About a month ago, I woke up with a sort of loose association of images in my head: an idea of small woven wall hangings, heavily embellished with beads, polymer clay, found objects… but not so heavily embellished as to bury the weaving.
I finished the first in this series tonight:
More images here.
I’m looking forward to continuing with this series!
Sorry to say, my heart’s not in it tonight.
It’s not the fault of the recipe - it was a delight to work with and smells scrumptious cooling right now! - or the wonderful, welcoming Daring Bakers crowd. It’s just been a long and difficult week at the end of a long and busy month.
So, pictures:
Notable changes/spins:
The filling is Vineland apricots and Florence honey, cooked down to a chunky paste - that’s it. Sweet-tart golden goodness.
I used agave syrup (processed in Denver from Mexican agave) in place of the sugar, and it turned out really well; I was afraid the dough would be too wet, but it turned out quite silky and easy to work.
The flour is whole-wheat pastry flour grown and milled over the mountain in the San Luis Valley. It’s much finer than standard whole wheat, but even so, between the whole-grain flour and the altitude, my first batch was much too dense and hard. I added vital wheat gluten to the second attempt (as I’ve been doing with my Five Minutes breads) and that seemed to make all the difference in the world.
These will make a lovely breakfast tomorrow, and hopefully (!) the start of a better week.
Over the next couple of months, I’ll be experimenting a lot in preparation for my senior presentation, which is structured as a dinner party.
So, I made my first batch of tamales today. They’re good, but not where I’d really like them to be.
I found myself in a Goldilocks sort of situation - the masa recipe (from Southwest Flavors: The Cookbook of the Santa Fe School of Cooking) was way too little, the corn husks were way too much (!!!) and the filling - a super-simple mix of roasted, shredded chicken and green chiles - was just right. If I’d had enough masa, I would have had about two dozen tamales; as it turned out, I got seventeen, after quadrupling the recipe. (Who makes four tamales at a time, anyway? What were they thinking?)
Notes:
1.) Making tamales is not nearly as fussy as I have always been led to believe. If the masa and filling are proportioned correctly so that you don’t have to stop in the middle and make more, and remember that the process is very much like rolling sushi (except imagining that the nori and bamboo pad are one unit), it goes pretty quickly and easily.
2.) A bag of corn husks makes an insane amount of tamales. For future reference: figure how many tamales I’m making, count out 120% that many husks. I’ve put the leftover husks in a zip-loc and put them in the fridge; I’m hoping they’ll keep till next weekend, which is the next chance I’ll have to make another batch.
3.) The filling needs to be just a little goopier than this batch was; next time, I’ll add some molé sauce into the filling, instead of just dishing it over the top. However,
4.) The molé recipe I used was pretty awful, so I’m shopping for a new one. (Well, it wasn’t awful.) Clearly, there’s still a lot of work to do before this recipe is ready for prime time.
Next up: Calabacitas (summer squash) vegetarian tamales, also from Southwest Flavors; chocolate flan with dulce de leche from Seasonal Southwest Cooking.
Almost every day this week, we’ve had the Rocky Mountain midsummer fireworks show that makes me fall in love with this valley all over again: thunderstorms at sunset. Yes, the color really is this intense.
While out shooting this evening, I noticed something I’d never picked up on before: how overwhelmingly I shoot skyscapes in portrait orientation. The horizon, for me, is a starting point and not a focal point; I love to capture the sense of sweeping upward, taking in the full expanse of shifting color and movement. The vertical orientation gives a completely different sense of scale than one usually expects, brings into tight framing the towering cumulus forms and complex layered structures that make the sky so interesting here.
This morning, I got the official notification in my e-mail: my work for this semester has been accepted and I’ve completed the degree requirements for the IBA; I will graduate in August.
This is a big change. Among other things, it means that I have (in theory) 28 hours a week of “free” time I didn’t have before*, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how I want to spend that time. More time in with my family, certainly; more in the studio. More volunteer and community work, hopefully. And more time writing.
There are going to be some big changes on this blog in the next few weeks. I’m working on customizing a new theme; there will be some new and changed widgets, more feature pages, and more extemporaneous content. My Twitter posts have been mostly library- and personal-productivity-related of late, with some recipes and news links; that will probably continue, although I’m looking to add more art and design content, both original and linked. I’ll be adding a del.icio.us feed widget when the new theme goes live, and replacing the LibraryThing (which I haven’t updated in, god, six months) with ReadSocial, which I’ve come to really like and have been updating consistently via Facebook.
The content here will shift somewhat. I’ve been trying for a long time to settle on a range of content, without much success (is this an art blog? a formal writing blog? a personal journal? how personal? what about professional issues?) For a while it’s been pretty much limited to my art practice… but a good third of my undergrad work dealt with integrating art practice and life, and I’m going to try to put that into practice here, better than I have.
Some areas where I’m thinking about expanding content:
- Much of the recipes, cooking photography, and food politics content I’ve been posting at LiveJournal (hello Daring Bakers!), although meal planning and other food-life chatter will not get crossposted.
