I’ve had a couple of sleepless nights this week.  I haven’t been up worrying about stuff, it’s been more of a feeling of expectancy.   Like I’m about to give birth.  Waiting.  I’m in that strange and restless time in between creative endeavours.  I have the ideas, the inspiration.  Those have been steadily growing and developing for the past 6 or 7 months and couple of years.

I woke at 1am on Saturday morning and laid there in bed next to Steve, with my mind and eyes wide open.  I got up at 3am and organised the freezer.  You know how it is.  Now all of the wild boar sausages, beef casserole meat and chicken thighs are in one section.  The homemade chicken and fish stock is gathered together (I threw out the bread crusts and still need to investigate the 50/50 mix of icing sugar and ground almonds – could that be a marzipan mix?).  A bag of ice cubes, an ice pack from my osteopath and a bottle of Absolut in the top compartment.  A pint of real vanilla ice cream is floating about.  Sorted!

Then I tidied my studio.

I decided a couple of weeks ago that I am not going to renew my membership to the British Quilter’s Guild, nor am I going to enter a quilt into the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham this year.  This is a biggish move for me because I discovered and claimed my self as an artist through quilting.  I have enjoyed working to the structure of quilting, it gave me a container for my first pieces of art that I put into the world.  All guidance and structure can come with a cost however.  With quilting, it was the rules and definitions of what a quilt is (and is not).  I’ve found the constrictions frustrating over the past couple of years and have been organically moving towards other media and ways of creating.   So I put my BQG membership application and a couple of quilt show applications in the recycling pile.

Then I erased my chalkboard and wrote this.

A collection of curiosity cabinets;  poetry, haiku and a fairy tale about a shape-shifting Muscogee wolf girl;   drawings of jackdaw inhabited rooftops and illuminated fibre works are shimmering, mirage-like on the approaching horizon.

I finally got to sleep at 5am.  I woke and felt ready to get on with the day by 8am.  I set fire to Our toaster broke the other day, so I decided to pop out to the Co-op and get some croissants (which I could heat in the oven) and The Guardian.

On the way down the front walk, I noticed a snail heading over to our side of the wall which separates us from our neighbours.  We have a wild, little front courtyard with lots of lovely, delicious, succulent plants and flowers.  I am too tenderhearted to outright kill the little buggers, so I picked it up and turned it around so it’s cute horns were pointed towards the neighbours.  Then I went to the shop.  Couldn’t have been gone seven minutes.  By the time I got back, that snail had pulled a U-ey and was headed right back on over to ours.   So I thought, “What the hay?  Who am I to stand in the way of a determined snail?”  (Snail trail digitally enhanced!)

I went inside and made breakfast in bed for my husband.  Our 3rd wedding anniversary is coming up this week, so we’re beginning our celebrations early!  It’s time to take it easy and keep on truckin’ in the right direction.

]]> http://melindaschwakhofer.wordpress.com/2013/05/19/change-in-direction/feed/ 1 Inspirationist change in direction11 change in direction1 change in direction10 http://melindaschwakhofer.wordpress.com/2013/05/15/the-art-of-noise/ http://melindaschwakhofer.wordpress.com/2013/05/15/the-art-of-noise/#comments Wed, 15 May 2013 19:55:45 +0000 Melinda http://melindaschwakhofer.wordpress.com/?p=10734 ]]> This week, for my Monday drawing class, Andrea asked each of us to bring something which makes a noise so that we can draw the sound.  We normally begin each session with a piece of blank paper on our easel and we draw for 2 minutes, then move to the next easel and so on until we are back at the beginning.  This Monday, each of us ‘played’ our offering for two minutes while the others drew.  Some of the things people brought were: wind chimes,  Swiss goat bell,  hand wound Victrola with records, rain stick, egg carton played with a paintbrush, marimba . . . .

Here is the ‘group’ drawing.

One of the women brought a set of carved wooden hollow bells without clappers which were tuned to the eight octaves.  They were suspended in order and played with a wooden stick.  She bought them in China and she said that in days of yore they would have been made from monk’s heads.  At least that’s what the person selling them said!

All of the various instruments/sound making devices were arranged on a table on the centre of the room and I drew two of the heads.  I used my coloured charcoal pencils on black paper.  I think I need to get a hold of some white charcoal or chalk, as I really liked the way it looked in the group drawing above.

Owls, coloured charcoal, 59 x 83 cm, 2013

The carvings in them looked like owls.  I have fairy tales bubbling on the back burner and these two looked straight our of some Eastern-European story.

