Notebook: Part I (inside).

Pocket Moleskines: 12-dollar nuggets of goodness, perfect for taking on voyages. But I can't afford to feed this habit, and I tend to put off writing in them because they're so nice I don't want to "waste" them. So, last November or so, I checked out Michael Shannon's page on making your own faux-Moleskine notebook, and this art has become something of a (benign) habit. Particularly once I realized that you can use ANY kind of paper. My favorite is graph paper, but you can also use...

Staff paper!

Parchment paper! (faux vellum)

Once you've chosen, you take a sheet of paper and -- well, you know the song... YOUUUU MUST RIP IT!

Into four pieces. You then fold each of these in half, leaving you with folios. (Folia?)

I think I'm going to start using a paper guillotine, because matching these can be a pain. Both of those sheets have the fold on the opposite side (away from us, in the picture), so you have left-fuzzy and right-fuzzy folios.
Now we collate them into signatures. For this weight of paper, I used 8 folios/signature, which makes mini-"books" of 16 pages. Just stick one folio inside another, and if you have fuzzy edges, it works best to alternate "left" and "right" folios.

Once you've made 6 signatures, you can put them together into a block. As you can see, that wavy edge-pattern you've seen on some old books is due to the folios being collated after the paper was cut.

Lovely, no?


...Of course, you can't make these stay together until you've punched holes through them, which was the secret catch to this post. Oh man, you'll have to take another ten minutes now. I win!!

Sew anyway...
Then you sew them together. On this one, I forgot that one is meant to punch four holes, rather than three, but it still worked... just won't be as even.


So now you've got your signatures all sewn; you do still need to smear glue on and near the spine, then press cheesecloth (or gauze, like I use) into the glue, to hold everything together nice and firmly. Leave this assembly pressed between a rock and a hard place, and move on to the cover.

And once you have that, it is time to take over the world. And/or make some endpapers. And find something to cover it with. Part II to come soon!

P.S. I made more tarts this morning. <3

Apricot-peach tarts

Having lived in England until I was seven, I treasure memories of toad in the hole, bangers'n'mash, lemon curd, clotted cream, sherbert fountains, liquorice allsorts, Cadbury Flakes, mince tarts, lemon tarts, strawberry tarts, and so on. Fast-forward to the present day, and you have a 22-year-old who, at the slightest wink of opportunity, puts everything and anything into a crisp, flaky shell of golden pastry. Into TARTS.

A recent dumpster-diving success left us with some perfectly ripe, somewhat squashed peaches and apricots. While we gorged ourselves on the accompanying melon, strawberries, cherry tomatoes, 50+ pounds of bread, etc., I sought to preserve some of the lovely, sun-colored stone fruit by roughly chopping the flesh and freezing it in cubes (with the juice and a little bit of water). Having rediscovered some of these cubes, I made some sweet nuggets of delectableness. TARTS!

I use the Joy of Cooking vegetable oil crust recipe, but since these are tart-sweet, I left out the salt. The fruit still has a biting quality, which melded perfectly with the neutrally crisp crusts. The recipe is incredibly simple; for 12 tarts:
• preheat oven to 425º F.
• mix 1/3 cup plus 1 T vegetable oil and 1/4 cup cold soymilk (vanilla would probably be nice) (until creamy)
• pour this over 1 1/3 cups flour
• stir with fork until blended
Once you have the dough, pull off balls about 1" in diameter, smash them between your palms, and press these into the hollows in a greased muffin pan (only coming about a half to 3/4" up the sides). Bake for 10-12 minutes, until gorgeous.
Heat the cubes in the microwave, smashing occasionally with fork, until quite warm. Spoon into the baked crusts. Absorb.

Best flavors so far:
• Apricot-peach
• Orange with dandelion jelly (amazing)
• Fresh strawberry-raspberry-blueberry
• Fresh cherry with strawberry sauce
• Dandelion jelly with huckleberries
• Dandelion jelly with heirloom tomato (so good)




Lust!!!

cheerful

My job, political canvassing door-to-door, is not particularly fulfilling, though it is outside and pays well. That and sad music videos make me need a bit of a jump-start. So:
Muppet Danny Boy
Swedish Chef making banana split
Muppet dancer
Father Ted - My Lovely Horse
Father Ted - Spiderbaby
Introduction to Maru the cat
William Shatner "sings" Common People
Men at Work - Land Down Under

Have a good day. :)

Fridge tea

Is spectacular. Inspired by accounts (such as a recent story on NPR's The Splendid Table) of sun-tea alternatives, I made my own. It is perfect for Michigan summer, when the temperature is satanic and you can pick a handful of fresh mulberries to go with it; this method makes tea without bitterness. Take a teabag and drop it in a bottle of water, stick it in the fridge for a few hours or overnight, and you have a bottle of amazing. I've been experimenting with flavors, thanks to the local People's Food Co-op and By the Pound bulk foods store, which both carry ingredients as well as tea blends for cheap. I could use a tea ball, but I was given some marvelous fillable tea bags, and they do admirably.

Good flavors so far:
• Earl Grey
• Raspberry
• Rooibos with lemon
• Lemon-ginger-licorice
• Lipton "red tea" (rooibos with strawberry and things)

Magic ingredient for black teas: sweetened condensed milk.

wood carving

A few years ago, I believe when I was still very into the Lord of the Rings, I told my grandpa that I wanted to carve wood. He responded with approval and gave me the whittling set that he had abandoned, and soon after that I also abandoned it. But the soapstone carving has reawakened a jonesin' for such things, so maybe tomorrow I'll put up some pictures (if I get anywhere with it).

I'm looking for a very gentle way to polish the soapstone smooth selectively (to highlight particular elements)... further updates as events warrant...

Soapstone carving: "Fly"

As my co-op's maintenance manager, I get to fix things. Like faucets. Which means taking out the truck to Lowe's in search of such things. On this trip, I couldn't find the proper one, but I ended up in the welding section and found this treasure: for $2.31, seven sticks of soapstone, clouded with grey and eminently carve-able, stonework for the tight of budget.

What you need:
• soapstone (used for marking welds, apparently): hardware store
• small, sharp flathead screwdriver: hardware store
• damage-able surface

I had a look at the dark swirls in the stone, with the sun behind it and also by wiping it with a wet cloth, to see what sort of pattern would fit.


I made two pieces: the grey area above became clouds, and the other part got cut (score and snap)...



...and became a feather.


The form starts with a lightly scratched outline, and then I start scraping around it with the flat of the screwdriver head. I slope the scraped part inward, so as to create the illusion of a raised design. Details are added, the grades are run over a few times for smoothness, and we have our design.

Fortunately for me, the pieces of stone are cut somewhat roughly, not polished; in this case, the cross-hatching from the saw became texture detail on the feather. The clouds came out less satisfactorily, but I still like the piece.
The first one got a touch of Russian - "летай", the imperative "fly". The second didn't really need anything more on the front, so the back got "небо": "sky". I may do a couple more and make it a series...

As a final touch, I put my stamp on the side.

Et voilà! Two pendants, perhaps a few dollars, and marvelous occupation for an hour or two as the job search continues.

Experiment.

Time for new things. My grand plan for using creative exploration as a source of (possible, minuscule) funds is in place! First and foremost, I will be documenting the exploration of various art media, but any of the examples you see here will be put up for sale on Etsy.

Enjoy!