- More book reviews, MORE ART! (yes, really!), profiles on other artists as they inspire me and relate to my own work.
- Probably not a lot of library-specific content, but perhaps more reflections on the literate life, life-long learning, self-improvement, public service, and other issues that touch on librarianship.
- More short pieces - although the longer, thoughtful original pieces that I’ve always intended to make the centerpiece of this site will remain, and increase. More original poetry and fiction.
- A regular posting schedule may make an appearance.
What would you like to see?
*If any reader may be thinking about Goddard: DO. It’s an awesome program at an outstanding college; I have loved every minute of the IBA and will almost certainly go back to Goddard in a few years for my MFA. I have known students who could do the program in the predicted 28 hours per week; for me, it was a joke. Partly because I’m a slow reader and a slower writer, and partly because I’m just too stubborn to let go of excessive pieces of overly-ambitious study plans, my program ran closer to 40-50 hours per week. Consider yourself warned: it’s a challenging, demanding, difficult program.
Since the end of February, I have been working on only one piece of artwork - five or six days a week, three or four (or more) hours a day.
It’s the last of the five big pieces for my senior thesis, and it is big - a crazy quilt about twelve feet square. And I’m enjoying it quite a lot, but I’m getting really tired of not working on anything else.
So the other night I rummaged through my yarn stash and warped up my loom for the first time in six months. I chose an alpaca-wool blend for the warp, and warped on enough length for two small wall hangings that I have in mind. I got an order of copper punchwork sheet in today, which is another element of these pieces; there will also be polymer clay, beadwork and found objects involved.
There’s still quite a lot of work to do on the crazy quilt, but the diversion has given me a second wind, I think.
Last summer, the yucca blossomed.
That doesn’t do justice. Let me start over.
Yuccas are small, grey, spiky plants,
mostly self-contained and mostly invisible
even as
they blanket the swathe of scrubland in the interstices between mountain and prairie.
Like tumbleweed, they are only noticed
when they do something spectacular.
And last summer
– after a wet, interminable spring –
they exploded out onto the flatlands
with the most expansive blossoming in living memory.
Like hyacinths that
had wandered off the highway
and gone mad in alien soil,
they shot up four, five, six feet high with crowded jumbles of luxuriant creamy blossoms,
delicately veined in blush and green.
One plant has a delicate sweet fragrance,
a plumeria’s earthier cousin.
A million of them…
well.
For a few weeks, the desert became a tropical perfumery.
Other plants tried to get in the game;
columbine and penstemon,
wild iris and
cinquefoil and groundsel flung splashes of purple and yellow across the landscape.
But the
sheer brassy drama
of the yuccas elbowed the rest of them
out of the way.
I remember seeing them at first from a distance,
from moving cars,
in small clusters in people’s yards in town,
crowding in
on the edges
of playing fields and parking lots.
It was a couple of weeks into the
blossoming event
that I finally hiked up the hill behind the water tower,
intending to photograph the clouds
of an afternoon thunderstorm –
but by the time I got up to the ridgeline,
I was taken in
by things
closer to hand.
A scatter of broken glass against a flat of sandstone.
A tail, just beginning to dessicate, left behind by some panicked lizard.
A tiny cluster of wild phlox sheltered by a few boulders.
A cholla skeleton interwoven with a stand of sunflowers.
And everywhere, everywhere, the gravid ivory bells of the yuccas.
I scrambled off the path
and up a loose-graveled slope
to get close to a plant with a hip-high spire.
Layered shards of sandstone slid against each other underfoot;
I found myself making an arc up the hillside,
and finally arriving
at a cluster of yuccas further off the path
than the one I’d first been aiming for.
The desert may appear sparse,
but it is not;
I pushed through sage and over fallen juniper,
managed to skim past cholla and goatheads
and compact, ground-hugging prickly pears
before stopping short of the yucca’s
crown of menacing green swords.
I leaned in to get close-in pictures of the flowers.
A sharp, sappy
green
undernote
penetrated the heady floral scent,
paintbrush and grama crushed underfoot.
Complexity of composition.
Trying to understand
what to focus on,
what to exclude.
I’m sitting in a small room on a snowy night in New England and
I realize that at some point
I wasn’t photographing the yuccas at all,
that for a while there
it was all about the loud vermillion of the wild poppies
and the sunny black-eyed Susans and
the blue,
blue
sky
after the rain.
It’s only later,
when the prints came back from the shop
and the strange flowers are rendered
in shades of silver,
that it comes back in a rush,
how overwhelming they were,
how perfectly they rendered
the all-encompassing sensation
of the desert
in my memory and in my soul –
sweet and beautiful and fragile,
sharp and green and grey
all together,
necessary treasures
bound up in
a difficult
and dangerous
wrapper.
… and part is knowing what to take with you.
