About second chances

I had ditched blogging and went awol from the internet for a long time for multiple reasons. One of the most pressing reasons was my concerns as a parent about posting pictures of my child.

I was a delirious mother whose world revolved around one tiny person.  I enjoyed every bit of it. Becoming a stay-at-home-mom was perhaps not the wisest career decision I have taken, I am not known for taking worldly wise decisions anyway. I recorded the most mundane moments from our world and shared it here. Infancy gave way to childhood and our relationship as mother and child also evolved. Increasingly I wanted to respect his privacy. It was also time for me to do some soulsearching. There are many private struggles I am not ready to talk about yet. 

However, that is not what I want to talk about today. This is about starting afresh. I had taken a long break from academics and started doing my PhD two years back. Almost all of my friends have settled in their jobs, have crossed professional milestones, most of them completed their PhD's and here I am with a million ongoing projects (none completed) and crises (oh the crises) and the only steady development is that I am raising a child. I have my own doubts about how well I am doing the raising part as most of the time it is him raising me than the other way around, but I am doing okay more or less. I have a lot of uncertainties ahead. But that is not what I want to talk about either. 

What I miss about blogging is the carefree way one could go about writing. I miss that. Increasingly I am editing and editing and again editing what I write a thousand times and I miss the spontaneity of clicking the 'new post' tab and just typing it out. I am here for that. I want to write and write and not edit. Blogging is probably a dinosaur right now, but who wouldn't agree that dinosaurs are cute as an idea. I have taken a second chance with studying again, I will soon be looking for jobs again(I miss the morning hustle of going to work), and I simply do not want this space to die out.    

Long Time No see!

I stopped writing this blog when life became unbelievably busy and when I thought I should give my son his due privacy now that he is a big child. Anyhow, lots of things happened in between. I joined a PhD programme and is half way through. The boy is in Class 1. We do all kinds of crafting all the time which I will update soon. I am not going to put this blog link on social media right now. But if anybody stumbles upon this and wants to say a quick hello, kindly do that in the comments and I will be supah happy about it.

Wild Flowers

The boy went out with his cousin and brought me back a bunch of wild flowers! This is all I ever want from you, kid! Nothing more and nothing less.. 

Let's build a play house!

Summer vacation is here and we have turned our 'let's entertain the kid indoors' mode on. It is too hot to go out during the day and without school and friends, the kid is bored as bored can be.

We made a play house for our little toy friends on the second day. All we used was old newspapers and old dupattas.

Here is how to make it.

Step 1: Take two sheets of newspaper and roll it tightly. Secure it with clear tape.

Step 2: Attach three paper rolls using clear tape to form a triangle. This is our basic brick to make the house. Now all we did was to make more triangles like this, attached them to each other until we found a desirable shape. 

We are getting there slowly, one triangle at a time. 

Each triangle unit was attached to each other with clear tape. I think now we have our structure ready. We chose a pyramid shape for our house. 

Final Step: Pick old duppattas of your choice and drape your house. Since my son's favorite colour is Orange, we went for two Orange shaded duppattas. Final step is ofcourse to shift all your lovely toys into the new playhouse! 

Voila! House! 

We are very happy with the results!

a late night desk

The Efficient German imported Himalayan Lazy Garlic grown in China

This is a garlic pod. It usually have multiple cloves of garlic which needs to be peeled, right? 

Now since we are in a country that boasts of their efficiency, here is a small example. Presenting the efficient garlic we got today.

When you peel it, it is one single garlic pod that can be sliced up like any onion you might have seen in your life.

The world that cooks with Garlic knows what this means! How awesome this feels! If this is a genetically mutated abomination, then I say, bring it on, Germans!

Now take a moment to think about this creation. Those who cook will know the repurcussions of a garlic pod like this.

Laters, garlic baby.

PS: It is actually himalayan efficiency. And it is called Himalayan Lazy Garlic :) Bring it on, exporters.

When we tried our andy warhol.

Just because we can! 

Bon Apetit!

The super easy super tasty garlic pull apart bread loaf I made today! It is so good :) 

It needs very basic ingredients and the outcome is just wow! 

I followed the recipe I found in this brilliant blog, Edible Garden and tralala, it is awesome!
Check this recipe out and try, all of you who want to bake something nice.

The only change I made to the original recipe was, I added a little more butter, because, Julia Child said so :)

See the original recipe here.

            Bon Apetit!

Fifty Shades of De

Corny as it might sound, I had announced few days back to have a 'Fifty Shades of De' series. De is the bestest friend I can ask for and I am taking it seriously! I will, in the course of time, attempt fifty or more portraits of De.

You might remember this one.

I also had a short lived cartoon series from the time we were roomies in hyderabad... 

Here is the new flower girl De :) 

That is three down, 47 more to go.

Ria De of my life. Thanks a lot for being there and being you, man :) I hope you won't mind the grey parody title, It sounds way cooler when it is Shades of De :) 

Love, 

There is a flower on my wall :)

Big surprise (as if) ! I have decided to make the work desk wall prettier and added a big flower! This is dedicated to all those school years making pookkalams, (flower carpets is something I would never want to call them)... Well, there is a big flower above my work desk now.

