Free Sharpening of Drozda Woodturning Tools!

Sharp tools are really good to have. In fact, it's almost impossible to get good cuts without a sharp edge.

You probably bought my Signature Woodturning Tools so that you would have the same tools that I use in my work. That's the reason I make my favorite tool grinds available. I want you to have all of the advantages that I have. But, as good as Henry Taylor Tools is, the factory grind is often not quite perfect. At the very least, the tools will "need honing before use" as they say.

To make it easy for you to use my tools, I am offering to sharpen them for free! All you pay is the shipping (both ways).

If you have a Cindy Drozda Signature Woodturning Tool, whether you bought it from me or from a tool supplier, just send it to me. I'll sharpen it, and send it back to you ready to use. How can you get a better deal than that??
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Here's what to do:

Send the tools to me at this address, include return postage (stamps, check, credit card info):

Cindy Drozda

PO Box 19065

Boulder CO 80308

USA

You'll know how much return postage is. It'll be the same as it cost you to send the tools to me.

Please contact me by email to let me know your tools are on the way. If you prefer to use UPS or FedEx, email me for a street address.

If you're local, bring your tools to my shop, or to a RMWT or FRW meeting.

Happy turning!

Too Much Dill Biscuits

This is not a food blog, I promise. I am a woodturner, and I blog about woodturning. Well, when I manage to blog at all......

This past year I have been embarrassingly lax in writing to my blog. To snap out of it, I gave myself permission to blog about whatever subject hits me at the moment. At this moment, it's food.

On to my subject -  Too Much Dill Biscuits



How much is too much? Dill is in season here. It's a short season, but the dill plants make up for that with abundance. A woodturning friend, Katherine Kowalski, (whose gardening abilities make me "green" with envy) gave me some of her dill harvest.

It was A Lot Of Dill. Even as much as I love dill, I would be hard pressed to use it all up before it spoiled. My challenge: To see how much dill is "too much" in a recipe.

Biscuits are fast to make, and David and I both love them. Great with dinner or as a snack the next day. Any biscuit recipe will do, but here's my current favorite:

Gluten Free and Grain Free Biscuits:
This recipe is adapted from Elana Amsterdam's website, Elana's Pantry. check it out for more great gluten & grain free recipes.

2 1/2 cups organic blanched almond flour
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 cup yogurt, kefir, milk, whey, or other liquid (I make my own raw goats milk yogurt)
3 eggs
1 teaspoon lemon juice

Directions:
Mix dry ingredients
Mix wet ingredients
Combine the 2
Drop by appropriate amounts onto greased baking sheet (or stoneware baking pan like I used). They don't rise much, so "appropriate" approximates intended finished size.
Bake at 350ºF for 15 - 20 minutes, or until golden brown on top and done in the middle.

I added 2 tablespoons of finely chopped dill leaves and flowers to a half-recipe (1 1/4 c flour). I don't think it was too much. Might be a waste of dill, though. The flavor would probably be dill-y enough with half that much. Great with lots of butter!

You can see from the photo that splitting the recipe didn't work perfectly. It's hard to split 3 eggs in half, and I also used too much yogurt. The results "spread" more than I wanted. Still tasted great, though.

The first time I made these, we had them with a baked pasture-raised chicken cooked with an excessive amount of dill and green onions (also from Katherine's garden). Oh, and did I mention massive quantities of real butter???

There is a tie-in to woodturning, here. In my pursuit of the artistic side of working in wood, I like to exercise my Right Brain in the kitchen. Cooking is creative, the ingredients are inexpensive (compared to exotic burl wood), results are immediate. It is something that must be done everyday anyway, if we want to eat a healthy diet. Cooking is a way to improve my woodturning skills! Who would have thought??

Thank you to Katherine for the garden delights, and to Elana for grain free biscuits! Now, off to do some woodturning........

My brand new Presentation for the AAW Symposium in Hartford!

Most of us in the woodturning community can do a lot more than turn wood. To share some of my other interests and skills with my woodturning friends, I like to offer symposium demonstrations on different, but related, subjects.

This year my alternative offering is digitally oriented. It's called "Image Editing for Artists". Next week I will be giving this presentation to my local club, the Rocky Mountain Woodturners.

Am I nervous, giving a new presentation for the first time? Of course. As always. In Aviation, we always used to say that a healthy level of nerves is what keeps us alert and therefore alive. There is a bit less performance pressure among my local friends at the RMWT than there will be at AAW. At the same time the club offers pressure of a different kind. The AAW symposium attendees who come to my presentation in Hartford will be in that room at that time because they are (at least presumably) interested in my subject. The RMWT members are just attending the meeting, willing to watch whatever and whoever our program director (David Nittmann) chose for us. They may have no interest whatsoever in my subject! Add to that the fact that I am really best at making stuff out of wood. I learned to do digital image and video editing mostly as a necessary part of my business.

In this Image Editing presentation, I will be sharing some of the skills that I have found valuable. Just making artwork is not enough, in itself. Sharing my work with the world is what brings the energy full circle, and gives the greatest reward of all. The creative process brings me close to the work in a way that the viewer of the piece doesn't always see. And the viewer sees things in my work that I might not have been consciously aware of. That subject is fuel for a whole 'nother discussion, on another day!

Digital images, in all of their forms, are the best way to facilitate sharing our work with the world. In my case, I use digital images extensively in marketing. My website, printed ads and articles, notices about my demonstrations (like this one in the RMWT newsletter), business cards, show applications, selling on various websites (such as the AAW online gallery); they all ask me to edit digital images!

What I find, in learning to edit images, is that the Computer offers as much creativity and adventure as Woodturning does!

So, please attend my digital demo at RMWT, or at AAW in Hartford. You just might get inspired to have some fun with the camera and computer!. I hope so. See you in Hartford!

Wild Iris on the Mesa Trail, Boulder Colorado

I thought about my grandmother while I was out running today. I think about her often. We just lost her last year, she was 102. I was 51. How fortunate I have been to have her in my life for so long! My magical Gram has had a special place in my heart for as long as I can remember.....

The Mesa Trail is one of my favorite trail runs, and this is its best season. Wild flowers are just coming out, the mud is drying up, and the temperature is right in my ultimate comfort zone - 75ºF. The winter chill and howling wind are giving us a break, at least for today.

I saw a black bear near the trail, just standing there, totally ignoring me. I was too overwhelmed to think of getting my phone out and taking the bear's picture.

This patch of wild iris was on the trail that I took to avoid meeting the bear again (just in case). It moved me enough to remember that I had a camera with me (my cell phone).

As I continued on the run after taking the picture, I imagined telling Gram "I saw some beautiful wild iris today while I was out jogging, so I took a picture with my phone to send you in an email." In the century of Gram's life, she saw the world change a lot. I visualized her as a young woman in the early 20th century, hearing me say that. Her reaction would probably be: "you were doing what? and took a what?? with your WHAT??? to send me a WHAT????"

Things that are a commonplace part of my everyday life, were not even in her vocabulary! She grew up on a family farm. They got so much exercise in the course of daily life that the concept of "jogging" just for "exercise" would sound ridiculous! The telephone and camera had been invented, yes, but they were cumbersome and expensive, and not something that people used every day. Sitting for a photograph took all day, and the telephone was just for emergencies, like a birth or a death in the family. Definitely not the sort of thing that a person on foot would have in her back pocket while out in the woods. The internet, and digital images, were not even thought of yet!

Thinking about what changed in our world in Gram's 102 years makes me wonder what changes we will see during my own life. I hope I am blessed with a long life, because I'm eager to see what wonders are revealed in these next 50 years!