessons, and possible consignment at a local shoppe, as well as continued work in Claremont. w00t.

B and I visited Alida and Mom and Dad O in Flagstaff over the weekend- it was wonderful. It's nice to get away now and then, and being with family is always refreshing and encouraging. Yay :)

Well, I am using my blog to procrastinate other things, so...I'd best get back on track. *sigh*

Untitled (#200)

2010-09-27T11:48:00.000-07:00

well, i'm out of pre-written blogposts and i just don't feel like writing one at the moment, but i did want to post something...so...lucky for me this is the 200th post on this blog. yep, this right here. ain't she a beaut.

also, summer has finally arrived (rudely ignoring the fact that it is now supposed to be AUTUMN), so i feel grouchy. but i get to have lunch with a friend in 45 minutes, and that's something to look forward to. :)

Adventures in letterpress printing

2010-09-24T08:52:00.000-07:00

#5: “A Meditation”, Behram Deboo (the Zoroastrian poem)

Subtitle: trust your instincts

I am very proud of myself for now being able to pronounce and spell “Zoroastrian”, not that it’s been much of a source of personal humiliation over the past 26 years. Anyway, the design process was fairly simple for this one (it wasn’t that way for all of them – the next two poems I’ll talk about proved to be very challenging) – Elisa had included some images of the brass fire urns that are kept at Zoroastrians’ places of worship, which are called fire temples. I thought it would be neat to lay out the text in the shape of an urn, and carve a flame illustration to place above it. It seemed a little bit like an obvious design, so I thought I’d try doing something a bit more unusual for the paper and ink colors- dark grey paper and bright yellow-gold ink. It would be like a goblet of fire (but not the goblet of fire from H. Potter…and by the way, for the longest time I always wanted to call it "the globule of fire") shining in darkness. It was pretty striking. Here’s the draft I created in InDesign:

Challenge 1: Kelly paper didn’t have a really dark grey paper. The darkest was “pewter”, sort of a middle-grey, not very dark, not very light. I got it anyway.

Then I bought a little linoleum block and carved my flame, realizing, as I did so, that I didn’t have to carve away all the space around the flame, but could instead create a neato halo.

Challenge 2: Ink, my apparent nemesis. I picked the color I wanted, mixed it, put it on the press, ran a test on leftover paper from the Mormon poem, thought it looked gorgeous, decided to start printing on the pewter grey paper, printed my first sheet and…ACK!

The ink was transparent. The ink was invisible on my darkish paper. What in the world was I going to do now? Step one: clean off the press. Step two: add lots and lots of opaque white to the color I had mixed (which was made up of process yellow and rubine red- both transparent inks). I thought this would lighten the color of the ink and increase the contrast between the ink and paper. I put this revised ink on the press and printed this:

It was too yellow-green. I wanted more orange. Just a tiny, tiny bit more orange, since this was supposed to be a flame in a brass urn. And geez- it still needed to be more opaque. So I cleaned off the press again, added more red to the ink- actually, by this point I had mixed several different little pools of ink and had even tried resurrecting some old metallic inks I’d found in a box (the gold- the most likely candidate, was completely crusted over and unusable. Metallic inks don’t keep well). I had some scrap grey paper to test the colors on so that I wouldn’t have to get the whole press dirty. The problem was, none of my attempts at mixing brighter, more opaque inks were coming out bright or opaque enough. The color of the paper was too light. Even if I used white ink (the brightest and most opaque option), there wouldn’t have been quite enough contrast. This was a problem. But I did have a color that I thought just might work:

And then, reassuring myself that ink gets lighter and more opaque as it dries (in the same way I told myself in the previous post that it gets darker), I ignored the queasy feeling in my gut and printed the whole lot. (It should be noted that this is something you never want to tell yourself. The change in lightness/darkness and opacity from wet to dry is almost too subtle to notice.)

I actually felt pretty good about them by the time I was heading home. I’d told B all about the fiasco, and he promised to give me his opinion when I got home. His words were very encouraging- the prints were fairly light, yes, but they were also subtle, and the image was lovely. I really liked how the flame turned out. Ok, so it’s not very easy to read from far away, but still, it looks nice.

Next time I met with Elisa, I took her a copy so that she could see my progress and have something to show the other people involved in planning the conference. She hesitated, but said it was lovely. Later that day, she came and found me and told me that some bigwigs at the school had declared it too light and difficult to read, so I needed to redo it. :( I could see their point, but I was really bummed.

I revised the color choices and re-printed last week:

and the little linoleum block, of which I am very fond:

Adventures in letterpress printing

2010-09-22T09:09:00.000-07:00

#4: “Tree”, Sri Aurobindo (the Hindu poem)

The imagery for this one was fairly straightforward- hands, trees, the conflict between heavenly and earthly desires- a tree in the shape of two hands with one branching, growing and reaching up, and the other, firmly rooted, reaching down. I chose lovely Environment birch paper for this print, and green and greenish-yellow for the colors, which seemed appropriately symbolic according to Hindu color symbolism (or so I was told by ye olde internet).

The first challenge: INK. INK IS TRICKY. I chose a color from a booklet and prepared it according to the directions using the base colors in the specified proportions. The green text was easy. The greenish-yellow…not so much. You mix ink on a glass plate, but then you have to test it on a piece of scrap paper because your puddle of ink looks completely different from the color it will print. So you get a tiny amount of ink on the paper, smear it around vigorously with another piece of paper, and that gives you a better idea of the actual color you’ll be printing. However, if you look at the color on the paper, you should imagine it lighter and less saturated, and that will be even closer to how it’ll print. Once you put your ink on the press, you have to clean the whole press if you decide it’s a tad too light/bright/dark/purple/whatever. Also, as a general rule of thumb: less is more when you’re adding dark ink to light. If you’re making a color that calls for 12 parts yellow , 14 parts white and 1/4-part blue, you’d better make sure you don’t add 1/2-part blue. You’ll quickly end up with a pint of ink if you try to lighten a color that’s too dark (you usually need less than a tablespoon to print 100 copies of something). It’s better to take, say, half or even a quarter of the color that you accidentally mixed too dark, and then add white/yellow/whatever to that. It’s easy to add more dark ink.

So anyway, I should’ve added more green to my greenish-yellow, because what I got was nearly neon yellow. I told myself, “it’ll probably darken as it dries”. I have also told myself, “I think the ink gets lighter as it dries” as well as, “I think the ink gets more opaque as it dries” (more on that later, actually). In reality, I still don’t know which, if any, of those are true, but the change is minute. The way the ink prints is basically the way it will look when it’s dry. If you have any doubts (more on this later, too), just clean the press and fix the color. You’ll be glad you did.

Well, I went ahead with the neon yellow. And then I encountered…

The second challenge. Something was odd about the way the image was printing. The ink coverage was good, but…what is that? Thinking the block still had some black ink on it from when I’d printed a test in black a few days earlier, I got out the cleaner and cleaned the block, being careful to get into the little crevices where black ink might be hiding. Using such a light color, I knew that any leftover ink on the block or on the press rollers would be noticeable.

Well, the problem didn’t go away, but now I could tell what it was: the ink from the sharpie I’d used to draw the tree shape before carving it was somehow printing. I have never seen or heard of this happening before- and had used it on the illustrations for the three previous poems. I scrubbed the block again with very, very nasty chemicals, but couldn’t get the permanent ink off (darn them and their accurate advertising!). After a third scrubbing, I gave up and printed the rest of the broadsides. At this point there was only a faint outline on part of the image, but it still screamed “SHARPIE INK RESIDUE!” to me. But if no one else knows how it got there, they probably won’t think “sharpie residue”. I hope they don’t. But after that I haven’t used a sharpie, which has been a bit of a pain because graphite smears so easily on linoleum. And you still have to be sure to clean it off before printing. Ah well.

Adventures in letterpress printing

2010-09-20T08:46:00.000-07:00

#3: “Pied Beauty”, Gerard Manley Hopkins (the Catholic poem)

This poem is about God’s Creation- so I went through a lot of ideas with spots for imagery (given the focus of the text), and eventually settled on this one, which I think looks pretty darn good. And silver on black is always very exciting. The spots represent the spotted things in the poem, but I also wanted them to look a little bit like stars or planets, so that it wouldn’t just be like “God created spotted horses” but also “God created the whole universe and beyond!” I like my pieces to work on multiple levels...even though it's maybe not all that clear.

Choosing paper was a bit of a challenge. I was reluctant to choose a flat black because flat colors look too much like copy paper or construction paper (in my opinion), but the laid paper incident was too fresh in my mind to attempt something with any, no matter how slight, texture (such as linen). So I went with the flat black. C’est la vie.

This poem was fairly easy to complete, but again, there were some image registration problems. Here’s the progression I went through with adding packing under the block:

You’ll notice that the left side had no trouble printing from the beginning. So instead of adding pieces of paper the size of the whole block, I added half- or quarter- sheets to raise only one side of it.The final result is at the top.

Adventures in letterpress printing

2010-09-17T08:46:00.000-07:00

#2: “On the Mormon Trail, June 1868”, Elisa Pulido (the Mormon poem)

This poem’s author, Elisa, is the woman I’m working with to create these broadsides. She’s the Student Chair at the Claremont Graduate University and is organizing the conference this year. She’s been really great to work with.

