Jedi Costume

I was commissioned to make a Jedi robe to be worn at a ComicCon. This was a really fun project, I'm happy with the final product and so is my client.

This was the inspiration - a playable character from the Star Wars online game:

 Final product - hard to get a sense of it on a hanger - it really needs some shoulders in there.

Robe and shoulder piece - belt is not pictured

detail of the belt 

I also got to make my first-ever pair of gloves. I was staying up late to finish them and ran out to the store. When the clerk mentioned how tired she was, I commiserated and added, "Yeah, me too - and I still have to stay up late making gloves." I'm still giggling over it and the look on her face.

Here's the outfit in action:

Found a really awesome fabric that looks like leather but is in fact a lightweight washable knit. Love this stuff!

Belt tubing is made of irrigation parts plus silver and black spray paint.
I love, love, love making costumes!

Honey Whole Wheat bread - what you should eat instead!

If you haven't read about Frankenbread, take a minute to do so. You'll understand why I was motivated to figure out a better way to have bread in the house!

And because I like problems to have solutions, here is my recipe, inspired by Great Harvest Honey Whole Wheat. If you have a Great Harvest bakery nearby, I highly recommend visiting. They grind their own flour, give excellent samples, and are generally awesome.

This is super easy if you have a KitchenAid or other stand mixer with dough hook attachment. If you don't, I'm sure you could knead it by hand for the same amount of time. A little more work, and a counter to clean up, but absolutely doable. 

Things I love about this bread:

• It is really, truly easy. 
• Makes the house smell amazing.
• It is real food - 5 non-weird ingredients.
• Satisfying and delicious - it has changed the way we eat bread. More open faced sandwiches, and a simple slice of this with butter elevates even the most ordinary salad to a wonderful dinner.
• My husband used to make himself 4 slices of toast, with this he has one. 
• It is inexpensive and has actual nutrition.

I've tweaked this recipe to fit my schedule, you can do the same for yours. You can adjust the amount of yeast depending on how long you have to let it rise. 

Typically I start this while my kids are eating their cereal in the morning. Dough is ready to rise by the time they are finished. 

Honey Whole Wheat Bread

Add to the bowl of your mixer, in this order:

• 2 c. warm water (however hot it comes out of your faucet is fine)
• 1/3 c. honey
• 1 tsp. yeast *
• 3-4 c. whole wheat flour
• 1.5 tsp salt 

Mix it with the dough hook until a sticky dough forms. You may have to add more flour, I like to get it to the point where it sort of all clings together in a lump instead of sticking to the sides of the bowl. Humidity can affect this, so add flour 1/2 c at a time.

 Once your dough has formed up, let that sucker knead on medium/medium low speed (maybe level 4 or 5) for a full 5 minutes. I stick nearby as this sometimes makes my mixer dance around on the counter a bit.

 Cover it with plastic wrap or a damp (and clean) towel. Forget about it for a while. This is where the yeast variation comes into play - if you use a bit more yeast (1.5 tsp instead of 1 tsp) it will rise faster. I sometimes like a slow rise so I do 1. Check back in an hour or so. The only way this part can really go wrong is if you leave it too long - like all day.

It should look like this when you come back - at least doubled in size:

 Now stab that sucker until it deflates! I kind of stab/stir it for just a minute and plop it into a loaf pan that has been sprayed with cooking spray:

Spread it out so it reaches all the corners and is relatively even:

Then spray just a bit of cooking spray on top, and loosely cover with the same plastic wrap from before. Let rise again for about an hour. This time, I would check after about 30 minutes. I find that if it gets too poofy it can be unwieldy to slice (but still delicious).

When it looks about like this, remove the plastic wrap and bake at 350 for 40 minutes.

Let it cool in the pan on the rack for about 10 minutes, then pop it out and let it cool completely.

So to review, we let the machine do the hard work (5 min kneading), and then it's basically a matter of periodically checking on it and maybe doing something to it for a minute. Easy peasy!

I store ours in a large ziplock bag, keeping it sealed shut. The bread will stay fresh for about a week, but to bu can fully appreciate how amazing your home smells.

I read somewhere that in today's food culture, baking your own bread is a truly revolutionary act. It's true. You are rejecting the need for a factory to provide yourself with honest, actual food. It is cheaper and better for you. You will want to share this with everyone.

Go on with your revolutionary self!


