Heritage

I've been letting Allerleirauh compost in my brain for a while, trying to figure out how best to retell it.  I've finally come up with a pretty satisfying twist, which gave me what I needed to finally name my heroine.

***

Once upon a time, my mother was the most beautiful woman in the world.

I would know this to be true even if my father hadn’t told me, because her portrait hangs in our great hall.  It is the largest of the three portraits that hang there: there is also a miniature, small enough to hold in one hand, and another painting that is half my height.  The women in those paintings look exactly like my mother, but they are not her, for they were painted before she was born, just as her portrait, taller than my father, was painted before I was born.

My mother’s name was Phaidra, and when she died giving birth to me, my father decided it was only right I have it in remembrance of her.

Firebird

Sometimes I just start stitching because I want to, and I don't really know where it's going to take me.  The last time that happened (in February, actually), it went a little like this:

"Hmm, I want to stitch, but I'm done Valentine's Day is over.  What else could I stitch now?  It might be fun to do one of my angels with the illuminated wings... hmm, illuminated wings... I'll bet it would be nice to stitch a firebird!"

And so I drew a little firebird on a piece of card stock, and started to stitch:

Burn.

Simple simple line-work, in the beginning, lots of long graceful lines to follow.  For the colors I decided that I wanted to work in shades of flame (obviously), but that I would treat the bird's body as the hottest part of the flame, and therefore white (twined with pale yellow) and then get darker the further out I went.

A lovely effect.

Such a nice gradient!  I got the subtle color changes by using three threads and slowly substituting one shade after another.  You can see it most obviously in the third feather from the left- I used a pale orange, a salmon, and a scarlet for that one.  Anyway once the main line work was done, I needed to go back in to the feathers and do the details...

Which I did.

That shot also shows you where I started adding extra flourishes, and how I draw the lines in pencil and then punch holes in the card stock using the needle.  But still more flourishes were needed!

Traces of gray, for smoke.

So I added those flourishes, and filled in the world "burn" while I was at it, but I knew that still more flourishes were needed!

More!  We need more!

In the end it turned out like this:

An Official Portrait, by Nathan.

And the back looked like this:

Awesomely ordered chaos.

And if you would like get a better sense of the scale of this thing:

Too much red!  Blowing out my phone's sensors!

And here are two more Nathan photos for more detail work:

Can you see the barest touch of blue I used in her eye?

Ha hah, who forgot to erase pencil lines before letting Nathan take photos?  THISGIRL.

So that's what I occasionally do with my time- freehand something onto a piece of card stock, and then stitch the hell out of it.  Wheee!  All in all it took me... three days, I think?  But they were highly satisfying days.

Isis Came Home With a Vengence

Ladies and Gentlemen, I would like to introduce you to Isis Abigayle, the newest addition to our little madhouse:

And they called it Puppy Love

 And now that I have bombarded you with adorability, I leave you with this definitely unexciting doodle.  What can I say?  I was a little bit distracted today.

Detox: Day Three (or: Learning From Your Mistakes So You Can Make New Ones)

After yesterday's moment-of-label-truth, it occurred to me this morning to take a peek at my "coconut milk beverage" ingredients... which include cane sugar.  Damn.  But I bought some "non-sweetened coconut milk beverage" this evening, so I'm good to go going forward.

But that wasn't today's mistake.  No, today's mistake was thinking that it was no big deal being out of spinach- that romaine lettuce would work just as well in my green monster smoothie.

Not so much.

I choked it down, but it was not a pleasant experience.  Unlike spinach (which stays nicely innocuous, taste-wise) romaine definitely has a very distinct flavor- which makes itself distinctly and unpleasantly apparent amidst all the fruit and such.  Bleh.

But!  Lesson learned.  (Plus I totally bought a new bag of spinach when I went out to get the new coconut milk...)

Breakfast: smoothie consisting of lite coconut milk, carrots, frozen raspberries, icky romaine, and frozen peach bits
Lunch: leftover steak, salad, and mashed cauliflower (a very hearty lunch, which meant no need for a later snack)
Dinner: fennel-encrusted pork tenderloin with roasted sweet potatoes, carrots, and onions

This is actually a variation on a dish that we make on a fairly regular basis, but that one involves apple cider and normal potatoes.  What was nice was that by substituting sweet potatoes for regular potatoes we got the sweetness that is normally provided by the apple cider.  So it's quite probable that in the future this will just be "the way that we make it" rather than "a variation".

(Oh, and I should mention that Nathan browned the pork loin in bacon fat, which did extra-special wonders for the flavor.)

The Plant of Living Flame

As we all know, tree blood is combustable.

What's that, you say? Tree blood? Flammable? Who-what-how?

Well it's simple, really. Tree blood (aka, sap) and its derivatives are highly flammable. Ever heard of turpentine? There ya' go.

I am telling you this, best beloved, so that you will better understand what I will tell you next. Perhaps you have heard of the phoenix? That legendary bird who, once every five hundred years, bursts into flames, only to rise up again from it's own ashes? Have you ever wondered what such a creature might subsist on? I shall tell you.

High on the tallest of mountain-peaks, far above the ordinary tree line, in complete and utter solitude, there grows a plant of living flame: the pyre-tree. The leaves of this tree glow with such an incandescent heat that no other living creature (save the phoenix) can approach it. Each day, over and over again, the leaves smolder away into nothing, only to be re-sprouted from their own ruins. It is upon the fruit of this tree that the voracious phoenix dines.

But this tree is more than just a source of sustenance- it is also where the phoenix makes it's nest. Most trees, you understand, are prone to exploding if the phoenix alights for too long (this is why, in the stories, the hero always sees them just flying away)- but to the pyre-tree, itself burning hotter than an ordinary fire, the phoenix is like any other bird- except that the phoenix can, in return, withstand the heat of the tree. Furthermore, the phoenix finds the frigid temperatures of the thin mountain atmosphere to be especially comfortable to sleep in.

(Fire)