Crafty crafty

Back on April 25th, I lucked into* two tickets for the 28th Annual Smithsonian Craft Show at the National Building Museum in DC. So, with a liked-minded crafty companion in tow, I moseyed up and had a look around. *again, thanks to a certain lovely co-worker are very much due!

Unsurprisingly, there were lots of the usual things, purses, jewelry, some abstract sculpture objects, and oodles of people looking around but not buying stuff (including moi). I think just getting face time with potential future customers is valuable for the artists, especially because some of us would go home and tell our friends, or, sayforexample, blog. So here are a few of my favourites:

Locality loyalty first, there were at least two booths from Brattleboro, VT in the array:

Natalie Blake's ceramics have been on my "to buy" list for years now. She makes these spiffy little jar stoppers that look like sea anemones, and decorates her work with patterns that look like scratch-art (actually called sgraffito).


Randi Solin's Solin Glass is also captivating, full of glittering fragments. The vases have so many mosaic layers they're often at least an inch thick, and you get lost staring into them (One of these became a Christmas gift to my mom a couple years back).

Both Blake and Solin have studios in Brattleboro, VT at Cottonmill Hill, one of my favourite warehouse-gallery-studios. The Torpedo Factory in Oldtown Alexandria is similar, and a lot closer to DC, for those who want to go exploring.

In alphabetical order, then:

Ignatius Hats had sculptural, woven, straw hats of all shapes. Some looked like fools caps, one looked like a fairy cap made from leaves (above), but I just like the wide-brimmed basic hat with a tuft of feathers at the side.

Lenox Workshops presented what looked mostly like very plain, ladder back style chairs, but for some unique shaping. My favourites had legs that curved outwards and looked like they could walk away if they got tired of being sat on.


A lot of the "wearable art" said either "grandmother" or "person skinnier than me," but I really liked Starr Hagenbring's dresses. Her work was pieced together in vertical strips, making the shaping of the dress very pronounced and the skirt very full.

Shu Juan Lu displayed another example of wearable art, this one calling to my minimalist tastes. The dark fabric obscures some of the interesting folds it makes; the wool stands on its own while the knit uses the wearer for stability.

My favourite straight-up, framed-work artist was Thomas Meyers. His work bordered on similarity with Nick Bancock (Griffin and Sabine) and Peter Sis (Tibet: Through the Red Box), but was primarily reminiscent of private doodlings on odd scraps of paper.

One of the most desirable objets d'art at the show was a reddish-orange leather coat from Toshiki and Maryszka Osaki of Futari, Inc. It was shaped by wavering, raised darts around the torso, not unlike climbing vines or trails of steam rising (Meyers, whose booth was directly next door, commented that a great many people had fawned over it until they saw the price tag).

The prize for most mesmerizing piece definitely goes to Jeffrey Zachmann, whose wall-mounted kinetic art (read: marble toys) kept a full audience catatonic for at least 5 minutes apiece. The only issue I had was that the pieces required small motors to carry the marbles back to the top after each run. Each machine made different clattering, swirling noises, and altogether they overwhelmed each other. One alone might make a nice variation on the sound of an indoor fountain (there are videos on the website!).


Last but not least, more shapely weaving, this time with willow bark into baskets by Jennifer Heller Zurick. I loved how the pieces were uneven and unique, how sculptural each was and how different weaves and braids were laid on top of one another.


The only downsides to the show were that a) the booths were teeny and I felt guilty taking up space staring at things when other people wanted to look. Craft show, not gallery. and b), which is part of a, there were so many people I felt pressed to keep moving, or at least not walk straight into them. (and c) that I didn't have camera to take my own pictures of the work for posting.) I heard that the other days of the show were less crowded, so maybe next year...

Chocolate Caramel Cups, +3 for alliteration

Yours truly recently acquired some very exciting and rare footage of the elusive Chocolate Caramel Cups in the wild. As you will see from the somewhat grotesque imagery shown here (reported exclusively on this blog!), the Chocolate Caramel Cups have a fearful habit of wreaking havoc on their fellows. Evidence suggests that an Alpha Chocolate Caramel Cup will strip an entire rival tribe of their outer coatings before eviscerating them (as seen below!). Your faithful reporter has little stomach for this, and shall not go into further detail. The photographs must speak for themselves in this case.

