Overambitious creativity

Posted on March 16, 2011 by HappyGoth

No, really. I don’t mean this as negatively as it sounds. It’s more a statement of fact.

I am my own worst enemy. In no particular order, I can do the following things: marble paper, embroider, knit, sew, paint, draw, spin, stamp, print, glue, fold, bind books, illuminate, work leather, cook, play piano, play the ukulele, make jewelry, dance, and about six other things I can’t remember at the moment.

That sounds like a really impressive list, but it’s just a list. Out of the things on there, I can do maybe four well. I’m sort of okay at the rest, and will likely remain that way.

Why this sudden burst of self-inspection? Well, I was lucky enough to be able to attend TEDxAtlanta yesterday, and the theme of the talks was creativity. I was very interested in this particular subject because as you can probably tell, I consider myself to be a rather creative person. Anybody whose motto is “that’s too expensive, but I could probably make one myself” is a creative person. So I had something in common with each and every speaker up there on stage.

The one thing that I don’t have in common with them is focus. Focus is so important to creativity, because you can  be sort of good at a lot of things or really good at one or two things, and the people who are really good at one or two things are the people who do amazing work. It frustrates me sometimes that I do okay work, but nothing particularly amazing. I’ve had to reign myself in with the SCA, because I want to sew and embroider and dance and sing and bind books, and while I’m dividing my creative time among all those things, none of them ever see real progress.

Anyway, hearing India.Arie and Elizabeth Turk and Victoria Rowell and Armin Vit talk about the things they know best was really eye-opening. They all do astonishing things, because all their time goes into something focused. India makes music. Elizabeth makes sculptures. Victoria dances. Armin collates and comments on all of the best/worst design out there (and designs well, too).

So now, while I may not have great clothes to wear and I may not be the most prolific knitter ever, I think maybe I’m going to play some killer ukulele and make some bloody amazing books (but not all at the same time).

___

Incidentally, another talk was about alternative learning styles and folks with ADD, and Sally Hogshead talked about shortening attention spans, both subjects I feel are relevant to my current creative output.

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Auction score!

Posted on March 12, 2011 by HappyGoth

I mentioned before that there was an auction house in my neighborhood that does monthly estate auctions. Last time I had my eye on a lovely rug that I was quickly outbid on. Afterward, I mentioned it to some friends, who were immediately interested.

So last night WH, Tori, Jennie and I wandered over to see what there was to see.

We started with some free barbecue and veggies (yum baked sweet potato and smoked chicken wings), and then watched the auction proceedings. We were early on, so the slower, bid-gathering auctioneer was on duty. While we waited for him to get to things we wanted, we looked through a lot of books (mostly in Russian) and discovered an angsty college diary, complete with random naked photo tucked in the middle. I bid on a small lot of lamps and things, which had been there last month but which apparently nobody wanted. I got it for $10. The lamp is kind of weird:

It is the brightest lamp known to man. We’re going to change out the bulb and possibly the dome (which appears to be a standard display dome). It’s cool, but would be cooler with an Edison bulb.

Also in the lot was a hideous, broken faux silver jewelry box and the thing I was actually hoping to get, a brass cutwork candle lantern:

This is going to be my SCA lantern. It’s so lovely! And when you light the candle, it makes pretty patterns through the lattice:

And then they switched auctioneers, to the guy who says that all furniture is mid-century modern or Victorian, all glassware is Depression glass and all things taller than they are wide are phallic (at one point he auctioned off a vase that we joked was a phallic mid-century modern Depression glass piece). To his credit, he did auction off a mid-century freestanding bar and an Eames-style lounger, plus a decanter that looked like it might actually be Depression glass. Anyway, he was the auctioneer for the rugs, which worked out in my favor. See, if you are a lady, that works in your favor, because he likes ladies. There were several Persian runners hanging on one wall, and I had my eye on two of them. One I bid on but the bidding went $100 over what I wanted to spend, so I gave up on that. Then the next one came up, and there was a brief little bidding battle, and I bid $150, expecting to be immediately outbid. Nobody moved, and he looked around the room, a little surprised, closing the bidding at my $150. And the rug is mine! It’s really very lovely:

It’s long enough to cover half of our hallway without getting in the way of the attic ladder. This photo is fuzzy, but good for scale:

The cats think that it’s great. One is either lying on it, or scrabbling around on it like a nut. We learned pretty quickly that we’ll need to get a non-slip pad to go under it, because I’ve had to reposition it seven or eight times since we brought it home.

