Art: Doing what we know we should not

Recently I was inspired by the idea that we, day in and day out, do things that we know we should not do. It’s compulsory, we do it though we know we must not, must stop; know that it will bring is more pain than pleasure. We’re obsessed and ridiculous. We are our own menace.

I worked on four small paintings following this idea, and the four pieces are called, collectively: “Doing what we know we should not” and feature four heroines either on the cusp of, or engulfed in the aftermath of our very poor decisions. I’m slowly beginning to develop a style of my own and I’m kind of excited where it is going. I’m proud of them and I hope you enjoy their plights.

Each piece is sketched by me using Micron pens in sizes 005 and 02  and painted with Golden acrylics, both heavy body and liquid.

I highly recommend clicking on the pieces to see them at full size.

Enjoy.

On the merits of painting rooms.

I hate painting rooms, soul sucking, physically exhausting, messy, smelly endeavour. Hate it. Hate it.

Which creates a certain sense of irony in my house when you consider how often I repaint rooms. I can’t stop myself. All I need is one good HTML click to benjaminmoore.com or sherwinwilliams.com and I’m done for. I think I have low color self-esteem: everyone else’s room colors are so much nicer than my own. Gotta have it. Now. This makes my husband insane because he likes consistency, sameness, everydayness that changing a room constantly does not lend itself to.

Yesterday, my best friend and I repainted my dining room/entry way/hallway/basement stairs from dark olive green to a color called Abingdon Putty by Benjamin Moore. The colors watch makes it look like a greenish putty color, like ecru, but the reality is not really like that at all. It’s much lighter and brighter than the color swatch, and a little more true on the online swatch, which I find hysterical. The actual color on the walls reminds me of Vanilla Ice cream, which I think should be the name of the color. It’s like swimming in a big bowl of the stuff. Absolutely delicious. Or vanilla creme. It’s so rich. There is depth to the color. “Vanilla ice cream?” my coworker said, “Isn’t that, well, white?” No no no not at all. There’s nothing “White” about this color. It’s got depth and dimension. I swear, its one of the most beautiful wall colors I’ve ever seen and set up next to the chocolate brown trim? My dining room is the color of dessert, I swear to it.

Still, these are the online color swatches, and they don’t match either color very well at all.

    

When it got dark out and the artificial light started hitting it, we discovered the slight green undertone come out more. It’s sort of a springy green color, a surprise. Always moving, always changing, always growing. it is actually inspiring me to bring the great outdoors inside and really play up the natural, growing world within design. Listen to me! I sound like an HGTV host.

Here’s a funny thing. When I was at Ace Hardware store buying my Benjamin Moore paint, the guy working told me to get Ace Hardware paint and have them match the Benjamin Moore color. Cheaper, and good quality paint. So I said sure. And you know what? Ace Hardware brand paint is absolutely amazing. I love it. One coat of this stuff was almost perfect. It’s thick and creamy with excellent coverage and about $10 cheaper than the name brand Benjamin Moore paint. I highly recommend this stuff. Paint match, you’ll be thankful you did. I never found anything great about the Benjamin Moore paint and I think it is ridiculously expensive. But I never found anything wrong with it either. I like Sherwin Williams paint the best, but my new favorite is the Ace Hardware brand. Also? No smell. Not at all. You couldn’t even tell we’d just painted most of the house.

We are going to finish the second coat tonight and begin to put the rooms back together. Once I’m done with that I’ll post pictures. Art on my walls? Can’t wait! Before the walls were just too dark green to hold my art very well. There was too much weird contrast. Now? Can’t wait.

We have lived in this house for a year and a half and it has always felt almost finished but never complete in any room. All the rooms remain somewhat disorganized with no style, and nothing felt finished. We made the worst mistake a home buyer can make in that we painted all the rooms before we moved in. I hated most of the colors after we moved in and Ryan hated some of them (but is mostly indifferent to these sorts of things). So for a year and a half the house never felt complete. The olive green is still one of my favorite colors, but it made the dining room, hallway, entry way feel closed in and the artificial light turned the green a yellowy pea color. I never hung up any art, I never finished the rooms. I hated it. Now? I love it and it finally feels like home. It feels like a space I live in and not one I avoid. I can hang up my art, I can move some pieces into the room to finish it off. After a year and a half…it feels like us. I’m so in love.

