Intertwined & Living Cuisine & still too damn busy

I am in a sea of books that I haven’t been able to read yet! I stole a peek at Intertwined (Lexi Boeger’s new book) and was totally inspired by the wild yarn creations, and I read some of the glossary in Living Cuisine and now I really want to buy cherimoyas, even though I doubt they can be found in the stores around here. I can’t wait for some time to read, and experiment with raw food…

Other stuff I’ve been too busy to acknowledge: Jean of the Assertive Cancer Patient sent me some of her cool Boycott October pins, which I shared with my mom. Thanks, Jeanne!

I’ll post more when I have time: for the time being, it’s a nuthouse around here!

wiki’d sweater

wicked sweater

Originally uploaded by Xao_T

I finally finished a Wicked! This sweater pattern’s been haunting me for almost 2 years. I tried it in two different cotton yarns, and frogged it both times, and then had a conversation with a very experienced knitter about cotton, and she gave me the idea that maybe the pattern wasn’t to blame, but my fiber choice. She was right!
This is done in Cascade 220, and it fits a little loosely on me, but the shaping keeps it from looking floppy. I like oversized vesty things and this works perfectly. In the pic, I’m wearing it over a black cashmere turtleneck & it looked pretty good! A nice, transitional piece for late winter into spring, and then into fall again.

In other news, I’ve been making various salad dressings with Vegenaise, and I can’t say enough about this shit. It’s awesome. It tastes just like mayo! I heart Vegenaise. Oh, and pineapple. I’ve had about half a pineapple this afternoon. Something about detoxing myself from the effects of the Horrible Cold: I wanted cole slaw, pineapple, and a big handful of dried cherries. Must be needing some nutrients, so I went with it.

I also made the evilest daikon radish pickles on the face of the Earth. They’re so salty, gingery, and vinegary that your hair stands on end, but you want more of them anyway. I think my fingers will be swollen tomorrow, they’re THAT salty. Evil!

It was a good weekend.

More DIY, less die

The focus of the blog is clearly shifting away from my cancer exploits & I’m okay with that. It’s a welcome development, and I am amazed to think of all the things I’ve yet to do, that have been waiting for me to get better.

As I write this, I’ve got a big gloop of watery indigo “dough” on my head: I’m on Day 2 of my hair-coloring adventure. Yesterday, I did the henna part, that makes it orange-y, and today, I do the dark blue part, that makes it brown-black. It’s still a fascinating process to me, after well over a year of this method. My hair’s longer than ever, and straighter than ever, and much healthier than it was during the years of chemical processes. Yay.

I’ve got an art project brewing, one that is more high-tech than you might be used to, coming from me, but tied in to craft, so please bear with me as I feel my way with this new idea. It’s QR codes. Right now, I I’m knitting a simple one that I made in black & white fair isle colorwork, aided by the wonderful chart generator at microrevolt. When it’s done, you should be able to take a photo of the block with your cellphone, and if your cellphone reads QR codes, you’ll be taken to diynotdie.com: the URL is embedded in the information in the knitting. My next one will be intarsia, and contain a John Baldessari quote, I think.

This isn’t new technology by any means, but it’s caught my attention, and I want to try doing some art-craft stuff that brings technology and craft together. Companies are using this technology for promotions and stuff like that, but I see huge potential to spread code, patterns, poetry, artwork, prose, etc.

In other news, I’m still struggling with my horrible cold, which has invaded my head & chest, despite repeated doses of Thai food, which usually does the trick for me. Hmmm.

More later…noses to blow, hair to de-goo, you know.

amazing!

I love Ravelry for many reasons, and here’s another one: I was just looking at people’s projects, and then followed a link to a Raveler’s website, and found this amazing site of a performance artist who has to be seen, not described:

http://www.lbufano.com/work.php?page=current

Check it out! Check them both out! Girlistic has a really interesting Winter issue out, which I’m planning to dive into later today.

Things and stuff

Thanksgiving…was good. My second cousin Rebecca was there, and is full of all this wildcrafting knowledge, which surprised the hell out of me. At this moment, I’m wearing a bracelet made of milkweed fiber, that Rebecca also made. My mother’s wearing one made from dogbane (another weed). We also brewed some sumac tea, which was surprisingly good. It’s funny for me to find pockets of nonconformity in my extended family: I think for the most part, my mom & I are the weirdo, artsy-fartsy ones, and everyone is pretty happy not to be.

Welcome to our weird club, Rebecca!

In other news, Rebel1in8 grrrl genius Jackie’s visit has left a Jackie-shaped hole around here. Every time I mention her name, one or the other of my parents will smile and say,”Oh, she’s so NICE!” and wonders when she’ll be back. I’ll keep you posted on that one.

minor freakout

I submitted an article draft to Etsy.com’s Storque (their online mag), for the Craftivism column & I haven’t gotten any comments back yet from them…and the article is supposed to run tomorrow. YIKES!!

Here’s to hoping it was a clean first draft & they were cool with it…and that they’ll run it in the morning. Oh, nervous stomach!

This is only the beginning of my adventures in writing: I’m planning to use that article as a sort of writing sample for Craft (the sister pub to Make, that O’Reilly publishes), about our dear Rebel Jackie’s sartorial revolution.

Wish me luck! Ow!

Apples and applesandapplesandapples

Just knocked down one of my many tasks for this weekend, but starting the apple-picking just plain left me scared shitless of how much is still left to do!