Tori bid on and won a framed print that she liked, and Jennie got a whole mess of Russian books for $7.50 (but not the lot with the crazy journal). We spent a little while watching people find the naked photo in the journal; Jennie would get up and tell people they needed to read the journal and we’d peek over the backs of the chairs we were sitting in and giggle.

I think I’m set for auction things for the time being. I’m at my rug limit, which is probably good.

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It’s on.

Posted on March 8, 2011 by HappyGoth

Did you wear yours?

(As it is a bit chilly outside, I’ve got on the obligatory cardigan. Also, I managed to wear the grey sari out finally! Happy International Women’s Day, everybody.)

And there’s another project in the works. Here’s a sneak peek:

Can you guess what it is?  Hint: it’s not a hennin (truncated or otherwise).

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Turmeric Rice

Posted on March 8, 2011 by HappyGoth

I have been making acquaintances with the woman who works at the convenience store around the corner. As part of this, and also because gas is expensive, I have been requesting special things from her, in order to try and keep up the demand for something other chan cheap beer and lotto tickets.

First special order: curry leaves

Now, I made this order because she lives in Lilburn. Which in itself is not particularly relevant, except that Lilburn is where the BAPS mandir is, and also she listens to Bollywood music in her little bulletproof glass booth. So I took a guess and asked if she could get them. She said she could. Be back Tuesday, she said.

Tuesday came around and she was not there, but I spoke to her husband who nearly immediately exclaimed “oh! I know who you are! My wife has talked about you!” (True to my roots, I was now suspicious and imagining all sorts of strange things she could have said, none of which were likely true). No curry leaves. Come back Sunday.

Sunday arrived and I went in, and she was there, pregnant and smiling. She retrieved the curry leaves from the cooler and pushed them through the slot in the glass. And suddenly I realized that I had not been imagining curry leaves correctly, because where I had been imagining the little hand-picked bundle of leaves that were sufficient for one moderately adventurous American household, these were two bundles of curry leaves so large I mistook them for bay leaves at first. I smiled and thanked her. I bought some Sai Baba incense as well, which doesn’t smell as nice as I imagined it would. (But oh, HEM brand agarbatti, I adore you. Where other incense smells like burning wood or burning tar or burning, well, burning, even your less pleasant varieties smell like something perfumey. And you are cheap! A good buy, all around.) She asked if I would need more the following Sunday and I replied that I thought I was probably good for the time being.

Now here I am with enough curry leaves for 8 couples to cook with for a week, ransacking my cookbooks to see if I can find a good recipe that uses curry leaves.

I really like cashews. I really like rice. I really like mustard seeds. I really like this recipe for turmeric rice. (I thought I was making it wrong by using cashews, but then we were given some special prasad at the temple that was this rice! With cashews! So I figure, if it’s good enough for God, it’s good enough for me.)

I am getting a little sick of this rice. What’s more, I keep forgetting ingredients. No coconut. No curry (that is not going to be a problem for the forseeable future, though). No lemons. Today, it was no coriander (cilantro). But it was delicious nonetheless! And then I made this dish that I thought was going to be a quick cook (heh heh canned chickpeas, recipe writer, I have fooled you so!), but ended up taking quite a long time. That will teach me to think that a recipe from an ayurvedic cookbook will be made faster with a “quickie” cheat. I am so wrong.

Anyway, it all worked out in the end. The food was delicious, even without the cilantro, and I’ve got lunch tomorrow, plus plans for what I’ll make for dinner tomorrow evening (what did not get made this evening). And when I get the turmeric rice to come out right, I’m going to share it with my new acquaintance.

Just as soon as I go pick up some cilantro.

The evening’s dinner:

From Lord Krishna’s Cuisine: The Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking. Great book. Requires a time commitment. It’s much easier to follow now that I know how to identify the ingredients. I recommend making a list of all you find and spending some time at an Indian grocery.

(And did you know that really unripe coconuts have lavender flesh? Well, they do.)

