donut pan idea no. 62: seed bombs

Oh yeah, baby. I'm feeling ballistic today. No snarky comments over at Apartment Therapy are going to stop me from rolling out more donuts. Stella and I are ripping this set of donut pans a new one. 

Here we go. DONUT-SHAPED SEED BOMBS. The seed bomb is as ubiquitous as the chalkboard wall (guilty!), but Stella thought this one up and it was fun, and it's done! We handed them out at a get-together this past weekend and used a few ourselves.

We followed this recipe, more or less. We used the art clay out of fear of over-baking the soil in the sterilization process and ending up with duds. By using the air-dry clay you can skip the oven and just use the sun. Of course it would've been fun to bake them, and possibly more in the spirit of the donut pans, but this was a fun way to get our hands (very) dirty.

Needed:

Five parts air-dry clay, one part native seeds, one part compost, water to loosen things.

If you don't have compost, maybe you can "borrow" a little from a neighbor or friend like we did. 

Mix it all up, and loosen enough with a little bit of water to be able to work it a little better. Form into donuts in the pans, cleaning up the edges the best you can. We sprinkled the tops with more seeds just for fun.

We left ours in the sun to dry for a few days, then brought them inside, gently pried them out of the donut pans, and dried them upside down for a day on a cooling rack. They are designed to eventually come apart when wet, but it's nice to give them away dry.

I can't imagine how all the seeds in here won't strangle each other once they get going, but imagine finding a little ring of wildflowers. Like maybe in the park, or the Panhandle more specifically, where we left a few last week on the way to school. I hope they work!

memorial day 2012

My father's private practice sign.

Memorial Day. My father wasn't a soldier, but he was enlisted during the Korean War, and worked for years and years as a civil engineer at an airbase in New Hampshire, now closed. I could say a lot about my dad right now, but today is not for him. I do miss him and his spartan style.

Both my grandfathers and my great uncle were military men. My grandfather Bill passed away last year, my grandfather Norman passed away almost forty years ago. I wrote about Bill here and Norman here. They thankfully survived their tours of duty, so today is not for them, but I am thankful to them for all they gave, as well as for all that their wives sacrificed. 

It is awkward to write words of thank you on Memorial Day to people who have suffered and died that one has never met, without sounding sentimental and self centered (at least, it is for me). I just wanted to say that I take this day seriously and that I am truly thankful to any person at any capacity who has given their life, their mental health, or even their pinky finger for their country. I hope they are all remembered personally in as many ways and by as many people as they deserve to be. Any more than that and I'm am just going to sound sentimental.

round up: a week of inanimate objects

101 Cookbooks: Rhubarb and Rosewater Syrup

The kids and I were licking spoons of this while it cooled.

While Pinterest was filling up with my crayon donuts, an Apartment Therapy feature
on them had some lively, snarky commentary. Check it out here. It was ridiculous!

 Oliver is anything but inanimate, but the balloons are. I grabbed them off a light
pole after a street festival. He calls it the sea urchin-monster.

I took an hour with Oliver in front of Sesame Street to get out my old watercolor gear and start a little something. I didn't get anywhere, but the act of doing that and the fact that I have space in my life to try meant a lot to me.

These postage stamps from Sweden are so pretty. Our USPS pine cone and juniper
stamps are my favorite, but these take the cake.

David and I spent our once-a-year twelve hour stretch without the kids last weekend. We had breakfast at the wonderful farm:table. We saw The Dictator, which we loved. We made a "stroll, talk, drink, snack, thrift and repeat" tour of the Mission. Highlight: Mission Cheese. Disappointment: Hog and Rocks, but not too disappointing, because there was marrow and toast!

Never met one we didn't like.

One more of this guy, for now.

Here's the before shot on my twice-yearly art/cookware cabinet cleanup. Seriously out of hand.

Total mess. I cleaned this before Christmas and this is what it looked like a week ago. Disaster.

But check this out. This is how we're rolling into summer vacation. We're ready to bake, to paint, to draw, to make more piñata eggs and try to start my Etsy shop. We are SORTED!

It's awesome! Except I forgot to leave an area for completed artwork. I guess that's what our art wall is for.

And finally, I've been complaining about not having a camera since the day I started this blog, almost a full year ago. I bought this one off of a friend. It's heavily used and was heavily discounted. I need a lot of practice and to get out of the habit of picking up my phone when I want to photograph something, but I am super lucky to have worked out this deal.