My first idea for this poem was a trail in a field, with the trail following the curve of the right side of the text. It works, but it was, I admit, boring. I came up with another idea, just because it’s nice to have more than one. B really liked the second one, and so did Elisa. I thought it would be cool to have the poem nestled and even hidden down in the long grass of the prairie. That’s about as far as my thinking went, aside from “that grass will be really fun to carve in linoleum”. It was :)

(The thing to remember with linoleum carving, or any image-making for printing, is that you have to make a mirror image of whatever you want the image to be. This is hard to remember, but you learn, as I have, by doing it wrong several times...)

I had the paper picked out long in advance- camel hair laid cover (I’ve ordered all my paper for this project from Kelly Paper, which has stores here and near Claremont and is very convenient). It’s a beautiful, warm tan with slightly darker brown fibers sprinkled throughout and it has a great toothy texture (that's what "laid" means). So I set the poem, carved the linoleum, ordered the paper, picked up the paper, cut the paper (because the broadsides are 11x14, I order parent sheets- uncut sheets of paper that come in large sizes such as 23x35 in.), and printed the text. Then I cleaned the press, took the text off the bed of the press, set up the linoleum block in its place, applied green ink to the rollers (I maybe should've done tan-ish yellow for the grass, but that would have been too much brown), got all set to start test-printing my second run, tested it out first on leftover sheets from my previous printing (the Rumi poem):

...printed the first piece of the camel hair paper, and hit a wall. The registration of the image was terrible. Really inconsistent and patchy (fyi- you can click on the images to make them larger. You probably already knew that. I probably just insulted your intelligence. Sorry.):

I increased the pressure, added more ink, paced back and forth mumbling to myself while pangs of anxiety shot through my stomach- nothing helped. And then I remembered something.

Textured papers don’t print well because of all the bumps and crevices, which the rollers have a hard time squashing flat in order to print something with a lot of surface area. If textured papers must be used, they have to be dampened first (which is a monumental pain in the neck). It worked fine with the text because the text is very small and is made of metal. You’ll notice that part of the linoleum block did print well. I don’t know why- it’s possible that the linoleum wasn’t perfectly flat, which may account partly for the uneven printing, but mostly, it was the rough texture of my beautiful paper. It printed fine on the Rumi paper because it had a smooth texture. *SIGH*

I ended up buying new paper (what else could I do?) with a lovely smooth texture- Royal Fiber cream, which I think looks even better than the other stuff. I still had a hard time printing the linoleum, which seemed to provide more solid evidence toward the theory that the surface wasn’t completely level, but I managed to turn out 100 good copies, which is all that matters. So far, this is one of my favorites.

It Came!

2010-09-15T10:58:00.000-07:00

It came! I received my copy of “Merry Sorrys, (Un)Happy Endings”!! After months and months of formatting, resizing, editing, tweaking, re-tweaking, and lots and lots of re-re-tweaking, it’s finally here in physical form. It’s all shiny and bright…yay. Now I have something real to show for all this – you all probably thought I was making this project up. :) I photographed some of my favorite pages:

Shiny…

Shiiiny…

Shiiiiiiny…

Yay!

Remember, you can order a copy of your own at http://www.merrysorrows.com/ :)

Adventures in letterpress printing

2010-09-13T11:32:00.000-07:00

I was commissioned back in early summer to created 8 limited edition broadsides (posters, 11x14 in) using 8 poems from various religious traditions for an event in October hosted by the Religious Studies department at Claremont Graduate University. I would design the layout and create simple imagery, typeset the text, pick ink and paper, and print 100 copies each of the eight poems, which would be sold at the event as a fund-raiser. The eight religions are Islam, Mormon, Catholic, Protestant, Hindu, Zoroastrian, Jewish, and Coptic. I’ve printed 6 (except now only 5…more on that later) of the 8 poems so far, and it has been incredibly fun, not to mention a rich learning experience. I have run into numerous design and technical problems along the way, so much so that I feel the need to share them. Maybe someone out there will be able learn from my mistakes. :) I’ll organize the lessons around the specific poem I was working on when I learned them, in chronological order.

So, #1: “Birdsong from Inside the Egg”, Rumi (the Islamic poem)

This poem, being my first to design and print, was sort of the guinea pig. Here’s a bit of my decision making process: 1) I wanted to do one print run because it’s much faster that way (more on print runs later). 2) I wanted to use blue because of the egg (robin’s egg. I don’t know why. Artistic license, ok?) and river imagery. 3) There is also a lot of imagery with wind, spirit, river, song, breath, and dancing. I thought the best way to unite these themes would be with a spiral/wavy shape that flows upward, and mirrors the right edge of the text, which is itself very wavy.

The challenge: during printing, I had a hard time getting the image to print solid black. Often, linoleum blocks (which I use and love very much) are not “type-high”, meaning they sit lower (shorter) on the bed of the press than the metal type. If the image is lower, the paper won’t be pressed down hard enough on it and you’ll either get no image to print at all, or else it will be sort of faint, splotchy and yucky. You will have to add “packing” under the block- usually sheets of paper cut to the size of the block- to raise it to the height of the type. You have to experiment a bit (with scrap paper) to see how much paper you need- too little and you still have registration problems. Too much and you run the risk of damaging the block and the image will look like it’s been smashed into the paper. Not good. It’s all about finding the right amount of pressure. You can also increase pressure by lowering the rollers on the press, but since there was a good amount of impression on the text, it made more sense to raise the linoleum block. Here’s an example of too little pressure:

And of increased pressure: (you can also see that increasing the pressure may cause some of the linoleum block to appear- this, obviously, needs to be carved away)

Overall, I don’t think I got the pressure quite right on this one, but it still came out well (the image at top is an example of how they turned out).

I have a pretty good example of this process of building up enough sheets of paper with #3, the Catholic poem (stay tuned!!!).

How to sew jersey on a sewing machine

2010-09-10T14:50:00.000-07:00

I have a very old sewing machine. I bought it from an elderly woman for $20 at her garage sale three years ago in Claremont. It’s a New Home 671 (purchased new in 1967, according to the lift-time guarantee certificate taped to the inside of the owner’s manual) and really works like a dream. A somewhat retro-‘60s dream, but still. A little over a year ago I found the cutest jersey dress on clearance at Target (75% off!). Upon examining it, I found that it has a very simple pattern and that it would be relatively easy to create a paper pattern from the dress (without even having to take it apart) and then, in theory, I’d be able to replicate it an infinite number of times, using any combination of colors and tweaking the details to suit my every whim. I made the pattern, bought a number of nice t-shirts from a thrift store, and set to work. I sewed about fifteen stitches…And was immediately thwarted.

Jersey and other stretchy fabrics are, well, stretchy and different from anything I’ve ever sewn before. When I tried to sew a seam, the needle seemed to “bounce” off the fabric every so often, so that I’d be left with seams like below (marked by angry red arrows):

Yuck. I was pretty sure that wasn’t supposed to happen. I searched the owner’s manual for guidance. Surely they had stretchy fabrics in the 60s, so there must be instructions on how to sew them. But the owner’s manual assumes that you can read its mind and a lot of details are missing. At a loss, I then bought proper jersey sewing needles, with no change in the resulting sewing. The lady at the fabric store mentioned something about a special paper material I could buy to make it easier to sew the fabric, but I was not about to do that. I abandoned the project.

Fast forward to last weekend. It suddenly dawned on me to look online for answers. SUCCESS! Here are the most helpful tidbits I found (cobbled together from various sources):

-Use a needle labeled "Stretch" (not just "Knits"). You could use a ballpoint style or a semi-ballpoint universal needle. For the delicate knits use needle size 70 (10). For medium thickness use 80 (12). Size 90 (14) needles are good fabric like polar fleece. I bought a pack of five needles that had 2 70s, 2 80s and a 90 for less than $4.

* Use a narrow zigzag stitch rather than a straight stitch. A zig-zag stitch is perfect for knit fabric, because it stretches with the fabric, and thus is less likely to pucker or cause thread breakage. Choose the narrowest zig-zag stitch that will not pucker or stretch your fabric, since the wider/longer your stitch is, the weaker it will be. Remember that a zig-zag stitch is wider than a straight stitch, and adjust your seam allowance accordingly.

-Use greater pressure (not tension) from the presser foot.
-Don't let pins get under the presser foot at all, and certainly don't assume you can stitch over a pin.
-Stretch the fabric slightly as you stitch.
-Stitch continuously rather than stopping and starting.

** Sew through something that tears away--tissue paper, toilet paper, old newspaper, etc. (watch for ink smears)

* This advice helped a lot, but the thread was still oddly loose in several places (red arrow: bad; orange arrow: making progress???; yellow arrow: hey, i think these tips are starting to work!):

** This little factoid made the sewing perfect (light green arrow: almost there!; happy dark green arrow: success!). I used strips of catalog paper, since it’s nice and thin. I know you probably can't even see it- that's how perfect and tight and tiny it is.

I believe the stage is now set for me to begin successfully sewing my Target-rip-off dress. Yay!

Genius!

2010-09-09T12:51:00.000-07:00

This morning I felt a distinct blogging bug coming on. This is a wonderful thing because 1) my blog has been shamefully neglected for several months now, and 2) there are several things I’ve been intending to blog about. SO, I’ve decided to go ahead and seize, er, scratch? this itch to type by writing out all the things I’ve been meaning to blog about…and then divide them up into individual posts and post them over a period of several days. Not a bad idea, right? That way tomorrow, when I most assuredly won’t feel like blogging, I will still have something to add. Something to keep you coming back…

A lot of the things I want to write about are sort-of-tutorials, by which I mean step-by-step walk-throughs of things I’ve been working on that didn’t go as planned and what I had to do to fix it. I’ve been learning a lot about sewing, letterpress printing (hey, you never know when info about this will come in handy), and painting furniture. I also have a couple of projects and books to share about.