Owls, detail

“Add garlic, ginger, red bell pepper, and pepper flakes to the pan and cook together a couple of minutes, then add peanut butter and melt it.
If you find that the area immediately around your house is very damp, you can add a gravel and limestone border, which will help
with drainage. The odor can smell like moldy must or worse than that.”

Interestingly, or not, “blog spam”, or “blam” for short, is spamming on weblogs. In 2003, this type of spam took advantage of the open nature of comments in the blogging software Movable Type by repeatedly placing comments to various blog posts that provided nothing more than a link to the spammer’s commercial web site.

Of course, many people also know and love, or not, Spam (shortened from spiced ham) as a canned precooked meat product made by the Hormel Foods Corporation, first introduced in 1937.

Through a Monty Python sketch, in which Spam is portrayed as ubiquitous and inescapable, its name has come to be given to electronic spam, especially spam email.

In the 1980s the term ‘spam’ was adopted to describe certain abusive users who frequented BBSs and MUDs, who would repeat “Spam” a huge number of times to scroll other users’ text off the screen. In early Chat rooms services like PeopleLink and the early days of AOL, they actually flooded the screen with quotes from the Monty Python Spam sketch. With internet connections over phone lines, typically running at 1200 or even 300 bit/s, it could take an enormous amount of time for a spammy logo, drawn in ASCII art to scroll to completion on a viewer’s terminal.

Sending an irritating, large, meaningless block of text in this way was called spamming. This was used as a tactic by insiders of a group that wanted to drive newcomers out of the room so the usual conversation could continue. It was also used to prevent members of rival groups from chatting—for instance, Star Wars fans often invaded Star Trek chat rooms, filling the space with blocks of text until the Star Trek fans left. This act, previously called flooding or trashing, came to be known as spamming. The term was soon applied to a large amount of text broadcast by many users.

Sources :: wikipedia :: Vintage Spam Advertisements

Last week, the sun picked out the achingly new, vibrant green leaves and traced their outlines onto the wall.

A 90° pivot to the right provides the background of my favourite terracotta and charcoal multistory car park.  I love the contrast between the fluffy yellow green leaves and the delicate, airy fern green leaves set against the broad stripes of colour.

I’m happy for the shining sun and the beautiful shadows it casts.  I’m happy to see the new leaves bursting and uncurling from branches which have been too long bare.  I’m happy that springtime has arrived at last.

I brought my mother’s wristwatch, one of the very few items I have that belonged to her.  It’s a Timex watch she bought from Long’s Drugstore when I was about 10.  Sometimes I wind it up and wear it.  It keeps more or less accurate time.

One of the gifts I claimed from the death of my mother, when I was 16, is the awareness of mortality.   When I got a little bit older, I was able to reflect on her life and I realised that she had waited until too late to start making positive decisions and choices based on her interests, well-being and desires.  Besides going to college at age 50 and leaving an unhealthy relationship with my father, I wondered what else she had left too late.  My mother died from cancer when she was 55.  At a very young age I decided that I did not want to follow in her footsteps and wait until it was too late for me to live my own life.

In a way, she gave me the gift of time which is symbolised by her wristwatch.

Anyhow, here is my drawing, followed by a poem which my drawing teacher read to us.

My mother’s watch, charcoal, 24 x 36cm, 2013

Antidotes to Fear of Death

Sometimes as an antidote

To fear of death,

I eat the stars.

 

Those nights, lying on my back,

I suck them from the quenching dark

Til they are all, all inside me,

Pepper hot and sharp.

 

Sometimes, instead, I stir myself

Into a universe still young,

Still warm as blood:

 

No outer space, just space,

The light of all the not yet stars

Drifting like a bright mist,

And all of us, and everything

Already there

But unconstrained by form.

 

And sometimes it’s enough

To lie down here on earth

Beside our long ancestral bones:

 

To walk across the cobble fields

Of our discarded skulls,

Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis,

Thinking: whatever left these husks

Flew off on bright wings.

 

 - Rebecca Elson, 2001

My mother’s watch

Ever since our last very wet summer, throughout the drawn out freezing winter and into this recalcitrant spring, even I, a sunny, positive, native Southern California girl who after 13 years living in the UK still occasionally and unironically says, ’Have a nice day’, has been complaining long and loud about the horrible weather.  But today, something happened that made me feel very optimistic.

