Trying to Be Serious About Jell-O

I finally did go through with making some Jell-O but not what I had thought I would do. I have to create some space which involves a couple of projects and maybe getting rid of some things, which I do not enjoy. I'll get there.

I did make these boingies which are fun to play with, though I don't have an immediate plan for them. I just thought if I started with something fun, it would get me going. It's like the trick of leaving some part of your work undone at the end of a session so you have a quicker start the next time. 

To make these, I use the strong gelatin recipe (3 oz per cup of water) and spread it about 1/4 inch or so thick in pyrex pie plates (after adding dye.) Then I let it sit about 6 to 12 hours, (less time is better) and use a sharp exacto knife to cut through it in a circular, spiral pattern to make a long, continuous narrow strip. I gently take it out of the pan and put it on another, or a plate, or any surface really, and twist it and turn it to have some interesting bends and shapes. Not that it will follow your directions, but you get more chances to shape it. You'll want to turn it over as it dries, or maybe drape it over something, when it gets firm enough to not break itself. 

Later, you can get a section wet if you want to bend it differently or make it do something even weirder than it chose to do on its own. You can always get this dried gelatin wet or damp and it gets flexible, so you get lots of chances to shape it the way you see it. I like to glue the end of these into a flower or in another place on a hat, and when you move, it moves, though it can be hazardous for anyone you want to hug or converse with. But it's something to try. It can be very rigid so you could make some kind of support for something, but it is hard to dry things that are thick so that can be limited. There's a lot to learn about physics, strength and gravity when you try to build things out of Jell-O. 

I remember this one piece that was a breakfast, with a suspended syrup bottle and a straw filled with "syrup" and I think you could do it without the straw, perhaps. Not to support the bottle though. I don't quite remember how they did everything in that piece. I'll go through the archives and see if I have a good photo. Food is always a good subject to render in Jell-O, particularly if you want to make some type of political statement about food. I like to use candy molds to make little shapes, which can be gummy-like or just hard and inedible, depending on your purposes. I think gummies do use gelatin, though I haven't researched that. 

 Here's the photo from 2012. It looks like the plastic straw supported the syrup bottle, emptied enough to weigh the right amount I think. Great use of props! Can't read the artist's name, and don't know if this one from 2013 is related. 

I suppose technically you could make breakfast foods that are garnished with or made from Jell-O, if you are weary of actual breakfast foods. 

And don't stop at breakfast if that is where you want to work. I made some sushi with Jell-O strips inside instead of cucumber, etc., which was actually tasty. Taste is not lacking with Jell-O, as you can make anything taste great with the right chemicals and expensive food scientists and factories. It has a great texture as well, and the brilliant transparency is a most seductive quality. That's some of the joy of Jell-O and why people keep coming back I guess.

I have a book called Jell-O a Biography by Carolyn Wyman which lists the many slogans used over the years, which are sometimes hilarious and endlessly useful when writing about and creating Jell-O. There are of course lots of old memes like the stapler from The Office and "nailing Jell-O to the wall" from corporate parlance. We need some new memes I think. The phoniness and lack of food value in Jell-O is fair game, as is the fact that it is made from hides and hooves of slaughtered cattle. One reason it is such an old food is that people liked to use everything from their livestock and it was probably easy to accidentally discover the gelatin from cooking up the waste parts. Also why it was mainly a savory food for a long time. You don't normally make desserts from animal products. But wait...dairy is an animal product. So much for that theory.

 I think I'll read back and see what still needs to be said about last year's show, since it is way too cold to go outside today. I will have to bundle up and go to practice in a couple of hours. I suppose we are lucky to not have snow. But snow and Jell-O! Wouldn't that be fun.  

Jell-O Jamboree

 

Yes, indeed, it is Jell-O Art season again, and I am as usual a little bit late to the party. After the Xmas retail season I need a vacation so it takes about this amount of time to get the decorations put away and get to thinking about the show, my art, and my goals for this Jell-O year. It makes the timeframe really short! The Show will be March 28th. 

