In a special Mother's Day installment of their weekly instructional series on Chinese painting, Blue Heron Art's Henry teaches us to paint Chinese Carnations in watercolor, with calligraphy highlights done in ink with a brush. His grace and accuracy with both the watercolor and the ink would be challenging for many of the less-artistically-inclined to emulate, but the finished product is beautiful and should impress all but the choosiest of moms if their child were to make / buy it for them.
Ducttapestuff presents colored duct tape that he uses in making a variety of objects like wallets, book bags and flowers. He strongly recommends duct tape made by "Duck", which is the only kind of tape he uses and he considers it the best. He shows all the tape he has (some of which were freshly bought when the video was made): a wide range of colored tape, from beige to black, and also a few patterned tape like "tree camouflage" or "cosmic tie-dye". He says that he always gets his tape from ...
A cold frame is a great way to extend the growing season in your garden. When you set up a cold frame, you can keep your plants healthy and growing, even when it's cold outside. In this video tutorial, you'll learn how to set up and use a cold frame.
Aerating your soil is an essential part of gardening, but it can be long and back-breaking work. In this episode of Growing Wisdom, Dave Epstein will teach you how to use a broadfork to aerate your soil. Using a broadfork, you can aerate the soil without damaging the soil's ecology.
If you want some large, bold foliage in a border during the summer, canna lilies take some beating. They are really easy to grow either in the border or large pots and produce large paddle shaped leaves and tall flower spikes. Canna lilies aren't hardy plants so unless you live in a very sheltered area it is wise to dig them up in autumn and store the fleshy roots in a frost free place. Increasing your stock of canna plants is very easy with the tips from this how to video.
This video origami tutorial shows how to use the traditional Japanese art of paper folding to make a pretty paper rose. You might not have money to buy someone flowers, but you can always make your own. Follow along with this instructional video and learn how to fold your own paper rose.
The origins of vodka are shrouded in mystery, with both Russia and Poland laying claim to its invention. Some say Genovese merchants brought vodka (then known as aqua vitae, or the water of life) in the late fourteenth century to Russia. For many years, vodka wasn't just an alcoholic beverage: it was also consumed as medicine.
Foodies and big-time chefs like Thomas Keller go crazy for fleur de sel. This finishing salt appears in fancy eateries and cookbooks the world over, and in the early 2000s, it was not uncommon to see diners in a high-end restaurant sprinkle a pinch of fleur de sel on their plates from their own personal stash.
This is a great instructional video on how to pipe cake lilies, morning glories and roses. In this video you can learn the techniques on how to decorate cakes. It shows you how to pipe flowers such as lilies, morning glory, roses, leaves and stack cake. You can learn almost anything you need to know in just 10 minutes by watching this informative video. This teaches you to decorate cakes beautifully. This Pipe cake lilies is becoming more and more popular these days. The decorating methods ar...
The renegade health show will show you how to make a great raw food salad that is vegan friendly. You can use coconut to replace the normal use of egg for a great new twist on an egg salad. This is a creamy and great savory coconut salad. You will want to use fresh ingredients if possible for most flavor and nutrition but grocery store stuff will work just as well.
It can be a real challenge to plant your seeds in evenly-spaced lines. In this episode of Growing Wisdom, Dave Epstein will show you how to use a four-row pinpoint seeder to plenty your seeds. Using devices like this, planting seeds in even lines will be a whole lot easier.
Watch this instructional video to fold a traditional Japanese origami morning glory. You will need a colored piece of origami paper for the flower blossom and a green piece of origami paper for the folded leaf. You will also need a pair of scissors and a small amount of glue. The video includes verbal instructions in Japanese, although the visual guide is quite clear.
This language tutorial teaches one way to say a traditional Chinese wedding blessing in Mandarin Chinese:
Learn how to choose plants that complement each other, as well as varieties that fit the climate and natural landscape of your area. She will show to correctly plant your flowers to ensure that they are able to take hold and grow. See how to create new flower beds in your yards and how to create an edging around it. Find out how to landscape a garden made of plants that are nectar bearing as to attract butterflies and hummingbirds. If you live in a smaller space you can also learn to pot plan...
Only a handful of food products are impervious to spoilage—dried rice, salt, sugar—but even among those, honey is unique in that it remains edible without any preparation necessary. It's like this: if you came across honey in an Egyptian tomb, as archaeologists have, you could taste it and never guess it was thousands of years old.
Cold brewing tea and coffee are all the rage, and for good reason: they're idiot-proof. I, personally, am a total dunce at brewing coffee. It either ends up strong enough to peel paint from a car or so weak that you can see through it. Meanwhile, I have friends who inevitably brew green tea to the point where it's painful to drink it.
To steal a quote from Mean Girls, Halloween is the one night when a girl can dress like a total slut and no one can say anything about it—but why do girls get to have all the fun?
Summer is the best friend of poison ivy, oak, and sumac. When the weather is hot outside, people spend more time in the great outdoors, which means more people accidentally running face first into some poisonous shrubs, leaves, and vines. If that sounds like you, instead of suffering through the itch or spending money on expensive pharmaceutical solutions, try some of these home remedies out.
Roses make a nice garnish for any pastry - cakes, cupcakes, pies.. Check out this video and learn how to make a rose from scratch using buttercream. This video shows you three different ways to make these delicious flowers. Watch the tutorial and decide which method is easiest for you. And don't worry if you can't get it on the first try..the mistakes are just as yummy to clean up as the successes!