I was walking through Exeter with my friend and spied a lovely summer frock in a charity shop window. When I came out of the dressing room, she and all of the customers gave me two thumbs up!  So I bought it.  It’s made by Hobbs and at £14.95 I paid a fraction of what it would have cost new.  It’s a wrap dress with a full, twirly skirt and made from two sheer layers of silk.

Front

And it ties in the back.

Back

I felt really happy when I got back to work, and showed it to all of my colleagues.  I’m already looking forward to wearing it when warmer weather comes.  It simply has to now!

Stormy sky and bare branches

Viewed through the fabric, the day doesn’t look quite so grey and cold.

On still, bare branches
new growth appears.
At long last,
the end of Winter?

-Melinda Schwakhofer, 2013

It’s not always easy being an expat.  When in the company of British people I don’t have a common cultural reference point when people my age talk about TV programmes and events which shaped their collective lives.  But it is fascinating to learn about things like The Magic Roundabout, Tony Hancock and The Winter of Discontent.  In a funny way though, I never felt like I “fit in” in the 35 years I lived in Southern California, so it feels natural to be a misfit over here too.  At least now, I have a bona fide reason.

But sometimes I long for childhood foods which I just can’t find over here.  I grew up in the 1960′s, the Age of TV Dinners and Processed Food, but luckily both of my parents cooked from scratch.  I spent a lot of time in the kitchen and started cooking when I was 8 or 9. I was home by myself a lot and very happily made good things to eat whenever I felt like it. I hear people talk about how deprived they were as children because Mom wasn’t there to make chocolate chip cookies when they got home from school.  Heck, my Mom had a job, so I made my own cookies!

Anyhow, I recently had a hankering for Creamed Chipped Beef on Toast (or as it’s known in some circles, “Shit on a Shingle,” more politely abbreviated to “S.O.S.”) a couple of weeks ago.  That classic American comfort food made from processed, salted beef in a cream sauce.  Served over toast points.  With origins in the South as a breakfast item, traditional creamed chipped beef is most often made with dried, shelf-stable slivers of intensely salty beef.  When I was a kid, we always had a package of Carl Buddig Beef in the fridge.  I used to make this for breakfast or lunch all the time.

I had a look on some of the American food websites and forums to discover that I can’t get Buddig beef over here,

but someone suggested using Bresaola (Italian air dried beef ) as a substitute.

A couple days ago when I was shopping at Sainsbury’s, I also found this finely sliced salt beef in the cooked meat section and got a pack of each to do a comparison.

So this morning, I made Creamed Chipped Beef on Toast for the first time on British shores.  I refreshed my memory with a recipe in The Fanny Farmer Cookbook.  She describes it as a ‘comforting, old-fashioned supper dish’ but what does she know?  Any Southerner will tell you that it’s for breakfast!

Creamed Chipped Beef

• 2 tablespoons butter
• 2 tablespoons plain flour
• 8 oz milk
• 4 oz dried, chipped, processed beef, cut into strips
• pepper to taste
• whole wheat toast, cut into points

Melt the butter in a skillet, stir in the flour to make a paste.  Slowly whisk in the milk to form a smooth sauce.  Add the beef and gently heat until it thickens to a creamy consistency.  Season with pepper and serve over toast.

Some people leave the toast in one piece, hence the ‘shingle’, but I think it’s more elegant to cut the toast into points.  That’s part of the experience too.  Holding a hot piece of toast and cutting it up onto a plate.

Voila!

.

It was good and Steve really liked it, but I felt that something was missing.

It was slightly bland.  It lacked piquancy, that certain je ne sais quoi.

Maybe because I used unsalted butter or the beef wasn’t as salty?

I looked up a couple of recipes online and discovered the missing ingredient.

Worcestershire sauce!!  That’s it.  We had a bottle of French’s Wershter Sauce which is the final addition to a good plate of Creamed Chipped Beef on Toast.

The next time I whip up a batch, I’ll stir in some Worcestershire Sauce at the last minute to make it a WOW!

(Of course, these days it’ll be Lea & Perrin’s Worcestershire Sauce, but what the hay!  When in Rome . . . )

]]> http://melindaschwakhofer.wordpress.com/2013/04/09/remembrance-of-foods-past/feed/ 2 Inspirationist creamed beef4 creamed beef5 creamed beef1 creamed beef2 creamed beef3 creamed beef6 http://melindaschwakhofer.wordpress.com/2013/04/03/alone/ http://melindaschwakhofer.wordpress.com/2013/04/03/alone/#comments Wed, 03 Apr 2013 21:52:32 +0000 Melinda http://melindaschwakhofer.wordpress.com/?p=10632 ]]>