More book love

I meant to post a couple days ago, but as soon as I started typing about how I should be cleaning the kitchen instead of blogging, I started to feel guilty, because really, I had just cooked a really involved dinner and the kitchen did need cleaning a lot more than my blog needed posting on... so to make a long story short (or a short story shorter), I spent the next 2 hours cleaning the kitchen, neglecting my blog. That's okay, though, because if I'd posted back then, I wouldn't have been able to post this:

This is my most recent book, done using a flat binding. It was a bit a lot more complicated than the coptic binding, but also really cool because it comes out looking like a real book! I decided to use fabric instead of paper for the cover, and I really love the feel it gives to the book. This fabric was chosen with some... difficulty, since I invited Chris to go to the fabric store with me to "help," and we both discovered that our tastes in fabric are often somewhat different. Incidentally, Chris and I have also vowed never to go to a fabric store together again. These two incidents may or may not be related. We both liked this fabric, though.

This book involved a lot of nit-picky details, including lining up cover boards exactly straight and parallel, sewing together signatures exactly on top of each other, and sewing headbands to the exact thickness of the textblock (yep! I sewed that endband!). I still loved it, though, and apparently I did a pretty good job. When my teacher handed my book back today, she told me that she'd never had a student hand in this type of book with such perfect craftmanship on their first try. And she gave me 100%. Wow. Apparently my book was so well made, she didn't even notice that I accidentally used only one page instead of two at the beginning and end of the book, leaving the stitching visible right by the book cover instead of stuck between pages. But oh well.

I figure I might as well post one of my head paintings, too. This one is a little more finished than they usually are, since it was done out of class. It's not great, but it's improvement. Maybe someday I'll show you my first painting, and this painting will seem like Rembrandt in comparison.

I might post today's painting someday, too. It was pretty good, aside from the fact that she was pretty much red like a tomato. Seriously, you basically have to paint in the dark in that classroom since they don't want to mess with the lights shining on the models, so you'll be happily painting along for 3 hours, and then they turn on the lights and BAM! RED!

I'll end with this awesome video that the HBLL (BYU's library) put together that recently went viral on YouTube. Seriously, almost one and a half million views! It's a parody of an Old Spice commercial--you can watch the original for context, if you want.

Bookbinding = love

Yeah, it's been kind of awhile since I posted, and this one won't be long.  I just really liked this book that I made in bookbinding, and figured I'd post it (you can pretend that I took the time to set up a nice background for the photo).  It's an old style of bookbinding called coptic stitch binding that doesn't have a spine--you stitch together a bunch of little booklets called signatures.  Also, I decorated the paper that I used for the book cover using walnut ink, watercolors, rubbing alcohol, and salt.  It was so much fun!  This is definitely my favorite class this term, though my other classes aren't too bad.  I'm also in figure drawing, which I'm enjoying a lot more now that I'm actually starting to be semi-talented at it, and head painting, which is... an experience.  The class goes from Monday through Thursday for 3 hours a day, and you pretty much just come in and paint a new painting every day.  The basic theory behind the class seems to be that if you paint the human head enough, you'll eventually start doing something right.  I guess it works, because I've definitely improved since my first painting (which I may never show to a living soul ever), but out of about 10 or 11 paintings, I've still only produced about 3 that I would ever admit that I painted.  This class has definitely been good for me, though--painting people has become a lot less intimidating.  I may even post something I paint someday--who knows??

In other news, I recently turned 21, and partied it up at... um... Brick Oven Pizza.  But there was apple beer involved!  Non-alcoholic, of course, but it still has the word "beer", which makes it legit.  We also went to see Toy Story 3, which I highly recommend to anybody who's still missing out on it.  For my birthday, I got clothes, jewelry, money for a new keyboard, and a Vienna Teng piano book from Chris that I'm sure he's regretted getting me a million times by now, since he just doesn't like Vienna Teng as much as I do.  Maybe it has something to do with the fact that she's practically the only artist I ever listen to these days.  Poor guy, just can't handle hearing the same songs a hundred times in a week like I can.  I wonder what's wrong with him.

