Another Week Gone By

Posted on by Sandy Webster

We are all tired of the rain here in western North Carolina. Too much grey skies. Too much wet.

So inside in the the studio I finished to large collage piece, The Roads. Here it is hanging ready to show art group on Sunday.

Too much reflection to shoot from the front. And some details.

The color here is more accurate. And speaking of the color, mostly the rust color, got me to thinking of these large panels that were part of the Expedition to Elsewhere: the Evidence exhibit a few years ago. I will dig them out and try stitching into them.

I notice that I already have a patch of fabric sewn on and each is sewn to a rusted heavy cotton sleeve to hang on the tobacco stakes….so why not just keep going. Each one is about three feet across and four feet long. It would give me something to do without thinking.

It is hard for me to do thinking any more.

The small prints below I made last week using blocks made from the negative spaces that fell to the floor as an old friend cut out his animals (mostly possums) on a scroll saw. He used a cheap 1/8″ plywood, drilled a hole near the top, slapped some varnish on them and sold them as Christmas tree decorations. I would pick up the bits and pieces and move them around on a piece of pine board to make a design. Then glue them in place, ink them up and make prints. If I turned them upside down, each butterfly and fish became two different critters.

I think I was born trying to make something from nothing. I do know we were raised that way. We were children of the survivors of the Great Depression of the 30s. Every scrap gets a good examination before going into the trash.

And when going through all my relief blocks I found these. Fun to print them again and remember the old fellow.

Also I just finished (almost) all of the work books for my master’s class in Australia. I only need to add beads to the strings and they are finished. They are a revival of an idea I had over ten years ago to jump start thinking….thinking of what matters to the maker. I called it Visual Definitions and since my class is titled, “Seeking the Visual”, I thought it would be fun to revive the idea.

I think I will have to mail a box down under as there is getting to be too much to be schlepping in the airports.

On another somewhat unrelated thought…..

While working in the studio I turn on Pandora to the Lyle Lovett channel. And there is also music from similar artists. So far I am thinking that as much as I like Lyle Lovett’s music, I could run off with Keb Mo or Willie Nelson. Lyle Lovett just has too much of other musicians to make his music….too much brass….too much piano….to much…..

Even though that “Pony on a Boat” has always conjured up some of the best images. Actually I even tried making a pony in a boat because of that song. Suffice it to say that the boat was salvageable but the pony died in the trash.

But Keb Mo is just plain good to listen to. I could move next door to him just to hear him hum if I did not have other things to do right now. I don’t have one lick of musical talent in my bones, but that fellow makes me feel good, makes me smile, makes me want to fix him a nice supper for all the relatable lyrics and smooth delivery.

Same with Willie Nelson. He just drags you slowly off to a better place with his “maybe I should have”……

It might all sound a bit silly but honestly on a dreary day, trying to thread a needle, wondering why bother, making a mess for no good reason that you can think of…..and then turning on your iphone to Pandora and the lyle Lovett channel just so you can hear Keb Mo and Willie Nelson take you somewhere else, it is not a bad thing.

Now I am going to go put the beads on those books and call it a day.

Til later.

 

Loose Ends

Posted on by Sandy Webster

It was a lovely sunrise two days after Christmas. Our company still here, still helping out where needed. Even the western sky was beautiful that morning.

They have all gone home now. Amy and Marla helped me exchange beds between the apartment and downstairs guest room. Now the twin beds are in the apartment and all the better to house private students. And honestly no one wanted to share the bedroom down stairs with anyone else so now just the double bed is there. I need to rearrange the pictures and add some decent lighting but other than that, a big improvement.

Patrick stayed with his dad in the workshop and the two of them made things.

I had the gift of time in the studio to work on the piece I started earlier and here it is so far on a panel measuring 25.5″ x 28.5″. Lots more stitching to go and those beautiful little stones I covered with cane toad and kangaroo hide were so very helpful in holding the sticks in place while the glue dried. Moving things around on the “canvas” is the best part. And then suddenly it says, “Enough. Leave me here.”

I will show a picture when it is finished and behind the frame. Here are some details of sections that might just be finished.

 

I will finish it this week and then look for other frames that have not been used and do a few more of these. It is relief printing on cloth, various papers that have their own history that seems to fit the narrative. This one is called “The Roads” simply because those words appear somewhere in all that is happening and the image makes me feel like I am or have traveled somewhere into this space.

Collecting loose threads and holding things together is where I imagine myself to be right now. And no wonder. Just this past week when this thought occurred to me I went around the house and photographed things with loose threads. I have always been collecting them it seems.

In baskets.

In textiles from other places.

In my favorite gauzy, thready scarves bought in Australia from Mahdi.

 

In my hand stitched pieces.

And as illustration in my books. Even Proust is reminding me again that “we have to try afresh to settle down to work which has ceased to have any meaning.” So easy to say and so hard to do, that picking up and starting over to get it right, make it matter.

