Paw Prints

Blue Spot Trees

Originally uploaded by Elaine with Grey Cats.

Last night i continued in the expressive spirit of “go ahead and just make a mess,” adding the silhouettes of branches to the Blue Spot painting. (See some section images here.) The scan seems to catch both the pigments, some contrast due to metallic/iridescent pigments, and the textured lines and patterns. It’s better than i’d managed before: photos were either too flat or too much glare. Unfortunately the scanner is too small for the full piece.

I’m still not sure what i’m doing, but that’s not the point, eh?

I had five clementines that were looking peaked and past the time when eating them out of hand would be a pleasure. Before deciding what i would make, i started by halving the sections and slicing the peel up in small strips (though not quite julienned). I left that all macerating under sugar to reflect on a recipe.

I decided on Marcel Desaulniers’ recipe for oven-roasted plum cakes in Julia Child’s Baking with Julia. The recipe is much like the “dimply plum cake” featured in this photo rich post and documented here. (This reminds me of last weekend’s discussion of copyright and recipes. My mother said that in her cooking school they taught that a recipe is new when measures are slightly changed. It seems that with so much of the basics in the public domain, anyhow, recipe copyrights must be a horror to try and track.)

After 30-60 minutes, I zapped the sugar and clementine mixture for three minutes on high, dissolving the sugar into a syrup, plumping up the sections, and tenderizing the peel. I added a little over an inch of vanilla bean and a dusting of ginger powder, creating a syrupy heavenly scented bowl of proto-marmalade.

The oven roasted plum cake recipe is given for baking in twelve single serving custard cups. We can get half a muffin pan into our small oven, with room for a small loaf pan and another custard cup on the side. I wasn’t sure how critical the volume was. After this experience and looking at some of the other recipes, i think it would do just fine in a regular cake pan or a spring form pan (where ever it’s got off to). The loaf pan was my volume test.

Warm from the oven, the spongy cake had absorbed so much of the vanilla clementine syrup. Christine and i were both reminded of pineapple upside down cake — i suspect that would be another recipe that would hold up under the dense syrupy proto-marmalade.

So there’s buzz about the $150,000 spent on dressing Sarah Palin in September. I’ve felt a little irritated at the buzz: the convention and campaign are packaging and advertising. While most of the candidates have been campaigning for twenty some odd months and have their costumes picked out, Palin has been swept up and needs to look as polished and as world stage worthy as possible. I don’t have anything world stage worthy in my closet. I sympathize.

On the other hand, big chain department stores are not from where i’d want my clothes. While much of the creative design and crafts folk seem to be producing more fun and funky than serious corporate couture, the choices are out there. Couture Crochet Workshop by Lily M. Chin has perfectly appropriate campaign wear (assuming the skills to put the pieces together in a timely manner). And a quick browse at Etsy finds a few pantsuits that might work — and shows how one can easily spend $1k on a costume for the world stage.

When will we see candidates (well, the women) wearing handmade creations? Is it protectionist of me to think that creations designed by and made by American craftsfolk are better? Or is it a question of sustainability & fair trade?

Another set of questions, probably better, address the whole paradigm of packaging candidates as objects. I’m not in support of that, but admittedly accept the “world stage worthy wardrobe” giving in to that paradigm. Which shifts first?

Here’s some Etsy picks and a manufacturer of US made shoes:

Coat (pictured) plus pants $895 from Meg’s Coture


Autumn Russell’s $400 Brown Pantsuit

Munro Shoes made in the USA

Honey Bee

Originally uploaded by Elaine with Grey Cats.

Working on a Father’s Day gift as a break from working on work. So far, bee butt. The legs are wool over “Chenille Stem” — i guess “pipe cleaner” is now politically incorrect. Look, pipes aren’t just for smoking! Lots of small tubular things need cleaning: those are pipes, too!