SAY CHEESE!

(Note: This photo still taken with my phone.) 

Today is the last day of school. I am SO excited. We all are. I've mentioned before, this will probably be the last summer I spend completely unfettered to any sort of work, and we will make the most of it like we did last summer. Like last summer, I'll be posting a whole lot of adventures, and even more days just staying home and keeping warm and hanging out. It's crazy to think I've been doing this a year now! It's been lots of fun, and it's so special to be able to look back on some of the highlights of our life over the last year. It's such a great record of how much Oliver and Stella have grown, and how much things change (and stay the same) in just a year. And I've met so many nice people through it, so thank you for reading. :)

brilliant projects heretofore unpublished: new spaces

Long, long ago when I was a scrappy, crazy and hopeful student of architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, I took a class called "New Spaces" offered by Reinhold Martin, then professor of architecture, now noted author and associate professor at the Columbia GSD. The class took a deep look at how installations and art can alter and create new spaces. I'm not surprised I can't remember much of the program, the reading was abstruse and ethereal. And to be honest, back then I put 95% of my energy into my studio work, very little into anything else (thank goodness they came up with "Math For Architects", a geometry-based mathematics course, providing us with math credits we could finish with our eyes closed at our primarily engineering school). I should dig out the readings. Like many things in architecture school, they will probably serve me well in terms of thinking outside the box.

I do remember who took the class, and that it was talky and fun. I remember a twenty minute long conversation regarding the word "jejune". The final for the class was a competition, to design an installation or intervention anywhere within the School of Architecture building that would create "new space". There was a small budget to work with. After presenting our designs to the class, we voted on which one we would build and install as a group.

Mike, Erika and yours truly. Probably taken at 3:00 a.m. This is old school architecture, people!

The installation I designed with my dear, DEAR friends Mike Stesney and Erika Zekos won. Actually, it got second place to our brilliant friend Nancy's design, which was something like a giant fish tank hovering at the end of a hallway in the building over the staff mailbox area. But who knows how to build a fish tank, and what if it leaked? So, ours "won".

Thirty steel studs, two 2 x 10s, a fluorescent tube light, two eye-hooks and some other nuts and bolts were put together to create our installation. The canted wall of steel studs altered the space by light, by a little bit of imposition, and even by making associations with the materials. Steel studs as finished surface, and side by side. Not common. The stamped cutouts in the faces of the studs, which let light through, looked to me like little skulls, which lent a bit of humor to it.

I believe the installation stayed up for several years inside our architecture school but is gone now. I've always loved looking at these photos and remembering this project. Also, remembering that no matter how much I hated redrawing this by hand over and over until we had the angle off the wall that we desired, I'm glad that we did it by hand. We just missed the age of computer aided design and drafting in the classroom and studio when we graduated, and I'll always be grateful for that. Old school architecture, people.

You've also got to see this. Shedding Light. This is an incredible project/installation that Erika went on to do a few years ago, lighting the inside of an old tobacco barn in the winter of 2010. It is in no way derived from our New Spaces installation all those years ago, but there is a small aesthetic similarity in the light and the gaps. As I told Erika recently, if I had pulled off a project like this, I would consider it the pinnacle of my design and art career and would feel free to hang up my pencil. The project is incredible on so many levels, and so is Erika. Please check it out!

gutter garden update

Just wanted to show off the gutter garden. It's been less than a month since we refilled it with soil and planted it, and it's doing wonderfully. I think, unfortunately, its success has a lot to do with a neighbor's tree that was removed a year or two ago. We're getting a lot more light in that area.

 The garden today.

The garden almost a month ago.

I'm so happy we planted nasturtium. It grows like a weed. Is it a weed? And it's really pretty. We've got radish and zinnia seedlings fighting with each other. If neither starts to flourish in the next few weeks I'll move the strawberries I bought last week from a window box up into the seedling spots.

We picked a colander full of different lettuces and a few nasturtium flowers to have with dinner tonight. My neighbor Paul and I were talking about how to prune the lettuce leaves so the plants keep producing more, plucking from the outside in. I hope that works! It's really, really lovely for this family who so desperately wants a real garden to be able to gaze out at that tiny bit of our own green in the morning. It gives me personally such a calming moment when I glimpse it. 

Nasturtiums on the cover of Plants and Their Application to Ornament by Eugéne Grasset.
I've always been fascinated with how the stem of a nasturtium leaf meets the leaf close to
the center, not at the edge of the leaf. And I love botanicals. Have you seen mine here? 

