Show Installation

The postcard for our show, which we got today.

Whew. Today was a long one, spent installing our gallery show. We started at 11 AM and we just got home. It's 5:30 PM! It took so long because not everybody was there to help, and there's just a whole lot to do. The show turned out really really well though. It looks amazing!

This is a small portion of the crap needed to install a show.

The room where said crap is kept. In here you will find paint, pedestals, shelves, glass, projectors, bleach, sponges, nails, staple guns, velcro, levels, measuring tapes and just about anything else you can think of. David brought us a bag of fruit to munch on that you can sort of see peeking out.

The gallery space, more or less. Everyone sort of had their pieces just resting on the wall at this point. Then much (much) rearrangement ensued.

One of the many pow-wows of the afternoon. You can see John fiddling with the projector. This happened a lot today.

Another common sight, everyone holding up the pieces so we can all see how it looks together. We took turns doing this. That black dress is one of my pieces.

After all of the pieces were arranged, measured, nailed, leveled and hung, the lighting began.

I made the entrance sign with stencils and a super king size Sharpie. I think I lost more than a few brain cells doing this. Indira made a sign with all of the artist's names, while Jeff and Quin mounted the title cards and wall texts.

My piece hung, lit very well (Thanks John), with title card and wall text. It looks beautiful!

A picture of the space completed! It looks very polished and nice. Thank God we're done. Which leads me to my next point:

The back of the postcard, showing where and when the show (and reception) is. If you come, there will be food!!!

All in all, this installation was a really great experience. Tiring, yes. Maddening, yes. Totally worth it? Absolutely.

Bread Pudding, Birthday Dinner

My Dad originally wanted to go to a New Orleans themed restaurant across town for his birthday dinner. The problem is, it went out of business. I had my high school graduation party there, and have very fond memories of it. It was something to appease my longing for New Orleans here in Albuquerque. They had the best bread pudding. So, my Dad instead requested that we make him some chocolate bread pudding for his birthday. I thought we should make an event of it, with Leah, myself and Ann (Grammy) all helping. It was very very fun and it turned out delicious. No recipe for now, as I don't have it, and there will be more than enough pictures to appease your sweet tooth:

My niece Leah cracked the eggs like a pro. She was amazing!

See? Grammy is grating chocolate in the background. We all had "jobs".

Leah then whisked the eggs at a furious pace! Do you see how hard she is concentrating?

This recipe required an obscene amount of bowls, each with its own little concoction. Leah wanted to try her hand at grating the baking chocolate.

She didn't quite have the strength to grate it all before it melted all over her little fingers!

Finally all of the mixtures are combined, and poured over the top of the cubed bread (which I did..).

After baking. It smelled amazing!!!

We also made a bourbon sauce.

Leah got to drink apple juice out of a tiny tiny wine glass, so that we could do a birthday toast. See that ketchup heart on her plate? I made that for her and then she refused to dip her chicken nuggets into it because the heart would be ruined! Too cute.

Cheers! Happy Birthday again, Dad!

Dreams of Hungary...part deux

Last night I had the most vivid dream of Hungary, one of the most vivid I've ever had in fact. Unfortunately now that I am awake, the details are slipping away.

John and I were in Hungary, and we were doing a homestay in Budapest (I think it was orientation for CETP) and we were paired with a Gypsy family. They lived in this little hovel, that looked like some sort of Turkish harem. They spoke English very well, and they loved us so much and were so curious and fascinated about America. They asked us if we were sad that we were paired with a Gypsy family. I said "No no, in fact I'm so happy that we got to stay with you." Much more happened with them, including wheelchairs, races, and rope bridges.

The fun really started when we were given a Hungarian driver to drop us off in various towns in Hungary. We were speaking with him and I kept doing this thing where whenever I didn't understand someone, I would just start speaking French. They usually spoke French back to me. We drove out of Budapest and the countryside started immediately. There looked to be mountains or hills all around us, but when I looked closer, they were made up of piles of giant vegetables. Potatoes and carrots and everything else you can think of, just gigantic. I grabbed for my camera as a semi-truck drove by hauling an enormous carrot. It was magical and whimsical.

