Wood!

We have been spending lots of time working at the JMU woodshop and at home on our various wood projects, including Jeremy's chambered paulownia fish surfboard and my new wood sculptures. They are both long winded but rewarding projects. Here is a little peek at the dust we have been kicking up!

This is the board half-glued. The strips of paulownia have to be glued on one by one. Its going to be rad!

Bass wood. Half-way done!

Woad & Weld

This year we have been growing Woad & Weld for pigments. Last week we made our first attempt at processing pigment from a plant to moderate success. I am going to post some pictures from our Woad processing. Woad is also known as "Isatis Tinctoria" or "Dyers Woad". The dye chemical in Woad is the same  chemical that makes the blue color in true indigo, but in a smaller concentration. Woad is in the same plant family as cabbage and mustard greens and grows much better here in Virginia than true indigo, a tropical plant, would.

Here is our pigment plot pre harvesting. The Woad plant we harvested is on the bottom left.

Cutting the leaves, much in the same way we harvest kale or other greens. We needed a plastic grocery bag full and we had exactly that. 

The Woad needed to be washed well, first in the sink and then dipped in a bucket to make sure that as much dirt/sediment was removed as possible (so it would not be confused with the pigment sediment later).

You can see the blue in the leaves before processing! Now we just have to get that stuff out of there!

Sparing all of the details for this post, the woad has to be brought up to a specific temperature (see the candy thermometer in there?!) and kept there for 10 minutes. After that it must be iced in a bath to cool it down quickly (about 50 degrees in 5 minutes!). Once you reach the correct temperature the soda ash is added and the blue is created. If you add the soda ash when it is too hot you will destroy your blue.  After this we got to aerate the bath with a mixer for ten minutes and watch it foam up bright green and then blue and back to green again. This was pretty exciting. 

Once you have your liquid you pour it in jars and let the sediment settle down. Then every two hours or so you syphon out as much water as possible without disturbing the sediment on the bottom until you end up with one combined jar. Then you syphon some more! Then you add clear water and guess what... you syphon more again... until you have clear water over blue sediment. This is the pigment. 

This is a brief description, the actual directions are much more technical. The directions we got said not to be discouraged if the first go was more of a grey blue, which is what our is. It probably means our plants need more nitrogen so we will fertilize more and hopefully the fall batch will be "blue-er". One curious thing is that our waste bath where we put everything we syphoned off had a bright blue streak in it when I poured it out! To be honest, we were kind of "blue" about that. (Sorry couldn't resist!)  But seriously, where did that blue come from??!! Research research. We will post more serious directions once we have this thing down pat. Until then, behold our sediment... 

After many hours of syphoning liquid with a turkey baster this was disproportionately exciting. 

We also harvested our Weld, which yields a historical yellow pigment. Here is the plant in all of its glory:

It was all sprawly and attracted bees and flea beetles....

and then we cut it down! In this hot weather it dried to a crisp in less than two days. We will post more on this one once we process the pigment.

Oh Jeremy

So I got one of my birthday/anniversary presents early this year because J knew I would need it as I get ready for my Cinders show. I have coveted this big beautiful sketchbook for nearly a year & here it is:

Its hard to tell from the picture, but this thing is almost two inches thick, kind of like an old textbook. I love it!!! And its just in time for me finishing up the beautiful sketchbook he made me (still my fave).

I am working diligently on "An Unearthly Child" which opens at Cinders in September... Heres a few previews...

"Eventually You Get Used To It"

"Parasite Planet"

Hot Hot Hot & Pickles Too!

Well, if you live in the Mid-Atlantic region of the USA you already know that it has been ridiculously hot here for the last two weeks. We have had to water the garden up to 3 times a day just to keep things from scorching to dust! Alas, it is July and good good things are happening in the garden like cucumbers, sunflowers, peppers, our first eggplant, strawberries, and TOMATOES! I don't think we are going to have a huge yield of tomatoes this year because the heat has stunted them so, they are usually twice as tall as they are by now, but the SunGold & Eva Purple Ball varieties that we grew this year are really tasty! We have eaten only a few but there are a lot of blushing fruits out there and I cannot wait until we can eat them all up! Here is a photo of those little buddies first:

The lighter colored cherry tomatoes are the SunGold variety, the smaller ones are Matt's Wild Cherry which are just okay, and the big one is Eva Purple Ball which is fantastic.