It does not look this tidy all the time, thanks to my constant mess maker. I tidied up just for the photo and minutes later, the scene became a crime scene!

I had a lot of black paint leftover from the other big wall project  and I love working with black paint. But this would look prettier even with any other colour don't you think? It is fun adding bold statement accents to plain white walls.

Not that we had a perfect white wall to begin with. The wall was covered with a certain someone's artful doodles :) What wonderful backdrop for a design!

I can even call it a collaboration project of me and the boy.

Things currently on my desk, aka deskfie!

Two lovely books I am reading and re-reading and slow-reading and translating. My sketchbook.

Spiderman and another superhero whose name I dont know, but whose head was destroyed by a certain somebody.

Bunny with a carrot, a little birdie and the ever favorite doctor panda! These are the boy's favorite people right now.

Brushes, pencils, thermometer (sigh! we were fighting recurring colds and fevers lately), big bottle of black acrylic paint, my trusted camel water colour box.

Hot pink yarn! The boring hospital like table cloth also got an arrowed makeover using, big surprise again, black acrylic paint by your's truly!

Reflections!

And us.

More later! Ta Ta!

You are the butter to my bread!

This post is dedicated to the most amazing cook I am married to. The kitchen is where a lot of our hours are so lovingly spent and I wanted to add some cuteness to the kitchen wall. The illustration is not an original, I copied it from here. I wanted to keep the recipe of a bread I frequently made on the kitchen wall where I can quickly take a glance at when I am mixing it and that is how it all began. Julia Child is always a lovely lovely inspiration. 

It all worked well, don't you think? The photo frames are from the euro shop, the european equivalent to a dollar store most crafters are familiar with.

Calligraphy is another thing I want to try perfecting. Right now it is in this hopelessly amateurish enthusiast level, I know. But some day, some day!

The very cute butter and bread couple!

This is not a complete bread recipe, but it is the no knead artisan bread recipe popularized by Newyork times. I  followed the recipe I found here. It is super simple with next to no ingredients and the bread is this lovely hard crusted artisan bread type. Once you take it out of the oven, you will be surprised that you made it all by yourself! One has to go through that experience to understand the feeling :)

Some character to an otherwise boring wall!

And here is a picture of the bread I baked :) It is so pretty, it is almost an art installation. The way the bread sings in the oven, the way the patterns on the crust evolve, everything is so therapeutic. Baking helped me get through a lot of sadness and depression in the winter months spent in Germany. I am starting to understand why people move to colder weathered countries and almost immediately start posting pictures of things they cooked! When the weather is so bitter cold outside, food you make is pretty much the only warm and happy tangible thing you can have.

I could go on, but I have work to do now. See you soon.
More later.

Similar but not the same

So I spent some 15 minutes today to play around with two techniques and a same style and it ended in two sketches that are similar but not the same.

For the first one, I first painted the whole thing and then sketched the outline once everything was semi-dry. 

 And the second one was done the other way round, first I doodled with my sketchpen and then filled it all with colour.

I decided to stick to the same colour pallette so that I will know how it will look like in the end.
When one is a self taught artist, one has to try out stuff to learn stuff. Not bad, eh?

Which one do you guys prefer? I cannot decide myself, I like them both. I dont even know if the technique differences count in the end product. I personally like the process of painting first and then sketching more because it gives me a freedom to improvise as I doodle. But the other way round is fun too. 

Write to me, let me know your thoughts in comments!

Tschuss! (That means bye in German! I know, I am showing off. )

Pages from the life of a journal junkie

I love everything about a sketchbook journal. I relax and workout inside the pages of my sketchbook. My sketchbook has my random thoughts, ideas that needs to be worked on, designs and patterns I want to try and just about anything and everything I might want to try putting ink on.

I sketch at all times. I sketch when I am happy or gloomy. I sketch when I am in doubt. I sketch when I want to celebrate. I sketch because I know no other way to reach pure unadulterated exhiliarating bliss. I love me the most when I play with colours. Take a peek into the pages of my new sketchbook...

I am that person who doesn't start a sketchbook on the first white sheet inside, but will start working literally from cover to cover. The idea is to not waste any kind of workable surface. Cover everything with art is kind of my style :)

New sketchbook cover makeover.

Forgot to take a before picture, it was just a plain cover with some paper quality and size written on it.

 This little kitty was for daniel and was copied from elsewhere.  the flower is mine :) 

Playing with pattern is lots of fun!

Mixing poetry and paint is clearly one of my favorite techniques...

I will soon come out with a post with my interpretation of fifty shades of De. But since this grim portrait of de was part of the sketchbook, here goes :) Ria De, the bestest friend one can ever have. 

The original photograph of this birdie was much more stunning and stark!

More random doodling and sketching...

I wish I had flowers instead of hair! :)