I store ours in a large ziplock bag, keeping it sealed shut. The bread will stay fresh for about a week, but to be honest, toward the end of that week I am mostly toasting it. And then, because it is actual food, unlike the monster that is still in my pantry - it will indeed go bad. :)

*a note about buying yeast:
It is cheapest in those little packets if you're just trying this out. But I think you are likely to get addicted to the beauty of fresh bread (as I did), so when you're ready, buy your yeast in bulk at Costco or somewhere similar. You will pay less there for 1 or 2 pounds than you will spend on the jar at the grocery store. Keep it in the freezer or fridge and you can measure it out yourself instead of the little packets.

Meet Frankenbread

We used to buy our bread from the grocery store. Once upon a time, we went out of town without opening the fresh loaf on the counter. We were gone a while, so when we got home I bought a "fresh" loaf. I was going to throw out the old one, but my husband stopped me.

"We'll feed it to the ducks. It will be fun."

So it sat on our counter. For a few weeks. 

Again, I tried to throw it out. 

"No, don't throw that out, the ducks will love it."

(We do have ducks down the street)

So again, it sat on our counter, next to the bread we would actually eat. Weeks turned into months.

I got tired of looking at it. I wanted to throw it out. But for the ducks, I put it in a cabinet. We forgot about it. 

About 6 months later, we came across it again. We were shocked. 

You can picture in your mind what 6 month old bread should look like. This was not that. It was... perfect. Soft. No mold or spoilage. We squeezed it and remarked on it, showed it to a few friends, and put it back in the cabinet. A year went by. Same condition. Showed it to more friends. They are always amazed and horrified.

It's been about 2 years now, and the bread is finally starting to show some age. No spoilage, mind you, just age. It is a bit dry, and we have squeezed it to determine how soft it remained, so it's been handled a bit roughly and it shows. The outsides of the slices have started to crumble off, but by god it still looks edible. Dry but edible. Like toast.

Now at this point you're probably wondering what kind of bread it was. And I will tell you: Nature's Own Honey Wheat.

Two year old Frankenbread!

I bought it because the label said the following things, in big bold letters:

"Nature's Own" (this actually means nothing)

"Honey Wheat" (just refers the the flavor)

"No Artificial Preservatives, Colors or Flavors" (BS!)

"No High Fructose Corn Syrup" (nor should there be!)

And in small letters, it also said this:

"enriched flour"

"dough conditioners" (scary)
and lots of other unpronounceable ingredients. yikes.

And nowhere on the package is there a date or even lot #. No way for me to verify the age of this bread. I'm sure this is not an accident. It is produced to appear "fresh" for a (very) extended period of time.

Which makes me wonder - how old was it when I originally bought it?  What is all that crap in it? 

Here's the ingredients, for what it's worth:
unbleached enriched flour (wheat flour, malted barley flour, niacin, reduced iron, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), water, honey, sugar, whole wheat flour, rye flour, wheat bran, yeast. contains 2% or less of: wheat gluten, salt, soybean oil, vinegar, cultured wheat flour, dough conditioners (contains one or more of: sodium stearoyl lactylate, calcium stearoyl-2-lactylate, monoglycerides and/or diglicerides, calcium peroxide, calcium iodate, datem, ethoxylated mono- and diglycerides, azodicarbonamide), yeast food (ammonium sulfate), mono calcium phosphate, calcium sulfate, enzymes, soy flour, soy lecithin.

Perhaps I will google some of these and find out what they are, but for now I am content with the decision to not eat them. I only recognize a couple of ingredients as actual food. The rest might be edible, but they are not food. 

We did not give up bread. Oh, no. But I started baking our own. I'll share in another post my favorite recipe for easy, idiot-proof, delicious and nutritious honey whole wheat bread. 

I'm considering buying another loaf and making a more scientific study of it, with precise dates and video. Because this is just too weird! Try it yourself!

Who cuts your veggies?

A couple of years ago, while taking a 4-hour road trip, my kids and I stopped for dinner. Thinking the better choice would be to go in to a restaurant (vs. stop for fast food), we pulled in to an Applebee's.

I'm all about making healthy choices, but this is one area that is tricky. I know you can bring your own food on a road trip, and sometimes we do just that. But I'm also ok with the rules being different when the circumstances are different. Like my kids understand that the rules are different when we are at Grandma's house, or when there is a babysitter. Road trips fall into that category and I am ok with that - we've agreed that chicken nuggets are for road trips, and that is the only time they get them. So on we went.

I ordered some kind of salad with chicken, and I was struck by what a sad salad it was. There was an enormous chunk of cabbage, and you could tell by how dried out the cut areas were that it was 1) definitely cut by a machine in a factory, and 2) really pretty old.