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Sari Day

Posted on March 7, 2011 by HappyGoth

Aamba posted a blog post today wherein she links to another excellent blog post and also calls for the sari-loving out there to get over the nervousness we all may have and wear a sari to work (or school or whatever it is you plan on doing tomorrow). Not only is is Women’s Day tomorrow, but the sari is also a lovely, graceful garment that, in my opinion, is undervalued in the West (or perhaps just lacks the exposure and endorsement necessary to gain widespread adoption). I think we sari fanatics can change that.

So I’m in. Who’s with me?

(This is a good chance for me to wear that ikat I put on and then had to change out of because of the surprise alumning.)

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It is only Tuesday

Posted on February 22, 2011 by HappyGoth

But already this week I have accomplished much. I have:

Restrung my ukulele with really fancy new Aquila strings, using only the power of my fingers and the internet (oh, internet, I love you so).

Ridden a bike with my husband (not on the same bike, of course) halfway down the section of the Beltline that runs past our house, lapping him on the uphill portions (this is way awesome, since he’s in far better shape than I; I admit that I have a mechanical advantage, in that my bike has several more gears than his).

Learned some more of the song I’m learning on the ukulele. I’m not great at it, but I’m getting better. Soon I will share my progress (promise).

Gotten a bit more done on the cuff of the husband’s gloves.

And that’s pretty much it. Gulf Wars is looming, and I’m making lists of things to pack, washing garb, and working on more garb. I’m only going for a few days, so it’s not a big deal, but I’m still freaking out a little. I’ve never done a camping event like this before. I will get to see other Indian personas I only interact with online, so that will be great. I have a feeling that the excitement will eventually overcome my trepidation.

We’ll see what I can accomplish with the rest of the week. I am feeling hopeful…

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Auctions

Posted on February 17, 2011 by HappyGoth

And other things. But first, auctions.

Specifically, the auction that WH and I attended last Friday, wherein we had much fun and came away with some pretty neat stuff, acquired very cheaply.

Behold:

A carved wooden elephant, complete with howdah and mahout. The mahout has a tiny turban!

A lamp that resembles a geodesic dome (CG, don’t worry – I didn’t pay much for this stained-glass delight.)

And the best win, this lovely 1930s-era Windsor-style chair, which looks like no Windsor I’ve ever seen, and is a lovely, rickety confection (which we scored for $30). The back is equally lovely:

(not blurry like this in person, I promise; it was very foggy and dim this morning)

The auction happens the second Friday of every month, down near Merkerson’s seafood off Ralph David Abernathy. It’s got a barbecue buffet (which goes quickly), and is a great, low-key, affordable auction. There were some amazing rugs that we hadn’t brought enough money to bid on seriously. I’m okay with that. There will be more.

Anyway. Still practicing the ukulele, but I’m not good enough to share that yet. I bought some nice new strings, though, and those will go on as soon as I get them, which should help with the dull-sounding C string.

I’ve also been doing crafts (as usual), and they are these:

The husband had selected a yarn a couple of years ago, with the expectation that I would knit fingerless gloves for him. I hemmed and hawed, and discarded pattern after pattern, finally settling on a WWII-era pattern intended to be sent to GIs on the front. He’s really excited about it. Here’s the first glove:

I was going to surprise him but realized that our hands are very different in size, and so had to use him to measure the fit. They fit well. And knit up in two hours! I’ll be making more of these.

Also, I’ve been working on my Ishbel scarf:

I have been describing it as being in a larval stage, because it doesn’t look like much yet and I’ve just started in on the lace portion. The color is amazing. I’m very happy that I ripped out the beret and am reknitting this as a scarf. It will be finished just in time for the weather to be warm again. Isn’t that usually the way it goes?

THEN (but actually before all this), a couple of weekends ago, Blogless Lea and I took a bunch of ladies out on a fabulous day-long adventure, wherein we introduced them to Patel Brothers grocery, Zyka (an Indian restaurant), and two saree shops. Mirage Sarees went over very well, even if I got their hours wrong and we went later than expected. Several of the ladies bought salwar suits, and a couple bought sarees, but there was a run on dupioni and other fabrics. I was among those doing the running. I bought this to make into a court ghagra (I have no fancy summer court garb yet):

It’s a pretty decent equivalent, when the 10-foot rule is applied. And that hoop in the right corner? It’s for doing this:

I’m doing zardozi (tambour w/gold) work around each of the diamonds, on the whole of the fabric, which will up the fancy factor a bit. It should be very lovely when I’m done.

