labricoleuse | Entries tagged with off-topic

So, totally off-topic for this blog, but my main hobby is improvisational baking, and very rarely i share a recipe of mine on here, if it turns out so good that everybody at work asks for it. This one is so easy, it feels kinda dorky to even act like it was some feat of creativity to come up with it, but so many people wanted to know how to make it, i'm writing it down. Or typing it out.

We celebrated Pi(e) Day and everyone had to bring a pie to share. Mine was a recipe i made up: Pistachio Cream Pie. The event started at 4pm and it was gone, no lie, by 4:07 (a guy in the scene shop timed it). So, here is the recipe for it

Sorry, i forgot to take a perfectly staged picture of it beforehand. It was pale green. This picture is partly a joke, but partly so you can pin the recipe on Pinterest if you collect recipes that way. How about that vintage 80s tablecloth?!

Ingredients:

Pie crust (if you like to make your own, rock on, and i'll let you pick your fave recipe, but you can buy one if you are lazy)

10 oz tub of Cool Whip

2 1/4 cups half-and-half, light cream, or heavy/whipping cream

1/2 package pistachio pudding

shelled pistachios

I have yet to make a successful pie crust on my own, so i bought one at the store. It was of the graham cracker variety. In a bowl, whisk together the pudding, the cream, and 1/2 the tub of Cool Whip. The heavier the cream you use, the thicker the filling will get. So if you like a dense pie, go with heavy cream. I used half-and-half. Then stir two handfuls of pistachios in with a spoon, and pour the resulting mixture into the pie crust. Put it into the fridge overnight at least. I let mine go a day and a half. Right before you serve it, top the green pie with the rest of the plain Cool Whip and sprinkle with more pistachios.

It really was that easy.

Completely and totally off-topic post, but this is a recipe i created and felt might be good to share with the world.

See, one of my hobbies is experimental baking. I've been trying out a few vegan cookie recipes of late because one of my coworkers is vegan, and this one turned out so well that i thought i'd put it on the internet.

I call them Corner Brownie Cookies because that is exactly what their consistency and taste is like.

Corner Brownie Cookies

Ingredients:
1/4 cup vegetable oil (or any oil of your choice, really, i suppose)
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
3 tbsp coconut milk
1 1/4 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 cup flour
1/4 cup walnuts (or whatever you like to put in your brownies, which could also be nothing)

Preheat oven to 350. Mix together oil and the two sugars (i do this all in a bowl with a spatula, you don't need a mixer). Stir in vanilla and coconut milk, then add the baking powder and salt. Next, add the cocoa powder, then the flour. It's easiest to add in the flour a 1/4-cup at a time. Then fold in the walnuts.

Dollop out blobs of about 2.5" diameter onto a parchment-covered cookie sheet. The mixture will be kind of doughy so you can shape them nicely if you like, but i usually don't. You do want to press them sort of flattish, so they're about 1/4" thick. You'll wind up with about 15 cookies on a single cookie sheet with this recipe.

Bake them at 350 for 13 minutes. Let them totally cool. In fact, they are best eaten the day after they're baked.

This seriously could not be more off-topic, but I've been doing quite a few baking experiments in my spare time and sharing the results with friends and coworkers, and this recipe is one that enough people have asked for it just makes sense to put it online and share it with the universe. You don't need a mixer for this recipe, just a bowl and a spoon and some determination.

So, if you happen to also enjoy baking as well as costuming, i guess today is your lucky day and this is a recipe lagniappe for following this blog!

Ingredients:

2 tbsp bacon fat
2 tbsp butter
1/2 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
6 tbsp granulated sugar
6 tbsp brown sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 cup all purpose flour

Preheat your oven to 350F and line a cookie sheet with some parchment.

Put the bacon fat, butter, and 1/4 cup of the chocolate chips in a microwave-safe bowl and zap it for one minute, then stir it all together til well mixed. Stir in both sugars til well mixed, then add the egg and vanilla. Again stir til well mixed. Add the cinnamon, salt, and baking powder, and stir til you don't see any powdery lumps. Add the cocoa powder and stir it in good, then the flour. At this point you will need to put your arm into it, but i promise it will all stir in without any need for a mixer. I tend to add the flour in half-cup increments. Then, stir in the remainder of your chocolate chips.

