Like Venus.
The Venus of Willendorf.
Friday, November 28, 2008
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Joy in the Making
"TYPE" pincushion by designsmayamade Thank you, once again, for all of the supportive comments on my “Heroine” post. I really needed a fresh set of eyes with which to view my work, and your comments helped me to do that. I feel like you all gave me a well-needed attitude adjustment.
I tried out several new techniques and approaches in that little fairy tale art quilt, and I’m glad that I stretched myself. I loved the thinking and making of the piece, and maybe I will grow to love it just for that reason—that what I carry around in my heart, mind, and hands got transferred to that piece, and I should cherish it as such.
Driving past a lovely creek this morning, enlivened by snowmelt, I noticed that there were areas of calm water along the stream, broken up a little farther down by water rapidly swirling over rocks, and even an area of water that was somehow eddying against the flow. Those rocks—perhaps challenges in a creative journey?—sure made that water do some exciting things, and what an astonishing sight that was to see the water in violent ripples, determined to go against the flow. I’m holding this metaphor in my mind as I flow along my own creative river.
And, here are some words of wisdom from Lesley Riley’s Quilted Memories; Journaling, Scrapbooking and Creating Keepsakes with Fabric (2005):
Just because it doesn’t look the way you thought it would does not mean it isn’t any good.
Don’t be so critical of your own work. Don’t spend time fussing and fretting, just finish and go on to the next project. This was actually a valuable lesson my daughter taught me when she was two years old. I watched her draw (scribble) picture after picture without ever stopping to judge, criticize, or ask my opinion. It was obvious the joy was in the making, not the product. I have realized that with quantity you get quality.
I’ve moved on to my next project, and what an amazing experience it has been making baby caps for Soulemama’s Caps to Cap-Haitien project. To make the baby caps, I used t-shirts that my own children had worn, and I just felt this wonderful feeling of connection between me and my kids and the babies who would be warmed by these caps. Thank you, Amanda, for organizing this project and connecting souls separated by thousands of miles and an ocean of cultural differences.
The whole time that I was sewing I was humming the song, “With My Own Two Hands.” Although it seems like an insignificant thing to make one or a dozen caps and a couple of blankets, what a difference it will make to a baby who arrives in this world underweight and facing long odds of survival. If nothing else, perhaps that little cap will give his or her mama hope and that same feeling of connection that I felt when I made them with my own two hands—that we are all connected in this world and together we can craft new possibilities for our children.
And just one last song to hold in your heart:
“Same Rain”
By Sam Phillips
went to the sun it was too hot
i went to the moon it was too cold
went to the mountain it was too young
went to the ocean it was too old
is it the same rain that falls on a holy man
is it the same rain that falls on a liar's hand
is it the same rain that falls on me
i knew a man a refugee survival was his art
all that he held valuable he carried in his heart
is it the same rain that falls on the mountain's face
is it the same rain that falls on the prison gate
is it the same rain that falls on me
all the money in the world
all the power it can buy
will not take your voice away
cannot own what you hold inside
is it the same rain that falls on a poor man's room
is it the same rain that falls on a rich man's tomb
is it the same rain that falls on me
*****
Yes, it is the same rain that falls on all of us—and it’s a fertile mixture of challenge and opportunity for growth and connection.
Monday, November 17, 2008
True Confessions of an Overthinker, In Which Our Heroine Continually Shushes Her Inner Design Critic (Yes, She Does Have One).
It started innocently enough, as these things do, with a newly organized sewing room. Fabrics stowed in their appropriate bins. Bins stacked in accessible columns in the closet. Notions in a neat row on a shelf. In short, our heroine could walk across the floor unimpeded and see the surface of her sewing table. A blank slate, if you will, for chalking up some sewing successes.
So, what to tackle first? Christmas presents--two slippers from felted sweaters to sew, for example? Embroidered Christmas ornaments from said felted sweaters?
Nah.
How about playing around with quirky, this-side-of-kitsch curtain panels with fairy tale motifs in two colorways that our fortunate heroine received in a swap from Resurrection Fern?
Perfect!
Said fabric panels showed scenes from three fairy tales: Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, and the Three Little Pigs. Intrepid heroine cut out each of the scenes to assemble into three separate pieced pillows for the kids' rooms. Simple enough, you say.
Then a little lightbulb went off over the heroine's head. What if she used a passage from each fairy tale to "Illuminate" the scene, and to fulfill a long-overdue commitment to contribute to Smoothpebble's "Illuminated Phrase" project?
