u/cagethehornytoad

This happy little camper is a 4” chocolate fudge cake, filled and topped with chocolate ganache. This is topped with toasted graham cracker crumble. The logs are made of the same crumble, packed into log shaped fondant molds, frozen, and brushed with bittersweet tempered chocolate. The flames and greenery are cinnamon French buttercream, topped with a skewer of toasted marshmallows.

This is the freeway overpass area of the SMART trail. It’s been up for several days.

Petaluma has a problem. The entire last year that I waited in the Kenilworth Junior High car pickup line, I heard countless children shouting this word, as well as doing N*zi salutes.

Last Christmas, local businessman and former Harlem Globetrotter had his car vandalized with racial slurs:

https://abc7news.com/post/petaluma-police-investigating-former-harlem-globetrotter-william-bullard-says-car-vandalized-racial-slurs/18284464/

This is when I met with the administrators at Kenilworth and asked them to hold an assembly, or implement a program addressing racism, they declined. They said they did one two years ago. I spoke with the district, and spoke at a city council meeting on the matter, to no avail.

Then I did some digging and discovered that Petaluma was a sundown town until 1970, extremely odd for a non-southern town. That sentiment has lingered.

https://petalumahistorian.com/petalumas-days-as-a-sundown-town/

I love this town because it IS so old timey- an accessible respite from city life—but it’s irresponsible to live here and bury our heads in the sand. The black population here is less than 2%, and I don’t wonder why. For inclusive and liberal as this town purports to be, it’s sometimes hard to believe. It tough to feel welcome when this hateful word has been up for several days; on one of the most popular walking trails, in full view of the police and SMART trucks which drive that trail daily. Many people have seen it, yet it remains.

What are we going to do?

EDIT: rode past a couple of hours ago and they painted over the ‘black is beautiful’ with a heart around it, which was up for less than 12 hours. Good to know the city’s priorities are in check when it comes to removing offensive graffiti 😆

My grandmother was born Beulah Joplin in 1918, in Bethel Springs, Tennessee. She was the youngest of 8 and she and her family were ‘gleaners”, which was a rung beneath a sharecropper. They essentially lived on the scraps sharecroppers left behind.

The second photo is her and my grandfather, Joffrey. The group photo is my grandma with all of her brothers and sisters, she’s bottom left. She outlived them all by decades. I can’t imagine.

The baby in her lap is my dad, her second oldest. She had 6 total. Pictures 6 and 7 are her 99th birthday party. She’s opening a portrait of my father I painted for her (he was her favorite and passed away 20 years before her 😢). The pic of her looking at me crazy was followed by, “you painted this?!?!” Haha.

The last photo is of legendary ragtime composer, Scott Joplin, who was grandma’s great, great uncle. Pretty cool.
(This is not a family photo, I found it online)

I regret to say it but I don’t even know his name. I know that hers was Cora. She was born a slave but freed at a young age and supposedly her masters were on the benevolent end of that spectrum because they recognized her brilliance and saw to it that she was well educated.

By the time this picture was taken, she and her husband owned the company or general store in their town- and again, I regret that I don’t know where that was. They were essentially king and queen of their community, and he handled…collections. He was the guy you didn’t want knocking, and I think his portrait reflects that.

It’s bittersweet looking at these, knowing what was to come, but for this period of time I love that my people got to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

I’m unclear on the year any of these were taken. My grandmother was born in 1918, and I had the honor of attending her memorial services in 2018. She was the youngest of 8 and outsurvived them all by decades. I don’t know a ton about my great grandmother, Jeanette, however I do know that her mother, Cora, was born a slave, but was made literate by her masters. After she was freed, she did quite well. At the time this photo was taken, sitting for a portrait was quite expensive and not everybody had one, ESPECIALLY not black folks. I love her silk dress and the look on her face is nothing less than regal.