-Sommer out

The Making of Limoncello

It was early 1900 at a boarding house on the island of Azzurra. The lady Maria Antonia Farace raised a garden of lemons while her nephew became the proud owner of a post-war bar in the same area. Using what they said was a recipe handed down through their family, they began offering complimentary shot glasses of a daring, brightly colored lemon liqueur they called Limoncello. After dinner, the travelers would sip what Maria called a “digestivo,” and the word of the delicious lemon drink soon spread across Capri.

Or wait! Perhaps it was Vincenza Canale and his Inn with those travelers! The truth is, the history of Limoncello is as varied as the people it comes from. Sorrento, Amalfi, Capri…it doesn’t matter the location, they all have similar stories and legends of it’s mixed and varied history and perhaps they are all correct. Whosever grandma originally bottled the stuff is a mystery and will likely always stay that way. The good news is…we have it to make for ourselves, and that’s what I want to talk about.

Limoncello is an incredibly smooth, sweet, delicious drink that is meant to be sipped with dessert after dinner from tall thin shot glasses. It is particularly good with Italian desserts, but drinking it with any kind of chocolate dessert will pair very well too. Making it is quite simple, though all you really need is time and patience. I started my first batch last night, and it was fairly time consuming but not hard. I’m going to tell you how to get your first batch started as well.

You’ll need some items to get started. Here, I’ve purchased two glass jars with seal rims. They were $6.99 each from Cost Plus World Market. Sun tea jars work well too, but stay away from plastic jars or jars that had something in them previously that wasn’t limoncello. You’re going to be letting this sit for 4 months, any residue that is left over is going to taint your limoncello.

I’m only making one batch right now, but my second jar is going to be started next month and will be a double batch for Christmas. Limoncello makes an excellent Christmas present when given in beautiful little sealed jars with personalized tags. Cost Plus World Market has many wonderful sized jars that work well for this.

 

Next you will need the alcohol. Here’s where things get a little controversial. Everyone who makes Limoncello has an opinion about what kind of alcohol to use. Some will die saying you can only use Vodka. Others will decry heaven saying that you must use Everclear grain alcohol or go home, heathen. They are both right, in a way. Traditionally, the drink was made with grain alcohol…OR Vodka. But the Vodka at the time was not quite so commercialized and low proof. Limoncello is meant to be kept in the freezer, and these days, Vodka will freeze, at least partially, in the freezer if it isn’t high enough proof. And if it is high enough proof, it is made with potatoes which will change the taste of your Limoncello! The best way to make this drink is by using BOTH alcohols. You don’t need a super high end Vodka, Smirnoff works well, which is what I’ve been recommended to use. These two bottles together cost a little less than $30.

 

You’re also going to need lemons! You’re also going to need a vegetable brush of some kind to clean them and a good vegetable/fruit cleaner. Commercial lemons, no matter how organic, come to you covered in a wax and chemicals which keep the lemons looking their brightest and best the longest. You have to get that crud off. The trouble is you can’t really see this stuff, so you’re just going to have to scrub them well and use the vegetable cleaner, it’ll help. Scrubscrubscrub, you don’t want that junk in your drink.

Also, beware of Sunkist lemons. I didn’t realize that Sunkist stamps their lemons with a green stamp that is harder than hell to scrub off. Fortunately, I only bought 5 of that kind. How many lemons do you need? Well, that’s also a good controversy. Some say you need 10 for one batch, or 15, or 20. And they should be organic. I have 15 organic lemons, and 5 non-organic because the organic lemons were pretty small with thin skins. Here’s a quick lemon lesson: The lemons you can buy in the store are nothing like the lemons you buy on the Amalfi coast from roadside vendors that are used to make traditional limoncello. You’ll never get limoncello like they do because their lemons are just better for it. They have super thick skins that have a high level of lemony oil in them. Our skins are very thin. So I’ll say 20 is better, but if you can get good sized lemons with good thick skins, 15 will work too. I think 10 is probably not enough.

After you scrub your lemons clean, it’s time to peel them. I used a potato peeler, but you can use a knife if you want to, though I don’t recommend it unless you are very good at using it. The potato peeler will make sure you don’t dig too deep into the skin when you are removing the lemony outer skin. Beneath the yellow skin is a white substance called the Pith. The Pith is very, very bitter and you want as little of it in your limoncello as possible. It’ll alter your limoncello making it bitter, and no one wants that. So using your potato peeler, remove the yellow skin without getting the white stuff. Any white stuff that sticks to your skin, use a knife to scrape it off. This is the time consuming part, but you want it done as good as possible.

