Drawing and Hulling

First of all, thank you to everybody who’s bought a Winter-Time Paper House pack so far — thank you, thank you! It’s been very exciting seeing the number downloaded go up. Don’t forget that there’s a flickr group that you can add your photos to, once you’ve built the houses. It’s pretty strange (in an awesome way) to see my little creations in different locations around the world! If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check out my last post for details on the new paper house pack.
Seeing the enthusiasm for my little houses has made me think about how amazing it would be to do this for a living. Wake up, sit down, do some drawing all day. The only illustration I’ve done professionally has been for book covers, which is very to-order and not at all done in a ‘what shall I draw today?’ type of mood.
I think the best bit of paid illustration (well, I earned my salary, anyway) I’ve done was the little drawings for Snowbooks’ edition of A.A. Milne’s The Sunny Side (Ecco in the US then bought our edition — my editing and illustrations — and did a lovely hardcover for the States). Silly drawings aside, The Sunny Side is SUCH a good collection of stories and poems. You should buy it now. The Snowbooks edition.
Anyway, I didn’t plan on talking about illustration and drawing, but I do like the idea of doing a bit more of it on my own and making the finished products available to you. We’ll see! It’s just one of those things in which I’ve received no proper training, yet I’ve (obnoxiously) been given the opportunity to try my hand at it with at least a little bit of success. I did work hard for the English degree that I now use to comb through manuscripts for the tiniest of grammatical errors, though. So it’s not all been handed to me on a platter.
Anyway again, I meant to say that I individually hulled each of the seeds from my homegrown pumpkins, because I wanted to make pumpkin butter. I found a ‘quick’ solution on the world-wide internet, which said to simply bash the seeds open with a wooden mallet and then dump them in water (the shells would float; the seeds would sink) — but the few shells I did manage to crack just resulted in smashed seeds, meat and all. So I went back to opening them each. One. At. A. Time. It was almost as bad as the year my mom grew popcorn, and we had to pick off each sharp, pointy kernel from the cobs.
I used this recipe, although I only had 1.5 cups of seeds in the end, so I changed the amounts. Sadly, my tiny food processor just didn’t get the seeds ‘powdery’ enough before I added the oil and honey, so my finished product is a bit… bittier. Not really a butter at all. BUT — the toasted seeds and the honey make it taste like baklava, so I can’t really complain.
It tastes extra good with some maple syrup drizzled over, but then, what doesn’t?