I just pulled out the journal quilts I did between 2003 and 2005, and selected seven of them to donate to the Priority: Alzheimer’s Quilts project. These are 8 1/2″ x 11″ art quilts, to be auctioned online and mailed to the auction winners in flat rate Priority Mail envelopes - hence the project name.
I kept a few because they are too heavily embellished to be suitable for the project, and a few others because they are still meaningful to me - but for the most part, they were made in the moment and I no longer feel particularly attached to them. But they are beautiful, and if they bring enjoyment to others and money to a good cause, I’m happy.
While sorting through my old boxes of finished and semi-finished quilts looking for the journals, I found a crazy quilt that I started for a swap about five years ago. The swap never took off, and the quilt center went into storage, and in the intervening years and moves was almost forgotten. When I unfolded it tonight, it took my breath away. I won’t have time to go back to working on it in the next few months, but it will still be there this summer, and I won’t forget it then.
I’m going into my final undergraduate semester in a few days; my art practice is in a very experimental, shifting state these days. Yet I’m also going back to my roots; a segment of my senior project is a crazy quilt, the first one I’ve started since the piece I found tonight. It’s cheering to find, tucked away and waiting for me to awaken it, a piece of my soul in brightly colored silk and stone and velvet and glass. This sudden, serendipitous awareness of continuity of aesthetic sense and of detail of craft foreshortens time; the years between fall away as nothing, and I sense, just outside vision, the glimmering promise of all the work I have yet to do.
Until a few months ago, the only spinning silk I’d ever bought had been carded roving. So when I bought a big bunch of silk hankies a few months ago, I really had no idea how much yarn would spin up from them.
A substantial ball of pearlweight embroidery thread later, I still had a great pile of hankies, and so I started experimenting with texturing and layering. I’ve done some felting and wanted to achieve something similar, so I started toying around with fusible webbing. To my surprise and delight, a hanky fused to a layer of webbing is not stiff or sticky, and the webbing doesn’t show through the front - so the individual hankies can then be fused together in layers, flat or sculptural, to create ethereal and translucent forms. These constructed fabrics can then be embroidered, beaded, quilted to my heart’s content.
Sky Bowl is currently being exhibited at the Spanish Peaks Arts Council Annual Members’ Show. I have three more projects in progress with this technique, and I’m taking in-progress pictures of two of them; I’ll do a Feature page on the technique within the next week or so.
I just adore Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project. I’ve been following it for almost a year, and it’s been wonderful fun to indulge in vicarious delight as she makes constant new insights about the nature of happiness.
The first and foremost of her “happiness commandments” is to “be Gretchen.” I’ve been trying to learn to take this to heart and “be Beth.” Far too much of my personal history is taken up with spending too much time trying too hard to be what too many other people have told me I should be, and I’m trying to grow past that. I’ve been paying close attention, in recent months, to emotions like frustration, resentment, and discouragement, being gentle with them, recognizing them for what they are - signals of dissonance stress - rather than either suppressing or indulging them.
I’m a sensuous person. My states of happiness are very strongly aesthetically triggered. I like stuff - beautiful, delicious, luxurious, soothing, pleasing, sensual stuff. My resistance to this has been motivated both by an ongoing war on clutter and by an ingrained poverty mentality that I’m trying very hard to break loose from.
Sometime earlier this year, it suddenly became clear to me that my love of stuff and my loathing of clutter need not work against each other. Quality over quantity. I’ve become more discriminating in my purchases, eschewing the quick hedonic treadmill fix of some cheap sparkle for fewer purchases of enduring quality. And I’ve uncovered an important truth.
When I have truly beautiful things - things I love to look at and touch - I use them. If a thing is both beautiful and useful, I will use it in a way that improves the quality of my life. If I want to change a process - to quit forgetting my cellphone, for example - the best way for me to do it is to buy a beautiful, well-made, enjoyable tool for the job. Like the elegant smoke-blue leather phone holder that I finally broke down and bought in September. It has an industrial-strength clip, a necessity because I almost never wear a belt. It fits my phone like a glove, and is not bulky. When I’m wearing it, I feel competent, organized, prepared. I love the touch of it - the smooth leather, the crisp snap. It seems silly how important such a little thing is, but it really changed the utility of my phone completely - no scrambling and digging in my purse when it rings, and if I want to use the notepad or calendar, I’m much more likely to just do it instead of waiting until it’s convenient to hunt through my purse, and then forgetting.
But - here’s the kicker - I wouldn’t use it if it weren’t as lovely as it is. I’ve watched my husband go through half a dozen phone cases - bulky, ugly, ill-fitting, just not right. I would never have bothered with any of them; that’s one of the reasons I put off buying one myself for as long as I did. Later, I dragged him back to the same vendor and made him get one there too. The right tool for the job is so important - and for me, part of what makes it the right tool, whatever the job may be, is that it is a sensuous delight.
So I’ve resolved to indulge - invest, really - in at least one such purchase per month: a carefully considered tool that, by its beauty makes me want to use it, and by its utility resolves some nagging frustration or streamlines some process or improves my overall work environment.
