![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
/waves
I'm lucky enough to have pets and to live with someone and have really good online friends and a loose quarantine. If you want to just chat or be social, drop a comment and let's blather about something or anything. I'll start: what's your favourite warm drink to make? Or plant?
no subject
no subject
Most common comfort warm drink is a particular local blend of Earl Grey tea with brown sugar and like half a lemon. After drinking the tea, I eat the lemon. Also, mulled apple juice is great - apple juice simmered with slices of orange, cinnamon, cloves, etc.
no subject
I have decided the next thing I'm going to study is Chinese brush painting, because it's easy to find books on it for clueless Westerns (or Korean-Americans as the case may be) and I think it will allow for some really fun crossover with Western watercolor techniques. To that end I have ordered a couple books off Amazon, which I expect will take their sweet time arriving since they are correctly prioritizing more important things than art instruction book purchases. I really really hate tight rendering and attempting (and failing) to do photorealism, and I really really like looser minimalist styles, so this could be a lot of fun, or else hilariously awful (on my part).
no subject
I've determined that I'm going to use the extra time I'm not spending commuting to do all the various little things I keep saying I'll get around to doing and then.... not.
no subject
I think, overall, that I like garlic best: it's tasty; it's flowers are pretty in a very everyday sort of way; and it's an apotropaic in a million different types of folklore.
no subject
no subject
i like aloe because it's hard to kill and nice if i burn myself!
what's your favorite cover song?
no subject
I got a bunch of wildflower seeds and I'm planning to dump them around the tree out front and see what happens.
no subject
I came to it pretty late, when I moved out here away from NYC. Back home I did like the idea, but I didn't really have any space/community knowledge about it. But gardening has genuinely, genuinely become one of the most therapeutic things in my life from spring to fall every year. It's absurd the amount of mental wellness I get from just being half a minute in my tiny garden patch in the spring.
Do you have any fun your-part-of-the-world-only traditions in the spring?
no subject
Yeah, man, the loose Chinese brush painting styles look really up your alley! Like that picture book with the horse drawings you posted.
What's your favourite experiment with mixing watercolours so far?
no subject
Tell me about your craft/cosplay to do list! :D :D
no subject
Ohhh, tell me about how you ended up with chemical burns from an Ophelia flower garden... (Also, an ocean of basil is so good. I'm at that point with parsley.)
no subject
Favourite cover song: https://open.spotify.com/track/4YIoQTJDBXAc7r8rDxUi50?si=4nrN8pufR_6EPiWPh8CqGA The Civil Wars - O come O come Emanuel
What's yours?
no subject
What's in the wildflower seed mix?
no subject
no subject
I was a sixteen-year-old goth and very very very into Hamlet, so I did a very sixteen-year-old goth thing and researched all the applicable flowers/plants Ophelia mentions and tried to plant them in my back yard. It was generally pretty neat. Hummingbirds came to sip at my columbines, and I had a lot of fennel and rosemary to cook with. The one plant I couldn't find, however, was rue. This is because rue--as will be explained below--is a terrible plant that nobody wants to sell.
It was through a miraculous piece of good/terrible fortune that, after determining nobody would sell one to me, I just ended up finding a rue plant that somebody had apparently planted as an ornamental and abandoned in the vacant lot next door. I thereafter spent a hot day in the summer sun digging it up, because I was very dedicated to my aesthetic and was okay stealing a random bush to have appropriately literary plants in my back yard. Within a day, I blistered badly. Really badly. It looked like my arms and legs were about to peel off.
After some frantic googling and a trip to the doctor, it was brought to everyone's attentions that the probable reason nobody was willing to sell me some rue is because compounds in rue drastically increase one's sensitivity to UV light. Rue juice, apparently, is like an evil reverse sunscreen, and I had been covering myself in it in the midst of a the noonday sun. The result was that I got what looked like horrific chemical burns all over my limbs, although not before I'd secured a rue plant. I was honestly very proud of my garden and how I'd suffered for it after that, but not so proud that I ever wanted to touch any rue again.
no subject
Did you, perhaps, rue the day...?
/HIDES
(Great horticulture story, though...)
no subject
no subject
Single-use packets at the moment, because I've been leaning on instant mocha a lot at cons the last year or so and packets travel well (instant mocha: one pack hot cocoa mix, spoonful of instant espresso, and if you're me, make the cup about 2/3rds hot water and 1/3rd creamer). I have an old tub of mix at work though that I'm trying to get through.
It's mostly crafts at the moment! I was in kind of a lull between big events cosplay-wise (the next con on my schedule was one where I'm staff, so I don't make new stuff for it), which means I don't have supplies set in for new things (and the rest of my spring conventions got cancelled anyway soooo). But I have a lot of non-cosplay projects that end up at the bottom of the priority list, so I've been finally doing those. I put pockets in two of my EGL dresses, and started in on making myself some sports bras, because my current ones are ratty af and new sports bras that fit me are like $50+ each.