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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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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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Running a Retreat
After 18 months at 555, I am finally ready to open the space to the public for a Drawing Meditations retreat. Won’t you take this as a great excuse to visit? These times definitely call for some quiet and self-care. With everything going on in the world and in your life specifically, give yourself a…
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Project 2025 Bingo – Day 1
Well, here we are at the first day of our 100 day bingo game. I am finding stamp-worthy articles in the news already and the White House website lists all of the executive orders signed during the inauguration. No BINGO yet, but the card is filling up. I will continue to update this through the…
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Vigyan Bhairav Tantra No. 79
I set myself up for the weirdest meditation experience this morning. On Sunday my yoga class practices meditation. We have tried many techniques over the years – everyone has a different way of getting to their inner silence and we don’t know what will trigger an interesting insight. So we try as many as I…
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Winter colors
We had a big wind storm yesterday and this morning when I went to remove fallen branches and cedar debris from the driveway, I remembered a video of someone making color from pinecones. We have an abundance of cedar cones always blowing down on the driveway. Free color! I did a little test with some…
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Project 2025 Bingo – pregame
We are just about two weeks from Day 1 of this bingo. I’ve been trying to keep track of the topics on the card and to be honest, it’s already a challenge. It should get easier when the 100 days begin since there will be news about what’s happened, rather than speculation. But using speculation…
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Remembering Philo
I didn’t expect this would hit me so hard. I met Philo Hagen only twice in person. I couldn’t call him a friend, but my life between 2008 and 2018 was shaped his influence and our online collaborations. I left my “hooping era” years ago, and so did he, but now he is gone from…
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