I’ve just written five entries (not including this one) in five pages in Word. I need to take a lot of pictures before posting them, but I plan to start with the first tomorrow.

book review

2010-07-30T09:39:00.000-07:00

well, i finally finished...er, no that's not completely true. ahem. start over. well, i finally read most of another book on the shelf that i own and have possessed for a number of years but had previously not read at all: conversations with an eagle: the story of a remarkable relationship, by brenda cox. it's a nice looking little book--well-designed inside and out. you can read the blurb about it on the link above (amazon.com). it sounds like a great book: an outdoorsy woman describes in vivid detail her experiences at a wildlife rescue center in british columbia, focusing primarily on an injured eagle that she is drawn to and everyone else is afraid of. then the eagle dies (don't worry, that wasn't a plot spoiler). despite all of these interesting points, the book was BORING. maybe boring isn't the right word...but the problem with the book is that it's driven by rather insignificant little events, but you know that all these things mean SO MUCH to the author. and here's another thing: she LOVES birds (and horses, too)--wakes up crying from a dream she had where the injured birds at the rescue center couldn't ever fly again. and although she tries really hard, i really don't think she manages to successfully imbue ichabod (the eagle) with human traits. there is no conversation in this story. ichabod is a wild animal--a dangerous, injured, poorly-understood wild animal. ok, so i did skip about 30 pages, so maybe i missed it, but there was really very little evidence, to me, that ichabod even liked brenda--barely tolerated, maybe, but brenda gushes about every aspect of her interactions with the bird with vivid details and raw emotions. i'm not trying to be harsh, brenda seems like a great person; i guess i just couldn't relate to her or the things she cares so deeply about.

also, if anyone wants to buy a certain book for a dollar...well, there's no reason for me to keep it.

done!

2010-07-26T09:22:00.000-07:00

i finished the beady last night! yaaay! the final 6-10 outer rows were really hard to manage- all the imperfections on earlier rows (teeny, very minor imperfections ;) ) just got magnified as the thing grew. if you look closely (go ahead, it's ok, i don't mind) you can see where i had to add more beads or not add any beads to try to keep everything on the same level. it was difficult and frustrating trying to figure out how to proceed at the end- i couldn't do much more with the pattern at that point because things wouldn't match up perfectly. so i decided to do a single color (the pale silver) in order to even out the flaws and give it a border to stabilize all the movement of color and pattern. and then the green border holds it all together.

the back looks cool, too.

i want to frame it with my other two 7" beaded things. mmm- shiny.

that's all for now!

ack. another month goes zooming by...

2010-07-11T21:01:00.000-07:00

june and july have been busy.

i just wanted to post this for a very good friend whose birthday was yesterday:

various. sundry.

2010-06-02T10:36:00.000-07:00

well, if i thought thursday was difficult, friday was like trying to push a boulder up a mountain of mud- difficult and frustrating. i stared at the computer all day, waiting for emails, tweaking, editing, saving and re-saving pdfs, uploading, waiting, cursing, deleting, re-uploading...it was the final push to get this book layout in before june 1. but now, with a few extra tweaks today, it's finally in. the contents of that "mysterious" black binder a few posts ago. it's a book of fairy tales written and illustrated by students from the claremont colleges (mostly scripps) who took a fairy tales class from professor roswitha burwick. the final project for the class is to write a modern fairy tale, and the best ones from the past few years have been edited extensively and compiled into a book, with a preface and introduction (and colophon, for extra fanciness points) and everything. i designed the layout, and had invaluable assistance from the amazing professor kitty maryatt (for whom i work on a weekly-ish basis at the scripps college press), and thanks to her, it is AWESOME (what? i'm not taking all the credit). if you are like me, when i first started this project, then you're probably thinking, "someone actually hired you to copy and paste words on pages? what could be easier?" WELL, MY FRIENDS, let me tell you that it was extremely challenging! there's a bit of psychology behind it- there are certain things that make a page of text more or less readable, and then as soon as you come up with the perfect layout for one chapter, you have to apply that layout to all the chapters, and then deal with problems that will inevitably spring forth. such as: what do you do when a story ends with two measly little lines at the top of a new page? what if you have text over images throughout the book, and some of the images are very dark and some are very light? is it ok to be inconsistent and use black text for some and white for the other? what do you do when your page limit, dictated by the publisher, is 40 pages less than what you currently have? these are just a few of the fun questions i had to wrestle with. anyway, i didn't intend to write about this today, so i'll have to come back to it at some point. i think the book will be available on amazon at some point (late summer?) and maybe will be printed for limited release. i'll let you know.

here's the important stuff- our garden! things are coming along nicely-tomatoes are growing, thai basil has finally gotten it's act together...the spinach, zucchini and cucumber continue to perplex us with their pathetic and persistently sickly behavior, though.

also, we made rope ladders for our beans! a couple 10' pvc pipes, a saw, a couple fancy knots and some twine, and voila! we eagerly anticipate the wall of green that these guys are going to make. grow, little planties! (i love working on projects with my best friend :) )

last of all (from the gardening group), i found this succulent thing on a curb a block or so away several months ago, and have been expecting it to die because i haven't been taking good care of it and it really needs to be repotted. imagine my surprise when, lo and behold, i noticed that it had actually flowered! it's pretty, too.

last but not least, shoes! new shoes!! about a year ago i found the blue ones on amazon, at steep discount and with free shipping. i bought them and loved them and walked miles and miles in them. i love these shoes, but made an informal deal with myself that i wouldn't buy a new pair until they were on sale for the same price again. it seemed pretty unlikely, because i'd gotten them for about 75% off. but again, lo and behold (that's just fun to say- especially the "lo" part), i found them on amazon, in a different, but still very acceptable color ("aloe"), for the same deal i'd had before, and decided to make them mine, aaaallllll mine! i made this picture extra big so you could see how shiny the new ones are, and how sad the old ones. green shoes, meet your future selves! bwahahaha!

UGH. it has been a great day!

2010-05-27T15:10:00.000-07:00

that's right. on my list of things to do today are about a dozen items that i had been putting off- emails, phone calls, grading assignments...well, here's pretty much the whole thing:

- email: lw, kf, al, jg, dad, rb, b, pr, ep (aside from "dad", which stands for my dad, those are initials); sga blog

- laundry (3 loads!)

- pantry: inventory, email, volunteers

- grade artist lists

- finish grades

- register for jury duty (bleh)- fill out form and call

- call old doctor's office

- call new doctor's office

- work on layout

- email layout

- call about layout

- blog?

- pilates

see how many emails? see how much grading?? ok, so i only have 8 students, and it took a matter of minutes to read and grade their two-page homework assignment, but that hasn't ever stopped me from putting it off! and anyway, see how many phone calls????

WELL. i was slightly dreading today, yesterday, because, like i said, those are almost all things i'd been putting off. and who wants to purposely fill their day with chores they actively avoid? but today i had two things to look forward to: a delicious breakfast of pancakes made by my b (yum!!), and dinner out tonight (also with b). with those two lovely events, i wanted to fill my day with productivity (fueled by whole-wheat sourdough blueberry pancakes), so that i could confidently enjoy yak tonight (we're planning to try out a nepalese restaurant), satisfied with a day's work well done.

by lunchtime (12:30*), i had gleefully gouged in check-marks over the following items:

- email: lw, kf, al, jg, dad, rb, b, pr, ep; sga blog

- laundry

- pantry: inventory, email, volunteers

- grade artist lists

- finish grades

- work on layout

- email layout

that left:

- register for jury duty (bleh)- fill out form and call

- call old doctor's office

- call new doctor's office

- call about layout

- blog?

- pilates

and now i'm down to:

- blog?

- pilates

which will soon be just:

- pilates

i really enjoy pilates. for a long time i fervently believed that you couldn't get a good workout without doing something highly strenuous and high-impact for a long time. but those kinds of things tend to hurt my knees and i can't afford to buy $80 sneakers every six months. then i discovered pilates on netflix streaming. it's really wonderful- it's relaxing, but i feel like i get a quality workout. and i don't even need shoes.

anyway, i was noticing that, not only was i getting stuff done like crazy today, my attitude was even pretty good. i know this is god working in me- blessing me today. i usually only work cheerfully on things that i like working on, while things that i don't enjoy are 1) avoided, or 2) done with resentment. i've often experienced what i would call god helping me get things done, but this is one of the first times i've (relaxed and) enjoyed the process, hunkering down and simply slogging through. and craziest thing of all- i didn't put anything off today, and now, at just past 3pm, i'm done with all that i needed to do! yay!

i'll let you know how the yak is. :)

*i made a yummy smoothie for with lunch- it was, approximately, 2 carrots, 1/2 cup plain yogurt, 1 cup orange juice, 1/2-2/3 cup frozen blueberries, 1 banana, ~3/4 cup frozen pineapple. there was a lot, but it was good! i may try something similar with coconut milk.

books

2010-05-10T15:06:00.000-07:00

Several weeks ago we had some friends over, and one of them, perusing a shelf of books, pulled out my copy of “Sailing Alone Around the Room”, a compilation of poems by Billy Collins, US Poet Laureate 2001-2003. He mentioned a few things about Billy Collins, saying he liked his work and asked what I thought about it. Well, I had to admit that I’d never actually read the book. It’s really quite pathetic- here’s this lovely slim volume of poems given to me by a good friend (Alanna) in high school. I remember trying to be interested in a book of poems, but really I have this innate fear of poetry- so much of it is deceptively simple and innocent on the surface, only to be about dark, evil things- or else it’s just vague and unnecessarily dense and “meta”. I didn’t even give this book a chance. And so for six…seven…eight years it sat on my bookshelf in my room in NY while I finished high school, went off to college, and then came back and then moved again…and then over Christmas I boxed it up and shipped it 3000 miles across the country, where, upon pulling it from the cardboard box, I carefully placed it on a different bookshelf and promptly forgot about it.