Our show has landed at the beginning of spring break for the last couple of years (this year it is at the end of spring break), so that the gallery where we have it can hang and take down their other, month-long art shows that are their real business. We get to suspend all that art world business to be completely irreverent and bring out silliness into their space, for one Saturday evening that somehow takes months to prepare for. The gallery is at Maude Kerns Art Center, at 15th and Villard in Eugene. (You can go tho their website for lots of photos of past shows.)

Art on glass by David Gibbs

We decided on Jell-O Jamboree for this year, feeling like everyone in our sphere needs some simple, childlike fun, and we as a troupe need to regroup with less of a narrative and more of a variety show. The Jamboree evokes celebration for its own sake, with a touch of nostalgia. It's likely that many people immediately think of Boy Scouts, and that's okay, because we do plan to bring together all of the many troops of artists and appreciators who are linked through Jell-O.

However you want to use it, Jell-O remains a silly, gorgeous, uncooperative art media that can be taken in any direction. We're an art movement that defies structure. First time, 37th time, all are welcome. Whatever you want to make, how ever you want to do it, theme or not, pretty or not, we want you to have fun with something irreverent, impervious to judgement, outside of the critical structure of the money-art world, and just pleasing to the eye and spirit. I know some people still eat Jell-O...I generally do not, but again, make your own rules. If you want to make something edible, be safe in your preparation, but you can choose to put it on a pedestal or carve it up for the Tacky Food Buffet.

This was Tacky Food, and delicious

 

We try to pick a theme with a lot of latitude and interpretations,  so you can comment on art, politics, our local scene, or anything you want. Focus on the Jam part if you want---Jell-O Jam. Turn Boree into Boreal and make a tree. Gather up your own scout troop and make some together. 

Nothing is banned or inappropriate, although we do ask that no one make a big mess if possible. Throwing Jell-O can only be done if you clean it all up and the white walls don't have to be repainted. People have done that...we either had a kiddie pool with wrestling in it or it was someone's idea that never got to the final stages (Jell-O is cold, by the way, making wrestling in it not as fun as you might think, as my next-door neighbors found out one summer. Also it takes a giant amount to make something thicker than water, and the price has gone up no doubt.)

I just checked bulk foods.com where I have bought my 25 pound lots in the past, and it still hovers around $10 a pound in big quantities, more in smaller ones. Agar-agar is more  but it says you need less, 1/3 to 1/2 the amount of gelatin. If you are just starting out you can play with Jell-O itself, but the name brand stuff, although cheap and usually on sale, has a lot more in it than gelatin, so you still need a lot. If you want to make jiggly Jell-O, you can certainly start with the brand-name boxes (and there are some off-brands too, if you like to support smaller producers) using less water for a firmer texture that may not need refrigeration. The bigger boxes of Knox clear gelatin have gotten very high-priced, and I think there is only 1/4 ounce in each of those envelopes, but it's somewhere to start. 

I use just plain gelatin powder, which I color with dyes that I have around from my other art forms. I generally work in dried gelatin, and my mix is 3 ounces of gelatin to one cup of water. It's pretty arbitrary, but I try to stick to it so I know what to expect. I put the gelatin in a quart canning jar filled to half, (that's 2 cups of water) and put in 6 ounces of gelatin, stirring well. I use cold water! It's a lot easier. Then after it "blooms" for about ten minutes (absorbs water) I put the jar in the microwave for about 2 minutes and melt it. 

Be careful as hot Jell-O is sticky and will hurt you. Then I put in the dye, pour it in thin layers in pyrex dishes, or molds, or whatever I am doing according to my plan or the lack of one.

Then I put it in a hot dry place like on top of the piano and tend it for a couple of days until it is dry like paper. I'll go through the process in a later post but I want you all to know how simple the process really is for the kind of art I have been making lately.

With the dried stuff, there is no jiggle, which is one of the best parts of Jell-O art, so you may want to reduce the recipe to use less gelatin and get that firm but jiggly texture that holds its shape and is workable by carving, molds, or stacking pieces together. Melted gelatin makes  excellent glue but you have to have a little patience as it takes a minute or so to go from warm liquid to cool adhesive. And of course if something doesn't work out, you can remelt it and start over. 

