Filed under: family, friends, holiday, photography, sewing, silliness by ramune

Kasabian – Secret Alphabets

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I hope your Thanksgiving weekend was as delicious and fun as mine was. It’s taken me a while to go through all of my photos from Thanksgiving weekend (and actually I am still not completely done) . . . but here are some of my favorites from the silliness I was up to with the family. When in doubt, go to Carderock.

Sidenote: No one was hurt in the making of these photos . . . except for a few missing limbs by the cleaver (that my great uncle made).

Filed under: events, holiday by ramune

Greetings! If you are in/around the DC area, join me Saturday, December 5th, for delicious wine tasting and a chance to pick up unique handmade items (made by yours truly) for the holidays. I will be selling my enameled pendants and earrings, gauntlets for men and women, greeting cards and select photos at Best Cellars in Clarendon, VA. You can see some of the items for sale at my etsy shop. Please pass on the info and I hope to see you there.

P.S. I do not accept credit cards in person at the moment, so please be sure to bring cash (there is also an ATM nearby).

Filed under: holiday, music, photography by ramune

Well, it’s Halloween and as usual I carved a pumpkin. I am not one for happy smiling pumpkins, I am all about the scary ones. I think this year’s is the best yet and I am quite happy with how the mouth came out. Last year I did a similar mouth, but it was all one piece and got kind of saggy. The new model comes fully equipped with structural support teeth. I also made sure to get a sickly swine flu infected child to sneeze all over it. He’s a killer swine.

Since it’s Halloween and I couldn’t pick one song, I decided to post a few. My friend has a nice playlist on her blog, District of Chic, that has a few other songs I would add.

The Gothic Archies – Crows

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David Fair & Jad Fair – Nosferatu (Thanks to the RA Fever Ray Podcast for introducing me to this one)

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Tom Waits – Everything Goes to Hell

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Ministry – Halloween

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Danny Elfman – This is Halloween (Nightmare Before Christmas)

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Filed under: collaboration, food, holiday by ramune

My favorite of my Easter eggs this year

This past Saturday I spent almost the entire day (nine hours) making margučiai (Lithuanian Easter eggs). Some of my friends came by to learn how to decorate the eggs and I was pleasantly surprised to see them pick up on it so quickly and develop their own styles. I find the whole process very meditative and wish I could decorate eggs more than just once a year. If only I could start a career in decorating Lithuanian eggs . . .

For more photos from Easter, you can see my Flickr set here.

One of my favorite eggs

Cherry blossoms

Vaidila made some really elaborate eggs

A bundle of eggs, as you can see the blue worked the best

Vaidila’s video of my sister, me and my mother making margučiai. My sister pointed out that we all use the same “pinky on the egg” technique.

Filed under: favorites, friends, holiday, photography, silliness by ramune

Happy 2009! Here is my friend “Silly Bob” on New Year’s Eve. She was attempting to do the ol’ push the nose up and pull the cheeks down face. I really love how this fisheye (or as my brother calls “fishbowl”) shot came out. The sparkly shirt with a little bit of blue background all surrounded in a thick blackness just makes the shot for me . . . not to mention her silly face.

All the best to everyone in 2009. If you made resolutions I hope you can stick to them (at least for the first month or so). Other than the usual things I am always trying to improve, I would like to not mull so much. My mother claims that this is just a trait of Aquarians and that’s just the way I am . . . I guess that means I have to work a bit harder at it.

Other than resolutions, these are my hopes for 2009:

1. Get a full-time job that I love (or at least gives me the time and energy needed to work on point 2)
2. Get fig.ments going, have a place where I can house a kiln and sell my goods.
3. Move . . . somewhere, anywhere (well maybe not anywhere, but I am open)
4. Travel overseas. I have made it a point to leave the country every year and fully intend to do so this year. Last year’s destination was Canada, which is somewhat cheating but it was way the heck up there so I think that counts. I would like to visit “Silly Bob” in Shanghai before she leaves, so that might be in the cards. Maybe not this year, but Argentina, Chile and Antarctica are at the top of my list for sometime in the next . . . 5 years?
5. This is about to turn into a list of things I want to do before I die, so I will stop here.