Gentle readers, this may have been where things started going very, very wrong.
Our stalwart heroine headed to the computer to do some research. Turns out that the Little Red Riding Hood tale has its roots as a folk tale from France, and the original story involved a strong heroine who kicks the big bad wolf's a** herself. The first writer to put the tale in written form (in 1697) was Charles Perrault, a French courtier to Louis XIV, the Sun King. Perrault's wolf gobbled up both the grandma and poor little despoiled Hood--a warning to all young girls not to trust strange men, especially the sweet talkers.
So, with the idea of a sweet little fairy tale pillow banished from our heroine's mind with this image, she set out to make something a little edgier. Poet Anne Sexton's rewriting of the tale--as one of appetites and deceptions of all kinds--fit the bill:
Red Riding Hood
By Anne Sexton
Many are the deceivers:
The suburban matron,
proper in the supermarket,
list in hand so she won't suddenly fly,
buying her Duz and Chuck Wagon dog food,
meanwhile ascending from earth,
letting her stomach fill up with helium,
letting her arms go loose as kite tails,
getting ready to meet her lover
a mile down Apple Crest Road
in the Congregational Church parking lot.
Two seemingly respectable women
come up to an old Jenny
and show her an envelope
full of money
and promise to share the booty
if she'll give them ten thou
as an act of faith.
Her life savings are under the mattress
covered with rust stains
and counting.
They are as wrinkled as prunes
but negotiable.
The two women take the money and disappear.
Where is the moral?
Not all knives are for
stabbing the exposed belly.
Rock climbs on rock
and it only makes a seashore.
Old Jenny has lost her belief in mattresses
and now she has no wastebasket in which
to keep her youth.
The standup comic
on the "Tonight" show
who imitates the Vice President
and cracks up Johnny Carson
and delays sleep for millions
of bedfellows watching between their feet,
slits his wrist the next morning
in the Algonquin's old-fashioned bathroom,
the razor in his hand like a toothbrush,
wall as anonymous as a urinal,
the shower curtain his slack rubberman audience,
and then the slash
as simple as opening as a letter
and the warm blood breaking out like a rose
upon the bathtub with its claw and ball feet.
And I. I too.
Quite collected at cocktail parties,
meanwhile in my head
I'm undergoing open-heart surgery.
The heart, poor fellow,
pounding on his little tin drum
with a faint death beat,
The heart, that eyeless beetle,
running panicked through his maze,
never stopping one foot after the other
one hour after the other
until he gags on an apple
and it's all over.
And I. I too again.
I built a summer house on Cape Ann.
A simple A-frame and this too was
a deception -- nothing haunts a new house.
When I moved in with a bathing suit and tea bags
the ocean rumbled like a train backing up
and at each window secrets came in
like gas. My mother, that departed soul,
sat in my Eames chair and reproached me
for losing her keys to the old cottage.
Even in the electric kitchen there was
the smell of a journey. The ocean
was seeping through its frontiers
and laying me out on its wet rails.
The bed was stale with my childhood
and I could not move to another city
where the worthy make a new life.
Long ago
there was a strange deception:
a wolf dressed in frills,
a kind of transvestite.
But I get ahead of my story.
In the beginning
there was just little Red Riding Hood,
so called because her grandmother
made her a red cape and she was never without it.
It was her Linus blanket, besides
it was red, as red as the Swiss flag,
yes it was red, as red as chicken blood,
But more than she loved her riding hood
she loved her grandmother who lived
far from the city in the big wood.
This one day her mother gave her
a basket of wine and cake
to take to her grandmother
because she was ill.
Wine and cake?
Where's the aspirin? The penicillin?
Where's the fruit juice?
Peter Rabbit got camomile tea.
But wine and cake it was.
On her way in the big wood
Red Riding Hood met the wolf.
Good day, Mr. Wolf, she said,
thinking him no more dangerous
than a streetcar or a panhandler.
He asked where she was going
and she obligingly told him
There among the roots and trunks
with the mushrooms pulsing inside the moss
he planned how to eat them both,
the grandmother an old carrot
and the child a shy budkin
in a red red hood.
He bade her to look at the bloodroot,
the small bunchberry and the dogtooth
and pick some for her grandmother.
And this she did.
Meanwhile he scampered off
to Grandmother's house and ate her up
as quick as a slap.
Then he put on her nightdress and cap
and snuggled down in to bed.