Here’s another controversial subject to talk about. Some people say peel it, others say zest it. Anyone who says you should zest it is an idiot. A lot of the oil is going to stick to your microplane as you zest, for one, and you want it all to go into your drink. For two, zest is so tiny and broken apart that filtering it all out is going to be time consuming and you may never get it all out and you don’t want anything grainy in your finished product. Save yourself time and heartache and just peel it. The bigger the slice the better.

 

Here’s what you’ll have when you’re done with all that. You can already see the alcohol turning yellow. This is only 1 batch, though next time I”m going to make a double batch and fill the bottle.

Here’s where it gets fun. Make a label or a tag to throw around the neck of the jar that tells you want date you made it and what date it will be done. From the day you make the jar, count of 4 months. That’s when it’ll be ready for the next step.

Four months?!?!?! Yes my friends, four months. Honestly, if you could leave it alone for a year, that’d be even better. This is definitely a drink that gets better and better with time. Anyone who tells you it will be ready in two weeks or two months is, well, being honest, but they are mislead. You could have it ready in 2 weeks or 2 months, but it isn’t going to be very good, it’s definitely not going to be authentic, and you might as well go buy a commercial bottle of limoncello, that’s about what you’re getting. Trust me, put it away for 4 months. Do it. Don’t open it before 4 months. Every day or every couple of days, give the bottle a good swish to move the alcohol around and re disperse it. If you can keep it in a cool dark place in your basement, that’s best. But if you’re like me, you don’t have a cool dark basement in the summer and you will need to keep it in your fridge. Some say you shouldn’t keep it cold, and maybe you shouldn’t, but cold is preferable to hot which is what it would be in my basement. Oh if only I were blessed with a root cellar.

In 4 months you’re going to pull it out, scoop out the lemon pieces with a slotted spoon, and start filtering the drink with a funnel and some coffee filters. You’re going to filter it with about 6 coffee filters (wetting the filters first before pouring the alcohol through) You should get everything out of the drink leaving it a lovely uniform shade of yellow. You’re going to make a syrup with 6 cups of sugar and 5 cups of water which will be added to the alcohol and set aside at room temperature for about a week or two. Then…well then it’ll be ready to bottle. I’ll have some large bottles that go into my freezer for every day drinking, and I’ll probably bottle a couple of small bottles for friends and family to try.

Drink responsibly! This stuff is strong! Sip it slowly, don’t drink a lot of it at a time, enjoy it with dessert. If you’re under 21, you’re not even allowed so just move on.

When 4 months comes, we’ll return to this subject and I’ll show you the pictures of how I make the syrup.

The Green Apple Project

When my husband and I returend from Las Vegas, we were physically and mentally exhausted. Vegas is a perpetual wonderland in the middle of a dessert. Every fantasy, every dream, every childlike excitement can be and usually is, fulfilled daily. Dreamily I traveled the world, gazed into the waters of Venice and peered off the tippy top of the highest New York City buildings. You can do it all. You can have it all. It was excessive, hedonistic, and exhausting. There’s only so much dream-fulfilling a body can take.

When we came home, I noticed that we had four bags of trash to set out on the curb on trash day. Four bags. We’d been gone for a week and yet we still had four bags of trash. How can two people make so much waste? So much of our trash was packaging, or throwing out items no longer needed, no longer useful. Even at home, excess was exhausting us.

Ryan and I sat down and had a very long, and important talk about things. We have talks all the time. Our political talks are epic, and we share the same views. We talk about the collapse of the Ameriacn economy, the smothering of the planet with waste, the Zombie-pocolypse. My husband is the thrifty one- he worries about these things because he worries about money. I’m the analyst and the plan maker- I worry about these things because I want to be prepared with a plan in case of eventual invasion. We boarder on paranoid, neurotic, psychotic. But we’re so academic about it you wouldn’t know any better. Two academics talking about how best to secure the house from zombies and it almost begins to sound plausable. We’re almost embarressed about how much time we spend talking about this.

But it has other uses too. We talk about how the rising cost of gas and electricity and food has impacted our spending elsewhere, and what are we going to do about it? Talking about these things has led us down the path that we are now on: a path to live greener, healthier, less excessive.

Whoa nelly! Less excessive? Is it possible to stop my excessive trips to Target, Pier One, Bed Bath and Beyond? Is it possible to rein in our collective need to well, collect things? As my husband would say, isn’t this kind of talk left best for crunchy granola hippies? Isn’t it more expensive to live greener, healtheir, less expensive? How can we look our friends in the eyes and say “You’re eating off organic plates. You’re sitting on organic bamboo chairs. We only eat fruits and vegetables that have fallen off a tree.” I think I saw a glimmer of humiliation spring into my husband’s eye when I suggested such radical changes. But then we got serious. Stopped joking around and poking fun at the stereo types. Like I said, Vegas exhausted us.

