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Hobby is a Terrible Word
I despise the word hobby. It raises my hackles every time I hear it. Doubly so when it is applied to me. Unfortunately, thanks to cultural perceptions, I hear it often from my Japanese friends especially when they see inside the shed or my studio in the loft. “Oh, what a great hobby space!” They…
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Planning the Color Garden
Energised by spring’s return, I’m starting to plan the hatake for 2025 and beyond. Having been told that monkeys, boars, and deer are likely to eat any vegetables I might plant, I am pivoting to my interest in botanical color. I will create a color garden that produces plants I can turn into dyes and…
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Camera roll
It’s time for some random photos of things around here over the past little few weeks. None are worthy of posts in themselves, but I’m hoping to keep the memories. First, some cats. Two new strays have been visiting. I think grey tabby is from next door, but “orange fluff” is a complete unknown. He…
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Forest fire?
Yesterday afternoon, I thought I heard the crunch-crunch of a cat eating a mouse downstairs. But nobody had a mouse. The cracking sound was coming from outside. Maybe Kawasaki-san was doing some brushcutting? I opened the door for a better listen. No…this sounded more organic. A fire popping and cracking. Bamboo burning. I trotted down…
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Fresh work maps
One of the little things that I have been wanting to do for almost a year finally got done today. I redrew all of the Oyama Senmaida work maps. The old ones were scans of photocopies of mimeographed sheets that had been hand drawn at some point in the distant past. They were hard to…
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Lake mishap
I was all excited to make a lake pigment with some iron-modified cypress (hinoki) dye I boiled up last week. It was a dark grey and the paper I made with the color is gorgeous. But when stabilising the pigment for paint, I messed up. I didn’t warm the water for the alum, so my…
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Project 2025 Bingo – Valentine update
We are 25 days into the administration, a quarter of the way through this Bingo game. Time for an update. We are getting closer to BINGO: Spaces on the Card Below are the items on the bingo card. There are so many items not on this card that probably shoudl have been. Plastic drinking straws…
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From branches to paint
[Apricot colors, part 2] Yesterday I reached one of my long-standing goals. I made paint from raw ingredients. Artists have been doing this since art started but I have mostly purchased supplies ready made. I love knowing how things are made from start-to-finish and making pigment from apricot branches, then binding the pigment into a…
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Apricot Colors, part 1
A few weeks back, I noticed a big pile of branches trimmed off the trees at Oyama Senmaida. The next day, I coincidentally read about extracting pink colors from cherry trees. So of course, I had to go ask Kaori Ishida, my local botanical color expert and the dye master at Oyama Senmaida, about the…
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85, but not
Today would have been Mom’s 85th birthday. It’s been five and a half years since her body finished its life here. I’ve mourned. I’ve remembered and memorialised. I know that she is always here with me – quite literally as half of my DNA and also in the way I move, think, and express myself.…
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