And then the brief aforementioned conversation happened, and, assured that Billy Collins’ poetry was quite harmless and pleasantly amusing, I plucked up the courage to read it.

And I loved it! My first read-through was fast. I just went from poem to poem like they were chapters in a book, not really pausing at all to enjoy them as separate entities. It was like, once I started reading them, I realized I had been starved for poetry and just had to keep gulping them down whole, as fast as possible, whenever I had a spare moment. Here are links to two of my favorites: “Another reason why I don’t keep a gun in the house”, and “Directions”.

This whole episode reminded me of a half-hearted new year’s resolution I made back in January. The Billy Collins book is not the only book of mine on our bookshelves that I haven’t read, though by this point most, if not all, have travelled hundreds, if not thousands, of miles with me. It seemed like a cool project to take this year and read through all these books, including “The Singer Trilogy”, “Conversations with an Eagle”, “Renoir, My Father”, “Les Fleurs du Mal”, and many art books (looking at the pictures dozens of times doesn’t count). It seems a bit late to get started on a new year’s resolution, but maybe I’ll still give it a shot!

Well, that’s all I wanted to say, so…toodles :)

various. sundry.

2010-05-05T09:58:00.000-07:00

1) garden: growing! things are actually continuing to grow in the pots (with the notable exception of the thai basil- there in the back- we bought a month or so ago at whole foods...i have half a mind to haul that empty pot over to whole foods and demand a refund for the faulty seeds they sold me. jerks.). b and i are planning to divide the tomatoes today, which may end up killing the bigger ones, but they're supposed to be planted at least a couple feet apart, so they'll die anyway if we leave them together.

2) aaron bros. was having a sale on frames last week, and i found a great one for this beautiful photograph- taken by none other than the lovely photographer of nature-y things, ms. alida oegema. she took this stunning photo at glacier national park; i love having a big "window" into the great green wilderness of the north here in socal. it's good to have a reminder that such places exist.

3) sitting there below the picture is a wonderful little artwork by cathy reichel-clark, a local artist we met a week and a half ago at a little art show called "art on palm" in altadena. b and i hemmed and hawed over her work for a loooong time, and talked to cathy quite a bit in the process. her work mostly consists of hand-built ceramic vases. she can't use a wheel because of (i think) some sort of neurological disease that causes numbness in her hands (and feet), and generally leaves her exhausted. her work is exquisite- it's very different from most ceramics works because of the fact that it's not thrown, and until i saw her work i would have thought this would make her work inferior. but she's very talented and creates work that brings out the best in hand-built ceramics. it's so elegant and interesting (i wish i had thought to take pictures!...if she would have let me- she doesn't have a website..and i can't find any pictures online), and her glaze work is really amazing- b and i really like this black and white design, but she also had pieces that were very "rustic" looking, some that were modern-arty...a really wide range of decoration techniques that was all very, very beautiful. well, we didn't buy anything at that fair, but thought about it and then went to the sierra madre art festival last weekend, where she had a booth, and there we decided to take this piece home with us. yaaay! :)

4) this mysterious black binder contains the first hard-copy version of a project i've been working on with scripps professor roswitha burwick (and others). i'll have more to post about this at the end of the month. :D

arty things!

2010-04-30T09:07:00.000-07:00

1) progress!

2) art show! the scripps senior art show, "artillier" opens tonight!

3) arty book to buy!

4) more arty things to buy!!!

happy friday :)

fooooods

2010-04-22T13:18:00.000-07:00

i have had food on the brain. i don't know if i'm feeling tired or it's the cool, cloudy/rainy weather we've been having or what, but i feel like i've been thinking about food, looking up recipes and snacking a lot today and yesterday. so i baked something this morning and now i'm going to share about it! :)

i've been making a lot of recipes from this site lately: http://www.101cookbooks.com/index.html. i really like her balance of healthy and yummy ingredients and that the main dishes aren't all meat-centered. and she has lots of things that i wouldn't think to try- she's pretty creative. anyway, last night i made the red lentil coconut soup for the second time- i don't use red lentils or yellow split peas or golden raisins, but rather the less-glamourous brown, green and purple varieties, respectively. i also used minced candied ginger instead of fresh because we never buy fresh ginger, and we never EVER buy cilantro, so there wasn't any of that either. and i just noticed, while perusing the ingredients again, that i forgot to add salt to it. i didn't notice it missing from the flavor. then we topped it with yogurt and roasted, salted cashews and heated up a couple whole-wheat pitas in a frying pan for on the side and yuuuuummmm...i highly recommend it.

on tuesday i made her vegan peanut butter cookies, again, for the millionth time, and i've already gushed about how wonderful they are. and they still are. and they are almost gone.

this morning (late morning, i feel the need to clarify) i was browsing the dessert section and came across ginger cupcakes. the ingredients list is simple, and since i wasn't being terribly productive anyway, decided that at least this would be something i could do and that i'd have something to show for it at the end. and do i ever! they are DELICIOUS. i did change a few things with the recipe- i used whole-wheat pastry flour, sucanat, 2 eggs instead of three, and, of course, i added chocolate chips to most of them after pouring the batter into the cups. and for some weird reason i got 16 cupcakes instead of 12. the flavor- i was really surprised. they're very tasty- mildly spicy and not too sweet- but my favorite part is the texture! it doesn't taste like it was made with whole wheat flour and sucanat, if you know what i mean. i love ww flour and sucanat, but you kind of have to resign yourself to the fact that all of your baked goods are going to have that quaint "rustic", "hearty" quality. not that there's anything wrong with that; all i'm saying is that these cuppycakes have a very soft texture and i think what may be called a "delicate crumb". yay!

another post?!

2010-04-20T09:26:00.000-07:00

howdy. i've been meaning to post some pictures of some of the projects we've/i've been working on. first up, another beady.

...yeah, i know. it's been really fun, though, and challenging. i started out trying to plan the design using photoshop, but that only worked to the ring of red beads, and then things stopped lining up for some reason so i've been winging the rest as i go. that part's hard. i'm not good at envisioning the final result and sometimes i'm too impatient to carefully devise a plan, so i do things without having a strategy in mind and then often end up trying to salvage them. i'm a weird mix of patient and impatient.

next we have some books- i recently found several half-finished books in a box, and for a couple days i worked feverishly on them, vowing to not start any more books until these were finished and, ideally, sold (because i have been slowly amassing a fairly impressive inventory of one-of-a-kind hand-bound books). but before that i made these, inspired by the idea of a book that wasn't a regular ol' rectangle:

...and inspired to try something a bit more elaborate with the binding (i added beads, naturally):

and finally, here are pictures of the wee little garden we've started. yay plants!! it wasn't easy- our duplex doesn't have a lot of vacant dirt space, but we do have a lot of concrete. we bought some large, over-priced pots from target a while back (why are pots so expensive???), and then i found pots of equal size, if a bit less attractive, at the dollar store (yes, for a dollar! :) ) and bought several, along with a few rectangular pots. almost two years ago, bart bought several vegetable seed packets as we dreamed of transforming the wesley street house (where he lived at the time) into a garden paradise. well, that didn't work so well (the poor plants were hammered to death by the summer sun's burning, relentless, pounding rays), but he did have a bunch of the seeds left over, which we've planted again this year. surprisingly, a lot of them are still alive. we'd also saved the seeds of nearly every heirloom tomato we bought at the farmer's market last year (but neglected to label them). so we've got cucumber, zucchini, dill, basil, thai basil, oregano, thyme, mint (seeds may be dead), spinach, chard, peas, green beans, carrots, broccoli, and two mystery tomatoes growing in various pots and in the one small, out-of-the-way patch of dirt we can safely call our own. we also have some cosmos started and would like to plant them, along with some california poppies, in a little rectangle of dirt that currently houses one small, somewhat frail rose bush in front of the duplex. i took pictures of the "empty" pots and dirt with the hopes of updating regularly (HA) with pictures of their progress :)

in addition, we were given permission to take home all of the easter lilies at church after easter. we have three of them inside, and gave away one, and the rest are here on the back patio, enjoying the sunshine, and, until very recently, full of extremely fragrant flowers. <3 we also have some geranium and fun little succulent cuttings rooting there. our one successful gardening venture at the wesley house was filling a small square of dirt that has a manzanita tree in it with little succulent cuttings. it has since filled out beautifully and is flourishing. yaaaay for green things!

oops!

2010-04-19T20:01:00.000-07:00

wow- i really didn't think it'd been a month since my last post. time has been flying recently, like, warp-speed. it's scary. luckily, i wrote this post a while back, so i have something to update you all with. :) it's about food.

