Pow Wow/Cabin Fun

The Honor the Earth Pow Wow was beautiful and moving, and fun. It was a 3-day event. We were there on Day 2, and there was a good crowd. According to the Hayward website around 10,000 people attend the pow wow from around the country (and world maybe?). It was fun to see all the costumes, all of the handmade. We even saw a little girl wearing a dress made with sponge bob fabric.

Drummers were in the middle of the ring and also around the edges. It was good to see many generations involved with the festivities.
Peter and Jim enjoy an "Indian Taco" as they were called, bison and the fixings on fry bread.

Aksel enjoying some crazy weird smoothie with giant black tapioca floating in it. He wasn't too fond of the tapioca.

Lachen Potter:
FGH exhausted after a weekend of cabin activity.

Upon entry into the car on the way home:
30 seconds later:
2 hours later:

Gluten-Free Oatmeal-Flax-Almond-Sunflower-Coconut-Craisin Cookies

With P's help I finally found the beaters to my handheld mixer. The KitchenAid was well hidden under tools, bulk grocery items and painting supplies so it's use was out of the question. I hardly bake since my Grandma makes all of my (gluten-free!) baked goods. But, sometimes one just needs to make cookies, eat a bit of the dough, and have warm deliciousness. A cold July evening is just the time to do so. (What is WITH the weather anyway?)

I modified a gluten-filled oatmeal cookie recipe and measured all of the ingredients clumsily, took out half of the sugar, added an extra egg, included many extras, and voila, cookies that taste like granola bars.

We're heading to the Honor the Earth Pow Wow this weekend. It's a tradition to go up to the cabin near Hayward, WI this weekend and participate in the festivities. It's the biggest pow wow in the country. We haven't been able to go the past SIX years since we were quite busy at the farm this time of year, but we always wished we were going...so this year is the year. We were there for our honeymoon 84 moons ago!

Inventory

Yikes. I'm getting quite low on books. Just a few weeks ago I couldn't fit them all in this here green tub. It's fantastic that I've been selling quite a few but I'm sooo anxious to have time to make books for the shop and for commissions. First on my list are some accordion books for a few different people (see the accordion mess in the lower image), then I will work on some 8x8 coptic sketchbooks (mainly because I need one for myself and I think they are a basic necessity for many), next long stitched 5x7 albums, and then an art book which I have brewing in my almost-full sketchbook. Hmmm. First that wedding book I guess.

Experiments with Text

I've been experimenting with text in class and also in my own bookmaking endeavors. I have a commission for a wedding guest book that has been really fun to develop. The bride wants a lot of structure in the book...more than the usual blank pages. Names, places for pictures and journaling, and of course space for wedding showers, guest signatures, and gifts, honeymoon photos...it's not terrible long, about 36 pages, so it won't substitute for a photo album, which it's better to have than separate so you don't have a 200 page mongo huge book to carry around.

So, I dove right into the project with Adobe InDesign. It's a great way to start using some of the skills I'm learning in my classes. I thought I would actually finish the classes before starting on a project, but I've had good luck so far and I can even ask my instructor for help when I get stuck. Eventually I hope to get some guestbooks like this one up on my etsy shop. Here are some of the pages on my laptop...

Other painterly experiments with type. Carbon paper!

Boyishness

Class Notes

I'm quickly losing enthusiasm over my graphic design course. I've been working on 2 ads for the box cutter (or is it a utility knife?) for TOO long. I need a break.

It's also been exciting(really) to design my future Swirling Tree website. I started working on it last week. Here's my homepage. My biggest hope is to make commission orders go smoother, using my website as a bit of a portfolio. La la la.

Some smooth moves by Michael have been my youtube destination the past few days. Dang!