It is hard to just give up on something that demanded all your passion at one time and then without even noticing, it has become something less, something asking to be left behind…or just left alone for now.

But I think I had success this morning with the ginger marmalade! Last week it refused to set up, so with new lids and more pectin and a bit more boiling I think I have it. Six jars of chunky ginger bits and eight jars of ginger jelly.

My suggestion on this marmalade is just buy it if you can. An awful lot of work for something that needs starting over half way through the process. But the flavor and the aroma might just be worth it.

And one more thing….earlier this month I saw how easily it is to thread a needle by rubbing the eye of the needle across the thread. It is supposed to just loop up into the eye. Well, it doesn’t! And even the you tube video showed the fellow demonstrating it with a rather raw palm where he had rubbed it silly trying to make the video.

Don’t bother trying it. Just get your glasses on, lick the thread and spend the next minute or so trying to find the hole…..make sure you have a good length of thread to avoid doing it all over again a minute to two later.

That’s enough advice for now.

Til later.

Good Grief How Dumb!

Posted on by Sandy Webster

Lovely sunrise this week…..and more about those malted cookies.

I really can not believe how dumb I was on all the previous attempts to make the perfect malted cookie. I could not understand why they all were so hard to bite into. So I googled “what makes cookies hard to bite into?” And the answer was too much flour….not enough wet ingredients. And of course I knew I was doing everything right, in fact doing it “right” over and over again.

So after my malt extract arrived I tried it again. This time no Carnation Malted Milk Powder.

 

That extract is sooo good, very thick and very sticky.

So I following my recipe AGAIN and when it comes to the softened butter part I realize that for some unknown reason I was thinking one stick was a full cup….so was very careful to use only 3/4 of it when the recipe called for 3/4 cup of softened butter. It must have been forever since I actually baked something calling for butter! So I corrected my mistake but still kept the lesser amount of flour that I thought was a good idea.

Here they are slammed:

And here the next sheet is “unslammed.”

And forget “crispy”. These are very gooey and soft. BUT flavor is close to what I wanted. No molasses added this time and a healthy mix of both the golden syrup and malt extract.

Now to try it again with the increased flour and a good slam. I swear when I get it right it will be the last time you have to look at cookies on this blog.

In the meantime I finished the latest Cormoran Strike novel by Robert Galbraith, aka J. K. Rowling. It was very hard to follow as there were so many characters and I thought a lot of them could have been killed off earlier.

Then I went on to Louise Penny’s latest Inspector Gamache novel and devoured it. I have admired how she could write while caring for a husband with dementia and now that he is gone, she can continue when she thought the stories would end with his passing.

And now to try to keep myself entertained because for some reason I am not doing anything in the studio but stitching, I have started Dianne Setterfield’s new book, Once Upon a River. I really loved her twists and turns of The Thirteenth Tale a few years ago and am enjoying this one as well.

Lee is absorbed in a football game and I have Lyle Lovett channel on Pandora in the studio. Now I will go back to stitching in there or better yet, go try to get the ingredients right for the malted cookies.

Enough. I am headed to the kitchen.

Til later.

 

Cookie Test Kitchen News

Posted on by Sandy Webster

Another view of that 35 year old basket on the front door this holiday season. I sure was proud of that woven god’s eye joinery.

Anyway, back to the ongoing search for a really good malt-flavored crispy cookie.

When I first looked up (googled) malt cookies one came up by Martha Stewart. I don’t know about anyone else but I feel I need to put on LL Bean clothing, comb my hair and even put a little lipstick on before reading Martha Stewart instructions. And the few times I may have followed her directive tone, I know she can see me, my messy counter and worst of all, my less than top grade ingredients.

Well her malted cookies use Carnation Malted Milk Powder and are squeezed through a press to form nothing less than perfect little dollops of flavor. In fact all malted cookies that I found use this powder. None looked right.

So I did use the malted milk powder with golden syrup the other day. And the results were very good but required being bitten into by strong teeth….and they did not last long as we found them delicious. So much so that this morning they were gone and I went back to the kitchen. These three ingredients are key to what I made next. My only mistake may have been increasing the amount of malted milk powder…now they have a slight after taste of powdered milk.

This time I added equal parts molasses and golden syrup to get the 1/3 cup required. The molasses gives a bit more color but does not give a molasses flavor. Like I said the powdered milk increase to 3/4 cup was a bit too much and made mixing in the dry ingredients something that required mixing in with hands.

But good results otherwise. The slamming down of the half cooked sheet works nicely….just have to do it when the first cracks appear. Otherwise you spend too much time interrupting the baking time with banging time.

Here are the results this morning….with a porter that makes a good companion. Forget that milk and cookies idea with these.

These are crispy and can be tackled with your front teeth….but there is always the beer for dunking.

Tomorrow the malt extract arrives and in a few days we will start again. I will let you know how it comes out.

Here is a picture of our cat Patches, always ready to supervise happenings in the kitchen.

She has that Martha Stewart look down pat.

Til later.