Asakiyume mita

The other day I found out that the Daasanach people of Ethiopia make gorgeous headdresses using bottle caps. I've always liked bottle caps: they're pretty colors, nice shapes, and they make a great noise. I like pretty much any art that uses them, and self adornment? Brilliant.

They give a sense of abundance and joy. Here are a couple of examples:


Source

This I like because the beads remind me of acorns--a headdress combining acorns and bottle caps is fabulous.


Photo by the talented Eric Lafforgue, a portrait artist I love. Source

I wonder if I could decorate a hairband with bottle caps and acorns.

I love the colors that acorns come in. Also, I just like acorns. I pick up one, and then I say, "Oh, and this one. Oh, this one too. Oh that one there! Gotta have that, too." I enjoy this as much now as I did when I was six with my grandmother.

And this is a great year for acorns--as for apples, as for hickory nuts. I think the fruiting trees are anxious to reproduce; I think last year's winter made them consider their mortality or something. Anyway, the apple trees are bowed down with apples, and acorns are lining the roadside.

This year I used white-oak nuts to make my acorn flour. I could tell from the first day that I started soaking it that it was going to be different from the red-oak acorn flour I made last year. Here are the ground-up nut meats when I first set them to soak, this year:



(Here, for comparison, are what last year's nuts looked like when I first set them to soak)



Hmm, actually, in photos they look pretty similar. Take it from me: this year's batch had a yellower cast, and last year's had a red-browner cast.

Just today I've dried the ground-up nuts after lots of soaking and changes of water. I'll let you know when I've baked this year's cake.

And the leaf wreath: I've wanted to do this for years, and sometime before Halloween, I finally did it:

Collected bright orange-red leaves:



Sorted them into groups of three (this was fun: getting the perfect threesomes together):



Joined them together (with Jiji's help):



Formed them into a circle:



And hung the circle on the door:



It lasted like that for, oh... 24 hours maybe? Then it started to wither. Here it is some days later:



And now it looks *really* sad. I'll probably take it down soon and put up something else--a circle of old man's beard, maybe. But it was very fun to make, and very satisfying to see it on the door.

This year some of the white oaks, whose acorns are less full of tannin than those from red oaks, are making lots of nuts! These nuts are practically edible out of hand. They don't make your mouth go all fuzzy the way red-oak acorns do (at least, the red-oak acorns from the trees around here). I've been nibbling on them--they're nice, though I hesitate to eat lots raw.

I'm going to try to make another acorn cake.

They're so pretty in different stages of ripening--multicolored. Here are some in a bowl:



And here are three pretty ones. Look how the one on the left is positively *red* down at its tip:



This one's wearing so many colors, it's like an acorn jester: