Seaglass Green Wall Hanging

This little cotton rug from Dharma Trading  Company is brightening up our living room. Well, it’s little for a rug, not little to manipulate and boil. The initial shibori was a little more of a backdrop than a feature. 

I bundled it up with jute. I just used some rules of thumb for a pleasing design. 

Non symmetrical- automatically has more movement and interest. 

Pick up the same color in multiple parts of the piece- this might be the most used transferrable skill I learned from painting classes. This lets you do a LOT and still have a cohesive viewing experience. 

Gradient- I let the dye strike and boil for a little while on the topologically lowest parts of the bundled rug before using my laundry stick to push more of the piece in. I think this piece could use a little more of the lightest most exhausted dye bath but of course you can’t really tell through the steam. This gives depth and interest. 

Resist: keeping some parts of the fabric reserved is why it is visually interesting enough to be a hanging. I also enjoy the evidence of handwork. 

IKEA sheepskin dyed blue

I’ve been wanting to dye these little rugs for ages, but, I think natural colors and especially white are the perfect color for a sheepskin. A dilemma which was solved when I was using the rug as a trivet for another dye bath and some navy leaked onto it. Now, I stead of a gorgeous cream I had cream and blotchy navy to work with. Perfect. I mixed up true turquoise acid dye in the dye pot, took it off heat, and put the sheepskin in hair side down and gathered. I saw some gorgeous patterning as the wool wicked up the dye but, as I let it rest it became more uniform.

 Oh, well, it still got it out of my system and the piece kept its glossy glow. 

Bear does like sleeping on it but not at a time of day with good light. I had to coax him into this photo and now he is recuperating from doing one task by sleeping tucked under one of my shins. 

Sharing the Ice

Tuesday night intermediate adult learn to skate has a half NHL rink to ourselves. I think we were doing backwards crossovers around the perimeter for 20 minutes. We didn’t get our whole free time, which our instructor tells us she “doesn’t call playtime” for adults, I know that. I’m not sure how you normally explain crossovers but if you want to turn left you lean left on your left foot and then put your right foot on the left side of your left foot, next weight on the right foot, and then pick up the left to uncross back to the starting position. And it is easier said than done. 

Anyway, I have backwards crossovers normally after I have warmed up. Today I did zero. First the ice felt sticky and then staying out of everyone’s way took most of my focus. You would think that everyone careening around in a circle would really lend itself to some psychosomatic centripetal force. I am definitely not good enough at backward crossovers to purposely vary my speed and direction so as to overtake other skaters. Practicing on my own I like to do maybe one pump, one glide, two crossovers, then glide or stumble. So I go through a cycle of different speeds that wouldn’t have been reasonable to subject my classmates to. 

Tonight I just did backward pumps, sometimes bringing the working foot to my ankle as a baby step. 

Then we spread out in 4 rows of four to practice our edges. Edges is, if you lean your weight toward your inseam, your path along the ice curves toward yourself, whereas if you lean out, the path you travel curves away from the midline of your body. Which is crazy! 

We had a different spacing problem with edges than with crossovers. In theory I was supposed to describe a perfect semicircle, pause, and describe another. In practice I had a bunch of space to my sides so I could make the arc of my circle really exaggerated and then bring it in when I got close to the shared space of the line. But then I still had to do my second semicircle with my lane mate even closer and skating toward me. So I solved this by doing the smallest little lobe. 

I don’t have full control of the tracing my line makes down to the millimeter, but I can hold all my forward edges. I have perhaps never felt a backwards edge. During Not Playtime I was trying to hold either backward outside edge for any length of time. Once it turned out a semicircle was out of reach I tried just describing any curve. I told myself very girly that it is okay to fall, and I leaned further that I had before. But my fall started too slowly and I stabbed my toe pick in the ground automatically to stop it and I tweaked my knee. Oh. I didn’t know I would do that. Typically when I fall I find out afterward. 

Overall I am getting a lot out of this class. It was amazing to break a real sweat on the ice after passively sweating all day. And all the time to know that outside, the heat was breaking. 

Urban foraging rosemary

Grabbed some rosemary on my way out of the ice rink. This grows so well in our area but I haven’t seen any around recently. This was new growth that peaked up past where the plant was hedge trimmed so I know it is fresh and a little unwanted. 

It was resinous so the car smelled crazy and I’ll need to rinse the sprigs in vinegar water before drying them. 

That’s the thing about the grocery store spice aisle, it has almost no smell. Very antiseptic. 

