Huh.
Found this guy among the radish sprouts today. Looks kind of like a mushroom, doesn’t it?
I scooped it out with a spoon and placed him in a bottle cap (if it is a shroom, don’t want it to dissolve my radishes with its shroomy enzymes!!!) so we’ll see what happens, eh? Maybe if I put it in a large enough bucket I could get a fairy ring! That would be so cool.
Yay, got new paints today!
These are the paints we used in colour theory. The colours I have aren’t the correct ones so my mixes end up getting a bit muted or even muddy and it’s been driving me bonkers! I’m perfectly happy using the easy-to-obtain Stevenson brand, but it’s hard to figure out which colour is the right one. The yellow I’ve been using is a cadmium, which has too much red in it and makes icky greens. I have a random collection of blues, all of which have varying levels of unwanted red in them. Blue is the hardest one for me to find. I did end up finding a nice red in Stevenson (think it was quinacridone red (magenta)) but it was quite expensive.
I don’t think the pthalo blue I have is the same in this particular brand which is causing a lot of the trouble but now the trouble is over because I’ve got it. Can’t remember if hansa yellow or hansa yellow light was the right one whoops.
Anyway, about these paints.
Um. They’re great.
They’re very fluid which makes them easy to work with. I particularly like the idea of just popping the top up and squeezing paint out. As stupid as it sounds, I tend to struggle with twist-off caps of just about every variety, and with these I can top up with one hand.
These colours are as close to primary as one could get. The yellow is a pure yellow. The blue is a pure blue. The red is a pure, natural red… none of that yellow that people keep tossing in there! You could make any colour in the world with these three. These are the colours I used to make grey. Nope, not a myth, it totally happens.
Unfortunately, I don’t know where to get these paints. The only place I’ve seen them was at the uni. So I decided to waltz in and pretend I was a student to get them. shhh.
I wonder if there’s a reason that so many bloggers drop off the face of the earth on weekends? :D
Just a gripe:
“Gluten-free”
I see it everywhere now!
Making gluten-free foods is a wonderful thing but what isn’t wonderful is when businesses turn the label into a cash cow. Gluten-free breads and such are expensive because to replace the flour they have to use gums. And gums are very expensive, so businesses must charge more to cover overhead.
But other things, like cheesecake and chocolates and popsicles and what have you that is marketed on other blogs as “gluten-free”, would normally not have any gluten in it in the first place, and thus it becomes an evil marketing tool tricking people into paying more for items for no good reason.
To me, that sounds like taking serious advantage of those poor souls who simply can’t eat whatever they want to. And that is sad.
Of course, I would hope hope hope that my celiac friends would know what gluten is, where it comes from and all of that jazz. After all, if you want to avoid something, you have to know what it is!
GLUTEN is formed when water touches hard flour. Hard flour is usually wheat flour, which is why desperate people often turn to rice flour or other more expensive things.
Wheat flour includes pastry flour and cake flour. The only difference is the content of glutenin and gliadin, the two proteins that form the gluten when it is mixed with water. This is what makes dough stretchy. If the dough stretches and pulls back, you’ve got yourself a gluten. :D
If you’ve got a product that doesn’t contain flour, never called for flour and never even needed flour in the first place, then slapping “gluten-free” on the packaging and raising the price makes you a fucking asshole. So don’t do it.
That’s like slapping “fat-free” onto a bottle of water.
But of course somebody out there is going to completely fall for it and that makes me an amused, but rather sad panda.
So anyway I’ve been done the first art journal for a while now
(Not really the first, I had to do one in high school. Maybe I’ll upload it someday)
Ahem. So just like the journal before it, this book is rather bursting at the seams and it’s difficult to place it between other books on the shelf :D
But so now I’ve just wanted to make use of the notebooks I’ve collected the recent year or two before collecting any more!
Specifically this little gem Lindz gave me for no good reason (isn’t that nice?)
Because the perfect/hardcover binding isn’t as flexible and forgiving as spiral I’m putting down the papers and glue for now… which means I’ve got to go out and get that paint soon.
It’s going to be a jumbled sort of mess which is kind of what I’m going for since that’s pretty much all my brain has been lately.
Has it really only been the first week back to class? Yikes! Already this week, I failed to study for an overrated math test, failed to plan a production day and failed to do whatever homework I’ve wanted to do because I’m sure there was SOMETHING I intended to do this week.
Oh, I failed to pick up poles for my beans and peas. Whoops. At least they’ve got their own soils now. The gerbera I split off of the mother is dying, but something else is growing in its place and I’m kind of curious about what it’s going to be.