Anyway, we also bought some shoes, and jewelry, and lots of scarves, and then there was a trip to an amazing embroidery shop (I bought loads more than was intelligent), and we ended up finally at Texas Sari Sapne. Texas isn’t the cheapest of the Atlanta saree shops, but they have the largest selection of relatively-affordable traditional silks and other fabrics, so it was a good shop to show people. I ended up giving an impromptu lesson on traditional Indian fabric embellishment techniques, since I found THE saree (which is my especially fancy court garb) for SCA:

Look at the zari work in the body!

Look at the kundan and embroidery:

It’s fine silk (and a nice traditional weave at that), and the little puckers around the dots in the bandhani let me know that some person somewhere did that by hand.

An excellent find. One of the ladies asked what I was going to cut it up to make, and I said that I wasn’t doing any cutting on this one. It’s too lovely. I did a quick pleat in the shop, (which earned me a surprised “you do that like an Indian lady!” from the shopkeeper) and satisfied with the drape, took it home with me. Draped in the usual manner, the folds and the way the pattern sits looks almost identical to some of the patterns in the ghagras of Mewari miniatures. So amazing. (But I am so totally cutting myself off for a while. I need to go on a saree fast.)

Sunday Jennie and SurlyQueen and I went hiking, and afterwards Jennie and I were looking for a place to eat. I pulled up my Urbanspoon app, set it to random, and this came up in the search:

Sure enough, down the road we passed Come N Get It, which had a decent number of cars parked outside. We decided to pass on it this time, even though the lady in the photo looks so inviting. We went to IHOP instead.

This weekend is a calmer, but nonetheless exciting excursion. I will be sure to relate details after the fact. And maybe post a uke video, if I’m feeling especially brave.

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Critical mass! (Not the bike kind.)

Posted on February 1, 2011 by HappyGoth

Look at this beautiful uke. JUST LOOK AT IT.

h70x.jpg

And then BEHOLD THIS THING:

mxnv.jpg

(Sorry Twitter/FB folks; I’m reusing photos because it is midnight and I am lazy.)

I think I may have too many hobbies.

No, really.

Remember how last week I said I’d learned to marble paper? Well, this week things are at eleven, or rather I have not only completed most of my first embroidery project (shown above), but I also learned to play the ukelele (also shown above). This sounds very impressive except that the embroidery is totally lopsided and I can only play a few chords on the uke (and not very well), and that I took piano for 14 years as a child/adolescent. But the ukelele! I get that whole playing-until-your-fingers-bleed thing now. And also, I hate metallic thread.

Anyway. If you look at all the new things I’ve done this year so far, it is thus:

Kathak, ukelele, paper marbling, brick stitch, lace shawl. And this year is only one month long! Screw you, 2010. 2011 totally kicks your ass.

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Superman

Posted on January 25, 2011 by HappyGoth

[Image from here.]

Last night while working on a crazy embroidery project (note: I have never actually completed an embroidery project, so this is kind of a leap), I watched some old Superman cartoons on Netflix.

I never really realized (okay, so maybe I did but wasn’t thinking about it) what a great record of popular American sentiment Superman is.

I mean here’s what you’ve got: A superhero that was created as a super alter-ego of a regular, boring working guy (Clark Kent), at a time when life was hard for the working guy. The cartoons from the 40s see him as the icon of America, fighting the Axis (the criminals in the sampling I watched were Japanese, German, Italian, etc.). Then you see him fighting Communists, and he grows into an atomic age figure, adding “and the American way” to his list of things he fights for. I’m sure other superheroes do this, too – progress through a series of politically-relevant foes, creating a record of the things America has feared as a collective public over the years. Crazy scientists, politicians bent on world domination, and his greatest foe, Lex Luthor, all reflect what people are worried about. Superman is the fantasy solution to all those problems.

I wonder, then, why he hasn’t seen a renaissance lately, aside from Smallville (which is a very clever show). Lex Luthor, from what I can tell, represents a conscience-less wealth machine, somebody who is out to make money no matter who falls by the wayside. Isn’t that how many people see politicians today? Isn’t that how a lot of people feel about the big banks? Is Lex Luthor too close to the truth?