Rainbow rice
I usually try to plan our meals ahead of time, in order to be more careful about spending money at the grocery store as well as to have a ready answer to that great, never-ending question “WHAT’S FOR DINNER?” But I’m not very good at it, for various reasons, and at least a few nights every week are mad scrambles to throw something together with whatever we have. It usually turns out ok, if completely uninteresting. A few days ago, however, I struck gold! We’d just come back from a run- it was probably a little after 7- and I’d had vague plans to make rice and veggie soup, since we had leftover rice and an open container of vegetable broth in the fridge, plus a slew of veggies. It turned out way better than that, becoming a dish that I now refer to as “rainbow rice”. It was:

Some diced onion
Garlic, minced
1 red bell pepper, chopped
Some canned diced tomatoes
2-3 carrots, chopped
Some frozen corn
2 large leaves of kale, chopped
Two small blue potatoes, diced
1 sweet basil pesto sausage, sliced
Water, some broth
Basil, parsley, oregano, fresh thyme, salt, pepper- to taste
Brown rice

The veggies kept their colors really well- we thought the blue potatoes would turn everything bluish, but they didn’t. A really good test for me on the yumminess of a meal is whether or not I will want to eat the leftovers- and for this one, I actually did.

breadcrumbs

2010-03-15T12:19:00.000-07:00

last week, if you'd opened up our freezer you would have found the following: flax meal, orange juice concentrate, a few frozen bananas, ice cream, normal things like that. and two+ loaves'-worth of ezekiel bread heels. we really like ezekiel bread- it's hearty, fiber-y, filling- all that good stuff. but it is one of the densest, most bran-ful kinds of bread i've ever had, and neither of us bother to even attempt to eat the heels. but, being cheapskates and hating the idea of wasting anything, we've been saving up the heels in the freezer. in the past, i've tried making bread pudding with them, but i don't enjoy the texture, and b (though he's an awfully good sport) was never able to keep up with the 9x13 pans i'd make of it. so what else do you do with unwanted bread? i don't like stuffing, meatloaf, meatballs, casseroles or any of those kinds of things, so the normal bread crumb recipes are out. and then last week i found this. you can count on the good ol' tightwad gazette for excellent ideas such as this- bread crumb cookies! of course! what genius!

making breadcrumbs is fun. i put ten heels on a pizza pan and baked them for about 15 minutes at 275. then i turned off the oven and let them stay in there while the oven cooled. then i ripped them up and dropped them, five slices at a time, into our beloved vita mix, and flipped the variable speed dial to "low". the sound is like that of grinding rocks, which is essentially what baked/dried ezekiel bread is, but it worked beautifully. in no time, i had several cups of breadcrumbs. the recipe was easy, though i substituted peanut butter for the butter and added chocolate chips (of course). the resulting cookie was just sweet enough and dense. they look a bit less like this and more like this, but they taste good, i promise! and personally, i like a cookie with character. we took about half of the batch to small group on friday, and then b and i ate the other half over the weekend. :) i have a new batch in the oven at this moment. i wanted to try them with some of the butter this time, adding cashews to (hopefully) make them somewhat reminiscent of trader joe's caramel cashew cookies, which are delicious. i think i added about 2/3 cup of cashews, but it's hard to tell because i kept eating them out of the bowl. YUM.

in other news, b and i have been reading the harry potter series aloud to each other. we got the idea from some friends of ours, and it's so much fun! tea, ice cream, and harry potter- that pretty much sums up many of our evenings. but we aren't total couch potatoes- we've also been running together about two or hree times a week, and walking several other evenings as well. i've said before that i think running alone is pretty boring; running with b is awesome. :)

also, here are some pictures of the harriet tubman poem. i actually missed all of the dedication and performances of the event itself (i was busy teaching art history in pasadena and then had to drive east to claremont in rush hour traffic), but got there in time to meet the poet, lynne thompson, and the artist, alison saar (both scripps alums). the maquette of the actual statue, which is in NYC, was installed outside one of the art galleries at scripps. both women seemed very cool; it would be neat to cross paths again.

by the way- the cookies turned out gooooood. real gooood. yay, it worked! :)

things!

2010-03-09T22:02:00.000-08:00

i haven't been blogging because i have been working on three or a million or so projects. here are some pictures!

these are two of three lino blocks i carved to accompany the text of a poem that was written in conjunction with this event. i was asked to design the layout for and typeset the poem and print 120 copies (letterpress) for the event tomorrow. it was a fun project- i learned a lot and it was thrilling to create something that made the artist, poet, and gallery director very happy. i even got paid. of course, i will take any excuse i can get to use the presses at scripps. :)

speaking of text and layouts and design, here is a portion of a drawing i just finished for my pa- more on that later.

done!

2010-02-22T09:34:00.000-08:00

four hours on sunday and an hour or so on saturday and i finished the beady*.

finally. also, yay!

i am looking forward to some other pastimes that do not leave my eyes, shoulders and back sore and exhausted. but overall, putting myself through that (for the second time...heh) was worth it, and since you're probably wondering why i would bother with such a weird project, now might be a good time to provide some answers:

1) it is shiny. i love shiny things.

2) as an artist, i am fascinated by the relationship between order and chaos. a lot of my work features imagery that seems chaotic from a distance, but is actually extremely (obsessively?) and, i hope, elegantly organized and controlled when viewed close up. some work conveys that back-and-forth relationship multiple times: orderly when viewed close up, then chaotic from a slight distance, and then orderly again from a greater distance. in this case, the patterns of the beads seem pretty chaotic, but each bead had to be individually sewn onto the canvas, which takes a lot of meticulous, patient work. in my own life (specifically during my high school years), i have experienced ordeals that seemed completely out of (my) control, but i know that god has everything under control; now that some time has passed, god has been showing me just how in control of those circumstances he was. i find that beautiful.

3) i find interactions and relationships between people fascinating as well. having moved around as a child, i am thrilled when i meet people with a connection to a place i have lived. this became especially important after moving three thousand miles across the country to go to college, and i reflected this in my art with abstract imagery that suggested interconnectedness- weaving together, working together, or branching apart. the beady is full of shapes that are connected to other shapes, whether linked together by color or line, or by variations in pattern. while at school, meeting people from moscow (idaho), or towns near potsdam (new york) instilled the "small world" perspective in me, and by extension, though it's been beaten to death, the idea that we are all connected. and god has a beautiful plan for it all, which is another reason i strive for beauty in my work.

and there you have it. :)

*if anyone can think of a more elegant term, i would be much obliged.

beadi and sushi

2010-02-19T11:21:00.000-08:00

hi there!

so last weekend was our first anniversary- hooray! we ate a lot of sushi and ice cream and pie went to the beach :) here's a bad picture of the sushi we made, and below that is what we had last night for dinner- "scattered" sushi, or basically "lazy-man's" sushi. just throw it all in a bowl and dive in...YUM. the neon orange stuff is smelt eggs, which are amazing flavor bursts; think of eating mildly sweet and tangy tiny bubble wrap. we found it at a market in little tokyo, a very convenient ride on the gold line away. also, scallops are amazing- somehow i'd never realized this before last week.

and then we have updates on the progress of the beady...it's grooowwwing! i am getting pretty close to being done- so maybe 6-8 more hours. :)

we found two lovely white table lamps next to our dumpster last week and i am working on making a lampshade for one of them- i have some really nice paper to use (and this is why i will never stop being a pack-rat: it's the paper that someone used to wrap one of our wedding presents!). because i care about things like this, i will probably post a picture when it's completed (hey- i have the same birthday as martha stewart, so i'm bound to get excited about home decor now and then).

happy friday!

beadquence?

2010-02-05T14:14:00.000-08:00

here i am, finally beginning the documentation process for a project after i'm already half-way through with it. this is a beady thing that i'm working on pretty much just for fun- the glass beads are beautiful and shiny, and i like making free-form, spontaneous patterns with them. i sew them onto light-weight canvas attached to an 8-inch hoop. you can see pencil lines on the cloth- that's from a project i started earlier and then ripped out. i was going to try to create one giant snowflake-type form with radial symmetry, but it was too complicated. the circles and lines were to help me keep the proportions right as i got further and further out. anyway, the additions you see in these pictures represent about a day's-worth of work (anywhere from one to three hours per day). the last one, from yesterday, has a lot of additions. b was gone aaaalll day (3:45 am - after 10pm) and i was bored and missed him; therefore, i beaded.

more to come :)

shifting focus?

2010-02-04T11:15:00.000-08:00

i think i'm going to try focusing on art-related things in this blog. i'm getting tired of writing lists of things i/we do, and i haven't had many thoughts to share (not any that i want to share on a blog, anyway).

that said, i just got back from a 6.5 mi walk/jog. to be honest, i felt like i had walked/jogged to the end of the world and back, so i was surprised (and a tiny bit disappointed) when i got home and realized i'd only been out for less than an hour and a half. i really want to get back into running, buuut...i just don't enjoy running by myself. or rather, i do...but i don't. you know? i guess what i'm trying to say is that i already get a lot of alone time, and while walking and jogging alone can be very nice, it's also sort of like concentrated alone time, which can be a bit over-whelming. but then...not very many people are available to go jogging during the day. maybe i'll just have to invest in more gorrillaz, genesis and belle & sebastian- music can be a good companion, though i don't think it's necessarily good to resort to that all the time.

so i'm working on four artsy projects (um, "commissions" might be a better word). i can't really post about any of them yet, beyond the fact that they exist. there's not really a point to, because they're all in the planning stages still. once they are finalized and i can get to the fun part, i may write about them.

i'm also working on another fun artsy thing in my spare time, and i've been taking pictures of it as i make progress. maybe i'll post them later today.

hmmm...i like thursdays.

updatey

2010-01-29T09:19:00.000-08:00

hi! things have been good and busy around here.