Stuff that I did

Seeing as how I'm feeling pretty sick today and have had to miss class because of it, I figure I might as well post some of what I've been up to in my classes this term.  Although I really like to complain about how busy life is this spring, things could definitely be worse--after all, everything I'm doing is at least mildly interesting to me.  Some of my classes even had me entertaining the idea of switching to graphic design, though I very quickly came to my senses.  At least part of my typography class has been interesting--I have to admit that I'm not very into our main project of redesigning a magazine, but our other project is to redesign the deseret alphabet, and that's actually been pretty fun. 

For those who don't know, the deseret alphabet is a phonetic alphabet that the Mormon church used for awhile once they came to Utah, but before they became a state (apparently it used to be all the rage to come up with new phonetic alphabets, since spelling was so un-standardized back then).  They used to publish their newspaper with it, and there were even some tombstones down in Cedar City written in the deseret alphabet, though I guess the families removed them and replaced them with modern, English ones (lame).  The problem is, the deseret alphabet was really, really ugly.  Some of the letters were so dissimilar that they don't even look like part of the same alphabet.  So our job was to redesign the letters of our name in a modern typeface, preferrably one without too many thick and thin lines because those would be really hard for us to design.  We were also supposed to make upper and lowercase letters, since another shortcoming of the deseret alphabet was that it only had uppercase, SO IT PROBABLY LOOKED LIKE PEOPLE WERE SHOUTING ALL THE TIME.

This is what I came up with, though blogger seems to have stretched it funny.  My name is written down at the bottom.  Like I said, lots of fun.

I'm also in a painting class.  We've been doing a lot of work in this class (probably more in the last few weeks than I did in a whole semester of my non-major painting class I took a couple years ago).  Our first assignment was to paint a bunch of squares in the style of Paul Klee using as many colors as possible.  My teacher said mine was "beautiful", so that's good, I guess.

Our most recent assignment that we turned in was to do a grisaille still-life.  I chose my Kitchenaid mixer that my grandma gave me for our wedding (by the way, thanks Grandma!  I hope Mongolia is a little bit warmer these days!).

Maybe I should learn to use the school's really big scanner--then maybe I wouldn't always be so disappointed in my image quality.  Oh well.

In graphic design we've been designing a logo for Ugmo, a company that makes underground monitoring systems for lawns that monitors water content and hooks up to the sprinkler system so that the sprinklers only go off when the lawn actually needs water.  Kind of a cool concept.  This is my most recent design for that:

Yeah, that stretched funny, too.  Imagine that they're actually circles.

Finally, I'm in a digital illustration class.  Our first assignment was to make an illustration based on a fortune from a fortune cookie.  Mine was "buy someone a thoughtful gift of love."  This is what I came up with:

Man, this stretched funny too!  Maybe blogger just hates computer art.  I didn't really like how this one turned out anyway, but I did learn a lot about using Illustrator.  Oh, and pretend that I actually finished it.  Anyway, our next assignment (the one due today, that I'll probably have to drag myself out to turn in) was to make the front page for an Independent Study course on speed reading.

For this I kind of went with the idea of a pop-up book.  Interesting that this one didn't stretch funny.  Maybe blogger just hates Adobe Illustrator?  Oh well.

This is pretty much what my semester's been like so far.  I have major projects coming up in basically all my classes, so we'll see how much blogging I get done between now and June 17th--maybe not a lot.  I'll try to post something every now and then, though.

Oh, and this is a side note--has anybody heard of Vienna Teng???  Because she's my favorite singer/songwriter ever, probably, but nobody's ever heard of her!  If you have time, look up Blue Caravan (one of my favorite songs), Shasta (Chris's favorite song that she sings), and Gravity (everyone else's favorite song).  Anna Rose and Lullaby for a Stormy Night are both lullabies, but they're both really good, too.  I also love My Medea, The Tower, Antebellum... well, a lot, really.  Look her up.

Sunday Picnic

This semester has been pretty stressful. Taking four classes during spring term was, it seems, a somewhat foolish idea, and the amount of homework I have due every day and the amount of time I spend not sleeping at night is kind of ridiculous. Thankfully, in exactly one month it'll all be over with, and I'll be moving on to my much more peaceful summer term of bookbinding and figure drawing. That's not really what I want to talk about, though. Mostly I want to talk about today, and what an amazing Sunday it was.

For those who don't know, I'm planning on cutting my hair later this week, probably to about chin length. I was originally going to do it last week, but Chris, who is slightly devastated by this turn of events, asked if he could have one more weekend to spend with my hair, so we could take some pictures for him to look back on. Amused, I took pity on the poor soul and agreed. I'm glad I did, too, because we had a lot of fun doing it!