Filed under: favorites, holiday, photography by ramune

Playing with star shaped bokeh

I have been wanting to play with shaped bokeh for a while now and forgot about it until I saw Flickr’s recent blog entry on holiday bokeh. It’s really quite easy to do if you have the right kind of lens (which thankfully I do). I haven’t tried playing around with it much on my other lenses because I have had pretty good results using my 50mm F/1.4 lens.

After cutting out some of my own shapes and experimenting with them I went to Paper Source and tried out their moose hole punch (for all my fellow meese). Initially I was hoping to get a snowflake hole punch but was not too impressed with the selection. Either way, I was like a little kid taking photos with my shaped bokeh filters. I might make some other shapes and add them to my Christmas set, in the meantime here are some to keep you entertained.

The beta with some hidden moose bokeh

Star bokeh over fish bowl

Shooting star bokeh

Regular bokeh with Christmas lights

Filed under: costumes, favorites, holiday, photography by ramune

My Jack O’ Lantern
He eats children

It’s been one year since I started this blog and although I haven’t always been timely I have completed 52 projects in 52 weeks! Since my first project was a jack o’ lantern I figured it would be appropriate to post this year’s jack o’ lantern for Project #53. Since it’s the 1 year anniversary and it’s also Election Day (everyone seems to have some deal going on), I will give you two for the price of one . . . only if you voted. So go vote, and then come back to this blog and read the rest. It’s on the honor system.

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Yay! You voted! Or you are cheating (I hope you can sleep at night). Now I shall continue with the bonus project, my Halloween costume.

On Tuesday afternoon I went to a cafe to use their wifi (my usual routine before Enamels class) but it was not working. I was there for 2.5 hours without access to the interwebs and forgot to bring a book so all I had were my two Moleskines. There is something liberating about being “forced” (liberating and forced in the same thought?) to sit with your sketchbook for that length of time. Since I had a while I thought it would be a good idea to work on a Halloween costume idea since it was only days away. After a bit of sketching I came up with The Peanut Gallery. I was pretty thrilled about it because I love to see creative costumes (especially ones that depict phrases) and I usually don’t think of anything until it’s too late and then I forget about it before the next Halloween.

I started out by taking a bundle of photos of peanuts in various situations. Three of my favorites are below, the rest are on my Flickr site.

Urchin and peanuts

Bobute and Peanuts (Bobute has traveled with me since Summer 2007)

Kinder Egg snail with Peanuts (his head moves forward when you roll him across a hard surface)

After taking the photos I went out to buy all of the supplies I needed. Ideally if I had had more time (and didn’t mind spending more), I would have made gold frames that had more dimension and detail, however I chose to spray mat boards with gold webbing paint. It worked out alright and was probably the best option in terms of comfort (not sure I want the weight of 12 wooden frames on my shoulders). I connected the “framed” peanut images with a ribbon and hung them from two rods which were connected by two ribbons that went over my shoulders. Below are two images of the final product (two is the magic number).

The Peanut Gallery (front)

The Peanut Gallery (back)
It looks like my head might do a full 360 Exorcist style

Unfortunately it was pretty dark when I went out with my friends on Halloween, so my costume was not the most visible and obvious to people. The people who did take the time to figure it out really liked it (after I fed them a number of hints “Do you notice a theme in the images?” “They are framed” . . .). Now to start working on next year’s idea . . .