1) i started january with one commissioned project, and it looks like i'll be ending it with four, plus i'm able to keep on working in claremont once a week. this is definitely an answer to prayer.

2) we put pictures on the walls last weekend! this makes me ridiculously happy. from left to right: collage by a family friend, three pictures (old photograph, image of an eyvind earle painting that i cut from a magazine, photo-collage birthday card from alida), two photobooth photos framing a wedding picture (awwww... :) ) and a panel from my squares project from sophomore year at scripps. (remember that?) when we visited new york for christmas, i threw a lot of the panels away, but only after my mother's brilliant suggestion that i keep a few and frame one or two.

3) b and i got to go on an almost-all-expenses-paid two-day mini vacation a couple weeks ago to big sur, monterey bay, and visalia. b had to do some work in big sur and visalia, and since i didn't have to be anywhere those days, i went along, too! we stopped at monterey for the night, because it is awesome there. there was extremely thick fog on the ocean as we drove up the 1, resulting in the feeling that we were driving on some incredibly high mountain pass above the clouds. it was exciting. :) big sur and monterey are beautiful, too, as is the drive to visalia. visalia itself, or at least the part we were in, was rather boring.

4) blogger is a huge pain! either i need to learn something about css and javascript and whatnot, or find a new blog provider. seriously. creating posts for my art history class is a major weekly frustration- the new editor is an improvement over the older one, but even that's not saying much. does anyone else feel this way?

5) anyhoo...happy friday!

alrighty!

2010-01-05T16:19:00.000-08:00

i have had an extremely productive day, and i thought to myself, why not make it even better by posting something on ye olde blog, like you've been meaning to do? righto!

ok. so. my last post was about a month ago. here are some highlights from that time:

12/12: day-long holiday bazaar in a huge warehouse at an art charter school in LA. it poured rain, not many people showed up to shop. i sold two things (but gave out almost all of my business cards) and did some serious brainstorming with my handsome and intrepid husband (who is not afraid of sitting at a table with his wife for eight hours with hardly anything to eat and very little activity going on around us). this fair was kind of my last-ditch effort at the etsy-type method for selling work. for 2010, i am going to focus on the so-called fine arts- creating large pieces that are time-consuming and take months and months to complete. i want to pour my creative energies into something, well, worthy of my time- moreso than cards, journals, little drawings and beadings. also, pursuing a series of commissions based on a specific idea, upon which i may perhaps elaborate in the coming weeks.

12/13: christmas party hosted by b's company. the band was good, the food was good, the photobooth that i had been looking forward to since last year was there again this year. (good thing! any mention of the christmas party over the past year unfailingly resulted in me prancing around and singing "photobooth! photobooth!")

12/17-12/31 (actually, 1/01): we spent christmas in NY! one week spent with my pa and stepmom in syracuse, one week spent with my mom and stepdad in potsdam, along with brother and associated stepsiblings (it's complicated), dog and cats. thoroughly enjoyed my (our) family, the country and the violent mood swings of the weather (such a nice change from the lazy, perpetually sunny days of socal- trust me, it gets old). also sorted through all my things in my old room and the basement. threw away probably fifty pounds of wonderful, dear treas...*eyes tearing up*....no no no, it was trash- old (nostalgic, yes) crap. but i kept plenty of it, too, and am in the process of shipping it across the country. lord knows where we'll stuff it all- we'll at least need another book case. anyhoo, it was all wonderful and very sad to leave. then we spent new year's in chicago because of bungled plane flights. beware united air, that's the moral of the story. worst. flights (etc.). ever.

so now that we're all caught up, i would like to say....see you later!

the dumbest thing you can say on a blog...

2009-12-02T07:29:00.000-08:00

i promise* to update soon! i've been trying (with only a little success) to think of things to write about that aren't merely streams of consciousness or lists of random things. writing a blogpost should take some thought and have some purpose at least some of the time, and i think my posts have been pretty thought-less in recent months. anyhoo, stay tuned, i guess?

*ok, ok. i admit that this may be too strong a word. "would like" might fit better, or (sigh), be more truthful.

just a friendly warning...

2009-11-12T11:51:00.001-08:00

CAUTION: these cookies are extremely delicious. why are they so dangerous, you might ask? because they are very simple (only a few, healthy ingredients and one not as healthy ingredient), vegan (extra healthy points, right?), and are quick and easy to make. i would recommend adding a cup or so of chocolate chips to the batter. and then resign yourself to eating them all in one sitting. except, thankfully, that would be a difficult thing to do- while being completely devoid of butter, white sugar, and eggs, they are very decadent and rich; i can't eat more than two in a sitting (but they are so good that part of me reeeeally wants to try!) :) yay cookies!

anyhoo, just thought i'd pass that along...

also, i (more accurately, many of my hand-made books) will be at this event on saturday and sunday! yay! i am a local artist/artisan! come by and see my work...but please don't cringe too painfully at the marked-up prices...it's all for the good of the shop and your friendly local artist/artisan!

pretty

2009-11-03T21:20:00.001-08:00

i have been included in a treasury on etsy! it's pretty- i like this one a lot. yay!

25(?) random things about stuff

2009-11-02T16:04:00.000-08:00

1) i just finished 17 progress reports/grades and graded nine essays. this process was interspersed with thoughts on the meaning of grades and what to say when some students probably freak out that they haven't receive an A++ this quarter.
2) i really like flagstaff, az. b and i went there to visit alida (yay) this past weekend, and it was super enjoyable- family, good food, pretty nature (including but not limited to the grand canyon), visiting local art galleries, a tiny taste of real winter (although apparently we brought socal with us when we drove there)...when can we go back?
3) i actually enjoyed the 7-hour car trip. i thought i'd hate it, since it involves sitting and the majority took us through barren desert, but after so long in crowded, falsely-greenified, noisy LA, it seemed GORGEOUS. like, i think i would actually like the desert if we lived somewhere along the 40 between daggett and flagstaff.
4) we bought an 80-piece assortment of fun-size snickers, twix, milky way, and m&ms on sale at walmart the day after halloween for the drive back, and there was ONE bag of m&ms in it. ONE. SINGLE. STINKIN. BAG. i have half a mind to complain to someone.
5) i can't think of anything to write about randomly except for things that should be written in paragraph form. but i am too lazy to write in paragraphs! i need to try harder to be lazy.
6) here we go: bookface! hehehe! "that's right, i am the popular social-networking site, bookface."
7) i give up! the end! :)

fun!

2009-10-22T15:20:00.001-07:00

i just watched this on another blog- it's a music video done with stop motion, and it's so cool! i don't know if the song is good- i didn't have the sound on when i watched it. but the video is super. looks like it would have been a lot of fun to make (also: time-consuming!).

2009-10-19T15:25:00.001-07:00

procrastinate! do it here!

stuff!

2009-10-19T12:28:00.000-07:00

b and i have started trying to make sushi! here is our first attempt:
several weeks ago i found a hugely jumbo egg in our carton of jumbo eggs that i got at trader joe's- it was so large that it didn't really fit in the carton. here it is next to regular extra large eggs:

our monitor used to be perched on the top-most shelf there (where the stand still is). it was a literal pain in the neck having it there, so we ordered this cool movable arm thing that clamps to the desk and allows us to swivel the monitor around to wherever we want it!

i soaked some beans. for some reason i soaked some black-eyed peas with black beans (which caused them to turn blackish purple), and then some more black-eyed peas with garbanzos. when i rinsed them, i thought they looked pretty.

it's a thing! i've been all about making things recently. in other words, beady circles that, aside from being fun to make, as well as shiny, serve no actual purpose. worse yet, i cannot think of a practical application for them. they are truly just things. :( ...unless one of my astute readers can think of something! :)

they are beads strung together using a technique called the peyote stitch, which i just learned recently thanks to ye olde intarwebs,and measure about 5-5.5 inches in diameter (at this point i find they start to become unwieldy and difficult to manage. however i doubt that this will stop me from someday making a blanket-sized beady thing :D ). i really like watching a pattern develop as i add the beads- it's fun and surprising (although unfortunately i also make a lot of mistakes and had to redo significant portions of both beady circles. multiple times. and there are still mistakes! boo hoo). please think of something i can do with them so that i can justify spending hours and hours on more! :)

b and i went to santa barbara to celebrate our 7 month anniversary and one year anniversary since getting engaged (and to kick off the five-month celebration of not having to do wedding planning anymore. HUZZAH).

we walked around all day, ate ice cream, tried to find the beach, got lost, found ourselves at sb community college, then walked back to the car (we could see where to go from the top of the hill there). win! that cloud is fog coming in from the beach/ocean.

hi!

2009-10-16T08:18:00.000-07:00

it is time for a blog post...

1) i had the opportunity to hang out with three other k's last night. it was a lot of fun. i don't do a lot of hanging out without b, since we're friends with the same people, but this time it was just me and these three other girls. also, i just realized, i don't spend very much time around girls (er, women, i guess?); it was surprisingly refreshing, because i hadn't realized that i'd missed it. anyhoo, i feel like god really blessed that time, and i look forward to more of those in the future.

