Tags:art, crocheting, diorama, Gray Lady, herbal, incense, knitting, preserves, projects, shawl, teaching, transcendence, travel, wine.
Now that my adventures in jam have passed for the moment, and I’ve (more or less) secured lodging in Scotland for our trip, my thoughts turn toward other projects, other pastimes… like making incense!
Yes, never content to have 20,000 in-progress projects at any one time, I’m always itching to start more!
Actually, the incense is something that was unfinished from before, so really I was tying up loose ends. Not to mention that it earns me some money for our trip (yay!). I’m an avid amateur herbalist, and so I’ve been working on developing a line of incenses and other herbal products. (The jam could actually tie in with this, but we’ll see.) Currently, I have two varieties of incense: Descendence Incense and Transcendence Incense, and they’re carried at The Sacred Well in Oakland.
The Well had requested more Transcendence Incense from me way back in November, but, what with school and all, I just couldn’t get it done. Now I’ve completed the order and earned some dough. Yay again!
Everybody needs a little transcendence now and then...
Of course, I’m also working on knitting a funky shawl, just because I feel like it,
Big needles mean I'll be done soon, I hope.
trying to get some more dioramas finished to sell through Gray Lady,
Can you guess what this'll look like?
coercing a friend to give me some blackberries to make more preserves (with Drambuie this time, I think), crocheting my outfit for Off the Needles: A Knitting Pinup Calendar, and…oh yeah, there’s that elderberry wine in the closet I still have to rack and sweeten, and I also still need to get honey to start the crab-apple mead going (crab-apple juice frozen in the back of my fridge). Mmm, a couple of other unfinished needle-work projects in there, too, but we won’t mention them.
Oh! And a friend of mine commissioned me to design a tarot deck for an iPad app he’s working on.
And I just got invited to teach classes to “mid-kids” at the Northern California Women’s Herbal Symposium this September.
Honestly, I don’t know how I end up getting so busy! I don’t set out to do a million things at once, I just seem to keep finding myself in the midst of it all. I can’t resist a new challenge, a new project, new ideas, new stimulation, new opportunities.
In school, my teachers said I lacked focus… I guess I could admit to that, but I prefer to think I’m just well-rounded.
Now if only I can get Lonely Planet to hire me to write for their travel guides…
Tags:apples, canning, cordial, Farmer's Market, fruit, homemade, jam, organic, peaches, plums, preserves.
Preserves, technically, but “preserves” doesn’t rhyme with “spam.”
I was lucky enough to receive a whole lot of organically grown peaches and plums from some friends’ fruit trees and I had to come up with an idea for what to do with it before it spoiled.
I took several plums and started a plum cordial: plums, cinnamon sticks, candied ginger, lavender blossoms (from my own patio garden), all in a big gallon bottle with a whole mess of vodka I’d gotten for tincturing before I decided I like brandy better for tincturing.
This needs to soak for a while.
When I’ve decided it’s more or less done, I’ll strain it, sweeten it to taste with a simple syrup, and then let it sit some more so the flavors can blend.
Now then, on to the preserves part.
I already had a couple of apples and some lemon juice and zest left over from making Apple Brown Betty for a 4th of July party. I blanched the peaches (so I could easily remove the skins) and peeled them, peeled the apples, and cut everything up. It took a while. When I was done I had 20 cups of fruit. Yes, 20 cups. I know jam recipes say you shouldn’t make more than 6-10 cups at a time because it won’t set right, but I decided to go for it anyway. (For anyone who has read my blog before, you may begin to see a pattern developing here.) Stuck all the fruit, some lemon juice and 10 cups of sugar in my biggest stock pot (hey, it’s less sugar than the recipe called for even!).
It looked like this:
Fruit, you will be preserves!
It needed to sit in the pot for at least a couple of hours before cooking (the sugar helps draw out the juice) and I kind of got started later than I meant to… That meant that the preserve-making process went on late into the night. Doh!
Moral of this part of the story? When canning, start before 3:30 in the afternoon because once you get started cooking, you really have to go until it’s done. It was completely done (including the boiling-water process part) at 4:30am.
I enjoyed the whole process, even if I was fading a bit at 3am. Hearing the jam jars PING! as they cooled from the boiling water bath was worth it. I don’t have any fancy equipment, I heated the empty jars in a chicken fryer full of hot water (they’re short jars), lifted them in and out of the stock pot with barbecue tongs, and used a towel in the bottom of the big process pot. I actually had to wash my stock pot after filling the jars so I could use it again right away to process them. A canning funnel is now on my list of must-have kitchen equipment, but it all worked fine makeshift style.
Last night I decided to make labels for the jars, because…well, because I’m like that. I put a little something together in Illustrator and cut them into circles on speckly card stock. My friends who are designers would, I’m sure, scoff at my simple design, and they certainly could have done better and fancier. All the same, the labels are far better than Sharpie on the lid.
Bask in the glory of homemade preserves!
The fonts are Fortunaschwein and Cochin, in case you were wondering.
I enjoyed it so much that I’m making plans for more preserves! Maybe I’ll add lavender or thyme to the next batch! Maybe Drambuie, maybe whisky! Maybe I could get a booth at the Farmer’s Market and sell them for $7.50 a pop! I guess it depends on how much people like it. We’ll see…
In the meantime, it’s still fun.
Posted on 8 July '10 by Jenny Wilde, under creativity, food. 2 Comments.
Tags:art, beginning, collage, limits, poetry, writing.
I’d love to say that I’m one of those creative types who just has ideas flowing forth all the time, that I could barely keep up with all my ideas for thing to make, to do, to write. I wish that were true. The truth is, despite the fact that I have (finally) a fine arts degree, I usually struggle to come up with a starting point or an idea. For me, when the field is wide open, I just can’t even imagine where to begin. Sometimes my kids will request of me, “Draw me something.” They don’t understand how hard that is, to just draw something, anything. “Well, what do you want a picture of?” “I don’t know.”
I don’t know either.
Sometimes it seems easier to me to begin within a set of parameters. Sometimes limits stimulate creative thinking. This is one of the reasons I’ve been a perpetual student for the last 20 years: because in school I’m forced to push myself and jump-start my thinking by having to generate something that conforms to a specific set of rules.
Now that I’m done with school (for now), I have to find ways to create my own parameters and my own rules. It’s really quite challenging in its own right. I’m not particularly good at rules.
Magnetic poetry provides one such set of parameters. I know, it can be used to make really stupid and pointlessly crude phrases (that is certainly one of its most popular uses), but it can also be used to force a certain kind of flexibility in imagery and word choice. I realized I like it because it’s a sort of verbal collage. In the same way that I cut out images and move them around until they look right, I enjoy taking words and moving them around until they feel right. There is some element of selection, of course, but the options aren’t originally my own. I have to use what I’ve got.
Hmm, that relates to the cooking thing, too. Using leftovers, and all that.
So, what does it mean to be an artist anyway?
Does it really mean “creative problem solver”? That doesn’t sound as glamorous somehow…
Well, I don’t know. Maybe. Too many choices, I can’t even begin to decide.
.
.
.
Some Poetry That May or May Not Be Good,
But Was Made with Magnetic Poetry
A thousand whispers
Planet balmy like evening wind
What gold-red moon sips my breath?
Strange universe falling
.
.
Tinge my pithy Kafkaesque zeal
With crass delights and sanguine veils
(that was a great philosophy-themed set)
.
.
still roses cry their elaborate symphony
as my bitter honey sleeps,
a languid beauty
shadowed tongues dream easy beneath
the forested light
and sing the mists away
