Paper and lists

This week at Redwall was Book Arts, but Charlene and I got a little carried away and ended up spending almost the entire week on making recycled paper with the kids from all the left over or discarded artwork and paper scraps that have accumulated over the summer. It was tremendous fun and fantastically messy and actually produced some really amazing little art books. At the end of the week we were left with two huge vats of unused paper pulp. After all the kids had left, instead of wasting the leftover pulp, we decided to make a couple of large sheets of paper with the door screens we'd been using as drying racks. The paper came out an amazing blackberry color and I now want to do some kind of printmaking project with it.

As I was thinking about all the things I could do with my huge sheet of paper, I remembered all the other projects that I have been meaning to start, or in some cases finish and I realized that I had so many I had forgotten most of them. So in the spirit of being productive, I am making a list of all the things I want to do and all the things I need to do and publishing it here in hopes that it will actually help me remember to get some of them done:

1. print making with handmade paper - not sure about this yet
2. finish lamp with guls wing - bought more feathers, lost glue gun...Dammit :(
3. make coconut ice - found a recipe online, had totally forgotten about this stuff and now I want it
4. tiny people for Robert
5. cake topper for Hampton and Erin - weddings not til January, but my powers of procrastination are amazing!
6. small birds - I made birds with left over air dry clay a few months ago, and never did anything with them,
7. knit sackboy for boyfriend
8. quarters - started a couple of projects using quarters - this may never actually go anywhere
9. pink flamingos - I have been wondering lately how complicated it would be to cut up and reassemble these lovely garden beasties - nowhere seems to have them in stock though.
10. finish/repair the pile of heads sitting on my desk.
11. Sam's birthday present - ?
12. make more paper and experiment with natural dyes.
13. stamps - really want to make some stamps, might try this myself and then take them to Redwall for the kids to play with
14. tiny books for Sherah

I know there are many more things I needed/wanted to do, but off the top of my head I cant seem to remember any of them. oh well.

ok... one more cup of coffee, lunch and then I start sketching.

BIRD!

I went to the High Museum the other day. I really don't like the High, it's expensive and the permanent collection is pretty pathetic. The layout is like something out of Escher's sketchbook, there are staircases that seem to go nowhere and bridges that exist only on certain days of the week and you need a degree in advanced cartography just to be able to understand the maps to navigate your way around the bloody place. However, I went with the boyfriend to see the cars exhibit, which was actually pretty cool, I think that watching Scoop's eyes get all big every time we turned a corner was the most fun though. After about an hour I snuck off to go check out the european design exhibit. mostly this was like wandering through Ikea, lots of plastic and patterns, but there were a few things that made me go "ooooo, I want to make that!" like the book shelf that was an enormous pile of furniture and musical instruments glued together and painted black, and the floorlamp that had a gul's wing instead of a shade...my first thought was to run home and start piling and gluing furniture like a mad woman with an industrial sized glue gun, then I realized that my roommate might not be oh so amused by my construction... but the birdlamp... that I can make! I think it was a real wing though, and not having access to sea birds or a desire to learn taxidermy, I decided to make a trip to Michael's to buy up all the feathers and make one myself!

So far I have half a wing (I need more feathers). next I need to actually figure out how I will turn this into a lamp shade as right now it's just a wing... also it looks pretty flammable or at least like it might release some pretty nasty gases when the wide array of glues I used on the already pretty flammable materials heat up and combine when wrapped around a 60 watt light bulb...

COOKIES!

Mostly this has nothing to do with anything but, refusing to be beaten by my lack of kitchen equipment, I made cookies. They were very good cookies. but I think that while I might not be a position to run out and spend a couple of hundred on a stand mixer, I should probably invest in a hand mixer and perhaps a decently sized mixing bowl as Scoop, who did not believe that cookies could be made that were not squeezed out of a tube, doesn't have a mixing bowl. consequently I covered the entire kitchen and myself in flour and made a right bloody awful mess. but like I said...the cookies were good.

a lament for cooking utensils lost

I miss my stand mixer. seriously. I have this feeling that secretly I am an amazing baker...I could make bread and cakes and cookies (and yes, weigh 600lbs but...) and pies and scones and those little chewy things my gran used to make when i was a kid and other things as well...but... I lost my stand mixer in the divorce. technically it was a gift for my ex but I hate him with a passion that could fuel hell now, so I feel like it's time he gave it back. It was a 5 quart, pistachio green, KitchenAid stand mixer and it weighed a half tonne... probably the nicest thing I've ever given as a gift. [this is where I had written something mean about my ex, but I decided to edit it out in the spirit of being a bigger person or something...not that much bigger mind you, as the thought is still there, I just blacked it out so that you can't read it]

...To be entirely honest I had completely forgotten all about my estranged stand mixer until this morning. I was looking on instructables while waiting on a phone call (one that still hasn't come) when I saw it, a pistachio green KitchenAid Stand Mixer, my heart actually jumped up into my mouth as I thought to myself, my stand mixer! how could I have forgotten about you? my head instantly filled with all the gloriously baked possibilities, the breads I could be making and the cookie dough I should be kneading (or whatever it is you do to cookie dough). As I tried to recall the whereabouts of my newly remembered mixer my heart dropped from my mouth into the pit of my stomach where it bobbed up and down for a moment, all the happy thoughts were replaced by that feeling you get right after you wake up on the day after something truly horrible has happened, like the death of the beloved family parakeet, or in my case it was the devastating realization was that it wasn't my stand mixer after all.

...I suppose the truth is that I liked having the mixer more than I liked using it, it was pretty and pale green and it offered the possibility of baked goods whenever I wanted them. now I have to knead dough by hand, and mix with a bloody spatula. A SPATULA! it's like the frickin' dark ages in my kitchen.