We arrived in a smallish town where the roads were water. Horses swam neck deep in them, pulling carts of people and produce. As we were leaving, there was a sign up ahead about a "mess" meaning there must be an accident or something. I kept thinking it was babies. So it switched over to Ernie driving us in the Passport. He was driving crazy and we eventually "got 10 feet of air" (my exact words) as we flew off the road and crashed. We decided where we were was not safe, so we started walking these penguins/anteaters down the road. They were on leashes. I asked my mom, "Where did we get these anteaters?" She didn't seem to know. There were giant black eggs all over the road that these anteater/penguins had presumably hatched out of.

The leashed creatures led us to their "home" which was sort of an enclosure made up of cardboard boxes, fencing and the like. There were kittens inside. I started taking pictures but a woman came out of a nearby building and starting cursing us in Hungarian. I answered back in French and we sort of became friends. Then as we were leaving this little place, we saw a statue of a giant fist, and a replica of the Sphinx in Egypt.

If anyone is a dream-interpreter, please let me know. It was amazing.

Happy Birthday Dad!!!

It's my Dad's birthday! This is one of my favorite pictures of me and my dad. We were taking a break on our futons in a Buddhist monastery in Japan. The monks knocked on our doors at 5 AM every morning to watch them chant. No wonder we were tired! I have memories from when I was a little girl of my dad laying like this when he would nap or rest. Like father. like daughter!!! I love you Dad, hope you had a great one!!!

Monsieur Leaf-Bug

Last night my Mom asked me if I wanted to see a cool bug. Never one to pass up a cool bug sighting, I quickly shouted "Sure! What does it look like?" Mom: "Like a giant leaf with legs." Me: "Is it a leaf bug?" Mom: "What do they look like?" Me: "Like a leaf with legs." So yes, he was a leaf bug, just sitting on the windshield wiper. I thought he was amazing.

Blueberry...Actually Raspberry Muffins

This really has been the weekend of cooking. I've found that baking actually really relaxes me, and it pleases me when I see people enjoying the food that I have made. Food really does bring people together. So anyways, while I was searching for a new recipe in the low-iodine cookbook, I came across Blueberry Muffins (which lives on the same page as the Oat Bran Applesauce Muffins in the thyca.org low-iodine cookbook). We get an organic box of fruits and veggies every week through Los Poblanos organic farms here in Albuquerque. We pick it up every Monday and have delicious, ripe and in-season produce. Raspberries have been one of the things we've been getting a lot lately. I wanted to use them right away because raspberries are the first to mold in the fridge. So I substituted the blueberries for raspberries in this recipe. They're delicious!

Blueberry (or Raspberry) Muffins

2 egg whites

1 cup water

1/4 cup vegetable oil

2 cups flour

1/4 cup sugar

3 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon salt (Kosher)

1 cup fresh blueberries (or raspberries)

Heat oven to 400 degrees F. Beat egg whites. Stir in water and oil. Mix in flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt until moistened. Gently fold in berries. Pour batter in the paper-lined muffin pan. Makes 12 muffins.

Contributed by Cathy T.

See something missing in this recipe?? I sure do. How long do you cook them for? I kept an obsessively close eye on them until they started to smell good, puff up, crack and brown. They were cooked perfectly. I think it was around 15-20 minutes.

I cut up the raspberries into fours. They seemed a little large to keep whole in a muffin.

Folding in the chopped raspberries into the batter.

Batter in paper liners before baking.

And after. I peeked inside the wrapper to see if they were done, that's why the front one is a little indecent.

These muffins are delicious and perfect for a low-iodine diet. Make them. Now!

Homemade Tortillas

Being a native New Mexican, I know a thing or two about tortillas. Growing up, I thought every grocery store in the world carried tortillas. I realize now that I have taken their doughy flat goodness for granted. My life really wouldn't be complete without them. So in preparation for our move to Hungary, I made a batch of homemade tortillas yesterday. I'm going to have to make a batch or so every week in Hungary, so I better get in my practice now! Here's how I did it:

Flour Tortillas

3 cups white flour

2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp salt (I used Kosher for my sister's low-iodine diet)

5 tbsp vegetable shortening

1 1/4 cup warm water

Mix dry ingredients in large bowl. Add shortening and knead in with hands. Next add the warm water a little at a time until the dough is soft, not sticky. Knead the dough for a few minutes. Pull off small pieces of the dough to form 12 small balls. Let dough rest for 10 minutes. Heat up nonstick pan over medium heat. Roll out the balls into tortillas on a floured surface. Heat in pan until bubbles form, then flip. They cook up very quickly, only a few seconds on each side.

Dough after kneading, ready for forming. I made a double batch.