The first photograph, daringly captured by our field scout, is a close up of one of these Chocolate Caramel Cups. You may observe the formation of the cranial ridge and overall dimensions of the beast. The second image shows the vestige remnants of rival Caramel Cups, and the third was captured after the war party had left; a lone victim of the atrocities.

~ ~ ~

All silliness aside, the camera on my phone is of seriously low quality, but it's all I got. The recipe for these monsters is as follows.

Chocolate Caramel Cups

You will need one or two mini-muffin tins and tin-liners. The quantity of chocolate is easily variable and amendable, but the caramel can only be fractionally divided. I made a full batch (measurements below) and have leftover (woe is me).

1-2 ~10 oz bags of semi-sweet or dark chocolate chips (I used ghirardelli)
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
1 cup cream
2 cups sugar

1. Start the chocolate melting in a double broiler over simmering water. Stir occasionally.

2. Melt butter and sugar in saucepan over medium heat. Stir once or twice to incorporate.

3. When sugar has dissolved and no crystals remain, add the cream and again stir until just mixed. Over-stirring causes the sugar to crystalize. Continue to cook over medium to low heat, just hot enough that the caramel bubbles a little at the edges but does not get too carried away. Cook until caramel reaches 240 degrees F. (you will need a cooking/chocolate/candy thermometer for this. Make sure it doesn't touch the bottom of the pan when you're measuring.)

4. Meanwhile, the chocolate has melted. Put a small spoon-full in the bottom of each mini-muffin cup (lined) and use a pastry brush to brush it up the sides so that it reaches the top and covers all the paper. Place tin in freezer to solidify.

5. Remove chocolate from freezer and carefully pour, do not spoon, the caramel into each cup. Do this by transferring the caramel from the pot to a pyrex measuring cup with a spout. Add enough caramel to almost reach the rim, perhaps leaving 2-3 mm free for the top layer of chocolate. This top layer must be able to connect with the first layer of chocolate to seal in the caramel. Place the cups back in the freezer again while you melt a little more chocolate.

(if the caramel gets too hard/crystalizes, turn the heat back on and don't stir it.)

6. Remove trays from freezer again. Spoon more chocolate on top of the caramels and smooth it to the sides with the back of the spoon. Fill to the brim. Replace in the freezer.

7. Once everything has solidified a final time, peel the muffin cups off of the chocolate and pack away for later or eat. They should be just fine at room temperature, or in the fridge if it's hot out.

Feel free to try other fillings with the same method. I did peanut butter caramel "cups" previously, but was lacking the muffin tins, so they were really... sandwiches.

Lessons learned

Commenting and leaving your website/blog info here and there on the interwebs can actually generate traffic. So sayeth my recent interpretation of the data I've been collecting on this very blog. Before you freak out, no, I can't tell exactly who you are, and if you're on the web you're spreading information about your surfing habits all over the place anyway. I left a comment over on Meredith Farkas' blog, Information Wants to be Free after the CIL2010 conference along with my blog address, and got a few clicks off it. That's certainly one way networking works, and why we should form connections online. (There's a building slowly on top of foundations metaphor here somwhere)

Posting links on certain days of the week, and times of day results in different levels of click-interest. I got a ton of clicks yesterday, and I suspect this is because people were le bored at work on a Monday. I'll have to devise a controlled experiment to test this theory. Maybe posting the same number of links of similar type every day? There are also notable changes in click frequency based on how I've "sold" the link in my tweet or text.

People are more likely to respond to a post or a link if they can see that others have done so before them. Facebook posts with lots of comments or clicks get shuffled to the top in the "Top Stories" feed, and if there are several comments saying "omg, so cool" and "this is great!" everyone else will click, too.

Which brings me to the irritating point that people are frequently more interested in visual content than in text. (this post is already screwed) This generally makes it difficult to communicate information to people because they are lazy or unwilling to go through all the trouble of reading. The blog Information is Beautiful takes advantage of this by posting awesome graphs, diagrams, charts and whatnot that are visually interesting, full of information, and make their point. I admit that I am also guilty of this trend. When I go through my Google Reader feed at lunch every day I beeline for the "pretty" items, the webcomics, and posts I know will be brief.