Drop the cookie dough in roughly tablespoonish blops onto your cookie sheet. It makes about 15 cookies and i like to do three rows of five. Bake them on the center rack for 10 minutes. No more, no less. They may look a tad underbaked when you take them out, but trust me, they are not. Let them cool, and then enjoy!

This has exactly nothing to do with theatre, costume production, millinery, graduate schools for costume career tracks, or any of the other topics you're used to reading about here, but i'm so proud i have to share.

La Bricoleuse is only one of the fora in which i write, and instructional/academic nonfiction is only one area of focus for me. I also write memoir, fiction, and creative nonfiction; occasionally these pieces are accepted for publication. I don't typically mention it here because, well, why? I hate when i read a particular blog with a specific focus and then randomly the author decides to start writing regularly about some crap i don't care about like his/her diet and exercise regimen, or a new pet, child, house, hobby, red-hot lover, or some similar personal irrelevant crap. (Callous? Maybe. But, true.) I know people read this blog because they are into one of the specific areas of focus--millinery or parasols or costume production or dyeing--and generally don't care if i have a short story coming out in some nerdtastic sci-fi magazine or an anthology about the travails of internet-dating.

But, i hope that y'all will indulge me this one, as it's a credit of which i am very proud, and which goes to serve a good cause: i have a piece called "Recollection" in the forthcoming anthology, Voices of Multiple Sclerosis, which releases December 1st and which has already gotten great reviews in both Publishers Weekly and Library Journal!

"VERDICT: Those diagnosed with MS or have a loved one with MS will find support in this collection of stories which provides a nice supplement to medical information about the disease as patients can read about others dealing with how MS has impacted their lives." --Library Journal

"Addressing all aspects of life with disease--diagnosis, diet, exercise, laughter, stigma, support, family and friends, acceptance, treatment, and the promise of new and better treatment--this is an honest collection that will provide great context and practical advice for patients and their loved ones." --Publishers Weekly

My mom has had MS for over 20 years, and i've often been active in MS-related charities over the years--i've done the MS Walk, raffled quilts, led fundraisers, and that's all been great--but this is something lasting which will hopefully actively, directly, positively affect those who read the book, both those diagnosed and their families/friends, while at the same time raising money for a non-profit. The anthology begins with an overview of the disease written by medical experts, and then follows with over 40 personal narratives.

Honestly, i wish no one had reason to read it. Unfortunately, so many of us do.

ETA 12/15/09 -- I'll be collecting links from related blog posts by other authors in the anthology here:

New Piece in Voices of Multiple Sclerosis by Marie Carter
No Longer Silent by Caryl Hunter
Self and non-self: Voices of MS by Jessica Lipnack
Exclusive Interview with Dr. Terry L. Wahls, a Doctor with MS by Diane J. Standiford

If you blog on LiveJournal, you know that when you log in, there's a prompt on your screen, often some question intended to give you a topic to write about in case you don't have a post topic in mind. I never use this blog to write about my personal life--it's strictly on-topic about costuming production topics related to my career.

However, today's question really got me thinking; i have a piece of personal history that really applies and which i'd like to share because i feel it is important to speak of such things, so indulge me this complete digression. I promise to return to the regularly-scheduled programming in my next post.

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Whoever wrote this question must never have spent any time in an Eastern Bloc country or near a border, or else they never would use a phrase as insipid as "nostalgic for the seeming simplicity of the Cold War."

For a couple months in 1988, i went to the Albrecht Durer Oberschule in what was then West Berlin. I lived in an area of the city called Rudow with the Mianowiczs, Dieter and Ilona, who had a daughter my age named Tanja. Rudow was at the very end of a U-Bahn (subway) line in the lower east corner of West Berlin. In fact, every day, riding that subway to school, we passed through two closed stations that went under East Berlin. The U-Bahn would slow down enough for us to see the empty platforms and an occasional armed patrol soldier, but of course it never stopped.

Two blocks from my house in Rudow was a public park called Rudower Hohe. In the center of this park was a hill. The land had once been flat there, but during the war, large sections of Rudow had been bombed, destroying whole city blocks. When the city was rebuilt, those blasted sections were bulldozed into a huge pile over which sod was laid. Trees were planted and flowers and paths put in, and the park of Rudower Hohe was created very literally upon the ruins of the city. I often went walking there, in that park, with my German friends from the Oberschule and other American exchange students. Sometimes when we were out of school for hitzefrei, we would take boxes of Schultheiss beer, drink and cut up and play music and joke around. (Hitzefrei is like a snow-day for heat--in hot weather, they'd let school out because they had no air conditioning and it was "too hot to concentrate on learning." Being from the American South, we thought this was hilarious, since hitzefrei happened whenever it got over about 90 degrees.)

At the base of the hill at the entrance to the park, you could see the Berlin Wall, die Mauer. Several of my classmates risked arrest to spraypaint graffiti on it. One of the Americans, Mike, wrote in green spraypaint, "Hi Mom! Having a great time in sunny West Berlin. Wish you were here!" and had his photo taken in front of it, which he sent home to his family. (This was well before cell phones with cameras and Facebook and Flickr, of course.)

On top of Rudower Hohe's hill, you could see over the Mauer, into niemandsland--no man's land--and beyond that to East Germany. Ostdeutschland, the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, which was of course anything but democratic. You could see the successive fences of razor wire, and the dog runs with dobermans pacing their length. You could see the guard tower, and sometimes, you could see the guards carrying their machine guns. We would wave at them vigorously when we saw them looking out at us. They never waved back.

Tanja's father, Dieter, told me that people often tried to escape East Germany into Rudow because there was a turn in the Mauer there, a place where they thought they had a better chance of making it across the niemandsland, the razorwire, the dog trench, a quirk of the architecture that seemed like perhaps the guards might be less likely to notice, if only long enough to get across. Dieter said he'd never heard about any of them making it across there though; all they heard when it happened was the barking of the attacking dobermans, the screams, and the gunfire.

So while i will always value my time spent as an exchange student in West Berlin during the late 1980s, no, i don't feel "nostalgic" for any misplaced "seeming simplicity." I can't forget the casualties of the Cold War, people shot down in cold blood mere blocks from where I and my friends lived, simply because they wished to leave the nation in which they were held prisoner.

I generally have a policy of sticking to the topic with this blog (i.e., costume craft artisanship and related topics of interest); this is really a stretch, so i'll just call it off-topic.

What topical news i have to share is this: I am currently working at the Public Theater in NYC, doing some craftwork for the royal court in their upcoming production of Hamlet for their "Shakespeare in the Park" program. I don't have permission to share any "behind the scenes" stuff in terms of the projects i'm working on for them, so i don't know how much content there'll be on here until the show opens--i do have another museum exhibit to discuss and various other media reviews i might get to, but we'll see.

The Off-Topic portion of the post is really this: i want to share some of my photos of the drive up and wandering around DC and NYC so far! ( Read more... )

I've been sitting on this review for a while, meaning to post and and continuing to forget. Oops!

If you don't know the story of the treasure of the steamboat Arabia, it's a pretty incredible one.

Loaded to capacity with an enormous cargo of goods, the Arabia set sail up the Missouri River in 1856; her aim was to distribute merchandise to a number of frontier-town general stores north of St. Louis. A submerged spar (broken tree stump) punctured her hull and the ship with all its cargo sank within minutes. The passengers and crew all escaped with their lives; the only casualty was a mule tied to the ship's rail whose owner neglected to free him before swimming for shore. Over time, the course of the Missouri changed so drastically that the Arabia wound up discovered in the late 1980s in a Kansas cornfield!

Archaeological crews exhumed the entire ship and her contents; the ship has been rebuilt complete with original working sidewheel, and the museum contains displays of all the lading of the Arabia. This includes medical supplies, household goods, preserved food, bourbon whiskey, hardware and tools, fabric and notions, readymade clothing, shoes and boots, luxury items such as china and jewelry, firearms, you name it! All of it has been painstakingly preserved and displayed. There's even a restoration lab open on one wall to the public--you can watch as technicians work to restore items before your very eyes using equipment like a freeze-dryer, dental tools, tiny brushes, etc.

What was so amazing to me was the quantity of recovered items--not just a few buttons, but thousands of them; not just one pair of shoes, but dozens; not a single bolt of cloth, but a whole stack of them. The opportunity to inspect multitudes of everyday objects of 1856 was indescribably excellent. I took some time out of my drive back to Carolina from Utah this summer to visit the museum--only a short jaunt off of the interstate highway--and am so glad that i did. I kept saying to my friend that accompanied me, "This is awesome. This is awesome!"