That's the basic recipe, gelatin and water, and you can use a lot of different things for color, including those neon food coloring kits and things like milk, candy coloring, metal powders and whatever you have around. Ink, paint, natural materials like flowers, you try it.

If the theme doesn't give you a workable prompt, play for a while and let your brain come up with something you want to do. I usually have some technique or end result I want to find out about. I've tried the gelatinas, which you make with syringes and other tools, and it is hard, but very fascinating to see and even eat. I'm made all kinds of molds with wax, plastic, toys and found objects. I sometimes like to go to a thrift store and see if there is anything fun I want to center around. Once I used a copper-faced pink breadbox to represent a house for Fishhead Barbie. Barbie has made lots of appearances with the rest of her family, including GI Joe. Props are just fine and many of us use them. 

Personally I like to make political statements and there will be those. It's a little tricky to know what will be funny or urgent in late-March, but you can make a good guess or just project. It doesn't matter. Your community of Jell-O Artists will like anything you make. Or they won't, but you won't know about that, because we have no winners, no Best of Show, no evaluation of success or quality. There is no bad Jell-O Art. It's just about having fun, and if it isn't fun, maybe you should make yourself do it anyway until you learn how to find the fun in there. That can be an artistic journey all in itself. 

The Radar Angels, the group of artists and creators who started this in 1988, wanted to stimulate the inner artist in everyone and give people access to participating in a gallery show. When you put your creation on a pedestal in a gallery, art shifts for you. It's not supposed to intimidate, but free us from the usual criticism we do to hold ourselves from really enjoying our creative lives without limits.

Jell-O will limit you, as it can be super uncooperative if you try to force it to do what it can't or isn't in the mood to do. I like that challenge, and although I don't know if I will find a new technique this year, I do plan to start today with some part of a project. I like to do props for the stage and I know of one that needs to be made. I'll be making some large sheets on the lids for big tubs. They are plastic so it won't be shiny like it is when I use pyrex, but the lids are flexible so it is easy to get the gelatin to release...sometimes it sticks to the pyrex and you have to know some techniques to free it. Read back to some earlier posts for tips or let me know what you want to learn and I'll try to write about it.

So get going! It's a perfect day for Jell-O. Internet research is also great fun...there are quite a few Instagram artists who make delightful gelatin (called Jellies in other countries) and there are even a few shows here and there, usually focused on edible sculptures, but look them up. You can try posting things on my Facebook page, Gelatinaceae, where I will try to keep up despite hating all things FB. Follow some inspiration on Instagram, which has more videos. I promise to share more. Maybe I'll even get around to my review of the art from last year, which I never did complete. 

Jamboree! Sounds fun. 

 

Set and Props

Before I do a show review with all the Jell-O Art, I want to honor all the work I did on the set, props and conveying the narrative through visual cues, to extend all that fun for the future. 

Maybe it looks better with the actors in front of it, and it isn't placed as I had envisioned it, but there are a couple of parts I really liked. We wanted to be in space, in two very different parts of it, with styles to coordinate with who we were. On one side we had what we called the Golds, whose ship was made of cardboard and had gold and logos all over it, plus a little graffiti. Their background, which was supposed to be right behind them, was covered with gold embellishment like the Oval Office now is. I really liked their ship. I wrote graffiti on it on stage, and thought about letting people have at it, but i was afraid someone would put a swastika on it and ruin the video. My original plan to have an eagle for a figurehead seemed insulting to eagles. I thought turkeys wouldn't care.

The Pirates, which we changed to Space Buccaneers for a less felonius image, were all about natural materials, with a DIY look as if they had escaped to space early on in the ruin of earth, and built themselves a paradise where they made Jell-O to sell to other space refugees. I made their ship first, out of sticks I had pruned off my apple tree. It was supposed to be closer to the front of the stage as well, but to accommodate the tumbling mat everything had to be moved to the back wall. Not what I had planned, but I can be flexible. I had ideas for sails that also had to be jettisoned, suspended on bamboo poles, which were way too long for the space. The figurehead for that ship was a lot more elegant in my imagination but oh well. I am used to that happening as it has since I was little. What I see in my head is usually beyond my capability to put it on paper. It looked DIY I guess...