I'll just conclude by saying that posting interesting, wordy content and creating a reader base isn't as easy as one might think.

(if I put a kitten here, would you be more interested? another future study.)

To think, to write...

Four years ago, I packed up my life and moved it all 500 miles to one small town on the top of a hill in Southern Vermont, without a damn clue what it would turn into for me. I may wax poetic about it all for years, in hindsight, in retrospect, whatever shades that might tint the memories. Everything wasn't always perfect, but the town of Marlboro felt like *home*. But before Marlboro, there was another me. A me who filled journal after journal with tiny cramped writing, drawings, designs, and lord-knows-what workings of teenage consciousness (the first image in this post is a quick view of some pages from an old journal of mine, and two books I hand-bound on the edges of the frame). Most of the writing probably isn't worth reading, but the way I lay out the text and sketches, sometimes weaving strands of text into images makes the journals visually appealing, a flip-book of nostalgia. Once I got to Marlboro I stopped writing and sketching after one journal of nothing but text. My question is, why did I stop? While I'm not prepared to completely answer that yet, here are some thoughts on the subject:

First, why did the content shift to text-only? Was it because I felt I didn't have the time to commit to more sincere creations on the pages? Because I felt my sketches and layout concepts were piddly, and not worth putting on paper? How could I be more self-conscious in college than in High School? My intent in keeping the journals was always that someday, someone would read them. Whether that would be a progeny or a historian, an alien anthropologist... Or maybe I thought they would fall into someone's hands sooner than that, and prove how awesome I was. With that in mind, I suppose the shift was because I started sharing more with people face to face at college, and didn't feel the need to record everything on paper for future transmission.

And then why did I stop writing entirely? Even at times when I could have used some introspection, I didn't write... at least not in paper journals. I began emailing, using Facebook and Twitter, recording my movements and thoughts in communications and snippets. Microblogging. This, so far as I'm concerned, is a significant step down. Maybe even a slide. Then again, I'm not sure all that introspection helped me develop much at the time, either.

I don't know if trying to restart my journaling is a mistake or not (my own version of NaNoWriMo... whatever month it may be). But if I think "nothing I do is worth recording, not the entire day, certainly" then I'm only discouraging myself. Maybe I became more private, in an odd, long-term way.

... and here I am blogging about it. Hopefully posting this will make me more inclined to journal at least once a week...

Mobile:Library:Toy:CIL2010

I... am a lazy, lazy blogger.

Back in early April, I attended* the Computers in Libraries conference in Crystal City, took extensive notes, and then sat on them for the last few weeks. (Bad blogger, no cookie.) So, now that we've all had sufficient time to process, here's a quick run through of my thoughts from those two days.

CIL2010 was my first conference of any kind, and I admit that I was a bit starry eyed and excited about the whole business. I did not, however, feel out of the loop during the sessions, or as if I didn't fit in with the crowd (although the librarians who have been to a lot of these are a bit clique-ish). There were more sessions than I could manage to attend all at once (where's a time-turner when I need it?), but I got to one in every time block while I was there. In all honesty, the subject matter was a bit disappointing. I was hoping for more cutting edge stuff I'd never heard about, and instead I got... "cool blue alien hot stuff" and way too much hype about smartphones and ipads. In some ways, the conference solidified my desire to be some sort of special or academic librarian, not a public librarian. I'll try to reserve judgment on a lot of the conference on the grounds that it was my first and I don't know the presenters or the insider drama very well.

On to my notes!

The first session I went to was a presentation of a fancy, interactive, online, visual collection exploration application that was entirely fake. The Smithsonian Commons is this big idea for a way to get visitors into the collections from outside the physical museum, allowing them to develop personal collections and so on. But it's only a prototype! It's a huge project, oodles of effort and money spent on something that doesn't exist. Argh. Plus I disagree with the concept of an online version of the collection in the first place, but I'm just kind of elitist about museums and keeping things proper.

