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thing 22: bird drawing

colored pencil, oil pastels, marker on 5″x7″ canvas.

i’ve had this little canvas for a while. not sure what prompted the bird.. perhaps my desire for spring and color outside. the fluffly white is quite pretty, but i yearn for spring. i’m tempted to cover it in resin to make it hard and shiny, but i haven’t quite decided. i’ve never put resin on canvas before.. and the canvas is a little stretched out from me coloring on it with pencils, so i don’t know how it would dry. probably it would be fine with a couple coats. we’ll see how i feel about it in a few days.

it felt good to draw again.

thing 21: inside out skirt

another skirt! for this one i decided to play with the interesting way the seams of this fabric looks inside out. they tend to lay flat open.. so i intentionally created it with a bunch of seams and to be worn with the seams showing. had a few hiccups along the way.. could they possibly be due to my not measuring nor pinning? crazy talk.

the lighting wasn’t great for the photo, so it was hard to see the seams. i had to bump down the contrast a bit, which is not what my eyes want in the photo, but since it’s about the skirt, it seems important to see how it looks.

thing 20: vegan runzas

most people in minnesota don’t know what a runza is.. but some of my childhood was spent in nebraska.. where you can even find a fast food chain based on this food originally from russia. it’s basically a pocket of yeasted dough with meat and cabbage. i based my version on this recipe. i managed to turn it vegan without much trouble with egg replacer and upton naturals vegan ground beef-style seitan. i actually made half the traditional way, and half i used italian sausage style and added green peppers, spinach and some daiya vegan cheese. wound up with 4 of each.

i don’t often make yeasted doughs.. usually i’m just too lazy, but it was a snow day, so why not? it wasn’t really that hard, and it worked well. surprisingly, i like the original version, which is fairly plain, better than my modified cheesy one. not sure if the flavors were just a bit off, or if i’m just excited by the memory of a food i haven’t had for probably 20 years. not something i’ll make too often, but it was a fun experiment.

thing 19: crackers

my friend beth is also doing thing-a-day, so we decided to collaborate today. we made two kinds of homemade vegan crackers. the first, seeded crackers, she had made once before. the second, we decided to experiment with a recipe for vegan goldfish crackers. we used a pasta roller to roll them out nice and evenly thin. some of the seeded crackers we rolled extra thin, which made little holes, but still tasted delicious.

the cheesy-like cracker recipe could use a little tweaking. it calls for nutritional yeast, but could use quite a bit more for flavoring. we wound up working a little more into the dough after the first batch. and i think the thinner ones worked better than the thick. they are still just a bit more dense and not quite crispy as i’d like.. but still tasty!

thing 18: black fleece leg warmers

today is a busy day, and it just got colder again.. so i opted for something simple and warm: leg warmers! black fleece, sewn at an angle, just a bit bigger than my legs. when i wear them over other pants, they stay up pretty well on their own. i even hemmed them.

thing 17: blacksmithing punch

i’m taking a blacksmithing class. today we created our first real thing: a punch. we will use it to punch holes in things! specifically, we will be punching holes for a rivet in the tongs we are going to make next week. (which we will use in future projects. how cool is that?!) we actually started this punch last week, but that was mostly grunt work. this was originally a coil spring from a pickup truck. they were cut into “C” shape pieces. last week we straightened them out and started tapering them. this week i finished the taper, rounded it out, heat treated it and filed it down.

the heat treating is tricky. you first have to slowly heat up the pointy end until it reaches its critical temperature which is determined by it losing its magnetism. once that’s happened, you quickly cool it in a bucket of vegetable oil. oil helps cool it somewhat quickly but not too quickly like water. then you wipe off the oil and grind off some of the outside. you heat it up in a pretty low temp forge and carefully watch for the exposed metal to turn a brownish color. if it turns blue or purple, you’ve gone too far and you have to start the whole process over again. i did this part 3 times. when that’s done, you cool it in oil again and then use a grinder to smooth out the end and level off the tip. if you’ve done everything right, the pointy end is now hard and strong!

then you have to anneal the other end, which is just heating it up in a hot fire and letting it cool down by itself at room temperature. this makes it softer. you want the end you are hitting with a hammer to have some give, and you want the pointy end to be hard. so in the future, i will heat up a piece of metal that needs a hole, and hit this punch through it!

thing 16: stylish wrist supports

my wrists get sore sometimes from using my laptop. my ankles also get sore (not from the laptop) and i wear compression socks once in a while to make them feel better. they increase blood flow, which seems to help. i wondered if they made such a thing for wrists.. and of course they do. but i wasn’t sure i wanted to pay for some ugly weird gloves to wear.. so i wondered if i could make some myself.

and it seems that i can! and mine are much more stylish. they probably aren’t perfect.. i know compression socks push more in certain areas, which this does to some degree, but not quite as well. but after wearing them for a couple hours, my wrists feel a little better.

i found that the seam on the inside bugged me.. so i’ve taken to wearing them inside out. one thing i will change if i make another pair is to plan for that and serge the outside seam to make it look nicer. (also.. i did make 2, but i needed my other hand to take the photo)

thing 15: red skirts

more simple skirts.. something i need in my life. this time, they are not connected, so i can either wear them together or separate. i may do some sort of heming in the future.. or i may not.. this is really stretchy fabric, and i fear it looking crappy, even with stretch stitch.. so.. we’ll see.

thing 14: chocolate hazelnut spread

i think i probably first had nutella on a crépe in france. it’s hard to find a vegan version. i’ve occasionally seen them, but i don’t remember the last time i had it. i’ve been meaning to try to make my own version for a while. i was looking through the veganomicon cookbook and found their recipe for not-ella. this seemed like a perfect thing for today.. something not too difficult as i’m still feeling kinda sick, but something i’ve been wanting to make.

i think my version is a little grainier than it ought to be. it’s tricky to get the hazelnuts blended creamy enough. the soymilk powder may also add to its graininess, but i’m not sure. still it’s really tasty. i can’t wait to try some on some crépes again.

thing 13: red and pink striped skirt

ridiculously long day participating in a ridiculous trivia contest. but a thing was made.. made a skirt out of a thin, stripey fabric i’ve had for a while. made it double layered because of how thin it is..but made the under-layer longer to give it a layered look. cut it into 4 trapazoids, sewed those trapazoids together to create 4 seams. it’s more seams than necessary, but sometimes i like this cut. magically i managed to cut it to exactly the size to fit me without measuring or having to re-sew. is that even possible?!

also.. hems? pfft.