I had a lot of fun making the stick structure. It was nice weather and I did it on the deck way early in the process. The sign didn't get made until the day before the show. There were probably too many pirate props but they needed something to do between songs. It will be interesting to see the video and see if they actually did pirate stuff. I woke up in the middle of the night Friday night and hated the background for the pirates, so went in Saturday and put up the colorful bandanas and that seemed better. 

All in all, it was relatively simple, with lights added by various people and some nice work with lighting and backdrop by TJ. Hopefully next year we won't have to squeeze in  a tumbling mat. The talented girls were a hit with the audience but it was pretty overwhelming trying to get that to work with all of us humans on stage trying to be at the mics to sing and deliver our lines.

We did pretty well but a week's more of practice would have helped. Lines were delivered out of sequence, dropped altogether, or needed prompting. Song starts were sometimes rough. We don't all sing that well sometimes...it's not great. Our crowd is sweet and loves us but it could have been smoother. And I forgot to get the band on stage before my speech and forgot to tell them they would have to play something while I got changed. They managed, though. Everybody did pretty well for a bunch of amateurs. And I get to have a pirate ship on my deck for a year or two. I'll probably grow beans on it or something. 

Just Desserts

 I decided to post this in both of my blogs, this one and my personal one, Divine Tension. I figured my readers of each might as well know both aspects of me, which really aren't separate, of course.

 Hello, it's me. I can't sleep. I noticed, when I got up after trying to sleep for a few hours, that the lights are on in my neighbor's house, as well. I imagine there are many who cannot sleep and this isn't something new, of course. But it is dark out in the world, much darker than I, for one, am used to.

I'm not naive. I've been a radical thinker from an early age, and I pay attention. I care about justice. I care about things that are life-affirming, both concrete and abstract things, and these are some times when it is impossible to rest easy. I knew the future would not be pretty, but I did fail to prepare for how fast and how hard it would come down on us.

I have this little thing I do, that I've done for almost 40 years, called the Jell-O Art Show. I write about it in my other blog, Gelatinaceae, which gets a lot more readers than this one does, because it is about art, and joy. Jell-O Art is a particularly joyful art form, silly, beautiful, awkward, glorious, and many times, jiggly and slippery and super uncooperative. It's the reason I call myself an artist, when in my profession I am a crafter, a production worker, a screenprinter and not all that skilled of one, despite doing it for my whole working life. I'm self-taught, so I'm just a worker. I like work and I am diligent, and I've done well with it in a limited and sustainable way.

But Jell-O Art is different. Producing and being in the Jell-O Art show engages all of me. Over the years I learned how to be an artist, how to imagine and conceptualize, how to find the deeper levels, how to put my whole self in and shake myself about. Every year I spend the three winter months of January through March working more or less full time on the Jell-O Art Show. Not only do I work out some kind of personal piece, which is an expression of something about my life or self, but I have been lucky enough to work with a very dear group of people called the Radar Angels. 

The individual Angels have come and go, and while there are still a few of us from the beginning in the late 70s and early 80s, it's an ever-changing group. We work in a process that is purely collaborative, with everyone pooling their talents to make something out of what we all bring. We brainstorm for a few weeks about what we want our show to be about. We throw out tons of ideas, and gradually we coalesce into something we all agree we want to say, using parody songs and a type of melodrama that is generally only a little bit serious. 

You can go to my other blog for about 15 or so years of what that has been about. In 2012 I was crowned as the Queen of Jell-O Art in recognition of how seriously I take Jell-O, and how important it is to me, and that just fueled this deeper appreciation I have for it and brought me into the role of bringing that passion and creative force to the public in the form of the show.

Now I generally write the bones of the script, which we develop together, and we choose the songs to fit and write our lines and pick our characters and figure out our costumes and I make a lot of the props and set pieces and we all work for the last few weeks to pull it all together to present it. This Saturday is when we will be doing it. 

