I Don't Really Get Twitter

I've never been a big Twitter fan. I don't really get it, but I think it's because I don't use it properly (maybe?). But when I started this blog, which obviously hasn't taken off because work is draining me pretty hard, I figured I should have a twitter account in case I, you know, suddenly became savvy at orchestrating social media.

I've had the account (@CraftyJackson) for less than two months. I've tweeted all of 12 (twelve, ten plus two) times. Yet today I get this:

Uh, what?

My last two tweets were from BBC news, so...

No, that still doesn't make any sense.

See, I'm a goodie-two-shoes. Somebody tells me I need to start changing my behavior, and it doesn't matter if it's my mother or my boss or the faceless auto-generated text of a giant corporate machine, I get paranoid and panic. Oh my God, I need to change my behavior. But how? What have I done and what should I do instead? What if I do it again and the Twitter page YELLS at me again?! Omg, omg!

And one of the articles I tweeted was about Twitter! Though I posted it without comment, I was applauding Twitter and their refusal to give out data! And I have all of (probably) eight followers (can't tell, they're still re-starting my account), so how the hell could I be spamming? Now I feel rejected, criticized, guilty...

Yeah, it's ridiculous. That is bogus. Twitter, this goes against my eager-to-please nature, but... I'm gonna go ahead and ignore your admonition. Because flatulent dinosaurs and Twitter-in-court aren't spam, they are NEWS.

Temple of Heaven Puzzle

So last week I was bored again and started poking through my craft box looking for something new to do. I came across the weird felt dessert kits I got in Japan that I will definitely have to do later, but I also came across these wooden puzzles I convinced my mother to buy for me when we were at Michael's a few years ago. I have two, the Temple of Heaven and the Dragon and Phoenix (can't get links to Michael's, but I sure didn't pay that much for them). I also have some cheap-o watercolor palettes leftover from the creation of Louis, the Greatest Halloween Costume I've Ever Made (2010). Louis was the best post-make-up career sculpting accomplishment I have ever done, and I'll tell you all about him some day.

Where I was going with this was Boredom + Wooden Puzzle + Watercolors = Something to Do. I decided to start with the Temple of Heaven because I really like the Dragon and Phoenix and figured I should practice before I made that. I have actually been to the real Temple of Heaven in Beijing, and I took this picture (among many, many others) in 2009:

So I used that for reference in painting. Which was tedious. Painting all these damn little pieces was TED.I.OUS. Also I ran out of the dark blue so combined teal and black for the very top, which doesn't look very good. The white didn't show up at all, so the billions of little pieces on the bottom that I tried to paint white look like I didn't paint them at all, so it looks super-half-assed.

Also, the pieces were quite inconsistent. I probably could have spent a lot of extra time figuring out how to arrange them all perfectly or sanding the shit out of them, but I just don't have the patience for that. I think if you buy a puzzle the pieces should already fit, is that too much to ask? For that matter, let's address the sandpaper they gave with the kit:

Yeah, no. Luckily I have some really rough emery boards that I am not likely to ever use on my actual fingernails, so I used one of those instead.

All in all, I would pronounce this: meh. It occupied my time, but now I'm done with it and just wish I still had a fireplace. It seems so wasteful to just chuck all this wood, but... this is ugly and just waiting for my cats to destroy it. Ah well, maybe the Dragon and Phoenix will turn out better.

Star Trek Saturday!

ST:TOS Season 3 Episode 20

The portrayal of hippies in movies and on television is hilarious to me, whether it is contemporary, as this was, or retrospective, as in the movie I just saw today, Dark Shadows. These TOS hippies were played as willfully dismissive of anyone's point of view that didn't match their groovy mentality, a negative portrayal even while Spock sympathized with them. They were idiotic and self-destructive. Dark Shadow's hippies were naive, dumb stoners, a cardboard piece of historical comic relief. My favorite hippie portrayal might be from Stargate: SG-1's season two episode "1969," come to think of it: visually stereotypical, but sensitive for as little screen time as they got.

TOS wasn't always so judgmental of hippies. The season two episode "Assignment: Earth" has a smart and sympathetic hippie character, wearing the most eye-hurting combination of pink and orange ever assembled into one outfit.

