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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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Empress Kristen
In my mid-30s, I had political ambitions. I didn’t like the way the world was headed. In the late 90s there was corruption and conflict and too many politicians clinging to power. Those things don’t go anywhere good. A shake-up would improve the situation. I decided that if I were elected president of the US,…
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Cedar Cone Color
Last weekend, Tod ran a fancy extension cord to the shed for me and now I have electricity. I can run the IH cooker and boil up color baths! So the first thing I did with my new electricity was to play with the cedar cones I collected a couple weeks ago. The results were…
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