So instead of doing productive things I’ve had my head stuck in a bloody long book! The Other Boleyn Girl is seriously kicking my ass. It’s like that old cliche about a train wreck. But I can’t put it down. I’m sure I’m genuinely interested, but the fact that I can’t put it down is probably due to it’s length of about eight hundred pages. I want it to be done and over with. So I read on the bus, I read on the train, I read while I’m walking (haven’t tripped up yet), I read on my break at school.
Week’s been tough already though it’s one of the last of Level One. I’m sick of making pies. I think I suck at it, really. And next week we have super-huge, big deal, can’t do it ever again practical tests that are a few days long. I suck at the actual putting it in the oven and baking it part so I’m a little worried. That, and there’s an unwelcome apathetic side that comes out when I’m at school. I should care more about the quality of my work than about what my peers are thinking and/or doing.
So tired when I get home now, that I go to bed at eight sometimes. Don’t do any studies or homework. Don’t learn any new signs. Don’t work on any paintings. Barely even journal. Just sleep, read, go to school (or work, if the universe hates me and it’s a weekend).
Got locked out of the house for a couple of hours yesterday, and today the sky train totally failed but at least I got to go home eventually. SO GLAD that it’s sunny and I’m immersed in books during this time. Oi.
Oh yeah, and creepers on the bus who like to touch me. Such a fun week. This weekend better damn be easy! *shakes fist*
So I ordered this fantastic dress and it arrived from Argentina in THREE DAYS! Awesome! Tracking is always a little wonky… Does it really go to richmond and then out to memphis for no reason and then back to richmond? or is that just buggy? Who knows. The packaging was not intact so I guess it could have gone just about anywhere.
And on a whim I am attempting to join the lovely package exchange, because mail is wonderful, especially cute mail full of love. See if you can squeeze your way in there before it reaches the limit!
Back to the daily grind for me!
Will be available tomorrow
[Etsy is a little bit on hold for the moment, which will most likely turn out to be for no good reason and a week wasted. Ah well.
Been quite a shopaholic lately… I’m struggling without proper yellow paint (yay mud! sigh) and my seedlings are getting tall so I must get soil very soon. Also, even after a couple of weeks off, my hands are still a bit unhappy so I must dole out the cash and get them some proper lotion from LUSH, which as we all know is rather expensive.]
So about this. Browsing etsy and visiting daily blogs, I end up wanting to do everything. So I try making journals, I try a little sewing & I try some new materials but often I end up wasting a lot of time. I waste time on a regular basis so this shouldn’t bother me. :D Who doesn’t, really? I mean, we spend the first 18 years of our lives wasting time in the obedience training that is schooling. It kind of catches on.
I always kind of wanted to do everything really well. A big lesson for this year is the more I get out of life, the more I want.
Maybe once we get something we want, we see how momentarily happy we become. And I guess, like any addiction, we want to maintain that happiness by getting more of what we want.
I made the mistake of watching Prozac Nation again which brings up storm clouds I forgot existed. Oh well!
Anyway so I feel like I’m going back to my roots a little bit. Beading. Something I learned as a teenager during one of my first pow wows. Bought a single vial of seed beads for $1.50 and a pack of size ten needles, six of which Mum promptly help me break the moment we got home. Got the hang of it pretty quickly. It’s really easy to get the hang of something when you see a lot of ugly pieces and you think of ways to avoid making the same mistake.
I guess learning from mistakes is a lot easier than just copying things that were done right.
I learned how to make beaded dreamcatchers just by having to wait to use the bathroom. My parents had a big one hanging on the wall next to the bathroom door and I would spend a lot of time just examining it. I haven’t seen anyone do these on etsy so that’s something I might consider the next time I find hoops.
There’s lots of butterflies in my work, though I try to avoid it. Maybe I should embrace it? I can see it now… Just another typical female obsessed with the beauty of butterflies.
I don’t think that’s really true.
Butterflies chose me.
They are deeply entwined in my life. I feel deep guilt thinking about the time I was taught to kill them. I was good at killing and maiming things as a child. Hmm. I remember the first time I’d been to a butterfly garden and just being covered with them. I won first place selling butterfly garden seeds in elementary school. I trained for two years at fancy shawl dancing, which happens to be a butterfly dance. Now they just tease me on occasion. Once a butterfly even tried to kill me by attempting to throw me off my bike into traffic at high speed. That would have been fitting.
Nobody suspects!