Nopales take 2

I haven’t been eating our paddle cactus because it’s not a main food for me, but I have been propagating a paddle that fell off and watching the fruits ripen. Our neighbor put out hundreds of pounds of cactus so I thought it was a good time to give it a try. Processing it went okay. Locally we have spineless cactus but once you start touching it you can feel the spines. 

Propagating this little fellow 

Our lovely, healthy specimen plant isn’t overgrown or terribly crowded so there is no urgent need to harvest paddles. 

My first attempt at incorporating the nopales. Homemade tortillas with refried beans, cheese, and nopales. The nopales were slimy and masked the rest of the flavors. I still had around 14 ounces of cactus left over after this recipe. 

For my second attempt I reheated the already cooked cactus by sautéing it in oil with too much spices to compensate for the flavor subduing property of the cactus. Onion, garlic, and cayenne. It was pretty good. 

Learn to Skate

Ice skating was different today. 

I was able to tell what was happening. Up til now I have been really only able to repeat something on the same side in the same direction because flipping everything mentally for every repetition is harder than just resetting to skate it the same way. We were just doing an inside edge half circle with switching our arms at the top of the half circle. But I was able to start them facing toward or away from the clock and standing on either foot. This sounds so reasonable but to date if I so much as switch my arms it forces out any knowledge of what else I am doing. 

Class was also a bit different format. They had us drill this for 20 minutes and I sort of had to stop skating eventually because I had to stop using my burning knees and I don’t know any skating that doesn’t use the knees. However after standing around a bit I realized I could still stroke around forward casually. 

My crossovers were also different today. They make us skate forward crossovers on half the ice sheet for several minutes in each side. Previously I have had kind of erratic crossovers where I would be falling if I didn’t keep taking steps and get a little speed going. Today every once in a while I would stagger around but I could also stand and glide with feet parallel, my left foot on the right and my right foot on the left, and then uncross them. So for much of the time I had a good deal of control of my carriage and then, who knows why I’d falter, avoiding a skater or a weird patch of ice or experiementing with a little tweak. 

Spinning Seacell

This little skein is pure cellulose fiber. I’m spinning as much seacell as I can stand before taking a little break and spinning bamboo for a few yards to calm down. If you draft the sea cell fibers 2 cm it comes apart. At the same time it is so luminously beautiful. 

Hypertufa wreath

Succulents were living for years in this wreath. They were so stunted and dried up you couldn’t see them, but they were alive. I’m thinking I can get a healthier living wreath if I give rainwater someplace to kind of stick before it dries out. 

So, I built sort of a flower pot around my succulent wreath using cement. 

When you read about hypertufa they say just to leave it out in the rain to leach. Well, the rains will be here in four months. So I have this under the spigot to kind of get a little wet each day. 

Foraged Bay Leaves

I have never used a bay leaf in my life. So while I am pretty plant-aware I didn’t have any bay trees on my mental map. I drove around looking for one which didn’t work at all since the first tree I stopped to check was eucalyptus and the second was perhaps olive. Plus I set out close to sunset for temperature reasons and the trees turned into shadowy masses real quick.

I honestly tried to visualize my different regular hikes and see if there was a bay tree. There was not. So I went to one of our less usual spots, a walk which I had not memorized, up at Merritt College. I didn’t see a thing until I was nearly under a bay tree. 

Bear was a big help. 

Urban foraging

Today’s survival food- dandelion. 

Our garden has half the footprint of our house and has to be used for grilling, storage, a dog run, shade, and planting. So I can’t have everything my own way and grow whatever I want wherever I want. I have identified the produce I buy the most- tomatoes- and the produce that is most frustrating to buy and store- lettuce. I am focusing my growing efforts on these. 

I’m toying with the idea of only eating homegrown lettuce but at the same time as my lettuces are one quarter inch big, I still have to have salad. I bought a bag of baby spinach because it keeps longer. Part of the bag froze and soiled and the other part stayed fine. I had one more salad from the unspoiled part and then let it go. This waste and short fridge lifespan is why I am prioritizing growing lettuce. Every bag I buy at the the store I hope is the last. I also have a system where if I let something go bad I skip buying it next time. So my next lettuce purchase was butter lettuce. 

Then I got home to cook up salmon and had no spinach to go with it. I went to the front yard (because it is not a dog run) and picked all the clean and young looking dandelions for an experiment. Rinsed in vinegar and water, simmered in two changes of water, added more vinegar. Tasted it- it was sharp, and the leaves didn’t really get smaller when chewed. 

While the salmon was cooking I looked up whether dandelions are safe to eat. I found they upset stomachs sometimes. I decided not to eat all the greens I gathered. 

Mixed with the salmon they were perfect. Exactly right. Delicious.