a restoration project
February 5, 2012
This little project has been on the “never gets started” list for a while, a bottle of mineral oil purchased for the purpose sitting on the kitchen chest of drawers for months, perhaps a year now. I finally got around to it today after attending a memorial service yesterday for an old SCA friend of ours (and one-time housemate of mine). Linda loved to collect and surround herself with natural materials like stone and wood, and she and I used to make garbage-picking rounds together (anyone else from London Ontario remember the glorious pickings of Spring and Fall Cleanup Week, back when there was still a designated time for throwing large items to the curb?) looking for old wooden boxes, bowls and crates. I came home thinking it was about time I cleaned up this bread tray she gave me 18 years or so ago, that we’ve all but destroyed by running it through the dishwasher. In summertime this tray sees a lot of use, as we tend to eat the lazy sorts of suppers that involve pita bread or a nice rye loaf and cold things (hummus platter, roasted red peppers, pickled eggplant) on the front porch.
The spoon butter recipe comes from the gorgeous Food In Jars weblog.
It’s super easy: just melt some beeswax in a jar, mix in the mineral oil, let it cool and rub it on your stuff. Then wait a bit and rub it off!
Linda’s tray and all of our wooden tools all oiled up. At least one of those spoons I’ve had for 20 years and never oiled, and after a sit overnight and a good buffing, it’s lovely and shiny again. The tray needed a bit more time to soak up the oil, but its glow is coming back as well. Don’t worry, we won’t put it in the dishwasher again.
Posted by jodi on February 5, 2012 at 8.08pm
new from old
August 12, 2011
If you know me at all then you’ll know just how wacky this is right here: I went to Pennsic for fifteen days and did not bring along any knitting or sewing projects. I KNOW! Okay, that little orange sock with the two broken bamboo needles was in my satchel, but that was for in the car only (okay, also for waiting in line at Herald’s Point that one time and also for during a class Peter and I attended on making mustards, because those times are Idle Hands Times which are in no way the same as Projects Times, right?). Also I did not bring anything to read other than the WFTDA rule book (ugh. . . does there really need to be an entire section on Blocking With The Head detailing all the ways in which it is not okay to block with the head at all, when it could just say “Blocking With The Head: DON’T”?).
So, what did I bring to occupy my time, most of which is spent in camp since I’m too lazy to go anywhere and do anything at Pennsic? Drawings. Lots and lots of drawings, of which I worked on a good few, one in particular which may finally be about to turn the corner from AWFUL to FINISHED. I’m not going to show you those yet, because they’re still awful. But here’s the other thing I worked on: two of the drawings were stapled onto plywood boards so that they can be worked with multiple layers of wet drawing materials and still remain flat. One of those boards was the back side of a block from that ill-fated larger-than-life self portrait I started way back in my first semester of graduate school. Because drawing is a solitary activity for me and one cannot spend one’s entire vacation sitting inside the tent drawing while one’s friends are outside having social times, I also brought along a set of knives so that I could flip the drawing over and cut on the block while chilling around the camp dining room with my House Redhair homies.
This 24 x 36″ block has been cut into and printed quite a few times, and at the moment consists of a section of a figure completely covered with thin chatter lines, with rougher chatter marks in the background. I’m cutting away all but a grid of 1″ circles, so that what little will remain of the existing image can be printed as polka-dots on fabric.
The wood is the cheapest, most difficult to cut plywood you can get, either pine or fir, because that’s all I could afford in my first year of grad school. Now I dream of Shina and buy birch, which is still hard to cut but not nearly as split-tastic as the pine. But because I can’t waste old work, I’m dulling my blades on this old block one last time, taking the wood right down to the middle layer so it’ll print nice and clean (hah! like I ever print anything cleanly).
These are going to be some janky-assed polka dots.
Posted by jodi on August 12, 2011 at 7.26am
green without even trying
April 10, 2011
Spring is here and it’s time to clear away all of the dead house plants that didn’t make it through the dim winter on the dining room windowsill (so long dead avocado tree; I’m sorry I didn’t eat you sooner, dried up basil!). Now that the gardening efforts will be concentrated outdoors (we have an entire backyard to overhaul before June), here’s a way to have a little bit of lower maintenance greenery in the house. I used tips from these tutorials at Life Hacker and Boing Boing, but didn’t follow either to the letter; moss isn’t likely to up and die on you if you don’t do things just right.
What you’ll need:
-glass jars with lids. I used a gallon pickle jar that my friend Jenn gave me (and painted the lid flat black), and a smaller storage jar with a sealer lid that I picked up at Value Village.
-rocks.
-soil (optional, actually, but if your jar is tall, like my pickle jar, soil will help to bring up the height of your moss garden without having to use as many rocks).
-charcoal-activated water (again, probably optional but I figured it couldn’t hurt. I broke open a Brita filter and mixed a bit of the charcoal grains with water; they didn’t really mix in but I’m sure it’ll all work out).
-one of the tutorials I looked at suggested Spanish moss, which I didn’t use because I didn’t have any. It’s another way to get some depth if you don’t want to use soil.
