Catching Up

I've been shifting between a variety of creative and personals project during the past month. Bennington college sets aside two months during the winter, requiring that students use to time to do field work relevant to their studies. Since I am studying teaching and education, I've been designing graphics and web pages for the Princeton Learning Cooperative, where Paul Scutt is the proprietor. This has been occupying the majority of my time.

The website is completed now, so I am shifting focus to more personal pursuits. Primarily, I have been teaching myself better writing skills, focusing on short prose and expositional text. You can find some of these pieces around the Congregation network, and perhaps I'll throw up a few here.

I've been brewing kombucha tea like crazy, in controlled experiments measuring the effects of different fermentation parameters. All of these experiments are being documented in both photographs and data. It's really fun, some truly revolting imagery has come out of it. Take, for example, degrading health of a kombucha culture over successive generations:

A testament to love at first sight.

 Fortunately, most the graphics are not so visceral. This comparison of the discoloration of tea during a kombucha ferment is downright alchemical:

Fresh tea, fermented tea, & fermented tea with low sugar and tea concentrations.

Continuing along...

I finished deconstructing and reassembling Dizzy's bowl back mandolin; that project will be split into a few posts to come. Any admirer of antique instruments would certainly suffer an heart attack if they saw the grisly process:

Found in the dorm kitchen the morning after the devastating annual party, "Dressed to get Laid". Vodka dissolves latex paint, and was used to age the fretboard paint.

The Langhart method. Nothing in the house could clamp to the bowl back, so it was an inside job.

Toothpicks have all sorts of marvelous applications.

I hope that I will be able to scrape together enough free time before school begins to undertake another amateur luthier job. A few years ago, a Solebury student inadvertently became a sort of pornography, kicked in the soundboard of Dennis Liana's guitar. I gave it a haphazard repair job, which involved large quantities of epoxy, and a saddle built like a spiked club. You can witness that abomination here.

I'd like to give it another go-around, and may have some means of doing so, due to this lovely find:

I guess we'll see what comes of it.