I ate my dried up salad. I'm sure you know the type - you've eaten hundreds just like it. No human being would cut and prepare a salad like that. But someone pulled it out of a bag - iceberg lettuce, weird cabbage clumps along with "shredded" carrots so dry and old they had a whitish crust on them. (Do they bleach this stuff?)

So it got me thinking - how hard is it to cut up some goddamn lettuce?

Why do we accept such crappy salads? Mealy tomatoes? I want to eat in a restaurant where there is a person who at least CUTS the food there, in the kitchen. I don't think that's too much to ask. I don't want to eat food that was prepared in a factory. I mean these are supposed to be fresh vegetables - washing and cutting them has to be OUTSOURCED? WTF?

We finished our dinner and the server offered the kids some kind of tiny brownie sundae dessert (great) for $1 (great). Tiny brownie, with a drizzle of chocolate sauce, and sprinkled with nuts. Then this happened:
Me: Ok, we'll have one, but could you hold the nuts please?
Server: Oh, it comes with the nuts.
Me: No, like can you just not put the nuts on top? It's ok if there are some inside the brownie.
Server: Well, actually, it comes with the nuts already on top.
Me: On top of the sauce? Really? Who puts them there?
Server: I don't know, we get them from the truck like that. It all comes frozen. We just take a piece out and let it thaw. It already has everything on it.

What the WHAT?!

This isn't any better/healthier than going to a fast food place. They are selling the same crappy food, but for more money.

I know Applebee's is not exactly fine dining, and if I'd thought about it I'm sure I understood that most of their food comes frozen or pre-made and shipped on a corporate truck of some kind.

But on this day it just hit me. An actual cook would not serve a salad like that. A home cook would not serve a salad like that. But the people working in restaurants like this are not hired to be cooks, they are hired to assemble pre-engineered components. I'm sure that much like in the fast food industry, the management wants to be able to hire people without culinary skills and then automate things so they don't have to spend time and money training them. And that is why there was a giant hunk of old cabbage on my plate. The people aren't paid to think about the food they "prepare", much less care about it.

I was inspired to come home and start a blog detailing which restaurants in town actually cook their own food, and which ones are reconstituting sauce and defrosting things off a delivery truck.

But then I realized that there would be very few restaurants to profile. I still think it is a good idea. As consumers we should demand to know more about the food we order in restaurants. Locally sourced food is a grand ideal, but I'd love to just start with knowing my lettuce was washed and cut in-house. It's just not that hard to do.

Navigating: food, culture and a kayak

I love projects. Paint, fabric, you name it. And I love that this blog gives me a space to record some of those projects, even though I am absolutely terrible at keeping it updated. But there is something else I am passionate about: real food.

I've resisted sharing it here because there are so many cooking blogs out there, and I don't want to be a cooking blog. But then I realized that:

• This is my blog and I can put whatever I want on it.
• Real food requires just as much energy and creativity as some of my other projects.
• I've chosen to make this a priority in my daily life, and so my blog should reflect that.
• I find I am asked frequently for the same recipes, so documenting them here will be much easier.

So, some background. Like many people, I have had an awakening about the state of our food system in this country. I have strong opinions on this topic and the many ways it touches our everyday lives. There is so much to say about this, but (very) briefly:

• Too much of our food is produced in factories.
• Too many people don't know how to cook. 
• So much of this factory food, while edible, is not actually food. (See Omnivore's Dilemma or anything else written by Michael Pollan). It is full of chemicals and things you wouldn't otherwise have any reason to put in your body.
• So much of our "food" is raised, grown and processed in ways that are dangerous to our health (and I don't mean that in an abstract way - see Fast Food Nation), economically short-sighted, and ecologically disastrous. 

And:

• Real food tastes better and is more satisfying.
• Real food is better for your body.
• Eating - and enjoying - real food can help us have a healthier relationship with food. 

There's nothing quite like having kids to feed to make you rethink what is on your table. And how it got there. 

The food we eat, where we get it, how we eat it - all of it is shaped by our culture. And frankly, this aspect of our culture is terrible. 

• We have allowed corporations to dominate our food culture, choices and policies. 
• Low-quality, highly processed food is by far the cheapest and most plentiful thing to eat. 
• And we eat it everywhere - in our cars, at our desks, everywhere.
• We're losing the communal element of what it means to eat together.
• We have lost the notion that eating should be pleasurable and important.
• We are losing the creativity, innovation and satisfaction of cooking.
• We are not teaching our children how to eat - but later we will definitely teach them how to be on a diet.

