What I did with it

Here's what I ended up making with the cord imprinted paper. A little different than my usual offerings, I know, but I quite like it. More to come, most definitely.

Fresh paper

Made some paper yesterday-- tried some new things, with varying levels of success. These are my three favorites. The first, speckly lavender one has dyed mulberry paper scrap turned into pulp and incorporated (nice, long threads); for the second I laid some cording into the pulp before couching, then removed the cording once it was all dry. The last has big chunks of mulberry paper mixed in.

Not quite sure what I'm going to do with these just yet. I think the one with the cord is my favorite, I may explore that technique a little more today. There was a fourth experiment that involved sprinkling Pearl-Ex and Powdered pigment onto the pulp, but it isn't very photogenic, alas.
While I'm sharing my papers, here are some recent dye jobs. These are mulberry paper-- can you tell I'm thinking spring already?

Mmmm...flickr

I finally got a flickr account. I must say, I'm much happier about it than I thought I would be. When I signed up, I just saw it as just another marketing and networking tool that people said I should have, but once I got in there and started poking around in the groups, it turned into an absolute revelation.

Ok, so, I'm not a photographer really (though I do have an eye for composition, if I may say so myself), but my dad was, and it ended up in me somehow to love photos for their own sake. I inherited his old photos: his work since he was a teenager in the 1930s, his early studio work, his work as head of the photography unit at the NIH, and later his photos of nature and sailing and so on that he took when he and my mother were cruising around in the Caribbean. I have kept ALL of them, even though many of them are not very good (he kept everything, too) and I don't know who, what, or where it is.

Here's one from his NIH days. Poor bunny!

I also have always had a certain fascination with things that others consider 'ugly' in the environment. I like water towers. Trainyards. Old barns and cracker houses that are leaning with time, half the roof rotted off. Downtowns in disrepair. Bleak, cold landscapes. Old books with the covers falling off. I always had a nascent plan to go on photographing sprees, documenting the watertowers of small towns across the country. I thought it was just a personal idiosyncracy, and never really pursued it because what the heck, I'm not a real photographer and what am I going to do with all those pictures anyway, since no one likes to look at that kind of stuff but me? But now I arrive at flickr and discover that there are hundreds of groups on such subjects: water towers, rural decay, old Florida, wabi sabi.

So, yeah. I feel...at home. It's not just me-- I'm participating in a zeitgeist of sorts. Huh. Who knew?

Meet Ballyhoo.

This is Ballyhoo, my bestest #1 kitty pal since 1998 or so. We like this picture because it looks like the one he'd use for the dustjacket photo if he ever got one of his books published. He writes poetry, though, and frankly it isn't very good, so I'm afraid there isn't much chance that he'll get to use this photo in that way. I keep telling him to try a different genre. I think he may be working on a mystery novel now, but he won't let me read it (I can't even find it! Where on earth could a cat hide an entire novel?! I have no trouble finding his hairballs even when he tries to hide them, so I find the whole thing mystifying. Apparently I underestimate him.)

Ballyhoo and Vindaloo like to hang out in my light box. Sometimes they move in when I'm in the midst of taking photos of jewelry. Of course.

Vindaloo is not a writer. She meows at birds and eats crickets she finds in the garage.

Chai

Every year about this time I suddenly become quite the enthusiast of hot, sweet, milky drinks. (Hmm, wonder why? *shiver*) Cocoa. Molasses Hot Toddy. And Chai. I don't really care for the concoctions being passed off as chai at popular coffeehouses these days, really, (some of them don't even have actual tea in them! How disappointing.) but I am fond of my chai homebrew, which is perfectly easy to make. I base mine very loosely on a vivid description of chai by my former Swahili professor (one of the more fruitful classroom digressions I've been a party to over the years), combined with limited actual experience drinking chai tangawizi (ginger tea) in Tanzania. The chai tangawizi I had didn't involve milk, though-- just the strongest, pepperiest ginger ever. It taught me not to hold back with the ginger.

Three ingredients are non-optional, as far as I'm concerned: milk, tea, and ginger. If you don't have those, you can still make it, but...well, it's up to you. Lower your expectations at that point, that's all I'm sayin'.

Put some skim milk in a pan, add ginger (fresh if you have it, candied if you don't have fresh, powdered if you don't have either of those), a couple cardamom pods, a couple of whole cloves, a cinnamon stick, sugar to taste. Let it simmer for 10 minutes or so, then throw in your tea--about a teaspoon per cup of milk. My favorite for chai is Upton Tea's Chisunga Estate BOP, but any good, strong black tea will do. I've also had some success with flavored teas like mango or orange spice.

Mmm. Off to have another cup.

Experiments in cuff-ology

Another one! I'm crazy about the shades-of-grey + red combo right now. No text, but the mosaic took me forever (it's on the other side, too).

So wrong, and yet...

We coughed up $6.50 for a bar of Vosges' new bacon and chocolate bar, mainly out of a perverse sense of curiousity. But. Wow. It was SO GOOD. No, really. The bacon really is crispy and fresh-tasting, little bits of salt scattered in, and...dark chocolate substrate. I would NEVER have thought it. NEVER. That's why those people are artists. Anyone can put chocolate with coffee, mint, toffee, or orange, but it takes true vision to add bacon. And mad chocolatier skills to actually pull it off. Not available at my local Vosges supplier is the d'oliva bar, white chocolate with kalamata olives. Time was (day before yesterday) I would have just said 'yick!' to that, but now...I'm a believer. I'd try it, and I bet I'd love it.

I used to say I wanted to be the Henry Rollins of linguistics-- well, that didn't happen, exactly, but if I could be the Vosges of paper jewelry, I'd be a happy, happy gal.