Clay Beads with Sculpey

 Once upon a time in a land far away, I dreamt of being a special effects make-up artist. I think Star Trek: The Next Generation was my inspiration, actually. I wanted to make aliens.

As part of my short-lived and extremely expensive make-up career, I acquired a number of sculpting tools and a taste for sculpting. Not a talent for it, not even an appreciation for it, or much knowledge of it. But just enough of a taste to enjoy it.

So when I got all starry-eyed about jewelry making this past winter, I thought I should make my own beads to make it all more truly handmade, for when I opened my amazing Etsy shop. Then I got really creative, as I sometimes do when I am bored at work or need a bit of a vacation from reality. I have a whole list (somewhere) of all the things I am going to figure out how to sculpt from Sculpey, turn into jewelry, and sell for mucho dollars. I'll give a few of them a try down the line to give us all a laugh.

Meanwhile, in a crafty frenzy at Michael's earlier this year I bought a few small blocks of Sculpey in several colors, and back in January I snatched up a friend's toaster oven before she donated it to Goodwill. My very first Sculpey bead-making experiment was a failure, as I discovered I have no natural talent for shaping pretty beads, and I burned the hell out of the first few I slapped together. I think it's because I was watching Game of Thrones, and stopped paying attention to the toaster.

The other day, I decided to try again. Months ago I had found a tutorial somewhere on making pretty beads with a funny name, and based on an extremely hazy memory of this tutorial (which, now that I look back on it, probably didn't even make sense when I originally read it), I smashed together some clay and was predictably disappointed with the results. So I just rubbed some stuff together and came up with these:

... and was actually rather pleased with how they looked. "Remember, Self," I realized. "Start with simple stuff and go from there." So I made some more:

Which I baked on these makeshift bead holders (that is a 3" jewelry wire baked into some Sculpey):

Glazed:

Then sat back and admired.

Certainly they won't be winning any awards, but I kind of like them. And it's about the baby steps these days, I need to keep telling myself. The real lesson, of course, is that I need more equipment, tools, and clay. Also maybe next time read the tutorial again.

Star Trek Saturday!

Season 2 Episode 15

From the wonderfully irreverent Trouble with Tribbles episode, we have this total WTF moment right at the beginning. While I am no Fashion It So, I am going to go ahead and speculate that somebody, somewhere, was preeeeeetty fucking high when this got approved.

Best Damn Pound Cake

Slice of amazing pound cake.

A while back I bought a book at the amazing A Southern Season, which I'm delighted to see has a nice website, on the science of baking. Bakewise, by Shirley O. Corriher, is a big fat book that promised me it would teach me the hows and whys of baking.

I love baking. I don't like to cook, generally, because I'm too impatient and I want food, dammit, but I find that baking is generally delicious every step of the way. Also I have an incurable sweet tooth.

Like everything else I enjoy doing, I would like to bake better. I have ideas of perfection in my head, and am consistently disappointed in the shortcomings of my various efforts. Every time I discover that I am not Martha Stewart, I am somehow surprised. Being occasionally methodical, I figured a book that explains how to be a better baker rather than just giving a bunch of recipes (at least half of which generally suck) would be just the ticket.

Naturally the book sat around untouched for a year or so. But here I am in Jersey, friendless, bored, and perpetually in search of something to eat. Bam, Bakewise. The first recipe discussed, as an illustration of the necessity of balance in baking, is pound cake. I like pound cake well enough, though it often disappoints me, so I thought I'd give Shirley's Even Greater American Pound Cake a try.

It's a bundt.

The ingredient list is complicated, involving butter and shortening and oil, flour and potato starch. Actually, I was surprised to be unable to find the potato starch at my nearby grocery store, considering that this neighborhood has a significant Jewish population - Corriher gave the helpful hint that it is generally found in the kosher section, which was oddly small at that store. Anyway. The recipe had a lot of stuff in it, but the directions were helpfully explicit and I followed them faithfully. It's generally quite difficult for me to follow directions faithfully unless it is the very first time I do something alien to me. Cakes - I modify those babies all the time. Which is probably why they fall apart so often.