After forming 24 small dough balls (Remember I made a double batch). The dough is resting now. Shh...

Rolling out the dough into tortillas. My mom had a tortilla-specific rolling pin that I used.

The aforementioned bubbles. I ended up cooking one in a pan and one straight on the electric burner because I had so many to make. See those finished ones on the plate? You want those little black burn marks. That's what tortillas are all about.

Et Voila. Finished Tortillas. mmm.. I could definately do this every week in Central Europe. Maybe I can bring them to my coworkers and start a tortilla-induced riot? Yeah, I bet I could...

Oat Bran Applesauce Muffins

Since my sister has to be on a low-iodine diet before her radiation, we have all been scrambling to find things that she can eat. She has never been much of a cook, so we have all been making her things. This muffin recipe is from a low-iodine cookbook that is available as a free PDF on thyca.org. I attempted these first sometime last week, and my sister loved them so much, I made another batch on Saturday!

Oat Bran Applesauce Muffins

1/2 cup brown sugar, packed

1 1/2 cups oat bran cereal

1 1/2 cups white flour

1/2 Tablespoon baking powder

1/2 Tablespoon baking soda

1/2 Teaspoon salt (Kosher is ok for low-iodine. sea salt and regular is NOT)

4 egg whites

1 cup applesauce, chilled

1 Tablespoon vegetable oil

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Line 12 muffin cups with paper liners. Blend together dry ingredients. Add egg whites, chilled applesauce and vegetable oil. Mix well until blended. Spoon batter into muffin cups. Let stand for 10 minutes. Bake 15 minutes or until golden brown.

Yield: 12 muffins

Contributed by Elaine J.

These muffins are really easy to make and bake up beautifully. Here's what mine looked like:

Muffins before going into the oven.

Muffins after. They puffed up and browned perfectly!

Rose Petal Beads, In Reality.

After having a dream about making beads out of rose petals, I thought I would attempt it. John had to do some yardwork for his dad, who happens to have an amazing array of roses blooming in his backyard. So I snipped a few off for myself, and set off on my project.

Rose petal beads were popular in Victorian times, and were mostly used in Christian prayer. I've known about them for a few years now, and am always intrigued by the fact that the beads retain their rosey smell.

I found a few vague tutorials online, so I was more or less winging it. It said what to do but left out important details and the measurements were all wrong. So here is how I did it. Was it a success? I'm not quite sure yet.

These are some of the materials needed. Roses, a mortar and pestle (or blender), some thin cotton fabric, and pins or needles. I chose a variety of colors in my rose petals, but it did not make much of a difference, since they are all ground together.

The petals must then be taken off of the flower, and the small, hard white cuticle cut off. It is at the base of each petal and connects it to the flower itself.

After about an hour or so of grinding. This was really intense work, but I was determined to do it the more authentic way, as opposed to using a blender. I transferred my ground petals into a teacup, for a more direct and intense grind. This worked much better.

Grinding away in the teacup. The mixture had a really nice color at this point, but that was to change quickly...See those little yellow petal chunks? They caused me some problems in this next stage. I was also sort of concerned by the smell, as it was much more leafy than rosy.

After adding water to the mixture, you must heat it in a pan over low heat (be sure not to let it boil or the scent will be destroyed). I didn't know how long or what it was supposed to look like at this point but I wasn't happy with the sort of...cat vomit look it was taking on. I had read that using a cast iron skillet would make the beads black, so I switched over to a small cast iron skillet, hoping to avoid wearing cat vomit beads around my neck.

After switching to a cast iron skillet, the mixture quickly turned an inky black. All except the little yellow pieces. They were resistant to the color-change and so I handpicked out as many pieces as I could. The smell at this point was much improved. They smelled like very fragrant warm roses, and the leafiness was gone. I didn't know how it was supposed to look when it was done, so I just called it done when I became bored of watching it cook.

The excess moisture then must be squeezed out of the mixture. The concoction is placed in a thin cotton fabric, and the water is squeezed out. Using the cast iron skillet made this so much messier, my hands are still stained black.

I then rolled out the mixture into beads and poked them with pins so they could be threaded later. They must be made twice the size as you want them, because they shrink considerably. My mixture wasn't as smooth as I had hoped, and the petals didn't stick together all that well. I hope that when they are dry I can sand and polish them. They look a little like dung rolled up by a dung beetle right now, but they smell amazing. My batch yielded 19 beads, out of about 10 or 12 roses. The recipe I went off of said that 3-4 roses would yield 24 beads. Not true.