Filed under: costumes, favorites, friends, holiday, photography, self-portrait by ramune

“A is for Amy who fell down the stairs”
Amazing cut out of Amy falling down the stairs by Karissa

This past weekend was one of the best weekends of 2008 (so far). My great friend Rasa has a catering company in Philly that does a variety of tasting parties. This weekend’s was an Edward Gorey themed tasting party (kicking myself for not having thought of that one sooner!). The invite went like this:

Edward Gorey has been one of my greatest inspirations/influences since I was a wee tot (maybe I wasn’t that wee . . . but still young) and my sister introduced me to The Gashlycrumb Tinies. She even got me a personally addressed and signed copy of one of his last books The Haunted Tea-Cosy: A Dispirited and Distasteful Diversion for Christmas. Two years later he died on the day of my senior prom (not really relevant, but still). All of this is to say that I was ecstatic when I received the invite in my email. I pulled together a few black and white options, got the ol’ bowler hat I bought some five or six years ago out of the closet (and fancied it up) and managed to convince our other great friend, Vaiva, to come down for less than 24 hours from NYC.

Rasa’s team did an amazing job with decorations, food and a great game of Murder. I happened to pick the piece of paper with an “X” on it for the first round, and thus was the chosen murderer. Unfortunately I only managed to kill maybe four or five of the ten people I intended to kill (you don’t hear that every day). It is an interesting exercise to intentionally make eye contact with complete strangers and wink at them without them thinking you are hitting on them or feeling rather creepy yourself. Several people definitely looked at me like I was being weird when I winked at them with my twitchy Gorey eyes.

The second round was much more exciting since there were two killers and they were on a spree! I was one of the victims and managed to win the prize for best death. I am convinced that it was rigged so that the guest staying at the house the longest would win and share the chocolate (and M&M) covered pretzels with everyone else.

The party was a great success and I think I got a few good photos from it. Below are some of my favorites from the night. As usual, the rest can be seen here on my Flickr site.

“They Got Themselves Up Killingly”

Rasa, before the guests arrived

All Gorey’d Up (without hat)

Vaiva and me all Gorey’d up (with hat). Photo by Adrienne R.

Adrienne was my first victim and she managed to die without spilling any wine!

Gintautas (Rasa’s brother) modeling one of many hats that evening

Filed under: collaboration, food, holiday by ramune

First off I would like it to be known that this post is brought to you from my lappy on the Bolt Bus somewhere on I-95 in Jersey. The Bolt Bus is the best thing since sliced bread. Prices start out at $1 a ride between DC and NY and they have free wifi! Insanity! I haven’t seen the pigs flying out my window yet, but I am keeping an eye out.

As promised, here are photos from this year’s margučiai (Lithuanian Easter eggs). Unfortunately this year was a bit rushed and I did not get to spend all day and night on them as I usually do. My sister, brother and I started a new “tradition” (we’ll see if we do it next year) of doing an exquisite corpse Easter egg between the three of us. We each started with one egg, would put a design on it, and then put the egg in a dye. Then the next person would add to the design and so on until each of us had worked on each egg. The bottom margučiai on this page are from that little experiment.

My signature Easter egg . . . a ramune (wild daisy)

Another egg

Another egg

Exquisite Corpse #1 – Collaboration between my sister, brother and me

Exquisite Corpse #2 – Collaboration between my sister, brother and me

Filed under: baking, favorites, food, holiday, process by ramune

Although I am not particularly religious, Easter is a big deal to me and my family. We have a load of Lithuanian traditions that I love. Two of my favorites are how we decorate our Easter eggs (that’s Project #22) and making Grybai, Lithuanian mushroom cookies. When I say mushroom cookies I mean they look like mushrooms . . . there are no actual mushrooms in the recipe.

This past weekend I baked the Grybai with my mother’s help and today I finished them off by frosting them. I documented the process and posted a bundle of photos in an Easter album on my Flickr site. Below are just a handful. You may notice my supervisor in a few shots (hint: frosting the stems).

Mixing up the dough

Rolling out the stems

Making the caps

Frosting the stems and dipping them in poppyseeds

The final product . . .