Because these times have been so dark, and we are all of a mind about them, we did something we have always made ourselves avoid for the most part: we got political. We had to. Three of us even decided to play a few of the current archvillains of our times. We chose three out of the many, many that we could have chosen, and for each of us, it is not easy to do. We don't want to come on stage as racists, nazis, psychopaths and evil men. We don't even want to play men! This year in a weird twist, all of our actors are women, and all of our characters are men. At least they start out as men.

One of the themes we wanted to work on was gender...we wanted to explore honoring multiple genders and the fluidity of them, to have a world where that was open for people to be free about it, and make our statement of acceptance of it, but as the show developed we kind of stopped thinking about it. We just acted like people...as if gender didn't even exist. It just occurred to me tonight that we did that. It's a metaphor really, that if there was that openness (WHICH THERE IS!) everyone would live like that.

So that's operating. And in coming on stage, generally, we Angels feel loved. Our audience is the best. They always approve of whatever we do, our mostly amateur singing and presentation, our ridiculous costumes, our dumb jokes and sometimes stale humor. Our obvious theme is always Jell-O saves the world, no matter how much we try to say something else. It just comes out like that. 

But this time, Jell-O is a very weak weapon against the world. We are coming on stage to be hated, the three of us who are playing the billionaires. Really hated. We hate ourselves even. Yet we will sing and dance and pretend at the end that we are transformed and we hope to leave the audience feeling loved and ourselves, at least as the people we really are, back to feeling loved.

There is not any hope that the characters will be loved, no matter how much they are transformed, because no, they will not get what they deserve, they will not be stopped or even aware of our little play and our sad and profound comedy. We will have our little moments of joy, our escape, but it will not be fully satisfying when we walk off the stage and back into the dark world we are living through.

That's life I suppose. As an old person, when I look back at the brief times when things were going well and the culture was opening and affirming, it was never that for everyone. Black people were still being killed by the police and racists, different people of all kinds were still being othered, poor people were still being starved and caused to suffer and being deprived of their humanity. It has never been a pretty world, except of course for the birds and trees and flowing waters and incredible kindnesses and soft hearts and all that everyone attempts to create and hold sacred for themselves and each other.

It's enough to keep you up late every night, isn't it? It's enough to make you dissolve in wonder for your whole life, and then when you get old, like I have, it's enough to make you weep for the wasted moments and lost opportunities and very short time left to have some more. 

This is my late night Jell-O Art world, friends. Maybe I can sleep now. Maybe I have had enough, for now. I am pretty sure the light will come back in the morning so I can work some more. I will never lose hope.

T Shirts! And basics

 I know some of you are struggling with your jiggly creating, so I will remind you of a couple of things. When you are doing the wet Jell-O, you can still get jiggle with a stiffer formula, like the jiggler recipe on the Jell-O box, which says to use 2 1/2 cups of water to 2 6oz packages of Jell-O, instead of the 4 cups of water for one 6 oz package. So that is roughly one fourth of the water. You still get a little jiggle and a firm enough piece to cut it or get it out of the molds with not much trouble. You can decrease the water even more to get a more firm body, so that it won't melt at room temperature and will set up fast. You can use hot water with the Jell-O brand, as it is mostly chemicals and sugar and not very much gelatin.

If you are using the Knox brand, those little envelopes hold 1/4 oz of gelatin which they want you to put in one cup of water. That means for a substantial amount you have to use a lot of the envelopes, and you will want to use more than that amount of gelatin to get more body. Since it is only gelatin, you should use cold water, let it sit for a few minutes, and then melt it in a microwave or pan on the stove.

For the dried gelatin I make, I use 3 oz gelatin per cup of water, so you can go anywhere up to that (I suppose more if you want) and it will harden up at room temp, and stay somewhat stable. Refrigerate it if you want it to not get moldy, because if you don't dry it, it will only last a couple of days in its wet state.

One of the best tips is that if you don't like what you get, you can just remelt it in a pan or bowl or jar, and try again. You can add more gelatin or try a different type of mold, or technique. One thing I do a lot is just swirl it around in the container to coat the sides inside, instead of making a solid chunk. You can't always do that, but it saves a lot of gelatin if you can, and that stuff is getting expensive. 