In my mind our food culture is like a river. A river I am not happy with at all. There are so many other rivers I would rather be in - French, Italian, etc. - as I think our river is pretty messed up and does not flow to a happy place. Think about how hard it can be to "eat healthy" or be on a diet - it basically involves swimming upstream, fighting against so many aspects of our unhealthy food culture. You can give up any of these things and swim upstream for a while: 

• carbs
• fat
• dairy
• gluten
• cooked foods 
• solid foods
• pleasure
• eating out
• the list goes on... 

And it will probably be great. For a while. But you can only swim upstream for so long before you get tired and the current overwhelms you and you are back where you started, or maybe even further downstream.  

I don't want to go where this river leads. But I was born into it and this is my home. When I was a kid, my dad taught me how to cross a river in a kayak. You don't paddle straight across, or the current will just carry you off. Instead, you aim upstream for the other side, higher than where you actually want to end up, and angle your boat so that while the current is pushing you downstream, you are also letting it push you where you want to go. And of course you paddle.

That is my goal - I have to work within this river, and I need to figure out how to make it help me and my family. We all do, for so many good reasons. 

We have to aim higher upstream.

We have to do the work and planning needed to navigate this river.

We have to forgive ourselves - we didn't create this river.

We need to explore this river - name the things that are in it and examine them.

We have to do what we can to improve this river. While we cannot control it, we should take every possible opportunity to make it better.

So... in summary, I'll be posting some things about food. :)

St. Lyle

Lyle Lovett, acrylic on canvas.

Love painting mature men's faces - we don't airbrush out all the lines and character. This might be the start of a series.

quick take

A quick take on a famous painting. Acrylic on canvas, 18x24" (i think)

siblings sharing a shirley

Caught a quick snapshot of my kids sharing their first shirley temple at Hali's wedding. It was too dark as a photo but I loved the composition.

Acrylic on canvas, 24ish x 36ish"

Still life with wine and red purse

Acrylic on canvas, 18x24"

Hali's wedding gown

Watercolor and ink on paper, 5x7"

pear

The pomegranate needed a companion piece. I have them both hanging together. Will have to get a photo.
This is also 36x36", acrylic on canvas. Wasn't sure about the bright green, but the more I look at it, the more I like it.

pomegranate

I love pomegranates. Love to look at them, love to open them, love to drink the juice (especially with champagne) and eat the seeds. Love that they are so many shades of red all wrapped up in one powerful little ball. Love that they are bursting with so much magic.

Pomegranates are an ancient fruit (learn more here) and show up throughout history representing fertility and rebirth - particularly in the Greek myth of Persephone (remember that one? Persephone is kidnapped by Hades, and her mother Demeter goes into mourning and shuts the whole world down. Zeus intervenes but since Persephone was tricked into eating six pomegranate seeds while down there, she can return, but must spend 6 months of each year down under. Hence winter.)

I've been planning this one in my head for a while, twice I have bought the prettiest pomegranate I could find at the store and brought it home, only to watch it slowly shrivel and get tough before I had a chance to paint it. So last night I finally seized the opportunity.

Pomegranate, acrylic on canvas. 36 x 36" 

This photo was taken with my phone, which is not ideal and certainly far from perfect. But hey, this is me trying to document more!

As always, if you are interested in buying this piece or commissioning something, drop me a line.

profiled!

I was lucky enough to be featured in Lake Highlands Today. Read more!

Abstract color exercise: six persimmons (on strings)

Another color exercise assignment - this one painted from a written description of Six Persimmons, a 13th-century Chinese painting that is widely considered a Zen masterpiece:

And again, my work is much different, as it should be, since this is really an interpretation of an interpretation:

Six Persimmons (on strings). Acrylic on canvas. 11x14"

I love this piece. Somehow those stems just wanted to go up further. I think it helps ground the composition. What do you think?

PS: it just feels so good to paint again!

Abstract color exercise: Rothko-ish

I'm thrilled to be taking an abstract painting class for the next six weeks. If nothing else, it is an appointment to paint for a few hours every Wednesday. Sort of like how you could go to the gym by yourself and work out, but it is so much more effective to pay a trainer - then you HAVE to go. 

Plus, I love assignments. Something about having constraints to work against/within. Limits to push. Instant focus.

This was a color exercise to paint a piece according to a description of another piece - Rothko in this case. Rothko's work is mainly known for being soft fields of saturated color, sometimes painted/washed directly into the canvas, soaking into the fibers. 