2) it rained for two days this week- i remember that it always and without fail rained around the weekend of fall break (which is this week) while at school. i loved that- rain and no classes- i could just hole up in my room, listen to it pouring down, and hide from the world (and/or stay up until ridiculous hours watching "firefly". hehehe). i had been really looking forward to the first rains of the fall this year, because with the fires and general LA grossness hanging around in the air, everything just felt so dirty. but we're back to sunny skies and 70-80 degrees again. (woe is me.)

3) i have a lot of photos to post from the past several months.

4) artwise...i'd sort of taken that pot off the stove for a few months. but now i have a few things simmering again. my problem now is follow-through- i get discouraged/lazy/uninspired/distracted so easily and approach things so half-heartedly. maybe i'm lacking vision, like either i've forgotten that i like art and want to create it (which is a perfectly good reason to create art), or i'm dissatisfied with that goal and want to aim for something higher...or rather, deceptively "higher", like, aiming for sales or something. meh. ramble, ramble.

5) b and i borrowed the first disc of the "planet earth" series from netflix and...wow...creation is amazingly cool- from the footage of the huuuuge great white shark that completely clears the water to nom a seal (slowed down for dramatic effect- sowwy, widdle seal) to the crazy and ridiculous-looking birds of paradise that perform hilariously bizarre courtship dances...ooh! i found them on youtube! this one and this one! here's the shark one (the part at 2:22 is especially amazing). anyway, we are excited that there are four more discs in the series- that's ten more hours of gorgeous cinematography and glorious learning still to be had. mmmmmm! :)

6) confession: i think fashion is incredibly interesting. ok, now go check out alexander mcqueen's spring 2010 collection. WEIRD. but also, strangely awesome. i bet she was in the audience...and it seems that even aliens prefer their females starved with vacant expressions. le sigh.

7) happy friday!

so pathetic...

2009-10-05T09:13:00.000-07:00

get this: i am wearing a hoodie over a t-shirt, a scarf, jeans, socks, and sandals, and drinking hot tea. my legs and toes still feel cold, and my fingers, also cold, feel a bit stiff (it's sorta hard to type). in other words...i am freezing!

IT IS SIXTY-ONE DEGREES OUTSIDE.

i think my right to call myself a new yorker is about to be revoked. :(

charles burchfield, 1893-1967

2009-10-01T12:26:00.000-07:00

clockwise from top left:
dandelion field(?)
cottage in the trees, 1955
child's garden, 1917
four seasons (definitely one of my new favorite paintings)

yet another artist whose work makes me wish i could paint with watercolors...or paint at all, really. here is some more info. his wikipedia page isn't really all that interesting.

in other news (except not really news, i was just trying to give you some warning that i am about to change subjects), i haven't been posting about my classes because...well,...i just haven't. but they've been going really well! i just wrote my first quiz ever for my art history students, and now i have the pleasure of grading it. so far there have been only a couple completely b.s.-ed answers, which are quite funny to read, except that i then have to mark them wrong. ;( i now realize that teachers are not fooled by b.s. answers. not fooled at all. for the sake of review i put together a blog, so if you're interested in seeing what exactly we're talking about, it's pretty much all there. yes, the terrible spacing makes me cringe every time i look at or think about it; i am really starting to hate blogger and its terrible dashboard/posting layout, and the way it mysteriously adds spaces or takes them away when you publish a post. *SIGH* woe is me...

current happenings: things and stuff!

2009-09-22T20:47:00.000-07:00

1) tomorrow i lead a "guided drawing" of the savannah biome for the middle school botany class, instead of teaching drawing. should be interesting.
2) i slept weird last night and somehow pulled something in my sternum (which is weird in itself because there are no muscles there! not on me, at least). it was a tad frightening because i woke up with rather severe chest pains...whenever i moved my arms. it still hurts to breathe :(
3) back to the future, tomorrow's art history lesson is about a) silvercraft and b) a painting inspired by a poem about paul revere's midnight ride. i think we all know this one...i remember having to memorize a couple stanzas for the formidable mrs. fries in 8th grade...sing it with me! "oh listen my children and you shall hear of the midnight ride of paul revere- on the 18th of april in '75, hardly a man is now alive who remembers that famous day and year!" hmmmm...i haven't figured out any homework for them yet; maybe i could have each student memorize a stanza. nah.
4) well, i'm tired of writing sentences. so many words. its hard n my brain is like, tired and stuff. lol.
5) oh yeah! things
6) and stuff.

pretty!!!

2009-09-10T16:58:00.000-07:00

so i was doing some research for next week's art history class (aren't a good, diligent girl?), and came across this website with AMAZING pictures of old churches in italy (but i think there are more pages with similar photos for other countries, too!). yum!

today and stuff

2009-09-09T17:26:00.000-07:00

forgive me if it seems like i have a very limited vocabulary in this post. today being a teaching day, i talked more in the span of nearly three hours than i do the other six days of the week, combined. my brain is tired. the little messengers that run from my brain, where thoughts do their thinking and forming of coherent ideas, carrying bundles of words to my mouth, where they toss these words out willy-nilly and hopefully sometimes get them in the right order, are tired. very tired.

but i think the classes went well! i didn't do a practice run beforehand with b, which really helps me get my thoughts in order (so i don't have to do so on the fly during class, which can result in calamity), so i wasn't as clear as i should have been, but i think it was ok. in drawing, we critiqued the weekly sketchbook assignment (drawing #1? "under the kitchen sink"! the same drawing the amazing mrs. sutter always started the year with in the art 1 class in high school- i actually, uh, "borrowed" a lot of the weekly sketchbook assignments she gave us, but only because they were fun!). i love seeing people's drawings- and some of theirs were really good! lots of room for improvement, but that's what the class is for. :) then we worked on 1-, 2-, and 3-point perspective, and i talked about other kinds of perspective (like atmospheric perspective, which we lucky folks in LA can see A LOT of, thanks to the handy smog making far-away things look hazy and dim). that went well, and they got to experiment almost the whole class time with those three different types. homework this week is to draw a crazy imaginary city with lots of interesting buildings, using 2-point perspective. i can't wait to see them :)

then i ran downstairs (these classes take place at church) and quickly set up for art history. we talked about native american pottery, and a couple minutes ago i had the brilliant idea to try blogging about classes a day or two BEFORE i give them, so that i can further process my ideas and the information (brilliant!). anyway, we talked about anasazi pottery, sikyatki pottery, maria montoya martinez, louisa keyser, caesar johnson/gullah basketry, and carl toolak. an amazing collection of native american pottery can be found here, and there's a lot of really cool stuff here, too. careful you don't drool on any nearby electrical devices (i know i almost did on multiple occasions!). we talked a lot about symbolism, decoration, and why the figurative designs were so highly stylized as to be nearly unrecognizable. we also talked about methods for making pottery (i got to make a couple of bowls back in ceramics 1 a la maria martinez, so i could talk about that process fairly in-depth) and baskets, and what these beautifully-made pieces say in general about the cultures they came from. also, we talked about concerns that may have arisen more recently, with commercialism (since many of the artists who make these traditional crafts/arts today do so for money, rather than for the functionality of the object) and how this may affect the integrity of the craft (such as decorative patterns and motifs). and then i gave them an assignment- based on some very unusual anasazi pottery, the function of which is unknown, i am going to have them each draw, actual size, an imaginary container for some personal possession that they value (which will be a secret), in their own style with color, decorations and designs, and then in class next week we'll use our observational skills and knowledge of each person to try to guess what their respective valued possessions are. i think that sounds like fun...

well, that was my afternoon. and now, toodle-pip. i am le tres tired.

ps- for some reason i can't change font in blogger right now. looks like i'm stuck with georgia, or whatever it is, the default font.

update for yesterday...

2009-09-03T08:10:00.000-07:00

teaching was fun! and exhausting...i cannot imagine teaching all day, every day. i don't know which would be harder- teaching all subjects to the same class of students (elementary school), or teaching a few subjects all day to different students (high school). all day, every day. eegads!

hmmmm...i'm out of ideas for extending this post. does anyone have a fun fact they would like to share?

first day of school!

2009-09-02T09:42:00.000-07:00

in two and a half hours i will begin the first of two classes that i'll be teaching at the wednesday co-op organized and run by the home-schooling moms at church. first is drawing, second is american art history- both for high-schoolers. i am terrified of being in a "leadership" role, and of having to stand in front of people and do a lot of talking, but what better way to learn how to teach than in a once-a-week enrichment program, with a small class of motivated and intelligent youth that i mostly already know? i am so grateful for this opportunity, though i know that anything these kids may learn will not be my doing, but god's working through me (and i pray that he does!).

but one of the many factors that led to my decision to do this is that it will help me to get to know about twenty moms and their kids in a controlled environment where there is a main goal- read: a foundation for relationships. i have had an enormously difficult time forming friendships for the past...hmmm...twelve years or so (and especially the past three years)- "difficult" meaning that it's hard for me to pursue getting to know people who don't pursue me the majority of the time. often, though, having a foundation helps (whether it's a class, or being on a team, or enjoying some sort of activity) - something you can always talk about until the awkward acquaintance stage is over. there so many awesome women at church, but i often feel at a loss as to how to even approach them, much less what to talk about. i hope this can help me get over any hesitation or shyness.

anyhoo- if i am able, i shall report back after classes. :-S

overwhelmed!

