Wine Leaf Memories - 30th Birthday
For my 30th Birthday I decided I wanted to be somewhere big, somewhere I could forget about those concerns (which ended up just coming after the trip...). So off I went, to Napa and Yosemite in one whirlwind of a long weekend. Napa was amazingly beautiful and Lush and on my birthday itself I spent my afternoon at St. Supery Estates, doing probably the most Kai wine tour there could ever be... an Ampelography Tour!
Almost two months ago now I turned the big "3"-"0". I'm not very worried about the number per say, but with the number comes a certain level of expectations and a lot of questions. Am I doing what I want to be doing in my life? Am I as far as I wanted to be? Whats for the next 30 years?!... this could explain why I haven't posted in a bit, but trust me, this doesn't mean I've stopped making.
We did a vegetable garden tour, an Ampelography lesson where we identified types of wine grapes by the shape of their leaves, and drank a little too much wine on the most beautiful sunny day. Our pup Betty was able to join the whole time, and boy was she a good sport about it. It was honestly such a good day, and I wanted to remember it, so I took those very grape leaves we identified our wines with and brought them home with us from our adventures.
Once home I dried them. This was pretty easily done between a bunch of my heavier gardening books. I put down a few pieces of paper to absorb some of the extra moisture in the leaves then laid the leaves out as flat as I could. I stacked paper between the leaves as well as an obsessively large pile of books on top. It took about a week to dry out in our very dry Los Angeles basin home.
Once dried the leaves are extremely fragile, so I wanted to preserve them as safely as I could. I also knew, if I could arrange them well enough with a title, perhaps they could be pieces of art in our little home. I have a bunch of cheap frames from IKEA|USA as I've actually been doing a very similar layout with watercolored leaves. (I'll post those soon as I finish the series!)
They came out great, and the large white frame ads a certain weight to the work that the leaf and light labeling really needed. I couldn't use all of the leaves, but I did use one leaf from each of the four different wines we identified. These have now become a part of my livingroom, and a great little memory of a really perfect 30th Birthday.
