glass etching

So here's a story.  Two years ago at the CFX department Christmas party, I participated in a white elephant gift exchange.  I landed a gift of 2 aqua globes and a Engrave-It (etching tool).  "Woot," you say?  Woot indeed.

I was pretty excited for the aqua globes, but had no idea what I would do with the Engrave-It.  And so it gathered dust until I recently realized a use for it.

Another story.  Eucharist, my church, does communion every Sunday and provides a choice of wine or grape juice.  Up until this point it's always been a bit awkward remember and telling people which purple liquid is the grape juice and which one is the wine.

So I decided to try and etch "juice" and "wine" into the glasses using the Engrave-It.  Here's the test glass.  I used the same font as what we used for the Eucharist font.

I think it turned out reasonably well.  If you look closely, you can still see it's hand done, but I think it looks pretty nice.  If I get buy off, I'll etch 3 more.

wool buddy

I always just thought of wool as itchy and the source for ugly sweaters, but look what wool can also create!

Hoyt got me a kit from this guy @ woolbuddy.com.  He has such cute designs with such personality.  If you go to events like Alternative Press Expo or the Maker Faire in the Bay Area you've probably seen his booth.  Anyways, all it takes is a selection of brightly colored wool, a felting needle, and a whole lot of free time.

I can't wait to try making some wool creations of my own design.

omg! look what I found!

I was looking for some photos on my flash drive and found these old sketches from an on-going project (which has stalled).  These are two character sketches I did at least almost 5 years ago.

It bums me out a bit because I have versions of these that are further along (and a sketch of another character), but they're on a hard drive that's busted.  Also bums me out that I'm pretty out of practice and am not at the level I was when I did these two sketches.

Anyway, I'd like you to meet some friends of mine:

Iris

Yan

I'm trying to figure out what to tag this as.  I've gone through a few working titles already: Purple Night Skies, Dreamwalkers.  I think I'll just give it a code name for now...  How about project Apricot?  I'll just make my way through this list of fruits.

Macaron experiment

I'm making another two batches of macarons.  This time I'm going to try and cut down on the sugar in the shells.  I'm going from 150g of powdered sugar to 100g.  To keep the mass of dry ingredients the same, I'll be upping the almond meal from 150g to 200g.

Results:  Okay, just finished the biscuits.  The sweetness level is definitely lower, but I'm noticing some textural differences as well.

• When I take them out of the oven, I'm noticing the foot has a good height, but once it cools for a while, the foot shrinks.
• The outer shell still forms, but is thinner, and the base of the biscuit is a bit cakey.  There is a hollow space between the crispy top of the biscuit and the dense bottom.  This makes it more fragile and more likely to crack.
• The smaller biscuits turned out better because it got cooked more thoroughly and the bottoms turned out more solid.

Overall, I'm not crazy about the change in texture.  I think I swung too far with replacing the powdered sugar with almond flour.  Next time, let's replace just 25g.  (Yeah, I'm using binary search.  Let's make use of this CS degree.)

I'll report back on the ganache once that's done.

Some photos from the process after the page break...

links for food coloring

While I'm thinking about macarons, I decided to check online to see where I can find powdered food coloring.

Here are a few links:

Country Kitchen SweetArt
Amazon ('cause what can't you find on Amazon?)
Candland Crafts

Holy what?  Did you know there are "Food Writer Markers"?

I can just imagine a 3 year old seeing mom do this and then taking a Sharpie to Thanksgiving dinner.  Thank you world for ambiguous products.

New macaron books!

Yay!  Presents from mom and dad!

 

and fresh off the pre-order list...

And this one was a present from Hoyt :)  (Thank you!)

There are some interesting looking flavor combinations in here.  I can't wait to try a different ganache recipe too.  Will post the results of my experiments when I get a chance to make another batch.

"Wallace and Gromit - Curse of the Were-Rabbit" notes

Just watched "Wallace and Gromit - Curse of the Were-Rabbit" and here are my notes after the page break.

I'm specifically looking at how each scene is organized and how it abides by the HIP structure (provided courtesy of Shawn).


Hook - start with an implicit question; the more energetic or primal (survival) the question is, the better
Intensity - ramp up the activity in the scene, drive it forward, bring the people to the edge of their seat
Prompt - end the scene with at least one question left unanswered; have the bad guy closing in with your hero backed into a corner; this drives people to read/watch more