I’m so fortunate to have any photos of my relatives from this far back. Jim Crow hit my folks hard and by the time my father was born in 1940, my family had next to nothing, however somebody held onto these photos because they meant so much.

**apologies for the quality of the photos, their pictures of pictures**

EDIT: I never expected this post to garner so much attention. I saw that gorgeous colorized photo of a lady from around the same era as my grandma’s colorized photo so I thought I’d share. I wish it’d occurred to me last week for Juneteenth.

It’s been emotional reading these comments. I always knew that it was special for my family to have photos and an idea of our history, but I’m realizing more and more just how rare it really is, especially considering black erasure is still happening as we speak!

I have many more photos and I’ll post them all, with as much information as I have. My family didn’t have much- especially post Jim Crow- but they were gorgeous, elegant, stylish, and humorous folks, and it. Really come through in these pic. These don’t just belong to me, they belong to all of us. Much love

i made this for a friend’s daughter’s 10th birthday.

I started with mid weight (9.5 oz., I believe) black denim and reverse tie dyed with bleach. Once it was washed, dried, and pressed, I laid it flat on a plastic sheet and used Jacquard dyes, diluted- applied with pipettes and sponges, then quickly further diluted with a spray bottle with water. After this was dried, washed and pressed, I cut the pattern (which I freehanded on paper), and assembled. I incorporated 2 layers of heavy duty interfacing to keep the brim rigid and non-droopy. The cord was made of twine that I dyed and twisted, then coated in pearlescent medium. The stars are Posca white acrylic paint marker.

The flip in the brim and the bends in the top of the hat were created by a series of fishing lines hooked and affixed in a number of places and this was the most frustrating and time consuming part of the project—- also not very pretty, so I sewed a circular panel about 4 inches up so nobody had to see it 😎

**apologies for only one photo, I’m trying to get better with progress pics. This one was a time crunch**

I’ve never been a cat person, in fact I’m pretty allergic. This cat ignored me for the better part of a year- living directly across the street- I liked to watch her hunt insects but that was about it.

Then she started hanging out in the front yard, and I discovered she was a bongo cat. One night, her human stayed out for the night, this one jumped through my bedroom window and slept in the crook of my knee and the rest was history: She wants to be with me 24/7. I work from home which doesn’t help.

Her human confronted me and sternly asked me to shoo her away from now on, which I swear I tried, but she’s scratched and bitten me trying to remove her from my house, also she smarter and faster than me. Add to all of this, I’m in love with her and- as I’m seeing is a common thread— she happened to “adopt” me during the roughest year of my life (so far). I’m convinced that cats are angels, even if this angel is going to get me beaten up.

Worth it :)

Blink and you’ll miss ‘em! These were yellow cake with a peach melba mousse filling and vanilla bourbon buttercream.

My go to sugar cookies with lemon royal icing, for Ms. Erwin and Ms. Turner (you guess who’s the favorite 😎).

This is my absolute favorite lemon cake with raspberry coulis and crusting cream cheese buttercream icing. (Sorry for no cross-section shot, it got eaten with a quickness)

It’s probably disrespectful to do ‘fan canon’, I just can’t help but squeal at the thought of a little Kayla Dickey/Jud Wiebe love child, playing with a bunch of great big, stupid looking toy trucks on the playground, making’ little girls cry.

I’m happy for Lily and Tim, I guess, but *this* is the baby I want to grow up and call me a stupid little bitch from his lifted 3900 series hover truck, one day in the not too distant future. A girl can dream…

EDIT: OMG Y’all, Lily actually saw this and even shared it!! I begged her for that Memphis Kansas Breeze/Kayla Dickey collab someone here brilliantly suggested. Now we wait ⏰

Never is my work so silly as when it’s CBB inspired. I was just telling someone how much I’m looking forward to seeing the show in SF this August, and when I said, the words “looking forward…”, the phrase “looking for dogs” popped into my mind- which I interpreted as Carl Tart psychically beckoning me to craft this. I’m sure that its purpose will someday be revealed.