First we went to this great park in west Provo that nobody seems to know about and had a picnic. Then we just went around with our camera and the tripod and had some fun! Because I am considered the camera expert out of the two of us, I was generally the one setting up the lighting for the shots, which meant that I was the one sprinting from the camera to get into place while the camera timer ticked down. It was so much fun, though, and I considered it to be my exercise for the day.

Afterwards, Chris said we needed to go one more place to take pictures, and he ended up taking me to the park where we first met, and where he proposed. Basically, I'm pretty sure I ended up with the sweetest guy ever.

He even says he'll still love me when the hair comes off, which I guess means it must be true love! Seriously, though, check out this hair action:

For the sake of my sanity, it has to come off.

P.S.  Today I discovered Blogger in draft.  Could it be that all my Blogger formatting woes are at an end???

End of Finals!

Well, I may possibly have been one of the last people at BYU to finish with finals, since I was finishing a D&C test on Blackboard at 11:50 last night, but I'm finally done! I'm still having nightmares about it, though--I dreamed last night that I'd forgotten that I signed up for some classes (Italian Food and Intro to Copper :P ) and consequently failed them because I never went to class and forgot to take the finals. I checked my schedule when I woke up this morning, though, and I definitely did not sign up for those classes, so I'll probably be okay ;) Even more exciting, I'm finished with my generals! No more writing classes, or American Heritage, or anything that I don't want to take. Just art and whatever I want from here on out :)

I did finish my figure drawing project! Thankfully, my teacher let me finish four pictures instead of six, because they definitely took awhile. Not all of them are photographed very well, but here they are:

The last one is probably my favorite, but I do like them all. I also made some kind of abstract stuff for 3D design, the class that I hate:

The first one is steel that I bent with a torch and welded to a plate of steel. The second one is made of paper, but for some reason I had the hardest time in the world gluing it so it wouldn't fall apart! I mean seriously, how hard should paper be to glue? Thankfully, it held together long enough to be graded, and didn't break apart until I got it home 30 minutes later. I guess prayers are the best glue after all.

Chris and I do have a little break, so we're going to Oregon this weekend (tonight, actually!), but next Tuesday it's back to school as usual for Spring and Summer Term. I actually have a couple of graphic design classes (Intro to Graphic Design and Basic Typography), but I also have a computer illustration class that I'm looking forward, and I might be taking a painting class--I haven't decided whether that's going to be too much yet. I'm also taking Bookbinding and Intermediate Life Drawing this summer, so I'm pretty excited about my summer classes. Thank goodness for a break, though!

Just a little something

Finals are approaching, which for me mostly means I need to get my art in gear, though I do have two tests, as well. I'll probably put up some more art on this blog when it's all over, including pictures of what I did for 3D design (the class that I hate) and the rest of my figure drawing project. This is the first of four images that I'm turning in for my figure drawing final. Isn't she enough to give you baby envy? (as if I needed any help with that)

This is Makenzie, done in black and white prismacolor pencil on gray Strathmore paper. Thanks to Lindsay and the rest of mother's group for letting the most awkward woman in the world (me) crash mother's group and photograph their adorable children. Those pictures were a huge help!

Tomorrow is the first reading day, so... here we go!

Spring Fever

Yay for being April! Actually, I guess it's still technically March, but it's April in my mind. I can't even express how burned out I am with school right now, and how ready I am for this semester to be over. The timing is horrible, of course, because I still have a 10-page paper, a test and 7 art projects to go before I can even start thinking about finals. Which is why today I decided to be super responsible... and skip half my classes doing entirely non-school related things, like cooking, watching Project Runway, and, of course, blogging.

I have been more responsible than I'd like to be, though. For instance, I haven't spent my time finishing this:

Crochet is seriously gangsta. I have to admit that I lost motivation for this project 50% through. Just as I was getting really excited that I'd finished the first glove, I remembered--gloves come in pairs :( I still occassionally wear just the one glove, though, much to Chris's chagrin I'm sure. It keeps me surprisingly warm, and I feel like it's some sort of fashion statement. I have the yarn to finish it, though, so maybe I will someday.