And from these talks, these discussions, this exhaustion, came the Green Apple Project. The name is my own devising. Something so important to us, so important to everyone, deserves a name I think. It deserves a significance so that when we really do look our friends in the eye and say “I grew those vegetables in my chemical free garden” I don’t feel silly about it. And they’ll know it’s totally cool too.

I believe that being aware of our impact on the environment scares people away from caring. Buying organic has always appeared more expensive. Going “Green” has always seemed out of our league. Only people who have the time, the money, the space can do it. Green living is just a fad. These are the things people say and I think I used to believe them too. And boy, I was so wrong.

The Green Apple Project is all about how wrong I was and how my husband and I are changing our excessive ways. Little ways, easy ways, ways that everyone can do themselves. The Green Apple Project is important to me. I can’t wait to share it with all of you.

I’m debating whether or not to make it a blog all its own or talk about it here and just mix everything together. I think the current fad of blogging is that every blog is dedicated to just one topic (hah! So much for that here) and I suppose that does make sense in a way. As I develop the project, I’ll post more info here. I’m so excited about it. I can’t wait to share the changes my hsuband and I are making to our lives.

(Note: Spellchecker is down in WordPress. As soon as it is back up and running I’ll fix these mistakes.)

Sketchjournal: Watercolor trees

From the sketchjournal in watercolor

Bare trees. God, there’s something about drawing trees that really takes me places.

Sketchjournal: Watercolor Playing in the rain!

From my sketchjournal, titled “Playing in the Rain”

I painted this the day after I had a dream about running around in a bright yellow raincoat. All day I had the image of the yellow raincoat in my head. I just couldn’t shake it. So when I sat down to drawn that day I knew I had to do something with a yellow raincoat. And viola. It was that kind of day too- all dark and cloudy out, constantly on the verge of snow.

Note: I’m a little disappointed with the quality of this scan. No idea how it got all mottled.

Too sick to work, too sick to write.

I got my proverbial ass handed to me this week by a sinus infection. It pretty  much wiped me out starting on Monday and lasting until this very moment. Thank all that is blessed in the world for antibiotics that make my sickness short lived. I’m already tired of feeling like crap.

Unfortunately, essays do not edit themselves and this week has been a loss as far as getting any work done. I could barely spell my name if asked let alone write anything worth reading. I did spy a few more publications I’m going to submit to, so that’s pretty exciting. If I could, you know, edit anything to save my life.

The office has also been temporarily put on hold until I’m feeling better. Painting? Manual labor? Yeah right. My husband has been forced to take care of dinner for the last two nights while I permanently affixed my butt to the couch under a pile of blankets and tissues. Ah CSI, how I love thee.

Office project

It was Virginia Woolf who is famous for saying that a writer needs a room of ones own, but I’m sure she wasn’t the first to come across this famed idea. Every writer needs a space that is theirs, that allows the thoughts to move and speak. I used to think this meant a dark room with lots of books and dust and a healthy alcohol problem. As it turns out, you just need a room that inspires you.

Fortunately for us, our home had three bedrooms. One of the bedrooms was particularly poorly suited to be a bedroom because of it’s small size and odd door placement. It was, however, a very good idea for a very nice office. We originally chose colors quickly, wanting to paint the rooms and get it over with. The room was originally an aquamarine that you could barely look directly at. So the blues we picked were an improvement, but not a very good one. They were too dark, and had no actual personality. It didn’t look like we tried and the truth was, we didn’t. We were also using a couple of bookshelves that were cheap to begin with and had seen one too many moves already. The shelves were bowing under the weight of the books and a stiff breeze could bring them both crashing to the ground.

We moved our huge desk to the basement and started working from there. The space was not very good for inspiration though and I found it hard to be creative there. In the mean time, the old office became a store room for old mail, artwork needing to be hung, wedding crap, craft crap and books. Everywhere. First thing was first, we started clearing it out.

Here, my husband and cat Lola go through papers and CDs. I encourage him to get rid of the CDs he has only looked at in the past three years when he unpacked them. He got rid of about 3 of them. Oh well. I tried.

This is a view from the doorway. The two doors are huge in the room and take up a lot of space. I took the doors off and I’m going to go and purchase two bi-fold doors for the room that will take less space. Hopefully I can install them correctly.

My favorite chairs in the world are two of these cobalt chairs. I love them so much. I picked them up from a girl who needed to get rid of them. I paid $25. The color in the picture does not do them justice.