Cucumbers are always too productive for our household so we end up sharing a lot of them. This year all of our neighbors ALSO have lots of cukes so I started looking for pickle recipes. We don't have the full canning set up or the $$ to get it so I looked into making refrigerator pickles. Wow, there are a lot of folks who are super into this stuff and lots of different recipes to try. I chose one that had coriander and dill in it since both are also growing in our garden. These pickles sit in the fridge for a week and then you can eat them - after that they are good for about 2 months. And you have to shake them everyday which is kind of like a herby-snowglobe. 

I still have a few more  days to wait ! I will report on their delicious or "non" delicious status soon.

For the last few years we have grown our large garden with the intent of feeding ourselves, and sharing, but also for sharing with people that are outside of immediate friends & neighbors. Our local food hub has a program where you can plant a row for the hungry, or just drop off donations for local shelters & soup kitchens. This is not something we really talk about a lot on here but I thought it might be good to point out to all of you gardeners out there that you can make donations, even one time donations, that will feed a lot of people and make sure that your extra food does not go to waste. Here is a picture of our last donation:

This is approximately. 9.75lbs of green beans! 

A few more garden things:

Look at this guy! We love our red cabbages! Here they are all cleaned up and shiny:

As you can see, while our cabbage is doing alright, the grass is dying.

Hope everyone is having fun outside, drinking plenty of water, and eating lots of fun stuff from their gardens, or from their neighbor's gardens! 

More soon!

xo,

Allyson

Oh yeah...

I said I was going to post an ocean picture too...

Here is J with his Alaia that he made. He is working on a chambered paulownia surfboard this summer which will be super amazing. I am confident that J can build anything once he decides to. Constant radness.

J's new handmade shaping station with another alaia in progress.

In NC with the beach house longboard & a giant towel looking like the ocean wizard that he is.

The water was cold but crystal clear.

While we are on the topic of the ocean... even if you are far away and it doesn't effect your personal day-to-day, don't forget about this...

Its still gushing. :(

Hello Summer!

I cannot believe it is almost July! We have been enjoying summer, time off, art making, gardening, and the ocean. Just this week it finally feels like we can let our shoulders down and really relax and enjoy some time off at home together & it is awesome! I am posting some pics from our garden, the beach, and such! More can be seen on my flickr. More updates soon!

Our garden from L to R, sunflowers, flowers, pigment plants, soybeans, greenbeans, millet grass, lima beans, squash, strawberries, chocolate mint, eggplant, echinacea, collard greens, woad, weld, tomatoes, marigolds, various peppers, brussels, cucumbers, onions, chard, kale, fennel, rosemary, peppermint, and cilantro! 

Jeremy is a sweetie-pie! Look at this beautiful birdhouse he made me!

Jeremy and I donated drawings to a benefit for the Gulf Coast Oil Spill that Meighan from My love for you is a stampede of horses is organizing! Go check it out, get a great deal and support a very important cause very dear to J & I. 

http://www.myloveforyou.typepad.com/

More soon! Hope everyone is enjoying summer!

Happy Birthday Fricktoriabee

When I was 18 I adopted a tiny tiny kitten... very much against the wishes of my roommates. From the beginning Fricky was trouble, she bit, scratched, mewed, and tried to eat, everything! But man was she cute! I think it was, and still is, her main form of survival mechanism. She caused her share of relationship problems due to her antics, even caused a house fire (in hindsight I think she was wrongfully accused! :) )... but I loved her anyhow. I still do! And when I met Jeremy he loved her too, the way that I do, in spite of her obvious personality issues... which made me only love him even more. Because, basically, my cat is kind of an asshole... A really cute, affectionate Dr. Fricky & Mrs. Hyde. She is either a doll or a devil. She does have her charms though, if you are sick or upset she will sit with you and watch over you very quietly until you stop. She is very sweet and really just wants to hang out with us all of the time. And she is a pretty lady. Fricktoria turns 14 today! I can see signs of her aging now, she has arthritis, she sort of squeaks when you pick her up... but she still runs laps around the house in the middle of the night, climbs on our shoulders, plays with her superball, and begs to go outside. I love this cat, she has been one of my best friends these 14 years.