We have five 35-year old apple trees in the yard, and my mother requested that we pick the apples while she’s in Colorado, since that’s usually her task.  These are the ugliest apples you’ve ever seen. Perhaps once they were a domesticated Macintosh or Delicious, but they’ve all been warped into being some strange ugly green-yellow apple that just yells,”Don’t eat me!” But they make the best damn applesauce and pie and just about anything that’s cooked. My mom eats them raw, cut up carefully to avoid the various scars and inhabitants (i.e. orchard worms), but I don’t see how she does it.

So I’m busy as HELL, but there’s these hundreds of apples staring at me, every time I look out the window, and I’m just not able to ignore them, and let them be taken by the deer and yellow jackets. Just like when I was heinously busy, and my mom got HGE (tick bite illness with a 105 degree fever) just as all the green beans needed to be picked. That’s gardening, farming, what have you. There’s no time to NOT harvest, unless you want to throw away your money and time, and it’s not a matter of convenience. Growing your own food is not convenient at all. It’s essential, and it’s rewarding, but you’ll hardly be well-rested.

I started at the smallest tree, and picked about 25 pounds of apples, dodging the flying yellow jackets and trying to ignore the ones who were threatening to sting my toes…and that’s about 1/2 of what’s on this tree alone. So, we’re looking at a couple hundred pounds of apples, once all the trees are done. It’s daunting, to say the least.

I finished my work in the early morning, and am summoning up the strength to go tackle the Great Frog Move of 2007  (see today’s earlier entry), and it’s a damn glorious autumn day & I want time to just experience it & stop all this mad rushing about. But convenience is for other people.

Foibles

I’m going bonkers.

I’ve worked every weekend for the last month, as well as some evenings, and combined with the move out of the cottage, I’ve been coasting into Meltdown City, pop. 1. On top of that, I brazenly pitched an article idea to Etsy’s new online magazine dept., and they said,”Sure! We’d like it for publication on Oct.1.”

Gulp. Ok, so I work at an agency, so I know how to churn, and I’m comfortably sure that my draft is competent and interesting enough to be submitted on Wednesday, but even so, I picked a weird-ass time to try and start writing anything other than opinionated blog posts. (As we all know, I ROCK the opinionated blog post. It’s just trying to be more journalistic that might kill me.)

In other news, all the apples are ripening, and I’m too busy to pick them, but I gotta; Wootini and his tank are at the cottage, wondering where the fuck everybody went*,  I was so busy that I didn’t have time to attend (or brain cells to remember) an 8 AM gastroenterologist’s appt. last week; there’s so much laundry to do that I could ski on the piles. Modern living. Fuck it.

[* if you've never moved a live (wet) 20-gallon aquarium and its residents before, let me tell you: for stress, muscle aches, and horror-thrills aplenty, there's little that can beat it.] 

Tagged

Kerry tagged me, and I thought I should finally try one of these memes, so here goes:

The rules:
1. Link to your tagger and post these rules.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself: some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post and list their names (linking to them).
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment at their blogs.

7 Random Facts about me:

1. I crashed the family car when I was about 2 years old. (and it was the last time my dad would ever leave me in the car with the engine running)

2. I have a cello, which I know how to play, but which isn’t in working order right now, and a guitar that is in perfect condition, but I don’t know how to play it.

3. I am allergic to milk products, so I eat pizza by ripping the cheese off. And I like it that way.

4. I had my first gallery show at age 19, and my last gallery show at age 22. And I’ve been sitting on my ass ever since.

5. I work in technology, even though I majored in sculpture and painting.

6. I know how to cut a gemstone cabochon.

7. I like to sing in the car. Loudly. And usually to Matson Jones, Cat Power, or Death from Above 1979.

I’m tagging Rebel1in8, Laurie, Emily, Pippi, Mary, Tori and Lori. All of these fine ladies have been part of my journey of the past 15+ months, and I am honored to tell them now: “Tag! You’re it!”

Thank god it’s not called “boobydance”.

“Bellydance” is one of those dumb terms that manages to corral all one’s notions of an activity into a few technically-incorrect inches of the anatomy. After reading & commenting to several Ravelry threads, I’m realizing that the dance bug is biting hard, and I’m guessing that my long hiatus is over. Obviously, a couple of things have changed:

1. My most recent co-dancer moved to Tennessee. (I’m not a big troupe person. I prefer solo or duo performances, and I think you can do a lot of very interesting, complex dances with just two dancers)

2. My back’s been giving me mucho trouble these last 2 years.

3. Oh yeah…I had several parts of my body removed, due to cancer. Namely, the Boobsey Twins, which, while they didn’t have a spotlight function in my dances (after all, I *was* an A-cup), they *did* do something towards emphasizing a nice shoulder shimmy. Now…it’s just shoulder shimmy. Period. Hence, the name of today’s blog post.

Indulge me while I publicly strategize: my ab work is pretty good, and I can start working on reverse bellyrolls,  and side-to-sides, my hip range is good, my arms are very good (and I’m not as freaked out about using them as I was a few months ago). I don’t necessarily want to perform anymore, but I think I can at least have a good time.

Bellydance is one place I don’t think I want to take the convo about boobage…but I might change my mind. Strange as it seems, bellydance classes, especially the ones taught by women in or near menopause, really  can advance feminist ideas , which pleasantly surprised me. Before I even took a class, I feared that bellydance was all tinkly submissive women with harem collars on. To my surprise, I found a bunch of self-assured badasses who had fantastic self-esteem and who would have broken a man in half before being ordered around by one.

(ps. If I find that ridiculous posed & heavily Photoshopped picture of me in tribal gear, I’ll post it, but only to make you laugh, dear hearts.)