Which brings me to a question I had a lot: do people really want all this change, all this web 2.0, ebooks, mobile devices... or do they want Classic Library? It's certainly true that librarians are a bunch of geeks, and think that all this 2.0 stuff could be useful/cool/blue, but are they also forcing it down people's throats? I heard a lot about how books are dead. Well guys, personally, I can't afford a smartphone, or an ipad, I dislike reading on a screen, and I love collecting hard copies on my shelves. I'm not the only one (even if I can't find a supporting study right this second).

The counter argument is that librarians are "complacent," and are saying "we're great, why change?"

I also made long lists of things to research and understand better in the future: Drupal and OCLC, par example. I signed up for Google Analytics right away, and now I can collect ridiculous amounts of data on traffic to this very website. I'm a sucker for pretty charts and information visualizations, especially if it live-updates! Watson Library created a spiffy "dashboard" that does this kind of thing. Another neat tool I heard mentioned was the Google Public Data Explorer. (Further exploration and maybe a post on the Google tools later).

I just realised that this post will be epically long and dull if I don't cut it into bits. Consider this Part I.

*It should be noted that a very kind co-worker/mentor loaned me his conference pass for two of the three days, for which I am very grateful.

Classic library image from Trinity College Library, Dublin, by Candida Hofer.

Modern library image from Francis Martin Library, a branch of the NYPL. Design by 1100 Architect.

ps. Some of the random links in this are well-worth clicking...

EDIT/PPS: at some point the formatting got all screwy on some of my archived posts. Sorry about that, maybe I'll fix it all in the future... [9.7.2012]

Quizzes! Games! Real Science!

It seems that the BBC (who I still find more trustworthy and comprehensive than the average US news service just because they're foreign) has a website (called Lab UK) dedicated to conducting studies on the internet through quizzes and such. Their big tagline varies along the lines of "Real Science!!" which I find quite amusing. You do what you have to in order to get your readers interested, I guess, but the biologist in me flinches when they say "Real Science!!" They have an information tab for [Real] scientists, which is more illuminating than the FAQ and info pages. Anyway, at the very least it's a more productive way to waste time playing online than the usual quizzes and games, and you still get a cute result at the end. Requires a BBC id/pword, quick registration, ostensibly to protect your answers and results. It's really fairly shrewd of whoever conceptualized Lab UK...

I did the "Web Behaviour Test:"

I am a Web Elk! (gr)

Slow-moving - Web Elks like you take their time finding exactly the right morsels of information – just like the real-world elk who carefully browses for shoots and leaves to eat.

Sociable - Real-world elks are social and stay in herds to protect themselves from predators. When you browse the web you are also a social creature, often using social networks, or other sites whose content is created by its users, as sources of information.

Specialised - Web Elks perform best when they focus on one thing at a time, rather than trying to multitask. Just as the real-world Elk is perfectly specialised for its environment, you have learned that while the web makes it possible to multitask, it’s not always the best approach.

Googlevoice, or, Lost in Transcription

So, in the interest of exploring the entire range of somewhat silly google products that may or may not improve my life, I signed up for googlevoice, and thereby googlevoicemail. I feel like I haven't explored all of the services involved (at least I think I haven't), but voice is definitely useful for when I'm at work without mys cellphone and need to make a long distance call. I just plug in the number I want to call online, and it rings my desk phone (which I had to set up, a simple procedure).

The voicemail service, however, is basically a good thought that doesn't entirely float my boat. I would love to have transcriptions of my voicemails, but the transcription algorithm or whatever just doesn't work that great. At least not for message-leavers without perfect diction (or with a sense of humor). Here is the transcript of a voicemail from Dan, telling me that he was coming home, that it's very nice out, trying to figure out where I was, and subsequently saying heck with it, he was coming home anyway. More or less:

Hey Pat, F, F, F, F. A. So, okay now. I've heard your message and I approved just trying to figure out where you are. It's a beautiful day. If you were over at the house thinking I was going to drop by if you could be a beautiful day, but I would go home. Viruses, Jeff, I was just like to away if you could do the big day, but it's I was. Barry.

The "FFFFA" was actually him laughing. Thank heavens I can still playback an audio file, too.

...without man, it sank back into the realm of the unimagined and unconceived and hence into meaninglessness...

