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Hey hey, friends! I was just asked if I'm okay because I've been scarce here lately. I'm fine, no emergencies, I'm just spending my time making an art mess. I bought a pile of chipboard supplies for Girl Scout camp 15 years ago and I still have it all. Chipboard gets decorated with alphabet dies and a mallet, just like leather, and we had a camper that year for whom holding and controlling a mallet was not an accessible activity, so we did something else. I've been struggling with my dexterity since last year, but I might be able to use a mallet. It's been a bit since the last time I had anything to share as a Jules Tries post, but if any of my experimentation leads anywhere productive — or if I discover something NOT to do with chipboard — I'll post it so y'all can learn and/or laugh! Thanks for checking in on me! Wish me luck! 🌹💜

#jules tries #chipboard

Last night's therapeutic handwriting practice topic comes from @aibidil-commenting! 💜 "Asemic writing" was a term that was new to me, but it's a fascinating art form: writing that isn't writing. It can be made of shapes that look like they should be real letters, but aren't, or simply scribbles. This is actually exactly how I doodled in my notebook margins in school and I tried it again last night. I can see the characteristics of my handwriting but also the way I dance. When I turned the page to see it from another angle, it looked obviously Upside Down to me somehow, so there's some objective truth in it about How I Do Things. If anyone else wants to post their own asemic scribbles I'd love to see them!

I'm trying to regain hand function by copying a few sentences on different topics each night! What interesting thing should I look up tonight? Suggest topics to me! 🌹

#adventures with ms #julchen writes by hand #jules tries #asemic writing

Jules Tries...painting with watercolor pencils! Posting this is an exercise in courage, my friends. I have neither the hand control nor the patience for freehanding anything. I just went for it and tried not to criticize it. I used this YouTube tutorial for complete beginners, which walks you through the basic steps of putting colors directly on your work paper and then painting over them with water. I definitely recommend the video for being warm and encouraging of scribbly lines and blobby imprecision. (There was another video for making a palette on a separate sheet in order to load wet colors onto the brush to carry over to the work sheet, which I haven’t yet tried.) This garden scene is made first with painted colors and finished with Micron pen definition. I did my best. I’ll give it to my mom and she’ll proudly put it on her fridge. 😁👍 If you have watercolor pencils floating around, maybe try painting your own garden scene with this video. I’d love to see what everyone else makes of it! ❤️🌹❤️ What is this series?

#jules tries #painting #watercolor pencils

Jules Has Been Trying

Hi, friends! I’m sorry the Jules Tries posts fell off a few months ago! The person mostly keeping the household afloat was suddenly laid off from his consultant gig at the end of March, and I paused the Jules Tries projects in order not to be spending money frivolously while we waited for a new assignment. The next assignment has now come through but I just want to make sure the finances are on an even keel before embarking on more art and food adventures. Meanwhile, the MS battle this Spring was intense. I had a pretty severe regression of strength and balance, and I spent a few weeks falling down again. I’ve also been struggling to function mentally under the heavy-duty muscle sedative that I have to take for spasms. I haven’t created anything for fandom since late last year and I miss it badly. I had to skip two beloved Spring fests and a few new ones that I would have loved to submit for. I hope to find the clarity and energy to be able to complete projects again soon. But! I have good news too! I went to my town’s playground a few weeks ago, just to see how I’d do walking on non-paved surfaces and maybe trying some play structures. I did good! Pictures under the cut!

#jules tries #adventures with ms

Jules Tries...baking pampushky! After last week’s difficulty, I thought, let’s bake a nice easy bread thing next. Pampushky are Ukrainian garlic rolls and I couldn’t wait to whip some up. It turns out I have a lot to learn about wrangling yeast dough. My first attempt at this recipe was a complete failure and had to be thrown away unbaked. All love and gratitude to the skilled and patient @l0vegl0wsinthedark, who gave me tips for making bread dough come out the way it ought to, and who also assured me that sometimes yeast is just ornery and will misbehave. This was the recipe that finally worked for me. (But without the dehydrated garlic in the rolls, because not every pampushky recipe has that, and the garlic that goes on top was quite enough.) Getting the milk the right warmth for the yeast was a matter of letting the milk come to room temperature and then microwaving it in two 10-second bursts. To make a warm place for the dough to sit and rise, I heated the oven to 170° and then turned it off. I suppose these are elementary things every bread-knowledgeable family knows, but my grownups didn’t bake bread at home, so I’m late but catching up! These rolls are wonderful: they have nice crusty edges and the garlic is flavorful but not overwhelming. This recipe was a hard-won success! 👍 What is this series?