My main criticism of the museum is its crummy gift shop. They are on the right track with some of their items--they reproductions of some of the recovered artifacts, a couple perfumes, a tiny child's doll, a bell, a key, a button--but by and large the merchandise blows. I wanted a range of t-shirt and hoodie designs to choose from, a whole array of postcards, a coffeetable book with excellent photos and documentation, etc., and they don't have much of that. It's largely stocked with standard generic state-souvenir crap you can get at any truckstop. Disappointing. Where are the parasols, reticules, ascots, fun sutlery things that would sell like hotcakes? The museum is well worth the trip regardless; they ought to fire their merchandising director though, because i really wanted to spend a ton of money in their gift shop but there wasn't enough quality merchandise for me to purchase. I bought a necklace made from one of the calico buttons and a single postcard.

Graspy shoppy acquisitivity aside, i highly recommend the museum to anyone interested in American 19th century history, particularly those with an enthusiasm for the minutiae of daily life. It's decidedly worth checking out!

* * *

And, speaking of costume related history, I've got a link from the GBACG list via La Bricoleuse reader (and pal)

trystbat: the Danish site Tidens Toej is an amazing resource for period garments! All the text is in Danish, but it's fairly easy to navigate anyway using intuition and online translating sites. The coolest thing about the site I think is, not only do they have excellent photos of their archived garments, but they have period research images (engravings, illustrations, etc.) *&* in some cases, downloadable PDFs of patterns for the garments! I like the format of the site so much, i'm going to forward the info to the folks that run our online historic costume archive, CoSTAR!

Also of interest, a page about shipwreck indigo. Essentially, dye professional Jenny Balfour Paul had the extraordinary opportunity to dye some cloth using indigo recovered in an archaeological exhumation of the Nuestra Señora de la Concepción, the flagship of a fleet of ships that sank off the Caribbean Turks Islands in 1641.

Fashion stylist Isabella Blow passed away this past week, and i'd like to mention a bit about her.

Ms. Blow is directly responsible for the career of a man who some say is the greatest living milliner, Philip Treacy, as well as fashion icon Alexander McQueen.

You cannot really be familiar with the hatwork of Treacy without knowing the face of Isabella Blow, whom Treacy considered his muse and to whom he paid tribute in the art book When Philip Met Isabella;, the publication of which was accompanied by a traveling museum exhibit of not only many of Treacy's most famous hats but also the hat blocks on which he created them (link features tons of hat and hatblock images).

Blow was buried in a willow coffin wearing one of her favorite hats, and during the service Treacy's iconic hat, The Ship, graced the top of the casket amidst a blanket of white flowers. Around 350 people attended the services at Gloucester Cathedral, and the eulogy was delivered by Rupert Everett. Ms. Blow had been suffering from advanced ovarian cancer, though it is generally believed that she took her own life. She was 48.

http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2007/04_03/isabellablow0805_468x604.jpg

What does an artist do when his muse has died?

I've just finished up a cross-country drive from North Carolina to Utah!

The PlayMakers Repertory Company season has come to a close (reopening in the fall) and we professional production artisans on staff at traditional seasonal theatres often travel to work at one of the many summer theatre or opera companies during the break.

Last year, i worked as a crafts artisan in the costume department of the Utah Shakespearean Festival, and really enjoyed the experience. If you haven't been reading this blog since August of 2006, you can read all about the company (with some cool pictures, too!) here, in a post i made last year, and by clicking the "utah" tag in the sidebar to the left, find several posts pertaining to last season. That post linked in the previous sentence shows some of the facilities as well, including a few images of the crafts building (though i'm planning on doing a "Virtual Tour" of the whole crafts facility in an upcoming post).

This year, i've returned with a bit of an "upgrade"--I'm now the assistant manager of the Costume Crafts department, and also Lead Crafts Artisan for the world premiere of the new musical Lend Me a Tenor (based on the stage play by Ken Ludwig). My posts for the next couple months will focus on topics pertaining to the production of the shows this season, from a crafts perspective--we've got lots of armor, hats, crowns, and leather goods so it should be some fun stuff.