Our neighbor "Backyard Richard" threw up some lemons from his tree for us
while we were back there today. Nice!

Many moons ago I lived north of Albuquerque, NM in a town called Bernalillo in the tiniest two room shack. I spent most of my meager architectural intern salary on gardening. I lived literally in the middle of the desert, so I dug furrows into the sand, filled them with store-bought soil, and planted rows and rows of corn. I loved growing corn. Have you ever eaten corn within an hour of it being picked? There's nothing sweeter or more delicious. So good. 

The crazy and sad thing about the year I grew that corn is that there was a plague of grasshoppers that came through in swarms soon after my first ears started maturing. They mowed the crop down in a matter of a week. Like, sawed them down. Never seen anything like it.

Anyway, I'd love to try it again when we get a chance. Being back there today reminded me of how much fun it is to grow food (and what a money pit gardening can be)!

really good food

Stella wasn't feeling well and stayed home from school Thursday. It was a wonderful reminder for me of what summer vacation feels like, not running up and down the Panhandle to school twice in a day. Summer vacation starts in ONE WEEK here! The basis of this whole blog was to document the lazy, laid back days of last summer vacation, and here we are a week away from the NEXT one.

Oliver took a rare and late nap, so Stella and I jumped at the chance to cook dinner together, just the two of us. It was such precious time, I couldn't bear to pull out the camera. Even I have moments that I don't want to share. Stella sat on the counter so she could really get over the soup pot and we had the laptop open to the recipes we were using. We were cooking really good food, which made it all the more special.

We made two nutritious and homey dishes from 101 Cookbooks. I just found this blog the other day and I am obsessed, reading through it whenever I get a minute. There are so many gorgeous and delicious recipes there. It is perfect. It's been around for a while, I don't know how I missed it. The author writes, cooks and photographs beautifully. 

We made these:

Chickpea Hot Pot

Sesame Almond Brown Rice Balls

And then this business, like clockwork:

Do you have a "baby"? Does it cry every time it wakes up from a nap? Mine does.

Just in time for dinner, Oliver woke up. After we got him settled we finished making the rice balls while eating the soup. So good.

Happy weekend!

donut-shaped crayons

Donut-Shaped Crayons. I'm calling this "Use #2" in our "Five 101 New Uses For Your Donut Pans" series. So fun to make, fun to hold and draw with, REALLY pretty to look at. You can see our first "use" for the pans, Cornbread Cocktail Donuts, by clicking here, by the way.

You probably were living under a rock if you didn't catch on to the melting-old-crayons-into-new-crayons trend that was sweeping the interwebs around Valentine's Day. There were a lot of super cute heart shaped crayons floating around a few months ago. 

I tucked that idea away, and the other day when Stella and I were riffing on other uses for our single-use donut pans, I remembered it. And now here we are. 

I wish I could credit someone specific for these instructions, but they mostly come from common sense. Plus, there are literally hundreds of tutorials out there for melting crayons, and they are all basically the same. It's easy, kids love it, have fun with it!

Preheat your oven to 250 degrees and grab your donut pans. We ran out of patience before also filling our silicone madeline pan, but those would've been pretty. Grab your bucket of spare and old crayons, and start peeling!

 They both worked really hard, then they both got "really tired".

Next, gather your color combos and chop 'em up.

 The chopping was very gratifying to me.

I used a beater of a cutting board. With very hot water almost all the wax comes

off, but be careful.

Fill the donut pans. Stella and Oliver loved this part, of course.

Put the pans in the oven and "bake" for 13-15 minutes, until donuts are just smooth at the top. They will keep melting when they come out of the oven. Move them gently to keep as much of the color variegated as possible, if you made your donuts multi-colored.

Note: All the chunks of color have dropped to the bottom.

Don't be alarmed if they look like this when you take them out.

Set the pan on a cooling rack for about fifteen minutes. After that, I set the pan in the freezer for five minutes to let the metal shrink away from the wax.

When you are ready to flip the donuts out of the pan, some will fall out, some will need a little coaxing. Ours were strong enough to handle a few whacks of the pan on the counter.

We broke a few in half, they seem to draw better that way.

Love these donut pans. As soon as it warms up here (we're in a very cold spell right now), we'll finish our next installation of "101 Uses For Your Donut Pans". So, stay tuned!