 Remember it is supposed to be fun! And you can use lots of things for molds, but the easiest kinds to get the Jell-O out of are flexible plastic. You can use blister packs, ice cube trays, candy molds, lots of things you might have around or find at a thrift store. My first step used to be going to the thrift store for inspirational objects. Just see what appeals to you.

You still have plenty of time to try some things out. Keep in mind that anything you do will be perfect. There is no critical structure in the Jell-O Art world, no judges, no "best" or "worst." There is only Jell-O Art.  Let it feed you and bring you joy.

Got the shirts done this week, well, almost done, as I decided to color in the little Jell-O and made way too many shirts. I ran through my gold marker and now have to use screenprint ink to paint the rest with a brush. Very time consuming but they're almost finished. 

The colors are maroon or brown, pretty dark. It's a dark time. I also had some brown shirts I needed to use up that I bought in 2021 and dyed. That's one reason I made too many. 

Hope to see you all there! I do think we will have a good time. Maybe it won't be as cold and wet as it is today, either. I sure don't want to go out in this.

Springing Forward Out of Chaos

 It was postering week as I went around downtown finding places for our Jell-O Art Show poster, which we produce and distribute ourselves. It's not easy to find places for posters anymore, and I doubt many people spend time reading bulletin boards, with all of our information now found online in more silo-ed locations. But we like art in all forms and we love our posters. The artist, Brian Hahn, has made the last five or so. We didn't do one in 2020, and I remember doing the Jell-O Goes Gold, which was 2018 if I remember right. His are excellent and professional and we love them.

 When the sun is out I like to be outside so yesterday I took things out on the deck and worked on the bigger set pieces that I don't have room for inside. I started that, anyway, but soon sat down and started putting all of my ideas on paper, which turned out to be four pages of notes on all of the projects I'm doing. I do most of the work on the script, sets, props, and of course t-shirts, my costumes, and a piece or two of my own, so I had a lot of details swirling around in my brain and it was really fun for me to see the amount of creativity I am involved in right now. 

In a way it was procrastinating and enjoying the spring day but I feel good about it. I even took photos which look like an extremely manic scattering of what many people would call junk and crap. I'm attempting to not buy anything this year, except I will have to buy t-shirts, but I needs to use up at materials and I probably do have everything I need. Most of it is the ethereal and ephemeral ideas I am generating and collating from the other creative people in our troupe. 

We have so much fun working out our lines, songs and jokes, physical and literary. We know the audience won't get them all. The first rule is to amuse ourselves, and then to share it, but one thing I remembered yesterday is how Art Saves Lives.

There's no getting away from politics right now as our whole world seems to be hijacked by lunatics and psychopaths, with a gazillion good people desperately trying to keep up with it and stop as much as we can. As my defense against the cognitive dissonance I have fully immersed in Jell-O land as I generally do to keep down my anxiety about getting it all done by showtime. We only have two more weeks!!

Fortunately it is all progressing rather well though we realize we are risking offending people with our show this year. I decided to give a little trigger warning in my opening speech, as it will be apparent by our set pieces that we are inviting some super villains. We hope it will be funny and the comic relief we all need, but there is always a chance the timing will be off...some last minute horror could happen that would turn us all to jelly and scare us from making the bold statements we intend to make. I am hoping if that does happen we will pivot and quickly write an epilogue or some way to communicate our real messages to our audience, which is our art and appreciator community here in our region and town. I hope you will come to the show and take the journey with us...we are going to space, if you need a hint. 

For my own piece, as well as the t-shirt design, as I made notes I recognized that I am compelled to channel my radical self. I was transformed at age 19 when I changed schools to American University in Washington DC, where there was a lot more happening than in my freshman year at Purdue. I went to see a film, the 1966 The War Game, about a nuclear holocaust in Britain. It's a fake documentary that cuts. I remember the repeating of "It's perfectly safe" and I dropped in horror into the new reality that governments lie...and I had grown up believing a lot of things that I'd been told. It was 1969, not long after the JFK assassination, and all the others that piled on after, and of course I had crouched under my desk at school many times as a kid. It all added up to me having an instant radicalization, which I never "came back" from.  