In addition, I hope at least a few of my fellow staff will agree to help me launch a new feature i've been tossing around for a while: artisan interviews! We've got a very talented milliner from the St. Louis Repertory on staff, a visiting artist who was the road manager for a Cirque du Soleil production, an amazing moldmaker/caster who's a propmaster at Milwaukee Repertory as our Crafts manager, and a whole crew of great artisans (including two of my graduate students from UNC-Chapel Hill). Hopefully a couple of them will agree to interviews about their careers and fields of specialty, because i'd love to have this blog feature more than "ME ME ME" and my projects and my students' projects and my opinions on shows and craftwork (because, while i do like myself quite a bit and am proud of my work, the egocentric nature of blogging is something that makes me vaguely uncomfortable on some level).

So, that's where i'm at and what's coming up here on La Bricoleuse. Upcoming posts will definitely involve some Elizabethan stuff and some fin de siecle stuff, among other, well, stuff!

And, they're totally off-topic, but here are some photos from the road I'd like to share:

( six pictures )

This is off-topic for the blog, but i thought it might be of interest to my readership.

Someone on crew at the theatre i work for (PlayMakers Repertory Company) filmed strike for our last production, Stones in His Pockets by Marie Jones, and posted a time-lapse video of the process to YouTube.

Our theatre has a rather unusually-shaped thrust stage, over which a deck was constructed, and the entire back wall of the set consisted of 1:5 scale Holstein cows grazing in a field of grass set perpendicular to the floor. My favorite part of the video is watching them get up on a ladder and take the cows off the wall at top speed.

Thought some of you might get a kick out of watching "the two-minute strike"!

Watch on YouTube

I realize that this post is off-topic for this blog, technically speaking. I'm justifying it because frequently the line blurs between props and costumes ("propstumes," anyone?), and because when it does, it's the crafts artisans who build those pieces, and because the subject is just plain really super duper cool, IMO.

We--crafts artisans--are often called upon to make bags and satchels, parasols, walking sticks and swordbelts, and enormous strange elements of macropuppetry (witness the Audrey arms), sometimes in tandem with props technicians. I have worked as a props assistant occasionally when freelancing, especially in soft-goods construction, upholstery/drapery construction, and sculptural propbuilding. This post is actually all about my new couch, but i am guessing that if you enjoy the subject of this blog, you will enjoy hearing about my couch. Seriously! Read on!

See, I lived a nomadic freelancer's lifestyle for a while before settling into my current staff job, and as such i developed a profound appreciation for modular furniture that was well-designed, ergonomic, space-efficient, and easily assembled, disassembled, and moved/carried by one single medium-build female (me). I haven't owned a couch...well, ever. I've always had futons, which i've liked for their multifunctionality but disliked for their general utilitarian design over comfort, and the fact that wrestling a futon mattress out of an apartment and into my vehicle is, for me, a bit like trying to move a dead horse in a dufflebag around.

So, i was overjoyed when i discovered the existence of Home Reserve's build-it-yourself couch-in-a-box furniture. The idea being, you choose the size and style of couch/loveseat/armchair you want, and it arrives via UPS in 50 lb. boxes that a lone human can move into their abode--up stairs even! You open the boxes, bust out a Phillips-head screwdriver, and within an hour or two, you have a couch. The frame is constructed so that you also wind up with a "secret compartment" of storage under your seat cushions! Because you do the assembly, the price point is around $300 (higher if you choose more expensive fabrics), and because you do the assembly, if you ever want to change the color, you just order new fabric covers. If your cat barfs on it, you just take the covers off and clean them. God, what's not to love? I totally adore this couch.

The website is full of great information, from an animated gif illustrating how the furniture goes together to a fascinating (to me at least) page showing what goes on in the factory--sewing and frame cutting and such.

While i'm not sure this sort of furniture is for everyone, it's right up my alley. I had a great time putting it together--it's like a huge puzzle that turns into a loveseat when you're done--and it's perfectly suited to my lifestyle. You eat a lot of wind pudding with a career in the arts, so the low price point and easy transportability was key, and the fact that it turns into really quite a nice piece of furniture clinched it. (I got a loveseat in the Monroe style, with Chicago Olive upholstery, if you are curious.)

So, apologies if you wasted your time reading this couch testimonial crap when all you really care about is what i have to say about 18th century footwear or whatever. That's valid.

But dude, i really really love my new couch.

Next post: Unequivocally costume-related, i swear.