-plastic dinosaurs, gnomes, lego toys, ceramic figurines, plastic flowers, fish tank decorations or whatever other doo dads and frippery you want to include.
-chopsticks for placing items if the mouth of your container is too small to get your hand into.
-moss! I brought a bit of moss back with me from my visit to Georgia in February, even though the varieties probably aren’t any different than what grows here. If you want to bring home some moss from a trip, it will survive in a Ziploc bag for a good long while; mine sat around for a month before I got around to planting it. Otherwise, go out and find yourself some moss and gently peel up just a small amount (don’t go decimating a single population!) with some of the dirt attached to the bottom. I supplemented my Georgia moss with two different kinds I found in my backyard, one low and clumpy and one more luxurious and long. I also had a bit of lichen covered tree bark that I picked up in Georgia (RUH-ROH, lichen in a mossarium, I’m already DOING IT WRONG). We’ll see how that fares in there, as I’m not sure it wants to be as moist as the moss does. I don’t recommend going out and collecting lichens in the wild unless you find a piece of bark already lying on the sidewalk off the tree like I did; lichen colonies can take a hundred years to establish themselves and that’s not something I really want to go messing with.
To assemble the mossarium:
Fill the bottom of your jar with rocks or soil or Spanish moss. Sprinkle in a small amount of your charcoal activated water if you’re using that, or regular water. You don’t want it to be TOO wet or the glass will just fog up. Then place your decorative rocks and the larger of your doo dads: in my large jar I used one large-ish rock and a statue of a bowling friar, which I placed before planting the moss, but in the smaller jar I just placed the rocks and then waited to decorate it until after the moss was planted.
Now break off small sections of your moss and place them on and around the rocks, using the chopsticks to wedge the moss into any smaller spaces. You don’t have to carpet the whole thing, as the moss will spread on its own, but if you’re impatient you might like to fill up a lot of the gaps between the rocks right away. I placed most of my moss directly on the soil around the base of the rocks and shoved a bit into the narrow spaces between the rocks and the glass, then put a few clumps right on top of the rocks just to see how they’ll fare there. Then put in any of your smaller decorations. If they’re lightweight like my little plastic dinosaurs you’ll want to press them down into the moss bed a bit so they’re secure.
Place your mossarium in a location where it’s protected from direct sunlight and wait for your moss to grow! You won’t have to water it very often but when you do, just take the lid off the jar and sprinkle in a few tablespoons of water. If the glass becomes foggy just open the lid for an hour or two to let the steam off (but don’t forget to put the lid back on; your mossarium wants to stay moist).
Posted by jodi on April 10, 2011 at 9.38am
blue
January 13, 2011
The finished product of a little comedy of errors the other day. The first dyebath I mixed up (a combination of what I thought was two deep blues) turned out to be a dark grayish purple so awful that I dumped it out five minutes after the roving went in, hoping the dye wouldn’t take too much. I then grabbed the first dye-like thing I could find, which turned out to be several packages of various green flavours of Kool-aid, mixed up a bath and tossed the now pale grayish lavender roving in, only to realize immediately that this was going to yield an uglier form of grayish something. So I quickly dumped that bath as well and, in desperation, overdyed the lot of it with a fiercely bright turquoise. Which turned out a roving of the loveliest blue, much lovelier than it looks in that sad, indoors-in-winter photograph above. It’s a tad fulled after all that bouncing around, but with a little extra love it seems to be drafting and spinning up just fine.
PRO TIP: if you accidentally forget to wear gloves and dye your hands purple, it’s not a good idea to attempt to wash the dye off using that powdered soap that goes in the dishwasher. All this will do is show you, painfully, just where all of your cuts and hangnails are. And, also? You don’t really need the harsh, bleachey soap to help you find those cuts and hangnails because THEY WILL ALREADY BE DYED PURPLE.
Posted by jodi on January 13, 2011 at 7.18pm
from the old projects graveyard
November 29, 2010
Our fancy new front loading washing machine has necessitated a laundry-area rug to protect my wet, dropped clothes from basement floor gunk. And so this braid rug and its accompanying bag of fabric strips were dug out of the bowels of the attic to be finished.
It was started some time in the late 1990s and abandoned at some point in distress over the fact that once sewn together, it wasn’t lying very flat on the floor. The fabrics range from old secondhand wool suits to leftovers from a skirt my gramma made me to permanent press polyester trousers that used to belong to my granddad. This photo shows how the rug came out of the attic, but there’s been some noticeable progress made since then. Of course, there’s no longer an urgency to finish it since Peter convinced me the rug will be too nice to get ruined on the damp basement floor and that it should be in a living area instead. Guess it’s going to be crocheted bedsheet strips for the washing machine, then.
Posted by jodi on November 29, 2010 at 12.58pm
what a seven hour faculty meeting looks like
April 14, 2010
in my day planner/colouring book.
Posted by jodi on April 14, 2010 at 9.15pm
distraction
March 23, 2010
I started something new. No, the socks aren’t finished. Shut up!
