One launch down, and lookee what I found!!

I launched my free mini-course on color in weaving yesterday! It’s about designing handwoven cloth with bold or subtle patterns, and is designed to solve the age-old problem of your beautiful, bright colors weaving into dull, boring mud. If you’re interested in it, go check it out! It’s free, so you’ve got nothing to lose except your fear of another color disaster.

This free mini-course, and the bigger paid course launch that’s coming up right behind it, are the reason you haven’t heard much from me recently. Getting the courses and the marketing campaign behind the launch ready to go has been an insane amount of work – the last three weeks I’ve been working 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, getting everything ready and putting on the final coat of polish. Yesterday I announced the course to my mailing list, and promptly fell over exhausted. I am taking today OFF.

And what am I doing with my day off? Why, preparing for the arrival of the lovely Maryam! The garage is PACKED with stuff, and since she arrives in 3.5 weeks, I’ll need to do some decluttering to make space.

Um, just a little bit of decluttering. Here’s where she’s going to live:

As you can see, I have my work cut out for me.

Fortunately, a lot of the work isn’t too hard. Much of the stuff I’ve accumulated is craft stuff where I’ve clearly headed in other directions, so selling or donating it to others who will make better use of it is a fine idea. The table will replace the rickety table in the back yard. The chairs? Haven’t figured that out yet, but I think they can fit next to Maryam on the sides. The elliptical trainer will be replaced by a rowing machine that can be moved around when I need to warp Maryam. So life moves on, and it’s all a matter of logistics and cleaning things up.

Of course, when you clear out the old to make room for the new, interesting finds crop up. I was sorting through a box of ancient memorabilia yesterday and found this!

That’s me on the cover of Farang Magazine, back in 2003 when I was backpacking through Southeast Asia. Yep, wearing only body paint. 🙂 Through a series of fabulous adventures, I had convinced the best body painter in Bangkok to paint me – just for the fun of it (and he normally charges $5,000/day!) – and he had arranged a photo shoot with a photographer friend. Then his buddy at Farang Magazine called him up, he was stumped for a cover for the latest issue, did Richard have any suggestions? And next thing I knew, I was gracing the cover of a Thai travel magazine, clad only in body paint. (Well, and a shell necklace, if you want to be technical.)

Ah, those were the days.

But those carefree days of lost youth are behind me now. I’m now beyond such frivolity, bent on more serious things. Like total world domination. It’s seed-saving time!

Here are a few of the steps in my seed-saving process.

First, I gather tomatoes from my adorable killer mutant ninja tomatoes. I taste-test them, write my (terse) notes on a slip of paper, and photograph the fruits next to a quarter (for scale) along with the plant number. That will all go into my tomato database.

As you can see, I’m getting yellow Fruity Mix tomatoes this year. This is an excellent thing – last year’s were all red, and I was worried that the yellow genes had all gotten lost. But this year I got orange and yellow as well as red – so am selecting all of the above!

Next step is to squeeze out the fruit gel into labeled cups, and let the gel ferment for a couple days so the gel around the seeds rots away. (The gel contains a germination inhibitor, and also can carry diseases.) After a few days, this cup looks delightfully ripe and rotted:

Next you rinse out the seeds (they sink to the bottom, the gunky stuff pours off the top), dry them on an uncoated paper plate, and put them in a neatly labeled paper envelope. Voila! Freshly saved killer mutant ninja tomato seeds, ready to wreak havoc on another unsuspecting generation.

Of course, the next task is to enter all the information into the database. That’s what I’m not looking forward to. Perhaps later today….

Anyway, I have not been silent because life has been slow. Quite the reverse: it has been PACKED!! Hopefully things should slow down a bit soon, so I won’t be quite so exhausted all the time, and will have other things to show you.