Origami Box

Origami is a passion of mine. Sara has video instructions that are the best. Enjoy. Click Title it will take you to you tube.

WORK GIVES MEANING TO LIFE

"One must bear in mind one thing. It isn't necessary to know what that thing is." John Ashbery

Fortune

This is what one does on yet another snow day

Fortunes

If you dream a little dream that is exactly what you will get.

One bird in the hand is better than peanut butter and jelly.

You will never have to worry about Vicks being rubbed on your chest.

Your memory is your guide. Now forget this fortune.

Hot fortune cookies may burn your fingers.

Not to worry, this is not an ice age.

It will rain at the Olympics. It will snow where it is not supposed to snow.

Fortune cookies taste like almonds. Fortunes can be sweet, or not.

You will have many friends and many families.

You will never be carried by four men holding your perch above their heads.

You will pull a plastic swimming pool up a mountain and back again on the snow to bring in groceries.

There will be many snow days and if you are a child you might be happy.

If you are a teacher you might be sad.

You will go over many mountains to reach the other side. The sun will shine as you go.

You will feed a woodpecker all winter who will kill the tree where the

feeder hangs.

You will live in a strange land and you will thrive.

Soon you will hear a ding.

You are an orchid blooming in the desert.

You are a cactus blooming in the Amazon Forest.

Hamburger makes you have the hiccups.

You will have a Lemon Meringue Pie ; it is sweet AND sour.

When you go to Amsterdam you will sleep with the windows open.

You will go to Paris to photograph nursery schools, clotheslines, and little ladies who let pigeons perch on their arms.

You will go to Paris to sing and pass your hat when you are old.

You will see every Vermeer painting in the world.

You will have dishes to wash after making fortune cookies, your kitchen will smell of almonds and sweetness, and you will share these fortunes with all.

You will go to Sweden to buy many pairs of embroidered red shoes.

You will write about this on your blog.

Recipe for fortune cookies

Paper fortunes about 4 or so inches long

This recipe makes about 10 fortune cookies

2 large egg whites,1 tsp. Vanilla extract,1 tsp. Almond Extract,

3 Tbsp. vegetable oil,

¼ tsp. salt, 8 Tbsp. Rice Flour,

2 Tbsp. white wheat flour,

1Tbsp fondant sugar,

8 Tbsp. granulated sugar,

3 tsp. ice water

Preheat oven to 300 degrees.

It must be really hot.

Cook for eleven minutes. You want the outside of the cookie to be barely brown and the inside art to be white and still soft.

Froth first four ingredients in mixing bowl. I use a kitchen- aide mixer. But, a whisker would work very well.

Sift next five ingredients together into a small bowl. Add the water and stir it into flour mixture, a little bit. Then add all of these ingredients together into the mixing bowl. Mix very well on medium high speed for a couple of minutes or until it is all dissolved.

Let batter set a little while, it is better, this way.

Pour one Tablespoon of batter onto either a well greased cookie pan or use a special cookie mat. With the back of your metal spoon swirl the batter into about a four inch circle. I just do two at a time because after it is cooked, the folding has to be done quickly before the cookies cool, at all.

Wear white antique lace cotton gloves to keep from burning your fingers. when you remove them from the oven. Place the paper fortune in the middle of the cookie. Quickly fold cookie in half without cracking the seam and then fold this semi-circle, in the middle, over the side of the mixing bowl to get the crescent shape. (Google how to make fortune cookies for video on U-Tube)

I leave the other cookie on the pan with the oven door open until I finish folding the first cookie. Then do it, the same way.

Place the folded fortune cookies inside a muffin tin to let them cool so they will hold their shape.

This recipe is my own invention because I switched flour and did not have any corn starch. See other recipes on the web. Chinese Food , fortune cookie recipe

Filamental

Fortune Cookie Lines

Last night I had a dream about fortune cookies. I found photographs of cookies made of photographs. The lines of colored paper so tiny and slim stuck out of these cookies. I found myself sitting as if I were Alice at quite a pretty table set with green moss covered teapot and teacups. I drank green tea that tasted differently every single time I took a sip. One time it was of raspberry and another of hot coconut milk, lime, and chicken, Thai soup, of course. Once it even tasted like mango and papaya and salt and lime. Set on a very pretty mica tray were slivers of, oh you know, it is a big ugly vegetable, when peeled tastes like a very crispy potato, with salt and lime and sprinkled Cayenne pepper, with fresh cilantro leaves artfully dropped as if they were random snowflakes. I am Alice, remember? I can not remember the name of that vegetable.

Suffice it to say, I was really most interested in the colorful threads of colored paper with a font I had never seen before. It was not Cuneiform or Sanskrit, for I know what those look like. It was not a Linear A or B (good thing or I might never know what was said). I think it would be so helpful if I started a group.