The pattern is Verdaia by Jodie St. Clair; yarn is Fleece Artist Merino. I know already I’m not going to have enough, and yet I knit on. Sucker.
Posted by jodi on March 23, 2010 at 6.12pm
hot tip for all you sewers out there people who sew*
October 2, 2009
*edited because Norma didn’t like the thought that my luscious bare thighs might somehow be associated with giant pipes of human potty waste spewing into the river a few kilometres upstream from the city’s water intake. And come to think of it, neither do I.
I’ve been meaning to try this ever since I bought my serger in the spring, and the first really cold day of fall was all the kick in the pants I needed to get to it. See, I’ve got these chubby (but lovable!) thighs, and all-a-y’all chubby-thighed girls out there know what I’m talking about when I say that pantyhose crotches, by definition, oughta sit nice and close to my CROTCH and not way down between my knees or halfway down my thighs chafing my most delicate tender skin and why can’t they give me a break already and make the pantyhose leg-part actually STRETCHY enough to fit around a real life regular sized (in other words, WITH SOME FAT ON IT) thigh? And don’t believe those weight charts on the back of the package, either. I’m a totally bog-standard average 5-foot-four, 150 pounds, I buy the biggest, tallest pantyhose I can find, and the crotches of those pieces of shite still ride ever downward.
But NO MORE!
Y’all, this was like an epiphany when I figured out I could do it. See, I have a serger now! And that means I can do anything! So on the first cold morning of fall I dug out a pair of slightly-too-small warm knit tights and brazenly chopped the legs off with scissors, right below the oh-so-shifty “crotch”. Then I set up my serger for the stretchy stitch (“appropriate for swim suits and athletic wear”), and zip zip! (okay, 45 minutes of wrangling the 3-thread threading and rethreading and rethreading the lower looper thread and why does it keep breaking? and rethreading and this one thousand dollar machine is a piece of crap! and ohhhhh, no, it’s just me being stupid and rethreading one last time and then zip zip! Hey, cut me some slack, I’m still learning this machine).
And lookey here.
Now I have a brand new pair of cozy, warm, (covered in cat hair; whoops) totally stretchy and NOT FALLING DOWN stockings! And paired with this crazy lightweight polar fleece skirt I picked up recently, they kept me perfectly warm on a chilly fall day.
Now there is a big pile of pantyhose lying next to the serger, waiting to be transformed from frustrating to fabulous. I will never wear pantyhose again. Because, y’all, stopping to hike up your tights every 30 metres when you’re walking down the street isn’t sexy OR comfortable.
Posted by jodi on October 2, 2009 at 2.17pm
chasing my tail in the driveway whenever a car drives by
February 27, 2009
These last few weeks have been crazy-busy, exciting and exhausting. Some highlights:
I taught my first workshop out of the Windsor Printmaker’s Forum, a two-day whirlwind introduction to stone lithography. It was fast-paced and fun, and we got an incredible amount of work done in less than twelve hours. We’d scheduled it for Monday and Tuesday of the university’s Reading Week to accommodate some professors who came down from North Bay to attend the class, but there was enough interest in the community that we’re planning to schedule a weekend workshop very soon (stay tuned!).
After the workshop I spent the next day and a half building slideshows in preparation for our Pecha Kucha Night, which, if you didn’t get the message last time, was the event of the season. A week later I’m still a little hung over from the excitement generated that night.
The day after Pecha Kucha Peter and I took the day off to drive around the county, paying a visit to the Ridley homestead where they have recently welcomed an incredibly soft and lovely baby llama into their growing fibre family. First-year shares in this homegrown fibre co-op have sold out, but if you keep your eye on Old School Fibre’s etsy shop you might be able to snag one next season.
This week I spent two mornings at the University of Windsor teaching a lithography demo to the senior printmaking class. We did our best to speed through about four weeks of instruction in six hours, falling a little short but not disastrously so. I got to spend some time in my old haunts, working on a press I love, and one of the students is even interested in coming out to the Printmaker’s Forum and running for a spot on the board, which is beyond awesome.
In local news, Windsor’s very own Phog Lounge was named this week as best live music venue in Canada by CBC Radio3. The National Post even called Windsor “the nation’s undiscovered indie rock supercity”. But hell, we knew that. If you were unfortunate enough to miss the big announcement you’re in luck, because CBC television cameras captured the moment of the big reveal live. Click to relive the glory!
This weekend we’ve got some sooper-seekrit family stuff going on out of town, but if you’re staying behind in Windsor you should check out these two events tonight that I’m disappointed to be missing:
-a live music benefit at the Kildare House to raise dough for Rafiki Kenya
-opening reception for La robe-ruche (The Hive Dress) by Julie Faubert and Héloïse Audy at Artcite Inc
And don’t forget, if you feel yourself starting to wobble, use the zen to keep you steady.
Posted by jodi on February 27, 2009 at 10.40am
what i’m working on today
February 18, 2009
Posted by jodi on February 18, 2009 at 8.26am
