WTF-Beta

You can use whey from strained plain yogurt to kick start fermented veggies in a mason jar. I’ve done it with shredded carrots and cabbage. Add salt and some spices and a pickling weight, get a lid that lets the gas escape and leave it on the counter for a few days til it gets fizzy, then put it in the fridge. Eat a couple of spoonfuls with a meal.

Holy Wow!! The mosaics - I love the mosaics. And the tiles, and the painted ceilings, and the castles!! What a trip. That lemonade looks fabulous.

I don’t pay at the moment, but may in the future. The free versions available currently are pretty useful. Junior (a software engineer) uses it all the time, both at work and for his hobbies. He says it helps him (code wise) work faster and far more efficiently at work. It’s not going away, and it’s only going to get better at what it does.

It makes a really nice color - the Tansy - but I have not put it in the window yet to see how quickly it fades. The best natural substances for longer lasting color are usually the ones used historically by native peoples. Like Cochineal, Indigo and Rabbit brush. (All botanical dyes fade, none are 100% lightfast, some just fade more slowly than others). Lightfastness isn’t quite as big an issue on textiles (that you wear) as it is in artwork. I read somewhere that though turmeric is considered a fugitive dye (fades really quickly) people still use it and just re-dye the piece when it has faded.

I don’t show it in this video, but the pastels made from the botanical lake pigments fade faster than the paint made from the same lake pigment. All of this stuff is fun to make, but not really suitable for professional (as in you sell your work) art.

A video I made about making paint (and ink) from botanical dyes. We have a lot of rabbit brush (chamisa) for a good yellow in the area, but you can also use marigolds and common tansy. Best if watched directly on YouTube.

Link to video

I would like to try a tin mordant with the cochineal (bug) I have - alum makes violet lake pigment, but tin supposedly will make the scarlet lake color - redder. I just haven’t ordered any yet.

We get a lot of cloud formations like this around here, it’s a landscape painter’s paradise!

Gorgeous. What a lovely video. I love natural dyes, and have make lake pigment watercolors from the plants we have near here. Grand Prismatic Seed company has nice dye plant seeds for sale, I’ve made paint from Hopi Black sunflower, and the double black hollyhock, black knight scabiosa and the coreopsis. I bought some safflower seeds - but I think I got exactly one flower from them! That one is tough, you need a ton of flowers and you have to get the yellow dye off first before you can get the red. Problem with all botanical dyes is lightfastness - some fade more slowly than others, but they all fade. There is a reason we have synthetic colors.

Slightly related - do you ever watch the old videos from Liziqi ? They are so peaceful and beautiful (she took a many year break and her newer ones are not as good)

Link to video

We drove over to Bozeman to pick my daughter up at the airport yesterday. This is a picture I took on the way back to Butte. We’ve been having some pretty big storms in the afternoons/evenings lately and there was a severe thunderstorm and flash flood warning yesterday. Daughter said there was pretty scary turbulence on landing. Torrential rain and wind and tons of lightning on the drive back home, I-90 that is normally 80+ mph was down to 35mph with flashers going - we just tucked in behind a semi on the way down the Cardwell Hill and crossed our fingers. That road with two passes and a ton of semi traffic can be dangerous even in good weather. So much water that we hydroplaned at one point from one lane to the other - I thought we were just doing a lane change because Steve handled it without panicking, and only told me after how freaked out he was. Wish I could have gotten a picture of the lightning, it was spectacular. Hopefully with all the rain, it didn’t start any fires.

Great photos. That spread looks fantastic! How cool is it that this group of piano forum friends can still get together after all these years!

They talk about Edmundston and Madawaska in that article, we routinely went to both towns when we lived on the edge of the universe (Fort Kent). Madawaska depended heavily on the Canadian traffic to their businesses, I’m sure it’s been devastating. Madawaska has a tractor supply and my favorite store ever, Mardens. We pretty much went every Sunday. That part of Maine is trump country for sure.

@Mik said in WTF Cookbook:

Make this. You'll thank me later. I just used ground chipotle and some adobo spice instead of the can. also breasts instead of thighs. Also sauteed instead of firing up the grill for two little chix breasts. Still delicious. Marinated for three hours.

https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1023145-tajin-grilled-chicken

This looks great, definitely will try it!

lol!

He’s adorable.

@AndyD said in Guess who came over for dinner.:

Lovely photos and interesting room!

I think its a Yueqin on left and Pipa on right, old Chinese instruments(MrsA watches a lot of Chinese&Korean movies on youtube). Gusle is new to me.

Our visitors from Seattle who stayed with us last week were really into ukulele playing.
They had a carbon fibre electronic model. Also a hand-built by Luthier wooden one. Sounded a bit different to our £40 plywood job.

Oh and thank you for the instrument names! It does look like a Yueqin. I have the purchase receipt somewhere. The other instrument has animal skin covering the body. I will take some closeups of it. I love the ukulele, though I haven’t been playing much lately. I have a tenor and a baritone, and Steve learned the bass so he could play with me, but he has Dupuytren’s contracture in both hands and has not been able to play for about a year. He’s going to have surgery this fall.

Yes, I think so. It was held together with tape. I don’t know what happened to it, I remember Steve getting it to make some noise, so it was around til ‘fairly’ recently. There was also a really cool wooden flute with some silver keys, but that disappeared too.

Yes, very mid century!

PD - some of them are playable.

The one on the left plays, it wasn’t really created as an instrument, but as an ornamental object according to the receipt - it was purchased by Steve’s uncle in Japan ages ago. The one on the right is a real instrument (but I can’t remember its name), it came from Steve’s family. Both have strings that vibrate at certain piano key frequencies, so I have to put pieces of felt on the strings sometimes to keep them quiet!

The violin came from my Dad’s family in England - it’s got a crack in the body, and the bridge is missing (I think the crack was caused by the bridge) and it has not been played for as long as I can remember.
Here I am in about 1964 playing the harpsichord my Dad built for my mom from a kit. The violin is on the shelves - that my Dad also built. He once told me that he signed up for a shop class just so he could make these shelves for our living room.

This one came from one of my Dad’s trips to Serbia/Croatia - it’s real, it’s called a “Gusle”. I like it for obvious reasons.

When my Dad and Stepmother moved into senior living, I asked for the instruments, and a huge box arrived with some of these. There are a couple of unplayable concertina type instruments and a mangled old trumpet and several wooden recorders as well - that all lived on those shelves my dad built.

The ukuleles are playable.