I've also managed to restrain myself from making another one of these:

It's kind of weird, but I've been on a sort of homey, crafts kick recently where all I want to do is sew, crochet, and home decorate (though since we're planning on moving for the summer, I haven't bothered with any decorating). As a part of that, I decided that I wanted to learn how to knit. After doing some online research, I ended up buying Knitting for Baby, because I heard it was perfect for people who'd never knit before--it explains it well, and every project introduces a new concept in order of difficulty. The hat above is the very first project in the book, and I think I did pretty well--I only dropped 5-10 stitches, and all of those were in the first half of knitting. I have no immediate use for it, though (and anticipate not using it for quite some time--after Suzanne's blog announcement, I figured I should clarify this), so I guess I'll just have to box it up for later. Once this semester's over, I do want to make another hat, maybe this time in a boy's color. The next project in the book is a blanket, and I want to do a really good job, so I figure I could probably use some more practice before starting on that.

However, I couldn't restrain myself from making this:

Recently, I decided that I want to work on my food photography, so I'm going through my favorite recipes, cooking, and photographing them, and I'm going to compile them into a little cookbook that I might publish online using Lulu or mypublisher.com or something. I had actually never made this recipe before--I was just online and had somehow wandered onto the Johnny Carinos website and I realized that I had to have Italian food. Immediately, if possible. The description of Chicken Milano looked good, so I started looking up recipes and eventually found this one, which is actually a copycat recipe of the Chicken Pasta Milano at Macaroni Grill. It turned out great, though there were some mishaps along the way. First of all, it called for 4 chicken breasts, and after skimming over a few reviews I found that most people thought there wasn't enough sauce in the recipe, so I figured that since I was cooking for two, I could half the chicken and be okay. Turns out there still wasn't enough sauce (so anybody who'd actually made the full recipe would've really been in a bind!). So next time I'm halving the chicken again (because there was too much of that for my taste), and I'll probably still double the sauce, and then it might work out. The second problem was with the basil. Basil is the last thing you add to the sauce, so I was almost done when I happily added the two tablespoons the recipe called for. It was right as the second tablespoon went in and the little green leaves were spreading everywhere that I had that heart-stopping moment of fear--was it 2 tablespoons of fresh basil, or dried? I had used dried, but as I looked at the overabundance of green now permeating the sauce, I was very much afraid that it was referring to fresh (and there's a definite difference between 2 tbsp. of fresh basil and 2 tbsp. of dried!). So I immediately added more half and half to thin out the green, then took my handy dandy strainer to see how much I could get out. Unfortunately, I couldn't really take out the basil without also taking out a lot of sundried tomatoes, though in the end that might have been a good thing, because there really were a lot of sundried tomatoes. However, miraculously, the recipe still tasted good, which for me means it's a keeper. I just need to quarter the chicken, double the sauce, half the basil, and maybe use less sundried tomatoes, and I'll be set (seriously, who wrote this recipe??).

Here's the recipe with my edits:

Chicken Pasta Milano (serves 2)

2 tablespoons butter

3-4 cloves garlic, minced

3/4 cup sun-dried tomato, chopped

2 cups chicken broth, divided

2 cups half-and-half (original recipe called for heavy cream, but this is healthier)

1-2 boneless skinless chicken breasts (your choice, depending on how much meat you want)

garlic salt

pepper

2 tablespoons olive oil

2 tablespoons basil

4-5 oz. fettucine pasta, cooked and drained

In a large saucepan, melt butter over low heat. Add the minced garlic and cook for about a minute. Add tomatoes and 1 1/2 cups of chicken broth. Increase heat to medium and bring mixture to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer uncovered, for about 10 minutes. Add cream and bring to a boil again, stirring frequently. Simmer over medium heat until sauce is thick.
Sprinkle garlic salt and pepper over both sides of chicken. Heat the olive oil in a skillet, then add chicken and saute until chicken is no longer pink in the middle (about 4 minutes each side should do it). Remove chicken from skillet and set aside somewhere warm (like a warm oven). In the same skillet, stir 1/2 cup chicken broth with the pan juices, and bring to a boil; reduce slightly and add to the cream sauce. Stir in basil.

Slice chicken and serve atop the pasta, coat with the cream sauce.

An alternate way is to slice or cube the chicken and mix it in with the sauce, then serve that over the pasta.