A Farewell to Scoby

 A co-worker pressed a starter batch of Kombucha on me after I expressed casual interest in making the fermented concoction.  Kombucha, a fermented tea, had appealed to my mad scientist side. I consider myself an adventurous cook, creative, and maybe a little reckless.  (Like, for instance, the time I cut up a pepper for a salad without tasting it and made the hottest salad of my life.)

There I was with a jar of some strange circular mold that I thought of as the "mother", but I would learn was the SCOBY.  My colleague had given me some instructions, and I had watched a bunch of videos about the methods of making Kombucha, all of them narrated by fanatics.  I quickly ascertained that making Kombucha might involve a little more precision than I was willing to commit.

I considered bailing altogether, but decided at the last minute that I should at least make an attempt on the recipe, perhaps I could just wing it.  I'll just cut to the chase and tell you that my batch was a total failure.  One sip made the acid in my stomach rise like the tide.

The menace.

When my work colleague asked how it turned out, I had to admit that it was a failure, I was going to have to throw it out.  "No don't get rid of it, it makes a great cleaning product."  Well, that wasn't really my intention, it was time for my brief Kombucha career to end.

I left the Scoby in a jar in my fridge, as well as a small jar of "juice".  As the jar sat there, the Scoby continued to grow. Even the juice jar grew a small "oyster" of Scoby.  The longer it stayed in the fridge, the bigger it became. I would know someone rummaging through the fridge had uncovered it when they would pause and then exclaim in horror, "What the hell is in this jar?"

I started to become a little afraid  of it. How was I going to get rid of it? I imagined it exploding out of the jar and gnawing on a forgotten cauliflower behind a carton of orange juice.  Or what if I added it to the compost pile and instead of assisting with the biological breakdown of the pile it instead fermented into some new form of intelligent life?

 I chose to ignore it for four or five months.

Shortly before burial.

Then, one trash day right before we were to leave town for a week, I decided it had to go.  I poured the liquid off the Scoby and slid it into a plastic bag which I slammed into the trash can.  Our county incinerates its trash, so hopefully the Scoby died by fire before it could consume any other organic material. As for the jar of juice, I decided to use it's cleaning properties to cleanse my garbage disposal.

 It has been working great ever since.

Future drain cleaner.

   

 

Baltimore Museum of Art, hon

Nick Cave Soundsuit

What makes the Baltimore Museum of Art

 different from other art museums? It's the chatty security guards.

"Do you think this statue is a man or a woman?"

"You have a lot of hair."

"You should smile."

"Didn't you already come this way?"

"I love your hair."

"You know it takes more muscles to frown that it does to smile."

Okay, I was frowning at this desiccated and reconstructed orange by Zoe Leonard. I mean, this has got to be a conservators nightmare.

 The museum houses have some great iconic artwork, like this Cezanne.




 They also have one of the largest collections of Matisse, thanks to the Cone sisters.


 And this one comes with my favorite overheard comment of the day.  " If I was to get sucked into a painting, I'd want it to be this one because I would have a companion."

Amish on the Beach

This summer we went to our rental beach house in Avon, NC, as usual.  We had neighbors several houses up who appeared to be Amish.  Although, as my son pointed out, we did not see any horse and buggies parked under the houses, so possibly they were Mennonites.   It was fascinating to see people on the beach fully dressed.  It seemed rude to photograph them, although I tried, so I sketched them throughout the week.  These are some of my sketchbook pictures.

What we learn from copying

 We had two snow days in a row which meant that I got all kinds of things done at home.  One was to make our holiday card.

When our children were little I would photograph them and then make a collage with their pictures.  In later years I might make a series of original prints, and one year I made an abstract painting of poinsettias and cut it into card size pieces.  Last year I had the genius realization that I could take a photograph of one of my paintings and get it turned into a card the same way anyone turns their family pictures into a card.  I don't know why it took me so long to think of this.  I used a painting of a leafless oak tree; it was very Bleak Mid-Winter. 

None of my paintings from the past year seemed appropriate, so I decided to start fresh.  I was inspired by this woodblock print of travelers in the snow.  I had forgotten how fun it can be to try and copy a work of art; there are so many details you only see when examining a picture up close.  I punched up the colors because I suspect this print is pretty badly faded.  Keeping it simple, I did my version in watercolor.

It was a nice way to spend a snowy afternoon.

Yankee thrift

I always say that it is my Yankee nature that I won't throw anything away.  I will repaint and reprint over things until they look good or are beyond saving.  But then if I go to far, there is always the option of tearing and cutting apart, because, even if the whole is not good, some part of it is.  And that is why god (or Picasso and Braque) invented collage.

I had been wanting to make some collages with my dyed scraps of paper (see previous post); and I had a show coming up and wanted to have some unframed and inexpensive items to fill out my display.  These are some of my favorite collages that I made with my scraps.

Easter Egg Dye

We take Easter egg dying pretty seriously in our house.  We don't just dunk eggs in a color made from a tablet and call it a day; we dunk them in different colors at different levels trying to build up new hues and designs.  We also spend a lot of time adding and removing masking tape, or better yet, stick on letters, as a resist effect.  One year we got a pysanky kit (Ukrainian egg techniques) and dabbled in that, although you can spend hours on one egg, which is not as much fun.  This year we learned about a way to swaddle the egg in a piece of patterned silk to transfer the color, which looks really cool, but we were afraid to eat those eggs.  Here is a picture of this years eggs.

At the end of the egg dying, I couldn't bear to just wash the leftover dyes down the drain.  We had mixed up most of the pysanky dyes, and that's pretty high quality stuff.  I started dipping some scrap paper into the dye and that looked pretty good.  Then I remembered my giant stash of unsatisfactory prints that I can't bear to throw away.  I always feel that I can repaint, overdraw,  or reprint on top of anything.  After all, plain paper is so boring.  So I started dipping and drizzling dyes onto the print scraps.  I also floated some of the dyes on top of oil and marbled some of the papers.  I had the remains of some old book pages left over from the sketchbook project, that I added into the mix too.  This is what the table looked like at the end of the session:

It took days for the oiled ones to dry, but they took on a translucent quality, that is pretty cool.   Now I have a big colorful stash of paper to add into future work.

Four Hour Vacation

One of the great things about living in Washington, DC is that on a Saturday you can say to your spouse, "Let's go downtown and look at some art", and you can, and it is free.  I wanted to check out the one million bones installation on the mall because I had worked with my students creating clay and paper mache bones for the display.  One Million Bones is an art installation created to raise awareness about human genocide.  My husband thought that this was a little grisly, but he is a good sport, so he came along.  This is what it looked like:

  Afterwards, he wanted to visit the Hirshhorn sculpture garden, which is a lovely and cool place to visit; it was getting rather hot.  That led to a visit inside the museum, where we saw an exhibit of mixed media art (my favorite kind of media!) from the collection.  It included Braque collages and Joseph Cornell boxes as well as more contemporary artists like Mark Bradford and unexpected works like print and paper collages by Louise Nevelson and stained glass assemblages by Josef Albers.  Then we puttered around the gift shop and bought interesting things that we didn't need.
On our way back to the metro we studied the plants in garden walkway next to the Arts and Industries building.   My husband looked at me and said, this was fun, we got to be tourists for a few hours, it was like a little vacation.  True, except we didn't have to figure out the public transportation, and neither of us wore fanny packs.