2009-08-31T11:25:00.001-07:00

by awesomeness! this blog features some majorly neat-o stuff! my brain felt like it was going to explode by the time i got to the bottom of the first page...

http://www.crookedbrains.net/

three haikus...

2009-08-28T11:19:00.000-07:00

I have a headache
My head is like a balloon
Filled with angry wasps

What’s up with this place?
Smog, fires, earthquakes- oh my
L.A. will kill me

I want to go walk
But it’s a billion degrees
I hate the desert.

a pointless story (sorry)

2009-08-24T17:46:00.000-07:00

I was just browsing the web, feeling reinvigorated by a delicious and much-needed caffeine-saturated goodie (thank you, caffeine!) and hopeful of getting a few more things accomplished this afternoon. I decided to try finding some cool new bookbinding techniques, just trying to spark some ideas/inspire myself. So I searched for ‘creative bookbinding’. One of the search results looked kinda familiar- a post on the creative spirit blog. There’s a gallery in P-dam (back in NY- holla!*) called the creative spirit, which I am quite familiar with. So I clicked on the link. Imagine my surprise when it was actually the blog of a woman in the U.K….to whom I actually sold a journal a year and a half ago, and the post was a review of a book on binding techniques that I already own. Here's a picture- for proof! Three crazy random happenstances all at once! Ok, ok- it just took me by surprise. I probably don’t really need to post this, but hey- I’ve typed this much and I don’t plan on wasting what could be deemed a fairly-acceptable entry. Maybe like, a C+.

In other news...it's pretty quiet around these parts (like you couldn't tell).

* Wow- I don’t think I’ve ever written, or spoken, that, uh, word. This must be a side-effect of the coffee…

an 8-year-old remembers the birth of her brother...

2009-08-24T08:55:00.000-07:00

Ok, folks, here it is…my helpful comments appear in the [ ]

Kristin 10-20-92
My brother was born June 15th 1991. I had to stay at the Robrt’s house and they have two kid’s named Joe and Anna. Joe is 7 and Anna is 4. I had to sleep at the Robert’s [not sure why I spontaneously opted for the correct spelling of their name this one time] because I’m not allowed to sleep at home by myself. [Pretty good so far, eh? Makes sense, spelling is good, etc.] I code not wate to see my nuw baby brother. [D’oh!] He was 8 ponds and 4 ancis and my brother’s name was Michael and now he is 16 munths. Now let’s git back to when my brother was born. [Yes, ma’am!] I code not wate to see my brother when I sow my brother I wnetid to pik him up and [get ready…] sqwees him to bits. An hour past and the Robrt’s cam with presents Michael got a botul and pujas [pjs?] and I got a pers with a panda and a whale on it. [a panda and a whale? What kind of ridiculous animal pairing is that? I demand answers!] A little whyol after the Robrt’s left the Sormo’s came with presents Michael got a nuk [which is to say, pacifier*] and a swet sut and I got colering Book and a skech pade. The Sormos stad for a little whyol and woched t.V.
11-3-92
When the Stormos [this is actually the correct spelling] left My Dad drov me back to the Robrt’s house until four then I hade to go. Three Days later.[Alert! Classic sentence about to be read!:] My mom came home with a bondol of Joey [!!!!!!] but there was one problem my brother did’nt have a name we allrety hade a mitol name we thot and thot and then at the same time my mom and I shotid Michael and Michael it was. Mom sed it was Prfect a blond hare blue eys Michael.

- - - - -

THE END!!!!!!! If you feel like you need to take a nap after reading this, I completely understand. *whew!* I’m worn out!

* Some people call them nuks, some people call them pacifiers. At some point, my family began calling them- and I am not making this up- loodle-oos. I'm pretty sure that's what toddler-Michael called them, and like many other items that he renamed as he started talking, it quickly caught on with the rest of the family.

ah, memories!

2009-08-21T13:24:00.000-07:00

my mom sent me a box of stuff recently, included in which are several brilliant works of prose and poetry that i composed as a first-grader. here is one delectable morsel of pure, raw creative talent:

"Clouds"

Clouds, Clouds, the wonderful thing, they make me laugh,

they make me sing, but when the clouds all go away,

I have to sit and wait all day.

By:

Kristin

this is exactly how it looks - i think it was a combination typing exercise/writing exercise, printed on acidic printer paper. anyhoo, i do like clouds, but i'm not sure if i can say truthfully that they've ever inspired song, much less laughter...and i never sat still as a child, and definitely not for clouds, so basically it seems that this poem is full of lies. i've repented, though, don't worry.

i also wrote a pretty epic piece about the birth of my brother- my amazingly creative spelling makes for unintended hilarity. i think it's also in a box of stuff. stay tuned!

oh bloggins...

2009-08-11T14:54:00.000-07:00

poor, neglected bloggins. let's see about an update, shall we? in list format, of course, for maximal laziness.

1) i have been drawing mostly, lately (as opposed to bookmaking). this is bad news for my etsy shop, since i don't think etsy is necessarily the best place to try to sell drawings, but i'll give it a go anyway, probably. a pseudo-goal of mine is to contact a few local galleries within the next year to see about having a show (!). in the meantime, even if i'm not trying to sell anything, i can always work on building my portfolio.

2) speaking of which. at scripps we were taught that the message of a piece of artwork was just as important as the image/photograph/sculpture/etc. itself. it is not a school that teaches you how to draw still-lifes really, really well (though there was some of that, too)- they care more about educating artist-wannabes how to talk about something important or ask interesting questions in their work. that was an awesome experience for me. but in day to day drawing, especially when i want to work on something bigger and more in-depth than i have in a long time, i often find myself paralyzed by not having anything "great" to say. more importantly, if there is something i'd like to "explore" (as we call it), a major challenge is to "translate" the concept into the kind of style that i like to draw in. for instance- i've been working on an ongoing series of drawings illustrating the attributes of love given in 1 corinthians 13- i have two done so far...but how does one illustrate "love is kind"? i really don't want anything to do with one smiling person handing a loaf of bread to another person who looks sad and poor. (there- kindness! DONE.) so one problem is that i'm probably not thinking hard enough, but....

3) i have also recently decided that art for art's sake is ok, too, thanks to a short thing i read about james mcneill whistler's "peacock room". it's pretty! he's all about art for art's sake and the pursuit of beauty- he didn't feel the need to inject moral messages into his work (though there is a story behind the painting of the two peacocks- whistler's patron decided not to pay him the full amount for this commission, so the peacock on the right is him, being pompous and puffed up, while whistler is the peacock on the left...so i've read). so anyway, this inspired me, and i've just been drawing things with the intent to create something pleasing to look at, with a focus on depth, unity and balance. AND little doodlies.

4) so i wasn't reading about whistler because i am a disciplined individual who takes particular interest in educating herself in her post-college days. no. i am teaching an american art history class once a week starting in september (and, as a side note, i am TERRIFIED). this blurb on whistler is one of many blurbs on many artists and artistic styles prevalent in the US since before the US existed as such, all the way up to the present. and then i will teach this material to a handful or so of high schoolers (in a co-op for home-schooled kids run by our church). also, i'll be teaching a beginning drawing class in the fall (eeeeek!) and a bookbinding class in the spring (wheee!!!).

5) in other news- i have been making excellent use of the pasadena public library system's digital audiobook collection, which allows you to download audiobooks onto your home computer for a period of 7 or 14 days, after which the files mysteriously delete themselves (by magic, naturally). i love this- it's so convenient, and the selection is so much better than what they have in actual cd-format at the library branches. the importance of being earnest, and, the three musketeers are two books i would highly recommend.

6) so. my dear readers, you have inspired me to get thinking creatively (ugh) about how to translate what i want to say into new and exciting and doodly ways of saying it. i mean, after all, it was only out of feelings of guilt toward you that i even began this blogpost. but i must also thank coffee, milk, and trader joe's midnight moo chocolate syrup, for waking up my brain, because otherwise i wouldn't have had the energy to feel guilty. :)

toodles and promises to update more often,
-k.o.

birthday! (belatedly)

2009-08-05T17:13:00.000-07:00

BEACH! bart, brother, bistro, (sun)burn...

yay :)

summer heat!

2009-08-01T07:27:00.001-07:00

yay! i'm in another treasury!

green things...

2009-07-28T14:18:00.001-07:00

introducing the first of a series of books (i hope) featuring what i humbly acknowledge as a rocking beaded design on the front cover. now at and coming soon to ye olde shoppe there on the left. this is my third attempt to find a useful application for these beaded thingies, which i can't stop making (they're shiny! they sparkle! they are great to work on whenever i feel anxious!). they take a long, long time to make, which is why these books are going to be the most expensive things in my shop.

anyhoo, i bought three green t-shirts for $7 (total!) at a thrift store on saturday, and yes, this announcement is just as exciting to me as the one above. no amount of piercing sun or dry desert wasteland-ness can cause my green t-shirts to wither and turn brown, no matter what may happen to the other green things here! so HA.

well, anyway, tomorrow will bring another book (not green- possibly purple, red, or red/blue), and more irresistibly charming anecdotes as well, i'm sure.

toodles.

LOVE this treasury...

2009-07-27T13:47:00.000-07:00

and i'm so happy that i get to be in it!
treasury of northern ny-ers!

ps- the woman who made the pretty woven scarf (above my b book) is actually a family friend. ha. ;)