*Lots* to write about – I’ll be back on Tuesday!!
Tuesday
Mayonnaise Rolls
Mayonnaise rolls are terrific. Some people call these ‘mayonnaise biscuits’ and the idea is that they only have three ingredients and take no time to make…plus the whole house smells like fresh-baked bread.
Ingredients:
2 cups self-rising flour — self-rising is great, but they’ll still absolutely turn out and be a little flatter with all-purpose
4 tbsp (1/4 c.) mayonnaise
1 cup milk
Thinking of adding herbs, etc? Absolutely! I added several shakes of chimichurri seasoning (just the regular jarred mix from Target) to this recipe and these were fab.
Directions:
Preheat to 350*.
Take a muffin tin and with a paper towel, spread some oil (Wesson is perfect for this) in each well so the rolls will come out easily. Just a little bit will be fine.
Mix all ingredients just until blended.
With a spoon or ice-cream scoop, fill each of the twelve muffin wells with dough (this recipe makes the perfect amount for 12):
Bake in the preheated 350* oven. Mine are usually done between 20-25 minutes, but start checking at 15 minutes. If they’re not as brown as you like (for whatever reason) just switch the broiler on for a few seconds – I do it too! You can not taste the mayonnaise at all – they just turn out perfect. They’re really great!
Halloween Wreaths
This year I made two Halloween wreaths. This one was made from a twig wreath form plus some spanish moss, embroidered ribbon, and florist hooks. I hung some Spanish moss on the form. I had a local embroidery shop put “Boo Y’all!” on some super-wide, wired ribbon. Florist hooks were used to pin the ribbon to the wreath form.
This other wreath was a take-off on the Valentine wreath from earlier this year. Just a flat wreath form plus images of old romantic Halloween cards from a postcard book at Amazon put on with hot glue:
In The Windows
Last December, I posted about an exhibit at Space One Eleven in B’ham by Spencer Shoults called ‘Cupcakes!’. They’re back in front now (SOE is great about having fantastic work in their windows – I think that’s one of their missions):
This is by Guido Maus – the artist statement reads in part, “In his works, Maus confronts the abusive power of opinionated forces which bombard each of us from without and within. The structured influences of an organized societal existence wage war alongside the individual quest for truth and decency.”:
This is by Jim Neel:
If you read Dennis Covington’s Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia, Jim Neel’s series of photographs will be very familiar.
Lonnie Holley, “Profiles of African Women”:
Walt Creel, “Deer”, made up of bullet holes through painted aluminum. His artist statement is entitled ‘Deweaponizing the Gun’ and reads in part, “when I decided I wanted to make art using a gun, I was not sure what direction I would have to take. I knew I did not want to use it simply as an accent to work I was doing, but as the focus. My main goal was to take the destructive power away from the gun. To manipulate the gun into a tool of creation and use it in a way that removed it from its original purpose. To deweaponize it.”
Beginning November 6, the gallery will open an exhibit called The Compassion Project.
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Through November 28 at the Carnegie Visual Arts Center in Decatur is a Nall exhibit – Out of the Box – with many of his new works, and he is also working on a book to be titled ‘The RSA Permanent Collection of Alabama Art’.
Kentuck, Kentuck, Kentuck
This weekend (Sat & Sun, both 9a-5p) is the Kentuck Festival of the Arts in Northport, Alabama. This past year, it was chosen by Time Magazine to represent Alabama’s “authentic experience”. It has over 300 exhibitors and more than 30,000 people attend each year.
There are activities for children (making corn shuck dolls, making paper, self-portraiture, making art with clay, quilting, and more), music (including Elliott McPherson of T’loosa’s Dexateens – *love* them), and of course, art:
Especially can’t wait to see:
Michael Banks, Ned Berry, Jerry Brown, Chris Clark, Gee’s Bend Quilters, Lonnie Holley, Charlie Lucas, Joe Minter (this is Joe’s first year!! Yay!), Missionary Mary Proctor, Bernice Sims, Ruby Williams, Miller Pottery, Amos Kennedy, Bettye Kimbrell, Martha Beadle, George Jones Jr., Yvonne Wells, Jim Shores, Kathleen Fetters, Bethanne Hill…I’m sure there are other favorites I’ve missed…but the entire list of artists is here.
If you see us, please stop to say hi – we met a ton of new people at Bluff Park which was *so* fun! Av will of course be wearing the baby in his Baby Bjorn so that should make it pretty easy to spot us. See you there!!
Great Idea In B’ham
Boarded up, abandoned buildings look admittedly awful. It only gets worse if it’s in an already declining neighborhood.
But rather than just let it be, someone wonderful has come along and painted over this building’s particleboard-covered doors and windows with lovely scenes of happy home life – this is in west B’ham:
Love the trompe d’oeil doors. The girl with the dog, and the hearth are wonderful!
This is great.
I think it was in one of my Sociology classes in college that we learned about the ‘broken window syndrome’. I just looked it up, and I think the idea of it was first written about in the Atlantic Monthly in 1982. It’s summarized very well here, and here are a couple of excerpts:
“If a window in a building is broken and left unrepaired,” they wrote, “all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. . . . One unrepaired window is a signal that no one cares, so breaking more windows costs nothing. . . . Untended property becomes fair game for people out for fun or plunder.”
‘If disorder goes unchecked, a vicious cycle begins. First, it kindles a fear of crime among residents, who respond by staying behind locked doors. Their involvement in the neighborhood declines; people begin to ignore rowdy and threatening behavior in public. They cease to exercise social regulation over little things like litter on the street, loitering strangers, or truant schoolchildren.
It’s so nice that someone has done this and made what would have been a very negative element a canvas for positive, happy images.
I’d like to give whoever did this a big hug.
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