Bento Box Creations from Convergence

My family just recently attended the sci-fi/fantasy/literature/anime/manga/gaming/general nerdiness convention "Convergence", which we have been going to every year for quite a while now, and we all had a very good time going to panels, watching movies, partaking of free food and drinks and looking at all the interesting cosplayers.

In past years I'd barely even noticed that there was a craft room at Convergence, since I spent so much time at panels or walking around, but this year I noticed some interesting-looking events that they had scheduled going on in that room, so I decided to try them out, and with a couple of them I found myself having a very enjoyable time.

One of these craft workshops, which I attended with my mother, was for the purpose of making bento boxes (Japanese boxed lunches). The purpose of bento is not just to fill them with tasty food, but to make them look appealing too (see various examples of cute bento boxes at the linked-to page).

So for the bento workshop everone sat down as volunteers began passing around various foods, fruits and vegetables, and then we all set about using various materials to make adorable and edible animals, flowers, people, etc. for our bento.

I, however, was (as usual) not satisfied with doing what everyone else was doing - I had to go outside of the box, to make something different, to use my creativity to its fullest capacity...

...which meant, of course, making an "ero bento" (ero being the Japanese term for "erotic").

I was inspired first to use the tips of a hot dog and little bits of carrot to make the boobs, and then I just had to cut a little penis out of a cucumber slice, and arrange them just so. Yes, I am that juvenile.

I also took photos of some of the other fun bento created by various people at the workshop. Below is my mother's delectable creation, complete with a non-traditional hot dog octopus.

Below is the only other bento with boobs, made by someone I didn't know. I'm not sure what the scene is supposed to depict, or what the creature is, but it's still a very fun lunch box.

Here's the bento made by someone at my table, with a little woman in a flounced grape dress with a cheese hair bow, and a clever rice head with vegetable features.

The next bento was made to look like a clever little scene. I'm not sure what it's suppose to be, other than what looks like a saint praying and what looks like the dead form of the Dread Pirate Roberts (from the film The Princess Bride), but it's very cool nonetheless.

And below is a cute little kitty that someone at another table sculpted out of rice and nori sheets.

So as you can see, the workshop was enormously successful and fun, and the room was just bursting with creativity - I know I definitely want to try making bento again in the future. There's something really satisfying about preparing food that's not only tasty, but creative (and maybe a little bit sexy) too.

Crafts: Valentines Day Box

Here's a box I created for my dorm room door this past Valentines Day. Our floor's wonderful Community Advisor organized a little event where the members of our floor could get together, make and decorate these boxes and hang out. There was glitter, heart-shaped stickers, pipe cleaners, paper in red and pink, and so much more - it was a decorating smorgasbord! I haven't made something like this since fourth grade, so it was really great to get craftsy again, and I think it's pretty evident that I had a lot of fun creating it.

Sculpture: Metal Cyborg Arm-Pencil

Yesterday, as my brother was working on cleaning out the extra room on the upper floor of our house that has served as a storage area for a lot of miscellaneae, he pulled out this!

 It's a piece that I created for a sculpture class about two to three years ago. We had to create various assignments using plaster, wood and metal in turns, and the prompt for the metalwork section was to create something that was an extension of our body, both literally and metaphorically. We had to actually be able to wear it for the class critique.

Since I've loved to draw since I was little, and my most oft-used instrument being the common pencil, it really does feel like an extension of my body when I use it. It was also easy enough for me to figure out how to portray that using sculpture - just make a big metal pencil arm!

A Statuesque Painted Gentleman

A long while ago I purchased a plain white statuette of a victorian-esque gentleman from a local thrift store with the intent of painting it at some point. After at least a year passed, and after accidentally breaking both legs of the statuette off and then subsequently attached them again (thank Cthulhu for hot glue guns), I finally got around to bringing him to life.

So a few weeks ago I spent a whole day hunkered down in my room with my acrylic paints and assorted other necessary supplies (including coffee) and painted him. I wish I'd thought to take a picture of him as he was when he was completely white and unpainted, but by the time I remembered and took some comparison photos I had already painted his face and head. His face was something I worked long and hard on getting just right, and the transformation of it from blank whiteness to color was quite interesting, I'm sad I didn't capture it. You can at least see some of the effect that a paint job had on him in the comparison shots below.

a Delightful Ditch of Dandelions

I took these photos a short while ago on day that was so truly gorgeous I couldn't help but go outside for a walk. I traversed the neighborhood and enjoyed the fresh air, greenery and flowering crabapple trees. I began to approach my old elementary school, and as I did I passed by a sort of ditch, an area that was sunken in the dirt and filled with water and the remains of fallen leaves, that lay just beside the sidewalk.


I decided to pop off the head of a dandelion growing in the nearby grassy areas (since many of them were in bloom at the time) and throw it in the water. Then, I just kept doing that - for more than an hour I spent my time collecting dandelion heads and laying them on the surface of the water in such a way that they'd float upright upon it.


I don't know how many flowers I ended up getting on there, but it was definitely more than fifty. It was really interesting to watch them move about on the water with the force of the wind, sometimes collecting at one side of the ditch or the other, and sometimes spreading out evenly upon it. By the time I tired of it, my hands were dirty and yellow from handling the dandelions, and my calves ached from doing so much bending over and squatting, but I felt quite pleased nonetheless.


Once I was done, I took some photos, and I thought I'd upload them here, for as simple as this was, it's a little like art. I know the artist Andy Goldsworthy did a lot of things like this - using natural ingredients like flowers, leaves, rocks, wood, wool or even ice, he'd make very simple but interesting and beautiful temporary art pieces in natural environments. Some of them involved arranging leaves or flower petals in the water of ponds or streams, and their interaction with the water and movement in it was part of the art.


While my little adventure with dandelions wasn't much ofanything in the scheme of things, and certainly wasn't as interesting or work-intensive as his works, it was still fun, and brightened up an otherwise dank little pool of water.


Is it art? I don't know, but I don't think it matters whether it is or not. I had a good time, and I got my hands dirty, and I made something pretty: that's good enough for me.


_______________________________________________________

Making Tasty Meaty Pasties

I cannot express just how glad I am to be back home for the summer, to be free of the stresses and time-consuming works of school! Just to have free time that I can spend without the knowledge that there is another assignment waiting for me around the corner. The only thing waiting around the corner that I have to deal with is my family, but I'll take them over essays and tests any day!

 Well, to segue into my main post topic... Earlier last week, out of the blue my mother (shown on the left) asked me to help her make pasties for dinner. They've become something that we eat every once in a while at the Alberti household ever since the first time I created them, entirely on my own, just after I first went to see the Sweeney Todd movie. While that movie probably made a lot of people sick to their stomachs, it just made mine rumble for delicious meaty pastry!

Those pasties had been a bit time-consuming to make, but they were just so delicious that all of us developed a taste for them. So this time around I was quite willing to participate in the pasty preparations, especially knowing that I wouldn't be the only pair of hands working on them.