Faaaaan aaaaart/fooood

Check out these delicious jello shots I made, recipe courtesy of My Jello Americans. The top is vanilla vodka and rose Monin syrup, the bottom is fancy-ass gin and sweetened condensed milk and lime zest.







Don't they look like adorable little boobs? Kind of?


Bonus: Halloween eyeball jello shots! Third year running, and they just keep getting awesomer. Plus I made candy corn mousse, which turned out too sweet but still good.

Thanks, Dave Singerman

rotating kitchen from Zeger Reyers on Vimeo.

Two months and counting

The instantaneous autumn weather we've had this week has turned my thoughts to Halloween - specifically, my friend Emily's second annual party for which I plan to make decorations and weird foods. Last year my contributions included:

• Blueberry-buttermilk-cardamom panna cotta in the shape of Frankenstein hands, which my friends promptly re-carved so that one of the hands was giving the finger. It was still pretty delicious though
  
• Realistic jello shot eyeballs (the round ice cube trays I used are currently missing, and I am freaking out - they were extremely well received and fun to make. I painted the iris, pupil, and bloodshot veins on with food coloring)
• Two bats made out of wire hangers and duct tape
• An entirely black flower arrangement
• Purchased light strings (orange, purple and eyeball shaped)
• Enough grey, loose-weave "creepy cloth" from Oriental Trading's online store to cover Emily's entire futon couch
• A big cheap plastic skull wall hanging from the Five Below
  
• A sheet cake dribbled with jello eyeballs, plastic flies and maraschino cherry liquid which no one touched

Here's my brainstorming for this year's additions:

• Thai/Vietnamese basil seed drink; the floating basil seeds look like tiny eggs or something equally gross, but they taste like watermelon (not that I expect anyone but me to drink it)
• "Thousand-year-old eggs" (for looks - see above; I think they're interesting, flavor-wise, but the whites are purplish black and the yolk is green)
• Bone-shaped meringue cookies
• 44 assorted vital organ gummies, already purchased
• If I can find or make one, a tacky life-size jointed cardboard witch, preferably 1950s style
  
• We didn't have enough ghost imagery last year; either cutouts or fabric sculpture
• My ribcage chandelier design from art class in 2005 needs some more play; maybe in 3-D?? (Wire wrapped with something and spray-painted glow-in-the-dark?)
• BLACK LIGHT
• A recipe I found online for "alien autopsy shots" (bloody grenadine on the bottom, with bailey's half-suspended in mountain dew above to look just basically gross)
  
• I have this book of vintage monster images I have to remember to blow up at Kinko's; maybe I can make a banner or garland

OMG, right?

Ho hum

I'm officially kind of bored with embroidery, which is a shame, since I decided to undertake a larger project this week - a set of decorated cocktail napkins for an old friend who's getting married in October. So I find myself duty-bound to finish the little mushrooms and deers and molecule diagrams and cartoon characters I've already traced onto the linen. At least my supply of Star Trek: The Next Generation has been refreshed a la an Amazon shipment yesterday; that should smooth things over a bit. (I'm on season five, but I skipped season two.)

In personal news, my friends Tom and Alyse from Oberlin College have more or less relocated to New York, which is a bummer because they're kind of my go-to people; they're the only friends besides my sister who were living less than ten minutes from me. Alyse has been in NY for the past month, stage-managing a play about Emily Dickinson, but until yesterday she returned every weekend to visit Tom, who was doing some kind of unpaid Philadelphia internship with a nonprofit that had to do with the train system. Now Tom has finagled an unpaid lighting tech gig on the aforementioned play, so I probably won't see them for at least a month unless I drag my butt, crutch and all, up to NYC for opening night. That may or may not happen, so it looks like I have to commute to other apartments if I don't want to be a total embroidery/Star Trek loner for the rest of September. Undecided.

Otherwise, my sister's new job seems to be going tolerably well, although she is planning to vamoose out of there as soon as she finds another one. She's doing what I was doing a year ago - assistant preschool teaching - but it turns out she went to high school with two of her co-workers, one of which was also a complete horror show mean girl to her in middle school. So, not the greatest situation. I have to find a job too. I'm burning through my savings with Star Trek and restaurants (not to mention cigarettes.)