"...if, in his house in the mountains, he was being observed less and less, so rarely that, when he pointed his mirror telescope at people who he presumed were observing him from the cliff, they turned out to be observing not him but something else through their field glasses, chamois or mountain climbers or whatnot, this state of not being observed would begin to torment him after a while, much more than the knowledge of being observed had bothered him earlier, so that he would virtually yearn for those rocks to be thrown at his house, because not being watched would make him feel not worth noticing, not being worth noticing would make him feel disrespected, being disrespected would make him feel insignificant, being insignificant would make him feel meaningless, and, he imagined, the end result might be a hopeless depression, in fact he might even give up his unsuccessful academic career as meaningless, and would have to conclude that other people suffered as much from not being observed as he did, that they, too, felt meaningless unless they were being observed, and that this was the reason why they all observed and took snapshots and movies of each other, for fear of experiencing the meaninglessness of their existence in the face of a dispersing universe with billions of Milky Ways like our own, settled with countless of life-bearing but hopelessly remote and therefore isolated planets like out own, a cosmos filled with incessant pulsations of exploding and collapsing suns, leaving no one, except man himself, to pay any attention to man and thereby lend him meaning..."

-from The Assignment, or, On The Observing of the Observer of the Observers, Friedrich Dürrenmatt (Agee translation)

Dürrenmatt surprised me, when I opened the book and the chapter long sentences left me breathlessly trying to keep up with a hyperactive train of thought that continued until it found its destination: the sub-text. (I would try to pull off un-punctuation here, but I just haven't got it in me right now. A few long sentences will have to suffice.) I think that kind of free-form, rolling structure left the book much more open to exploring the ideas behind the text because the characters were not immersed in keeping track of "he said, she said" and all sorts of awkward exposition. The point of the book is definitely not the plot. I've been considering the difference between "literature" and popular novels lately, and it seems like "literature" is more often about the ideas behind the story, while popular works are more plot-centric. These of course follow Freytag's dramatic arc of exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution (also see Aristotle's Poetics for a good lesson in why your writing isn't up to snuff). The Assignment does follow the same arc, but manages to sound like voices in your head rather than words on a page, thus, at least for me, expressing itself without needing analysis.

And if any of my writing about books seems a bit odd, it's because I've been voraciously reading Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series. By book four I've grown to accept the fact that popping in and out of chalk pavement pictures books and working alongside fictional characters like Emperor Zhark and Hamlet is just as normal as time travel. Highly recommended, although I haven't finished books four and five just yet.

Seitan Recipe

I posted this elsewhere a while ago, but when it was difficult to find again today, I thought heck, I'll repost it here. Plus I'm making it right now, first time in the new kitchen. Eventually (soon, I hope, cause I'm hungry) it will become salad rolls.

This entire recipe is easy to change around, but here’s a starting point:
-4 cups UNBLEACHED (or whole wheat) flour (use more on your second or third try if you want, but probably not more than 6 cups)
-enough water to make your pile of flour (which didn’t need to be accurately measured at all) into a solid ball of flour dough. The ball is very important, so make sure it’s all stuck together and not too wet or dry at this stage.
-Once you’ve got a ball, fill a mixing bowl with water and begin to gently knead the ball under it, keeping it together as best you can. It does get a little too soggy sometimes and tries to come apart, but if you just keep going patiently and keep the bits together you’ll be fine. The water should be changed fairly frequently, once it becomes opaquely white. The white is the starch coming off of the gluten, which is what we want. Gluten=protein=yay.
-So you knead for about 45 min until your ball becomes a bit more solid and rubbery. The water should be a bit less opaque when you refill it now. Ideally you might want it to be clear, or quite close to that. Definitely don’t stop until it’s close or you’ll get sponge instead of seitan. I like to put a cutting board in the bottom of the sink and knead under a light flow of water for a while, sometimes picking up the ball and rubbing it or spreading it under the water to get those pesky lumps and starch out.
-Now that you have a squeaky lump of what looks like beige brains...
-Get a large frying pan with a lid, about 2” deep. Make up your simmering sauce to cook the seitan in. I think it can also be baked and other things, but I like doing this for some all-purpose seitan. Using a 2 cup measure, mix about 1/4 cup soy sauce, 1/8 cup olive oil, 3 tbl (ish, really, I just dump some on) sage, some thyme, maybe a couple drops garlic oil, salt, pepper... sautee some onions first and use those, too. Again, this is pretty arbitrary and variable, so maybe start with something simple (soysauce/oliveoil/sage) and then experiment later. Pour this into the pan and fill up with some water, about an inch deep. Bring to boil.
-Cut your lump of “brains” into half inch strips. Squeeze each of these carefully over the sink to get out the last bits of water, and lay them into the hot simmering sauce (turn down to simmer now). Put on the lid and let them sit for about 10 minutes.
-At this point the seitan lumps should have puffed up and look like poofy beige blobs. They can be coloured with this sauce, too, so more soy sauce makes darker seitan, etc. After 20 mins turn the blobs over, simmer another 20. Remove from heat and lay your blobs on a cutting board to cool. The sauce can be saved for another (slightly weaker) batch later.
-The seitan can be cut up again from here and used in stir fry, spring rolls, on salads, in tomato sauce.. whatever you like. I think it lasts about a week, but it’s usually gone so fast I haven’t tested that.

