Mr. Slug

I met this slug a long time ago, over the summer I guess. As astonished as I was that he had made his way up to my third floor porch, I was even more amazed to see he made it all the way up there with a giant hole in his side - it went all the way to the other side of his body. Don't slugs have guts?

More Food???

Yup, you got it. Here's some stuff I've baked recently...

sundried tomato & rosemary rolls

the sponge

incorporating the good stuff

the dough

est voila

these were absolutely delicious and i made them thinking that they'd be great for thanksgiving. it turned out they were, and all i could imagine while munching them was how delish they'd be with turkey and stuffing and cranberry sauce. unfortunately, i forgot to bring the recipe to my mom's house with me for the holiday, and so instead i made...

sweet potato rolls


i also made a really yummy
apple blueberry pie

i also made a cherry torte, and i used the cherry juice as the base for a blueberry sauce, to be poured over the apples in the pie. i cooked down a package of blueberries into the juice, strained it, put it back on the heat, added some spices, a little corn starch, and was good to go.

straining the cooked blueberries to make the sauce

yum yum, the sauce

a bad picture of the inside

nom nom nom

Apple Crumb...

I don't know what you'd call this. It's based on a recipe I have for a dessert called 'cherry crumb torte', but I dont think this is really a torte. Anyways, the cherry one is one of my favorite desserts to make - unbelievably easy and looks gorgeous everytime. I had a bag of some getting-old apples and some big hunkin fresh guys from the farmers market the other day all ready to be used for a pie. When I was cooking the apples though I decided it'd be delicious to try the crumb idea with apples instead of cherries. I was right - it was!

I forgot to put an egg in the crumb mix, but I think it worked out perfectly. I was really worried when I realized I had done that cause I thought it was going to fall, but it didn't! It's a little doughy in the center layer but otherwise it's delicious - the apples are AMAZING in texture and taste and the top and bottom crust are crisp and sweet. I shaved some manchego on top but could have done much much more.

Enamel Bunny

A bunny charm I made for my enamels class - he's jointed!

Illustration Model

In my illustration class that I go to way more often than I planned to, we're building model rooms to photograph for reference. We were supposed to pick a room that was the scene of an emotionally impressive moment in our lives, so that we're invested in the scene and will therefore be invested in our drawings. I chose something that happened in the living room of the apartment Rachel and I shared on Evergreen St., the night before we moved out - therefore it's pretty empty. I'm not done yet - and these are really (really) shitty photos, but I wanted to get this up here before I forgot.






I've still got to make a boombox, papasan chair and light out of clay - then the figures.

Illuminated Text

I've been working on the project I started talking about in my last post. I don't really like the text I wrote but I think it works really well as a text to illuminate. So far I've only done work on one spread - I have a feeling the book will be four spreads, 8 pages. I'm really liking where it's going, though. I have been borrowing the general gist of the decorative aspects from manuscript plates I've found in the books I have on illuminated manuscripts. I sort of want to go back and re-do the initial letter with gold leaf - that was my original intention but I don't have tools to do a small guilding job like that. Hopefully a trip to Michaels will solve that problem.

Here are some pictures of the work in progress -









All I want to do is work on it! Wonderfully inconvenient though, it takes a long time to do anything on it, and without a doubt a very certain calm and focused mindset (which is not always easy to come by...)

I'm working with acryla gouache for the color and a higgins calligraphy ink and flexible nib pen for the text

Also, check out my mixtape blog, i just uploaded a new tape chock full of 80's pop bombs and i bet you'd dig it!