Que ridiculoso

I had a pretty good week, I guess. I saw both Ponyo and District 9 in quick succession; hard to imagine two more different films, but I really liked them both (and hardly had any nightmares about D9 at all!) Ponyo was especially fun because my sister and her boyfriend met me there fresh from the Ikea, bearing weird candy from Sweden for all (toffee flavored whips, elderflower juice boxes, and no jelly rats because my sister scarfed them all before I got there.) Foreign candy and snack food is one of my many unhealthy avocations. My discovery of yesterday is Rollos Con Cajeta from Mexico - a rolled snack cake sheet filled with Coronado brand goat's milk caramel. What is it with Mexico and caramel? Or South and Central America in general and caramel? Whatever the explanation, they do it right.

But District 9 was really creepy! I successfully failed to spoil the main plot point for myself through prior knowledge, so when the bomb dropped, so to speak, I was pretty surprised - and horrified, because (uh, spoiler alert) I love/hate the genre of "body horror" (especially physical transformation beyond the affected person's control.) If I'd known it was going to figure prominently in the film, I would still have gone, but I would at least have been prepared for creepy grossness.

This week my homework for Color Theory includes tracing an 8 1/2 x 11" magazine illustration and transferring it to a board. I'm sort of nervous but I also can't wait; the trick is going to be finding an acceptable work surface in the unholy mess that is my living space. I don't even have a desk, dude.

Other current projects include my new obsession with embroidering my own line drawings. If I can figure out how, I plan to immortalize my "edgy" rendition of an ugly mermaid smoking a cigarette by uploading it here. I used peach, teal, mint, lavender, and yellow thread from the Needlepoint at Rittenhouse shop on 18th and Chestnut, but I didn't have any cinder grey for the curl of smoke, so I need to get back there today (although it's kind of a haul for me.) Embroidery is so cute and fun, and I can't wait for my glow in the dark thread and Jim Woodring iron-on patterns to show up in the mail! Fun, fun, fun. Anyway.

Who, what, where, why.

Hi. My name is Hannah, and I'm slightly obsessed with Star Trek. When I say slightly, I do mean slightly. That is, it's not as though I like or watch the bad versions. Juuust the first two series and the new movie; and only because of the new movie, really, so only since the new movie came out.

That said, this blog (officially undertaken in the name of Computer Science Summer 09, at the Art Institute of Philadelphia, for the record) is not intended to be exclusively about Star Trek, if only because I am notorious for being pretty much unable to stick to a theme. It was just the first cute name which came to me. "Spock's Brain", fyi, is an episode of the original series of Star Trek (I think I will actually use the acronym TOS from now on, cringe) from, I believe, season two, in which Spock's actual brain is actually stolen! By aliens! Who look exactly human! Man I love Star Trek.

Good lord! Okay, that is probably enough about freakin' Star Trek for one entry. Allow me to talk about me, which will at least be less boring for myself. I am a second-time undergraduate student; in addition to the associate's degree in web design I am currently attempting, I hold a BA in neuroscience from Oberlin College, which was a weird mixed bag of experiences. I never considered majoring in neuroscience until I decided to do it, sophomore year. It was very cool and very difficult, and I knew before I finished that I would probably never be a scientist; I have strange ideas about learning, I guess, or some bizarre Ayn Rand type idea that I can do anything I set my mind to, which I can partially attribute to growing up in the can-do, empowered 1990s. I thought I might use neuroscience knowledge to inspire art projects, or maybe become a medical illustrator. Upon re-examining the job market, however, I came to web design as a strategy to connect my graphic sensibilities to everyday life in these, our interesting times.

I know I don't get extra credit for prattling on, but one more thing: if Prof. Irwin hasn't figured this out, I'm the girl with the crutch. That happened almost four years ago, and the story is a little personal for me to go into. I'm not saying don't ask me anything if you're curious; I love describing my various cyborg surgeries and etc. (no sarcasm!) But, yeah; there's that, too.

More later, surely.