Follow the examples shown in this instructional video to learn how to fold an origami rose leaf. The origami rose leaf can decorate a previously completed paper rose, but also deserves some attention of its own. The step by step visuals are helpful on some of the tiny folds required for the origami flower leaf.
This quick how-to video is a demonstration on how to decorate an iced cake with butter cream blossoms. Grab your piping bag and start making some flower petals with some butter cream.
Gardening is a great hobby for anyone looking to grow beautiful flowers, ferns or fruit bearing plants. Learn how to care for a variety of garden plants with gardening tips from a horticulturist in this free video series.
Android 11 is available as a simple beta install for Pixel devices right now. Just visit Google's beta signup page, make sure you're signed in with the same account used on your Pixel, then opt into the program. You'll get an OTA update that will put you on Android 11 in no time. But is it ready to be a daily driver?
Plants all around us capture sunlight every day and convert it to energy, making them a model of solar energy production. And while the energy they make may serve the needs of a plant, the process isn't efficient enough to generate power on a larger scale. So, scientists from the University of California found a way to treat bacteria with chemicals that turned them into photosynthesis machines, capable of generating products we can convert into food, fuels, and plastics.
Cytochrome P450 (P450s) are proteins found in nearly all living organisms, which play roles that range from producing essential compounds and hormones to metabolizing drugs and toxins. We use some of the compounds synthesized by P450 in plants as medical treatments, but the slow growth and limited supply of these plants have put the drugs' availability in jeopardy and jacked up prices.
The popular beauty app company Meitu is incorporating augmented reality (AR) video and image filters and effects in its selfie-editing app BeautyPlus for iOS and Android.
Several years ago, I moved to Brooklyn, New York, just outside a Spanish neighborhood. It was here that I was introduced to chayote. Fast-forward to present day: I live in Los Angeles and buy several chayote squash a week to cook with—yes, I said several. It's so versatile and healthy! For the uninitiated, chayote (chai-YOH-tee) is a light green squash shaped like a pear originating from central Mexico. Although it's considered a fruit, chayote is a member of the Cucurbitaceous (gourd) family...
Watermelons scream summer like no other fruit, and there's nothing like biting into a sweet one on a hot summer day. Although there's no exact right way to cut watermelon, there are many occasions when you might not want to cut it into wedges. It may be the classic cut, but the triangular shape insures that you'll always get some on your face. And for parties, there's always the messy problem of leftover rinds.
I have a thing for citrus in any form. If I can't get a hold of oranges or clementines, I've been known to slice up lemons and limes and eat them straight with a little bit of salt—terrible for the tooth enamel, but amazing for the tongue.
As a kid, my favorite part of Easter were the days leading up to the holiday, when my family would dye eggs. This became an enormous event in my household, as dozens and dozens of perfectly white eggs would become little oval canvases for arts and crafts.
When you're expecting an important call or text, it's pretty annoying to hear or feel your phone go off just to find out it was your reminders app telling you that you need to buy more contact lenses. Not quite as annoying as phantom phone vibrations, but it's up there.
Decisions are rarely easy to make, and there are countless ways to mull your options over. You can sleep on it, pluck flower petals, make a list of pros and cons, or even follow the advice of a psychic. Yet to make the best decision possible, you might want to consider holding off until a certain time of the day—or even until you feel specific emotions. The state you find yourself in has significant impact on each decision you make.
Video: . Here there are some DIY gift ideas perfect for the Christmas season. They are really easy to personalize depending on what your likes are.
With only a few days left until Halloween, your options might be rather limited if you still don't have a costume. You may have laughed while some people spent the entire month of October painstakingly crafting their ridiculously detailed costumes, but now that the big day is so close, the joke's on you because you still have nothing to wear.
Is it possible to cut or chop onions in the kitchen without stinging eyes and looking as if you just watched the saddest movie ever? Before we get to that answer, it's important to know why we tear up when cutting raw onions in the first place. What is this irritant? Are you reacting to the odor? The answer to the latter question is "no," and the irritant responsible is amino acid sulfoxides.
Navigating through row after row of plants, my tiny fingers would reach into the leaves to pluck all the vile little creatures from their homes and deposit them into a can of gasoline. Potato bug duty, my least favorite gardening chore. Growing up, my family had a small garden every year. And every year, I was recruited to help plant, maintain, and eventually harvest the vegetables from it. There were some tasks I didn't mind, but the ones I hated most usually involved bugs (have you ever see...
If you grew up dying eggs for Easter, you've no doubt used or at least seen those boxed kits that turn your eggs neon colors. Admittedly, they're easy—just plop a dye tablet into some water, dunk the eggs, and wait for them to dry.
It's no secret that there's a lot of surveillance going on these days. It's easier than ever to end up in a database, and even former government agents are speaking out about the atrocious amount of spying being done against our own citizens. They've targeted our laptops, cars, IP addresses, and now they're coming for our iPhones. AntiSec hackers managed to get their hands on a list of over 12 million Apple UDIDs (Universal Device IDs) from an FBI computer, and they published 1,000,001 of the...
Omniscience is not required to make some really cool shit happen. Yes, it took a while, but we can make fuel from the Sun! Solar panels are basically our answer to God. And now that we can make solar electricity, finding the most efficient way to harvest it is tricky.
Nothing brightens up a table like origami napkin flowers. This short video tutorial teaches how to fold an origami red rosebud napkin design. Decorative origami napkins are perfect for any table and any occasion. Folding napkins into 3D objects is not only beautiful on the table, but fascinating. Origami napkin folding should be a trick up every table decorator's sleeve. Celina Table Linens shows you the simple steps involved in the napkin origami red rosebud.