My interpretation is, of course, a little different. I too love saturated colors, but also love texture and movement.

Abstract color exercise. Acrylic on canvas. 18x24"

thoughts on the new year

I love the idea of a new year. I love Christmas, too, but there is something about getting done with everything and making a fresh start. I try not to make resolutions but to make goals instead.

Last November I was fortunate to be invited to my friend Sarah's house for an evening of (wine and) creating vision boards. I'm so glad I did this. Basically we all talked and had some wine and flipped through old magazines, tearing out words or images that spoke to us. Then we put them all together to create a personal vision board. I love mine - maybe I'll add a photo of it.

The timing was just perfect - right before the holidays got so crazy - and it really helped me focus my thoughts as we closed out the year on where I want things to go in my life.

I came away from this evening knowing that I want to:

• Take more pleasure in my life. Enjoy things more. Do more things that are worth enjoying. Have the glass of champagne. Put on the lipstick when I'm just staying at home. Find and create beauty and savor it.
• Adopt a more French attitude toward pleasurable things - they are good for you and you shouldn't feel guilty about them. Vacations, good food, date night, "me time" - simply enjoy them. It's sort of the whole point.
• Tune in to the things I would really like to change but may have just gotten used to.
• Enjoy my children.
• Paint more.
• Play with fabrics and colors that I love.
• Get better in the garden. Creating food out of sunshine is an everyday miracle.
• More glamour. Hold myself to a higher standard of beauty. Take the time. Be worth it.

Around the same time, I ran out of business cards. I used to have three different ones - one for my role designing and creating handmade clothing, one for my role painting wedding dresses, and one for my other role as a web content specialist. I am proud to wear many hats - most creative people I know do more than one thing, and do it well. But still, this made me uneasy - I was feeling a little boxed in. (How's that for irony - feeling boxed in by three different roles?) But the truth is that none of these highly focused hats really fit me completely, because there is always something else I'm interested in. That was the day I started this blog, and my new cards simply read "Artist, Designer, Writer". I knew that one thing I want to do this year is simply create more work - paint more, write more, create more.

My youngest child is two, and can do a lot more by himself than when he was a baby. I'm feeling like there is just a little more breathing room in my life. Room to do a bit more.

I have a friend who is a very talented artist. I was so rooting for him when he quit the day job and tried to make a living making art. And I was dismayed this fall when he had to try to find another day job. It is so tough out there - you really need a patron. I have this, in a sense, and I am so fortunate.

I am energized and this is an opportunity I must not squander. Not many get it. The kind of flexibility I have in my life right now must be put to good use.

I've played around with some specific goal ideas (love the idea of this poem-a-day challenge), but at the same time not sure that a daily/weekly deadline is the right approach. But then again, maybe it is. I'd love to hear ideas on how people set their creative goals. Measure output : X number of ___ every ___? Or just force yourself to sit down and work for X amount of time every ___?

pen and ink house drawing

Another fun commission for the holidays. I was asked to commemorate a house in sepia ink. The finished piece is about 18x24". I photographed it before it was framed - it looks much fancier now.

I haven't done a pen and ink piece on this scale for a long time - I forgot just how much I like doing it. Love the obsessive quality of the ink and the sense of danger. Someone asked me what do I do if I make a mistake on something like that - well, since it is ink, I would have to start all over! 

All those wedding dresses (white dress drawn on white paper) gave me a good perspective on how to handle all the the white brick - too much detail and it doesn't look white anymore, too little and it just doesn't register. I end up basically drawing the shadows. It is more important how the different areas (light and dark) relate to each other to register the contrasts and scale.

This is a beautiful house in real life, I am happy with how it turned out on paper too. 

(And oh, those shingles!)

(I fuzzed out the homeowners' names and address along the bottom sidewalk - that's not a real smudge.)

wedding dress painting - vintage suit

I was commissioned to do this piece before the holidays and I absolutely love it. I do a lot of wedding dresses and baptismal gowns, this is one of the more interesting outfits I've done in a while. It was worn by the grandmother of the recipient. Couple of thoughts:

• I am in love with the cut of this suit. The jacket is like a perfect S-curve. 
• From a painting perspective, it was fun to do something with more ink and paint to it - I usually do a white dress on white paper. You don't exactly get to throw down the color for that, so even though this was in greys and blacks, it was fun.
• I like how the silver ink pops.
• Hats!

One of my new years goals is to document my work better. Probably the last 10 pieces I have done have gone undocumented - I get so excited to deliver the finished piece that I just skip it. And then of course regret it later.