#jules tries #baking pampushky

Jules Tries...cooking marinara! This was a lucky spontaneous suggestion that fell out of the ether. A funky little recipe for marinara rolled across my Tumblr dash a few weeks ago, and I had to try it. Since I have no sense of “a dollop” of olive oil nor “a bit” of balsamic vinegar, I checked other recipes for marinara to get a sense of the actual quantities I should start with. This is what shook out: I crushed half a head of garlic (all I had on hand) into 2 tbsp olive oil in a pot, and stirred over medium heat until golden. Then I added a 28oz can of diced fire-roasted tomatoes, 1 tbsp balsamic vinegar, 1 tbsp brown sugar, and almost 2 entire cups of grated parmesan (because I cut a bit off the block and just grated the whole piece). Stir until hot through. I didn’t put in the spinach because not everyone here likes spinach. I also gave the hot mixture a spin in the blender because some folks here prefer smooth food textures. And that’s what you see in the pic. This made enough for four adults to serve over rotini. Four neurodivergent people with very different tastes all enjoyed it, and that’s a big win. If you dig tomato sauce, this was super easy and tasty. Definitely recommended. 👍 What is this series?

#jules tries #marinara

Jules Tries

Hi, I’m Jules! I’m an artist in the Drarry fandom. I have MS, which has taken away most of the sensation in my fingers and much of my mobility. I make art by cutting cardstock into blocky shapes with a straight-edge papercutter. The primary treatment I’m receiving for the MS destroys all my B cells, to stop my immune system from chewing on my myelin. This leaves me immunocompromised. If I were to get Covid even once, it would go very badly for me, so I'm functionally stuck at home for the duration of the pandemic. I can't go anywhere indoors unless everyone else there is wearing N95s; I can't go nifty places outdoors because I'm not steady enough to walk on dirt or sand. To alleviate some of the depression and boredom of the ongoing pandemic, I'm making a list of new things to do/try/make/experience this year. I have a stack of recipes I've bookmarked over the years but never attempted. I have a lot of art supplies I've bought but never tried using for fear of wasting them with my lack of skill. I'm aiming to try doing or making one new thing every week, and I’ll post the result of each one, no matter how it turns out. Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoy my adventures! ❤️🌹❤️

#jules tries

Jules Tries...sewing a beaded bracelet! An effort was made. 😂 I had beads, filament, and beading needles, but I’d never tried to make beaded jewelry more intricate than stringing beads in a line and throwing a clasp on it. I searched YouTube for sewn bracelet instructions and went with the first video I found. The pattern seemed easy enough to follow. The finished bracelet would have been made of 12 of these little half-inch flowers, sewn one after the other on the same strand of thread. I took lots of photos of the progression of attempts, but the one on my dull and scarred paper-piercing mat came out the most detailed. 🙄 Left to right: 1. My first frustrating, abandoned attempt. Thirty minutes in, I was ready to walk away, but I’d committed to a week of trying. 2. The next morning’s try, a success. 3. I couldn’t maintain the thread tension for another flower right next to the first. A whole bracelet was clearly not happening, so I experimented to see whether fancy expensive Delica beads made for an easier, more pleasant experience. (No.) 4. I made one specifically for photography, but made a mistake right in the middle. 5. So I made a genderqueer flower and it came out exactly right. If anyone else considers trying this pattern, I would advise you to use all beads from the same company, and not mix-and-match as I tried to do. The pattern calls for three colors of size 11 and one color of size 15. There is a LOT of variation in the same size from brand to brand. Also, use ordinary seed beads, not fancy-ass Delicas. Delica brand seed beads are known for being high quality because they’re extremely consistent little cylinders. Perfect cylinders are not what you want for this project. The flowers are built from the outside in; the roundness of your seed beads will help the needle slip between snug beads with less fingertip-stabbing. Because I practiced this all week, I now know the steps without having to refer to the video. If you ever see these little flowers appear in my paper art, you’ll all know when I learned to make them! ❤️🌹❤️ What is this series?

#jules tries #beaded bracelet

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