On The Hunt

It's still a little early to be in the search of fall color in the lower elevation areas. I thought I would do some recon though while the weather was nice this afternoon. There was a forest road I wanted to check out because I finally got new tires. I also did a little search to see how good the road was. I've been on some wretched forest roads that I should have never been on so I was trying to be prepared. There was actually quite a bit of fall color in the deeper higher elevation part of the valley I went to. It wasn't enough to make for any good photos yet. I think this weekend will be rather nice.

Tsubayama is such a wonderful place. I have written about it numerous times before. I think the history of inhabitants stretches back to the 1100s. You really feel like you have left modern Japan for a brief moment when you go there. I decided to follow the forest road that leads to the Tsubayama hiking trail just to see the condition of the road myself. I made it all the way to the hiking trail entrance which is off an oddly paved portion of road in the middle of nowhere. I figured I would keep going and see where it would lead. I thought for sure it would go somewhere because of how good of a road it was. But the longer I drove, the longer the road was. I had to pull off the side to let a van go by at one point. The man had rolled down his window and when he saw me only said hello and kept going. It was kind of odd. I wondered what he had intended to say to me. I thought they must have come from the direction I was going as it was such a long way back from where I had come. Boy was I wrong about that.

By the time I started seeing signs that said 立入禁止 I was getting a little unsure of where I was headed. I told myself those signs only meant to stay away from the overhead wire areas where they would be sending logs up and down. The road got worse and worse. I just knew it had to go somewhere though! It couldn't just end. And then it did.


View Tsubayama Road in a larger map

Yes now I remember. I checked this road a few months ago to see if it connected to the next valley over. I remember seeing it didn't connect from what I could tell by the map. I wasn't that surprised the road ended but curse that guy in the van. He must have been too startled to even try speaking Japanese to me to let me know I shouldn't be going that way. So the long journey back along a rocky gravel road started again. I was in good spirits. At least I knew. The light was slowly fading and I didn't want to be out there in the dark.



Despite my wasted time I enjoyed the smell of the leaves. It was good to get away from the sugi, hinoki, and whatever other conifers are around. Not too far from the paved road back toward civilization is a nice waterfall too. It looked like it had a deep pool. It was almost dark by then so I couldn't see very well.



I'll probably be back out this weekend, weather permitting of course. I might just be on top of Tsubayama this time.

Failure Baked Into Apple Pie

So my printing projects took a turn for the worse the other evening. In the middle of doing complicated things my squeegee cracked and broke. I had white ink everywhere and was just starting to actually print on some shirts. I had to scrap everything and clean up the ink. There was no way to proceed with a broken tool no matter how much I wanted to. I'll come back to all of that mess after I've had a few days to mentally recover from the frustration. It wouldn't be the first with printing things.

However, I wasn't going to let that ruin my plans for today. Today was pie making. Last November I made a pumpkin pie that was delicious except for the crust. That needed to be much better. Aside from that I have no other experience making pies. It's probably one of those things best learned from a seasoned pro in person so you get the feel of the pastry dough and every little intricacy. No such luxury here. The next best thing was my lovely sister though. She kindly gave me her trade secrets. There was some gaping holes in the directions that left me a little unsure but I figured I could make it regardless.

I popped into the local store in the early afternoon to check out the apple stock. I noticed they had gotten quite a few apples in the past week. I thought they had some Jonagold but I read the Japanese wrong. When I got there today I wasn't sure what to get. The cheaper Santsugaru usually don't impress me much. They go bad quickly and end up mealy. They are too soft as well. I still buy them because I'm thrifty. My eye caught some other bags that had five apples in them. The only thing the package told me was 紅玉 (kougyoku). Great, red ball apples. That was so helpful. They did look familiar to Jonathon apples but in the apple world the looks can be deceiving. That apples could have tasted terrible and still looked like Jonathon. I contemplated for awhile and figured the red ball apples were worth a shot. I also got a more expensive bigger apple to see how it tasted.

The red balls tasted perfect. A wonderful tart flavor. I went to the work of peeling and chopping the apples up. Then doused them in sugar and cinnamon to let the apples sweat their moisture out. Alli had told me to add flour if there was a lot of juice but I had no idea if that meant make the juices thick. I decided to look at some other recipes and found that caramelizing the juices and adding them back into the pie is delicious. Maybe you can just put the juices back in the pie but I feared it getting soggy. In the mean time I did the crust per the recipe. I kind of forgot what it was supposed to feel like so it was more wet than I thought it should be. I didn't make any changes and left it how it was. I decided to trust the directions of my sister on that. If there was more too it she would have said. Plus I remembered from watching her she didn't do much else anyway.

The pie went in the oven for about 50 minutes. I pulled it when the juices were beginning to bubble up and it looked brown.





Everything was looking splendid.  An hour or two later I sliced the pie open and served myself a few slices.





I felt the joy of autumn surging through my brain. Might have been the sugary spike. So I didn't feel too guilty I cut up some pieces and delivered them to my neighbor. It's likely that I'll consume almost all the rest.





A great success for my first apple pie. Much thanks to my sister once again. I need to bake it longer next time to improve the crust texture but I think that's about the biggest modification it needs.  In the process of writing this I looked up what 紅玉 was. Well what do you know? That is the Japanese name for Jonathon apples. My intuition deserves a pat on the back. The taste buds already got their reward.

The Printing Saga Continues

I'm terrible at art. I'm better off just trying desperately to take pictures and write things on this blog.

After a bit of toying around in the 作業室 (sagyou shitsu, which I have aptly named recently) over the past few days I have made some progress on the previously mentioned printing apparatus. It was a mistake to buy cheap pine wood. I hate getting pine sap and resin on my hands. That stuff won't come off. I assume there is some easy solution to that problem that doesn't involve regular hand soap. Without wasting too much more time and if you are interested, watch the video below to get an idea of what this looks like in action.





It's a shame I'll have to leave these things behind next year. I'm sure I'll find a good home for everything. I couldn't have it any other way.

Screening Redesign

I've been thinking a lot about screen printing the past week after finally making something. I find the art very fascinating and really like it more and more. There are so many techniques and ways to print things. It's overwhelming but I love the flood of knowledge when I read about it. Just today I came across new things that made me eager to keep learning.

As my next goal is to print a 3 color design, I realized my printing press setup (if you can call it a printing press...) is not suitable. During my terribly busy day - see super not busy - I spent a large part of the afternoon thinking how I could build an easy and effective system for my table top. Bridging together my needs and elements of other systems I came up with the following.

 


This involves 6 clamps to secure different parts of the system. This allows a lot of flexibility because everything is movable on the table then. The screen will clamp to a hinges that are screwed into blocks which will in turn be held by clamps on the table. The printing platen that the shirt goes on for printing will be positioned on a longer piece of wood that can be slid up and down. This will then be clamped on the table edge.

There is a small degree of off contact with the hinge being positioned under the screen that will be very good. You can see that gap created on the drawing. This will help prevent the stencil from sticking to substrates in the future. Cardboard could be inserted between the clamp and hinge to raise the distance if desired.

The biggest plus of the design is the platen. The shirt can be slid on the platen and the excess material will hang off the edges and out of the way. Thus only one layer of fabric and the wood platen will be in contact with each other rather than the backside of the shirt bunching up against the front. The shirt will also lay very flat so it will make aligning multiple color prints easier.

Of course this all looks good to me in theory. We will have to see how it comes out. I'll start work on this tomorrow.

And It Only Took 8 Months...

Once upon a time I proclaimed that I was soon going to be making t-shirts. Soon was a huge understatement. The photo emulsion I ordered worked like Elmer's Glue, it just washed out with water and wouldn't stay in place after being exposed to light. Yeah that probably doesn't make any sense but I wasn't going to waste time trying to figure out how to use the sun. I like the flexibility of using a halogen lamp. As I sat pondering what to do about the terrible emulsion I did find another kind online. I'm glad I didn't buy it because it makes a permanent stencil. I somehow randomly caught that bit of info after looking over the same product many times. A few weeks ago I bought a kind that is more similar to what I have used before. I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best.

Last week in the middle of making my second stencil my lamp broke so I had to wait once again to actually get to making a shirt. Before that I had done a test stencil that still was washing out a little too much. Oh the joyous frustration of working with new things. In the world of screen printing or silk screening there is a learning curve with any product change. I miss the access to cheaper materials back home. It's what kept me from getting into this sooner.

Today brought much better success. I was finally able to make a suitable stencil.





Don't tell the North Central company I stole their design. But maybe if they didn't charge 3000 yen for a t-shirt I would be more likely to buy one. At least that is what I thought when I was in Hokkaido last winter. Sweet shirts with a price that made me want to vomit. It might be wise to open a black market and profit off cheap skates like me. I actually just wanted to make a shirt and this happened to be an easy design. If you are totally uninformed about making stencils just remember it's magic and nothing else. Yes, pure magic. Then with a few waves of your hand, some ink, and a squeegee the impossible happens. Oh the glamor of it all.


 


I was rather pleased given my interesting use of paper and canola oil for exposing screens. The details were pretty spot on. I think this one looked the best.





I mean it looks best on me.