Maybe we need Superman now, more than ever (although you really have to rethink Clark Kent and Lois Lane, since their sort of investigative reporting is an endangered thing these days; maybe they’re mild-mannered bloggers).

Maybe flawed heroes are what we’ve come to need more, though. Like Iron Man (everybody knows that Tony Stark is kind of a jerk) or Wolverine or Batman. We like our heroes to have problems. I think that’s why that unfortunate fifth Superman movie was made, to try and show that even Superman makes really dumb mistakes. It’s unfortunate because it made the attempt in an uncomfortable, overly hamfisted way (I think I’ve heard it referred to as “white trash trucker Superman”), which is more off-putting than approachable.

So here’s my request to all those out there with the power to evolve the Man of Steel, and continue the record of history he has become: give me a Superman for 2011, one who can do all the things Superman can, but who lives in a globally connected world with a warming climate. Give me one who has to fight intangibles like greed and callousness and ignorance. Give me one who does his best to help earthquake and tsunami victims but can’t save them all. Let me see him feel that. Let me see Clark Kent struggle with his mundane life, paying his bills, loving Lois Lane, figuring out how to be a journalist today, when journalism is suspect and newspapers are on their way out. Give me a superhero who has to work to keep his secret identity, because everyone wants to know all the details of people’s lives. Give me one who can’t do a blasted thing in the Middle East, except to keep a few more civilians from being killed.

I need another Superman. It’s about time.

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Papers!

Posted on January 24, 2011 by HappyGoth

While this may look like yet another hobby it is, in fact, ancillary to one of my main hobbies, which is medieval islamic bookbinding (hey – I do have some normal hobbies, like knitting and comic books). I’ve been working for a while on recreating the Islamic classical codex, more specifically Turkish book bindings. Through my research, I have also learned that the Turks were (and still are) very accomplished paper marblers, and often used these papers as end sheets in their books. While I wait on some sources on leather gilding and stamping, I am learning marbling.

Which is sort of the truth, but the real truth is that the CG knows how to do it, and had this great idea about Apprentice Day (TM), and since none of us were organized enough (or brave enough) to teach the first one, we tapped her, as organizer and general arts-guru. Mostly that meant that we asked for paper marbling, because it is the least intimidating of the things she knows how to do.

Anyway. On Saturday we mordanted a whole sheaf of paper with alum, then let it dry a little, and then I did some frantic house-cleaning, and then Sunday the CG brought all her nifty tools over. We quickly learned two things: (1) marbling is AWESOME (2) remember to stir the alum as you mordant your paper.

Marbling is a task in which it is easy to achieve mediocrity. Behold, my first paper:

See? Looks fairly professional. Is vibrant. Hooray! And in actuality, all the patterns we made were like this; lovely, skillful, sharp. That is, until we put them on the paper. We discovered that the alum settled as we mordanted, and so the papers on the top of the stack, which we did last, were far better mordanted than the papers at the bottom. As we went through the stack, the paint began to rinse right off the paper, or be left in the marbling trays, leaving us with things like this:

Which, while blurry from the camera, is actually also blurry from some of the paint soaking into the paper and some washing right off, as though we didn’t use any alum at all. Behold the others:

Not too bad, and you can see the spots where the paper was prepared correctly. The rest looks like what happens if you lay the paper on the ink untreated-side-down.

The very last one I did worked well, too:

Ultimately, this has given me a sort of stubborn resolve, and I will be working on perfecting this later. We had some Dye-Na-Flow paints that worked well, so I forsee yet another art supply trip in my future, to procure marbling stuffs.

And if you’re B, one of the ladies learning this? Well, you have the unfortunate luck of finding the perfectly mordanted papers in the stack, never having problems with paint sticking, and having your fellow marblers sort of loathe you in a good-natured way for the duration of the workshop. Seriously, though – she’s sweet and only probably sacrificed a couple of goats for her bizarre good fortune.

T didn’t have any better luck than I did, which made me secretly happy in a sick, malicious sort of way. She’s such a good friend.

(And the day before? With the alum? I had put on a sari because the party was an SCA thing, and therefore a place where it is not weird to wear a sari. I spent a good half hour ironing and pleating and draping and re-pleating, and got the sari just right, and then the CG called and said that we were aluming, so I should not wear nice clothes. I took a photo of the lovely, perfect sari before putting on jeans:

Yep.)

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