I became a hippie, war protestor, and student of politics, and couldn't have been in a better place, or more lucky about who came into my sphere of interest. The next few decades were wild. I moved here to Eugene in 1976 and we had a thriving alternative community so I found a home that worked for me and have been able to just inhabit my revolutionary self. I still practice voluntary simplicity, eat organic, try to be a vegan, and so many things I began at that time. It has been a rich life. 

Which is all to say I have to do something radical with my Jell-O Art. I haven't settled on it yet. I'm hoping as I finish more of the little projects an idea will flash into my visual brain, as I can usually depend on that. It only took about 5 minutes of brainstorming one morning in my journal to come up with a terrific t-shirt idea. You will definitely want one this year, so bring that $10 (maybe I will charge $15, as of course shirt prices are up a bit and I should make a little money I suppose.) I will still have all the old ones for $5, what's left of them.

Checked the weather and it is going to rain Sunday night, so I have to get outside and paint set pieces while I can now. I'll upload yesterday's photos and see if there are any I can post that won't tell all my manic secrets. I know, you all thought I was just a normal, dull old lady, didn't you. Well, some days I am assuredly not.

Can't give away too much about the show...but when you know, you will know.

 

Sliming Along

 It's all Jell-O all the time around here, though I have no idea what I am doing as a piece this year. I made a few flowers and some Slugs-on-Sticks to sell, since people always want to take home something and I am not making many of the fascinators anymore. I have previous years' pieces to bring, which I will, but I still have to make something new. Lots of other things are working around in my brain.

 The script is fun and pretty firmed up, so we have to learn and sing the songs over and over and try to get that done. Not many weeks left until March 22! We spent like an hour just working out how to sing one tiny short song which was a little ambitious for our troupe. We managed. Also, it is a forgiving audience so if we don't sound great, no one complains too loudly. We didn't really manage to channel Taylor Swift that well last year...those stars are popular for a reason, and it's not just the clothes.

Costumes are a very fun part and I have been working on mine, shuffling through my vast quantities of thrifting finds and ridiculous accessories I have held onto for just the one moment when they will be perfect. I don't want to spend any money this year if possible, supporting the boycotting to take down the oligarchy and all, but I might have to get a thing or two. 

Doing everything simultaneously is fun for me, lets my mind roll around being its weirdest with no consequences. By the time the show comes many ideas have been discarded for better ones or simplicity and I can trust that. If I go too far off people start telling me what to do and not do and I like to avoid that so I project their attitudes into my head sometimes to limit myself. One limit is how much I can fit in my car, because I have to get it all there and get it home. A ton of work goes into the three-hour show. 

If you are curious about how to make the flowers, it is a lot like making flowers from paper, folding and curling the gelatin into floral shapes. You have to get the dried gelatin to act like paper, which is tricky. I usually brush water onto the parts I want to bend, both sides, and wait a little for it to soften up so I can shape it without breaking it. Then I put it on a stick, glueing it with the molten gelatin, and glue a leaf on there too. I don't get too figurative with the flowers, just try to please my eye and make something fairly graceful. I layer up a few pieces, maybe a rolled on in the center or a few pieces of something of another color to look like stamens, or just an unusual concoction not necessarily found in nature.

One of the important things to do with Jell-O art is let it do what it wants. It isn't that cooperative about meeting your vision, and the dried stuff distorts itself as it dries, which I just work around. I have made things that looked ugly and I just take them apart and do something else. 

 Most of it does not photograph very well, and I should have waited for better light on these, but I'm trying to be productive today and stop doom scrolling, and there's no sun. Sunlight really does nice things to the flowers, shining through them onto the background and all. I'll look through some old ones and see if I can find better illustrations of how you might want to do it. Or just, like all things Jell-O, roll up your sleeves and get to it.

I noticed that at the Kiva they do have plain gelatin but a one-pound box is $21.00! I have gotten it for about $10 a pound in bulk but everything has gone up, so you might just have to treat it like the fine art material it wants to be. I expect the Jell-O brand is still cheap, and will go on sale for Easter, so if you want to make some Tacky Food, look for that. 

Here's a video of 2023, just to get you in some kind of a mood. YouTube There's No Bizness Like Jell-O Bizness