Il Trovatore

 

Greetings blog friends! As usual I have been busier than a one legged man in a butt kicking contest, yet haven't done much crafting in a long while. So it was my pleasure to work with my accomplished costume designer friend, Susanna Douthit, on Festival Opera's production of Il Trovatore. I made 34 hats and headpieces in the span of a couple weeks along with all the other things I was helping on. I am a mad hatter!!!!

I still hope to get back to blogging soon to report on the cool crafts I have witnessed around the world. We start work immediately on the costumes for Midsummer Night's Dream.

I'm doing alot of messing with my garden while I still have a few days to get away with it. I bundled up my catnip to dry and cut down my nettles to make plant food. I'm digging up my poor neglected perrenials at my old place to give some love to in the yard at my new place, mixing up my compost, editing my opera photos, looking through all my supplies for fun stuff to use in the next production, and wishing y'all well out there wherever you happen to be.

I'm Still Alive!

Pardon my lame post with no pics and nothing to say---I just can't stand that my blog has been abandoned for so long........(Hey I know it's my own fault! )

Heck, I'm in Hawaii. I can't keep up with this! I left the day after Christmas for a month in India, and then I went to Taiwan for a week, and now I'm visiting my wonderfully awesome friend Ciarra to see her new little baby girl.

When I get back to my own computer I have all kinds of global crafty stuff to share with y'all if you're still out there keepin' an eye out for me. Much love!!!!!! -Elizabeth

Kid's Ladybug Costume

This is a costume made on the night of the 30th for my little friend here to wear to pre-school on the morning of the 31st. As Susanna and I had 2 kid's costumes to make on the same ONE NIGHT, I did the easy ladybug for the 4 year old, and she took care of the more complex costume requested by the 8 year old (those pics coming soon!), which I assisted by constanstly rooting through my disorganized tangle of craft junk for the supplies she requested.

For this ladybug costume I used a large men's hoodie that used to belong to this kid's grandfather. I removed the front pocket and sewed a large oval of black sweatshirt material on the front. I sewed on spots, stuffed the antennae, and painted a little crack in the back to represent the wings parting. Not the most impressive costume, but easy, and it was really super cute on him. He loved running around in it.

The ladybug was his own request. We were going to make him a little monster costume but he wanted to be "friendly". In my opinion you can't get more friendly than a beneficial insect that eats the destructive mites in your garden.

WE DRANK OUR BEER!

Yesterday was the day we had been anxiously awaiting. We put ONE of our beers in the frige and tasted a cold one---and it was great! We were so blown away that we had actually made beer that was fizzy and yummy. Then of course we put a few more beers in the frige to have with our excellent dinner.


It's never been so satisfying to have a beer, as when we made it ourselves. This beer has been like a child. See it taking it's first steps in the carboy:


I think you can really see the pride in this next picture:


It was hard work making sure we drank enough beer to have bottles for OUR beer:


It was fun putting the caps on the bottles:


Our friend Ricky came over to try it and he agreed that it was GOOD!


At my last herbalism class my teacher informed that the full moon coming up on September 26th will be the "Vine Moon", sacred to Dionysis, and a particulary auspicious time for making alcoholic beverages, especially those containing blackberries.

I don't know where to go to get a ton of blackberries, although I know they are around here somewhere, but nonetheless, beer is an alcoholic beverage, and WE WILL MAKE MORE BEER!

My Garden Is Berzerk

I took garden pics in anticipation of this post tonight, and it seems that I am missing a few key shots. Guess I was just too overwhelmed to get it all in. This is a partial view of half of my garden:

This is my box of herbs. You can see catnip, chamomile and wormwood. There's dill and echinacea in there somewhere. The potted herb in the foreground is clary sage. While the herbs were all small, and I made an impulse purchase at the nursery of some snow pea starts and threw them in that box. They took up more room than I expected but they sure are good:

I wanted a box of mints. I put several kinds in here, a bergamot mint, a chocolate mint, variegated mint, plain old mint mint, and then I ended up adding in some zinnias and stinging nettles, because I heard that nettles increase the strength of your mint. I have no way of knowing if they did so or not, but I do know that I am quite wary of sticking my hand in that box now. Ouch! (I've done it a few times without thinking...):

I became a collector of tomato plants. Everytime I went to a nursery or a hardware store I would see a kind that I did not have and bring it home. I ended up with 26 of them. They are falling all over eachother; Early Girls, Better Boys, Brandywines, Yellow Pears, Sunsugars, Rainbow Cherries(?), Cherokee Purple, and....I think that may be it(???)

I have another pic to post here and I am not being allowed to do so! So there, that's not even the half of this crazy garden teeming with plant friends but I'm gonna call it a day.

A New Beer Begins

Inspired by the book, Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers: The Secrets of Ancient Fermentation by Stephen Harrod Buhner, my bro Sam and I decided to try some brewing of our own.

The herbal beer book talks about several fermented brews sacred to indigenous peoples, as well as the history of beer and how many an herb other than hops has been made into beer. It includes tons of cool quotes and recipes from way back in the day, like the 1600s.

Being in an herbalism class I was quite excited to see that one can make ales from my herb friends like elecampagne, St. John's wort, coriander, clary sage, yarrow, borage, etc. One can even make a psychotropic ale of saffron, molasses, brown sugar, water, and yeast. How interesting. (What's the cost of half an ounce of saffron though? Pricey, eh?)

To start off we figured we should probably just get the equipment and make some standard beer from a pre-packaged mix to get the gist of the process, before we add coming up with a pound or what have of you of some fresh flowering magical herb to the list of things to figure out.

We got the kit and the mix at San Francisco BrewCraft, which was really great because they actually had the herbal beer book in stock, AND the guy that was helping us out happened to be the guy that LOVED that book. He also told us about the success they had making a lavender beer. That's good to know! Conveniently and fortuitously for me, I work part time at a lavender farm. Lavender beer is definately on the agenda for the near future. I've got 7 pounds of dry culinary grade lavender just waiting to be fermented into a real good time! (We probably don't need near that much.)

Making the beer last night was really fun, although we started kinda late and I had to give up and go to bed before we were done boiling our wort with the malt and hops. Sam had to stay up and finish it off without me. I didn't get to be there for pouring the liquid over the yeast into the fermenter, but I was most likely there in spirit. I'm so excited about our beer. We are making an IPA.

The beer is alive! This pic is of the fermenter under Sam's bed. He can hear it gurgle underneath him. It's like his little baby beer:



The beer is going to hang out here in this fermenter for about 6 days and then it gets to hang out in a huge glass jar thing called a carboy to ferment some more until it is no longer cloudy (?) and then we get to put it in bottles and 10 days after that we get to drink it. Woo hoo! Maybe I will even make some beer bread with my very own beer.

ReFashion: Halter Dress From Big tee-shirt

This is my first re-fashion for the month of June, which I did for my lovely friend SeaLove. I used the halter#2 tutorial from OhMyStars, but made it longer so that it would be a dress, scooped the back down a bit, added darts, modified the way I attached the straps, and tied in beads where the straps hang down her back.

I LOVE OhMyStars. There are alot of cute ideas there that I want to work with this summer.It was alot of fun making this dress for my friend, and it only took an afternoon to do.