This project was fun, messy, therapeutic, gross, and aromatic. All I must do now is wait for them to be dry in a few days and see what I can do to make them smoother. Stay tuned!

The Boot.

While we were in Germany last summer, I found a boot. We were in the middle of a protest but in search of food in Berlin and it was just sitting there. It enticed me and so I grabbed it, took photos of it, and brought it back over the ocean. The plan was to take it with us everywhere, and take photos of it. "The Traveler's Boot" it was dubbed that night. The problem is, we forgot it in May when we went to France. So...oops. Anyways, the tradition will live in Hungary and beyond (provided I remember).

The boot precariously dangling over the Rhine in Berlin. This is the face of German protest-induced merriment.

The boot with a protest sign. The other side of this sign says "Capitalism is Boring".

The boot made its most prevalent appearances during the protest, but it can also be seen in a German housewarming party, watching the Tour de France, sunbathing in Paris, and eating waffles in Brussels.

Our Little Escape Artist.

Don't let that cute mug fool you. This is Kitty, otherwise known as Harry Houdini. We had quite a fright today. This photo was taken a few hours after her escapades; if you look hard enough you can still see a little smugness on her face.

So John and I are leaving for Le Peep, to meet up with Leah, G and G. We had been instructed to bring along Leah's "hearty" bear and her "jelly beans" (aka Asthma pills) and a few minutes after leaving the house I realized we had forgotten them. We turned around to get them and pull into the driveway. I see a cat sitting on the side wall, the one bordering the side yard.

I squint my eyes. "Is that Kitty??" John replies "No way, that cat is way too thin to be Kitty." I guess being outside shaves a few pounds off because sure enough, it's Kitty, perched atop the wall, as happy as can be. Now, Kitty is strictly an indoor cat. She has escaped a few times, just to roll around in the driveway. Nothing like this.

So, she immediately jumps down and is meowing happily at us. We sort of crouch down and John tries to grab her. She bolts the other way, around the corner. I tell John to go inside and get the stuff, I'll try to get Kitty back. I turn the corner and she's halfway down the sidewalk, meowing at me. I play along, and act like I'm walking away. She of course follows me. She rolls around in the rocks and tries to rub on a cactus, before jumping up on the same wall. She rolls around up there some more. And I talk to her sweetly while I slowly move towards her. "I'm just going to pet you..I just want to pet you.." "Meow" She lets me pet her and I grab her quickly.

What a booger. She had the time of her life. She must have been out since my Mom left earlier in the morning, because she didn't get by us when we left. Whew. That was a close one. But how could you stay mad at that face??

A Relatively Crafty Saturday.

This Saturday I was overwhelmed but the sudden urge to craft, to make things. For the most part, I decided to use what I had (and hopefully finish up a lot of my half finished things...). I fixed, assembled, spray painted, gessoed, and more. I can check a few unfinished projects off of my list. I can also add a few more unfinished ones.

An unfinished box that I bought at Hobby Lobby. I'm going to oil paint it and then varnish it, for an amazing one of a kind purse. A work in progress.

A nest I had that I spray painted black. I have since put two black feathers on the underside. All that's left now is to attach it to a hair clip.

A pendant that I've had for about a year, finally put on a chain.

Other miscellaneous unfinished projects.

A crocheted bow that I made out of camel hair yarn that my mom brought me back from India, I just need to add a pin to the back of it.

Two dolls hands that I cut off in a recent sculpture I made, I need to made a sculpey top, paint white, and string on earrings.

Pretty wine corks that I've collected, need to put them on earring hooks.

Finally, A gorgeous filigree "gas mask" that I made in my metal working class. I thought that it is too pretty and I spent too much time sawing all of those little swirlies out that I need to make it useful. I was thinking that I would put it out a comb with some feathers, to wear as a fascinator in my hair.

So there you have it! I've made more work for myself (of course) but it was a good start. Looks like this fall is going to be awesome handmade accessory heavy. I had a dream last night that I was making some rose petal beads. I think I will attempt that this weekend.

The Past Few Days.

They've been busy. We've been watching Leah, we've really been bonding. She's been so so sweet.

We've been watching movies at night, including "Everything is Illuminated" and "Moulin Rouge". I have a lot of posts to make with pictures, but sewing and Mario have kept me away from the computer. This one will have to be lame.