What if a person were to make fortune cookies out of photographs and took a shot of that? What if inside each cookie might be found an interesting fortune?

I told you this was a dream. My fortune would say, "When something is let go, it will come to you." SPRING

Specialness - Is there such a word? If not, there should be!

There are many things which I see each day that mean so very much to me.

A am surrounded by many many objects of wonder. Things like artist books, by one person  whose work is in a museum in Washington, D.C. and little boxes within boxes and a rubber stamp fish on a stick called "Fish Stick" and beautiful hands in many colors encased in mylar plastic for coasters and,a doll made of hand-woven and knitted fabric, candle holders with female sculptures attached, and drawings and fabric collage pieces with large female godesses. These things remind me of a spirit that is with me. She is the maker of all the above. These things remind me of my very best friend. She lives far away. We are connected through space and time and she is the definition of specialness. And now I have a print of one of her photographs.

It is special just like her.

I hope all are lucky to have a friend such as this.

Love/Layers/Time

"Intimacy is to love what concentration is to work: a simultaneous drawing together of attention and release of energy."  - Robert Grudin

This is a layering of works of love done over time. How fortunate I am, I know, that my love is also my work.
My most special love is my relationship with my husband and partner. We taught our children that you know you really love someone when you nurture and help them become the best individual; the very best person they can be. If you find that someone who feels the same as you do, in this regard, then that is it! It is true.

Happy Day!

Something for the future

"Just as one sends a letter from place to place, one may send,

to one's self or others, letters through time. Photographs,

mementos and journal entries are letters we send into the future;

and by writing or speaking about events gone by we can

communicate to some extent with the past. To do this regularly

and intelligently is to expand our being in time."

 

Robert Grudin - Time and The Art of Living

Everyday, I spend a little time at the beginning of my day to read

something from TIME and THE ART of LIVING. I love this

book and my copy is quite old. I have incorporated these thoughts

into my being. I thought you might like them, too.

I send this little bit of my recent past into the future.

A Few Shots Around The Studio

Photo 1. Sculptural Books in process
Photo 2. Shiny objects to attract crows
Photo 3. Objects of interest to me
Photo 4. Objects in front of Photo of
my daughter
Photo 5. Snippet of a drawing inside a
sculptural box of a child reading a book
Photo 6. Brushes, bonefolder, and pencil
containment, or just stuff.

Awareness: I do this in my studio today

"Great drama, like the energy implicit
in every atom, is eternally around
us and within us, but liberated
only by coincidence, ceremony,
creativity, periods reaching
completion, pressures reaching
the bursting point, and the
simple but painful cultivation
of awareness." 

- Robert Grudin

And so I work

for the shadow puppet show

bird by bird

flower by flower

butterfly by butterfly

child by child

Music

of Spring

for the video

where they will perform

the celebration

to remember

the springtime

of

their

lives.

Discovery

"X.4 Laughable error and profound discovery are born of the same freedom."

Robert Grudin - Time and the Art of Living

Snowfall

GREEN

LINES IN SPACE AND TIME

MORE LINES I SEE

I SEE SO MANY LINES

Lines In My Space

On Yet another snowy day my thoughts have silence to

surround them while I work and ponder the wonder of it all.



 

OTTO RANK - ART AND ARTIST - CREATIVE URGE AND PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT

This is how I mark my place.

Like Prayer Beads . . .Each Stitch

http://loopable.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/elephant.gif

http://loopable.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/elephant.gif

Lest we take everything too seriously. I am feeling a bit loopy.

Camera OBSCURA?

The image projected on my wall is not backward. It IS upside down. Is it a camera obscura? Is it a camera?
It is an optical puzzle. The answer awaits.

Camera Obscura Part TWO

The photo top left is enhanced for contrast,
whereas, the other three are not enhanced.
These images are close-ups of the image on
the wall. I opened the curtain a slight bit today
to see if the image would change as far as the
light was concerned.The lamp is obviously
upside down which is how it is on the wall.
I first became interested in this amazing sight when I lived in San Francisco area. My friend Tracy Hicks a wonderful photographer came to visit and asked to use my garage as a temporary photo studio to do a shoot for Susan Green who does amazing beaded jewelry. While we were in the middle of the session a light blue volkswagen magically appeared on the wall. There was a pinpoint of light coming through the garage door. The volkswagen belonged to my 16 year old daughter. The image was, of course, upside down and backward. I never thought I would see this again.

The funny thing about this new event is that it is because of the magnifying glass I was using on my lamp when I was doing some close up drawings with tiny details that I happened to notice the wall. I moved the glass and the image went away. Normally, you would see a life size image of whatever is projected but because of the magnification, like all else, it is the opposite. It is therefore, tiny. The aperture is the window in the door. And it is large, so normally this would not be a camera obscura. Click on the photo to see a close-up larger image.