This cake did not fall apart, except for that one tiny section that didn't come out of the pan correctly, because I used the wrong spray (okay, I followed it mostly faithfully). It came out looking quite nice. It baked for just under an hour - I may need to check my oven temperature. I applied the glaze as suggested and let it sit for 24 hours. Then I cut it.

This cake has a hole in it.

Holy crap, it is perfect. The texture and consistency are absolutely perfect, and the taste is just right, with that faint hint of almond. It is nicely sweet, and the glaze is the perfect compliment (though I used less than half of it, since it stopped soaking in). This pound cake is awesome!

Looking forward now to continuing with the book, trying more recipes - and soaking up more knowledge of how it all works? While the author is trying to explain which thing does what and why, I think the relationships are still best learned through trial and error. Many delicious trials and many incredibly bad for me errors. Good lord, I need to start exercising again.

No-Sew Rag Rug

This post was originally published on Saturday, April 14. But I'm an idiot, so it was published in the wrong place.

So today was a new crafty foray, for my own personal uses rather than any grand dreams of resale. My new apartment has hardwood floors, and I need area rugs. I have a buttload of fabric from numerous impulse purchases at various craft and fabric stores during various periods of inspiration for all the stuff I was going to sew! but never did. A rug rag seemed like a great idea.

I looked around the internet a bit (by which I mean I did a Google search and looked at maybe the top five results) and found tutorials for braided rags sewn into a rug, and an intriguing one for a rug made without sewing. That'll be easy, I thought.

Of course, I should have known that nothing is ever as easy as I think it's going to be.

I followed this tutorial from Little House in the Suburbs, and overall it's a great step-by-step. It is easier than it first seems, but I did have a few issues.

I started with some leftover fabric: a black velvet-like leftover from the Halloween cape project of 2004ish (I still have the cape, it's pretty badass)

This guy's big brother helps me be an even bigger dork.

and the sad leftovers from the failed 30th birthday dress attempt, a shiny hot pink "shantung."

This was supposed to be a really sweet skirt, except I suck at sewing.

Everything started out okay,

and I followed the directions for adding pieces of fabric, although that was where I started to run into a bit of confusion. The tutorial writer just says she did it "in a way to keep the pattern," which meant that I just blithely went along and didn't think much about it. It seemed successful at first.

The tutorial also instructs me to add two more strips of fabric each time I round the corner, but I found two things as I went along:

1) This was, like, a lot of work. More than I had thought, anyway, taking way longer than my initial half-formed fantasy of "zip zip I am done." I was at this thing all day, in between eating just about everything in my apartment. The pink fabric frayed like crazy, and the only lighter I could find was very difficult to use on it.

At one point I had 16 strips, I think.

2) As I went along and the outside got much wider, there was a distinct difference in tension, with the middle bits all super tight and squished, and the outside much looser. I like the way the outer part looks a lot, and kind of hate the inner part.

The end result, as of 9pm, was what I think will amount to a fancy new bed for my cats. I got bored of cutting new strips of the black velvet all the time, and generally bored of the whole thing. It didn't look as perfect as I wanted it to, but there was certainly no way I was going to do take it apart to do it again. It won't lay flat because of the difference in tension, and the bright pink, besides being hard to photograph, doesn't look as nice as I'd like with the brown of the floors. It's too small to be much use (except to the cats; they love small slightly cushioned spots and were fighting over this windowsill spot at one point, though this is just McClane being kinda chunky).

He sleeps like this often. When he isn't whining or yowling for no damn reason.

Also, I need to get something to attach to the bottom so it doesn't act like a banana peel the first time I step on it. That would be totally hilarious, but only if somebody were here to see it and I only landed on the bed.

One step away from slapstick stardom.

Overall, today's craftiness enabled me to watch three movies (including Snakes on a Plane, which I got for $3 at a thrift store yesterday) and loads of episodes of TOS. Kirk and Spock were in fine form in today's episodes, and I grow continually more obsessed with young Leonard Nimoy. He was SO. HOT.

Anyway, keep calm and craft on.