Artisan bread is best described by thinking about the person who makes the bread. An artisan baker is a craftsperson who is trained to the highest ability to mix, ferment, shape and bake a hand crafted loaf of bread. They understand the science behind the chemical reactions of the ingredients and know how to provide the best environment for the bread to develop. – Artisan Bakers.

Eliza and I have a bread machine but for a while I’ve had the desire to fool around with making really, really simple bread recipes. The above loaf consists of salt, flour, water and a bit of yeast. Small variations of those ingredients, the amount you knead the dough, and how you bake it – can wholly change the way the final product comes out.

I’m having a lot of fun trying different things (I also made my own tortillas with nearly the same ingredients) and learning a lot as I go. I recommend making homemade bread to anyone that wants to learn about this process. Here is a recipe which I tailored off of Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois who have authored a book about making artisan bread in five minutes. I happened upon their recipe via YouTube. Smart strategy.

The recipe

• 1 1/2 tablespoons yeast.
• 1 1/2 tablespoons kosher salt
• 6 1/2 cups unbleached, all-purpose flour, more for dusting dough.
• 3 1/2 cups of water (about)
• Some cornmeal. (optional, you can use flour)

Put yeast and salt into bucket. Dump in lukewarm water. Dump in flour. Mix with wooden spoon until no more dry flour. Do not over mix or knead at all. Let sit in bucket for 2 hours. Rip off grapefruit sized pieces and bend them into a UFO shape (watch this video to see). Place on pizza peel to rest for 40 minutes while the oven preheats to 450. Preheat oven with an empty baking pan under pizza stone on the middle shelf. After dough ball has rested and oven, pizza stone, and baking pan are preheated – place dough ball on center of pizza stone, drop in a few cups of water into baking pan (this will steam to make the crust of the bread) and bake for 30 minutes.

That’s it. Give it a try!

Already have a first-generation iPad and want to use Apple’s shiny new Smart Cover? Dan Provost, from The Glif fame, has figured out how to use the Smart Cover on the first-gen iPad.

My brother-in-law Perry and I made this driftwood iPad stand over the weekend while I was visiting my sister’s family in New Jersey. The driftwood is from their recent trip to the Oregon coast.

We followed these instructions on how to build your own wood iPad stand. With some slight improvisations to accommodate the fact that driftwood is a lot different than your average lumber.

Cost: $0.00

Check out our page and intro video.

What can I say, it has been a bird feeder weekend. Something I learned from my father is that it is very easy to put together your own bird feeder. Using what I remembered from him, I grabbed a branch of Birch tree and hollowed out a few holes, filled them with a peanut butter and bird seed mixture, popped in some nails as posts for the birds to perch on when they are eating and hung it from the tree.

Now we have five different types of bird feeders and I hope it will attract a wide variety of birds.

“Grumpy, long haired Colin.”

“Unsure, but getting there Colin.”

“Good for the first try Colin.”

“Satisfied for now Colin”

Total elapsed time: about 45 minutes. I think I will need Eliza’s help to clean up the neck line a little and I will be able to do a much better, much quicker job next time but I’m pretty satisfied for my first try. I’ll only get better at it from here and, after today, I’ll be saving money every single time I cut my hair.

Since I’m just now getting the chance to post about this bookmark I thought I’d take some time to share the process I went through to create this bookmark – albeit simple. Sometimes, and maybe this is only true for me, we look at things at being too difficult or involved to have the time to do instead of just giving it a try. This is usually the case for me and any art project I plan on doing. By sharing the process I’m hoping to debunk that myth a little. Making these little art projects can be both fun and not take up too much of your time.

I started out searching Flickr for bookmarks, geishas, and anything I thought that would inspire me to create this bookmark. You can rummage through my favorites on Flickr to see anything that I’ve found on Flickr that I find inspiring. Somewhere in there are a few elements that I pieced together in my mind in order to create this project. A geisha drawing here, a Japanese sign there, and I ended up with an idea.

Next, I began to make rough sketches (pictured above, click the photo for a larger view) of how I wanted to draw the geisha for the bookmark. I tried four different styles. One that had an umbrella, which didn’t turn out well. One that was a more anime/kid-like take on a geisha that I believe is from a current cartoon that I didn’t think fit with this project. And one that I ultimately settled on. Once I found the style I thought I liked the best, I sketched it a second time for practice.

I then outlined the geisha on a corner of small 140lb. watercolor paper. This gave me two straight edges off-the-bat and made it easy for me to make two simple cuts to finish the project. Using my simple set of watercolors I painted the geisha and was done. In retrospect my “keep it simple” approach worked well for this bookmark though I would have liked to experiment with making a “crazy” or “detailed” edition of this bookmark. Maybe next time.

Told you it was simple, but it was a lot of fun, and Eliza liked it!

I really think I just like the idea of creating dolls that “cheer you up because they are so sad looking”.  That and I think these would make great gifts for kids because they are cheap, made for each person you’re giving them to, and get away from the normal dolls that we see today that are all about high-fashion and bull crap.

PDF: Download the PDF for the doll.
Source: Make Your Own Sympathy Doll on Viddler.

I’m going to try to keep doing watercolor paintings, maybe even one each week. This week I really wanted to do an owl, so here I present my fifth watercolor in this new effort; The Owl.

I tried a few techniques this time that I hadn’t before. Some of them worked out quite well, like under-shading on the Owl (probably hard to see in any of the photos).  Some of them didn’t work out so well, because I did them wrong, like the snow by using salt.  I didn’t use enough water to make the salt effective.

The salt, if done right, will cause the watercolor to separate and move away from the salt. It would end up causing a neat effect that would work well for snow, stars, or other textures. But, again, I didn’t use enough water for this to work.

There is a lot that I would do differently, if given the chance, so I’m really looking forward to my next crack at another painting next week.  Overall I’m thrilled with the way this painting came out – but there are a few subtle things (like the snow) that I wanted to add to this and I simply didn’t do it the right way.

Live, learn, move on, try again. Here are some more photos of my watercolor paintings. Next I think I’m going to tackle a Japanese sign.

It turned out really great and makes our living room much more cozy than it was a few days ago. Our entire apartment is now really beginning to become my new favorite place that I’ve lived. Now, if we could just transport our current apartment and rent price to the North Shore on Oahu, Hawai’i we’d be all set.

Thanks Eliza and Carla for your hard work.

We’ve used iron-ons in the past, for the Star Wars prequel premiers, so we had some laying around (yes, from that long ago!).  Here is my tshirt design that I quickly did in Adobe Illustrator.  If you like it, you may download it here.

Eliza really likes the “Why So Serious” campaign that they’ve done for The Dark Knight. So her tshirt is made from the top portion of the poster from it.

Update: Here is what the shirt ended up looking like, taken by Eliza.

We’re really excited, especially based on all of the good reviews and press this movie has gotten, to see The Dark Knight tonight.  Are you going?

From the “An oldie but a goodie” department.

In March of 2005 I saved myself $30 by not buying an iPod dock and building my own out of the box that the iPod came in. I remember this getting on tons of sites and spreading pretty quickly.

“I thought it was a fun project, and it didn’t take me that long to complete.”

Looking back, I should do more of these types of things. I have always enjoyed fiddling with art, paper products, tools, and anything else to build my own fun things. Perhaps I should get back into doing something like this once per month and feature it here on my site.

Source: iPod box dock on The uber geeks.