Miso soup, of a sort

As usual, the fridge was empty, the cabinets were bare, and it was dinnertime. We tend to have some basics lurking in corners, a few carrots, some ginger, noodles... And what better to do with odds and ends than soup? With Tampopo in mind, I set about to make something tasty, simple and filling.

It began, as most soups do, with a pot of water. I used my dutch oven for the heck of it, about half full of water (6 cups). Into this I chopped one onion, about an inch of ginger (would have used more if I had it, ~2") and four cloves of garlic. After letting it boil for at least half an hour, I strained out the bits, and put the broth back on the stove with the heat off.

Meanwhile, in a blender I had been working on the miso. First I squeezed a lemon, retaining the skins, and put the juice along with a large (1/2 cup+) spoonful of red miso paste into the blender. I used the lemon skins to grate some zest and set it aside. I also chopped some dried kelp and set this aside, as well. Then I added the strained out onions, garlic and ginger bits to the blender as well as a splash of vermouth (because it made more sense than soy sauce (overwhelming) or water (thinning), and because I didn't have sake, which would have been more appropriate). [Blend] You could also use some of the broth, but make sure you have enough left in the pot for cooking the veggies in the next step. The broth is not strong on its own, but there should be about 6 cups left by the end step. I added water twice during the cooking process.

While everything was blending and cooking I also prepped some rice noodles (vermicelli style) and chopped a cube of tofu. Note that as a component in this soup the tofu pretty much tastes like plain tofu. I like it this way, and it's traditional in miso soup. The noodles soaked in a bowl of warm water for ~10 minutes. They don't need to be completely soft, as they will finish cooking when added to the soup.

At some point I managed to get two chopped carrots and about a 1/4 head of cabbage into the broth on the stove and turned it back on for a few minutes, maybe 5. The cabbage got a little overdone in my case, and could be replaced with a different green soup veggie, possibly bok choy or some such.

Check list:
-Soup base: broth + carrots + cabbage
-tofu squares
-rice noodles
-blended miso mixture
-chopped kelp
-lemon zest

To assemble: I used a couple of conical bowls, which meant that things stayed in the order I added them in instead of spreading out across the bottom of a wider bowl. First about a cup of tofu cubes went in (mine were largish), then a handful of noodles, then several ladles of soup to fill to the top with hot broth (ideally there should be a good pile of veg, but not so much that they emerge more than 0.5 cm from the broth . On top of this I spooned a generous helping of the miso mixture (er, 1/4 - 1/2 cup?), then a sprinkling of kelp and lemon zest and voila! a rather pretty bowl of soup.

Of course, the whole shebang should be at least partially stirred up before eating, or you'll get all your miso in one bite. It should be mixed into the soup on the table to create a new broth. Miso cannot be cooked or it will die a horrible horrible death.

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In retrospect, and if I had my choice of ingredients, I wouldn't change much. I might ditch the onion in the beginning for some shredded spring onion on top, and find something more pleasant than cabbage. There was also a vote for soba noodles instead of the rice noodles I used. The lemon really makes this dish, so don't you dare go using bottle lemon juice. Tsk.