A deceptive fellow.
Red Riding hood
knocked on the door and entered
with her flowers, her cake, her wine.
Grandmother looked strange,
a dark and hairy disease it seemed.
Oh Grandmother, what big ears you have,
ears, eyes, hands and then the teeth.
The better to eat you with my dear.
So the wolf gobbled Red Riding Hood down
like a gumdrop. Now he was fat.
He appeared to be in his ninth month
and Red Riding Hood and her grandmother
rode like two Jonahs up and down with
his every breath. One pigeon. One partridge.
He was fast asleep,
dreaming in his cap and gown,
wolfless.
Along came a huntsman who heard
the loud contented snores
and knew that was no grandmother.
He opened the door and said,
So it's you, old sinner.
He raised his gun to shoot him
when it occured to him that maybe
the wolf had eaten up the old lady.
So he took a knife and began cutting open
the sleeping wolf, a kind of caesarian section.
It was a carnal knife that let
Red Riding Hood out like a poppy,
quite alive from the kingdom of the belly.
And grandmother too
still waiting for cakes and wine.
The wolf, they decided, was too mean
to be simply shot so they filled his belly
with large stones and sewed him up.
He was as heavy as a cemetery
and when he woke up and tried to run off
he fell over dead. Killed by his own weight.
Many a deception ends on such a note.
The huntsman and the grandmother and Red Riding Hood
sat down by his corpse and had a meal of wine and cake.
Those two remembering
nothing naked and brutal
from that little death,
that little birth,
from their going down
and their lifting up.
Roots, mushrooms, carrots--all imagery from the poem--were added to the assembled piece. Three thrifted napkins with embroidered mushrooms were chopped up and painted to match the graphics on the original piece. Lines from the poem chopped and added to the mix. Circular lines of a target quilted all of the pieces together.
Was our heroine satisfied with the finished piece? She agreed with her husband when he tentatively asked, "Is it a placemat?" Tim Gunn would have called it a hot mess--the simple geometry of the piecing at war with the odd placement of the carrot and mushroom mix-ins; the colors an unharmonious mix; sweetness jarring with edginess. At each addition, a little voice inside the heroine suggested, You could take it all apart and start over. Again--Nah. It will all come together if I just add this, paint this, or do that, she thought, thinking of Calamity Kim's textile collages or Danny Mansmith's textile art. Alas, it did not come together. So, no, not happy.
As our heroine sits here today in front of the completed piece--nicely sewn though it is--she wonders, dear readers, what moral can be drawn from this failed creative exercise? Quit while you're ahead? Don't quit the day job? To thine own self be true? Make up your own fairy tale?
I leave it to my gentle readers to decide.
So, what to tackle first? Christmas presents--two slippers from felted sweaters to sew, for example? Embroidered Christmas ornaments from said felted sweaters?
Nah.
How about playing around with quirky, this-side-of-kitsch curtain panels with fairy tale motifs in two colorways that our fortunate heroine received in a swap from Resurrection Fern?
Perfect!
Said fabric panels showed scenes from three fairy tales: Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, and the Three Little Pigs. Intrepid heroine cut out each of the scenes to assemble into three separate pieced pillows for the kids' rooms. Simple enough, you say.
Then a little lightbulb went off over the heroine's head. What if she used a passage from each fairy tale to "Illuminate" the scene, and to fulfill a long-overdue commitment to contribute to Smoothpebble's "Illuminated Phrase" project?
Gentle readers, this may have been where things started going very, very wrong.
Our stalwart heroine headed to the computer to do some research. Turns out that the Little Red Riding Hood tale has its roots as a folk tale from France, and the original story involved a strong heroine who kicks the big bad wolf's a** herself. The first writer to put the tale in written form (in 1697) was Charles Perrault, a French courtier to Louis XIV, the Sun King. Perrault's wolf gobbled up both the grandma and poor little despoiled Hood--a warning to all young girls not to trust strange men, especially the sweet talkers.
So, with the idea of a sweet little fairy tale pillow banished from our heroine's mind with this image, she set out to make something a little edgier. Poet Anne Sexton's rewriting of the tale--as one of appetites and deceptions of all kinds--fit the bill:
Red Riding Hood
By Anne Sexton
Many are the deceivers:
The suburban matron,
proper in the supermarket,
list in hand so she won't suddenly fly,
buying her Duz and Chuck Wagon dog food,
meanwhile ascending from earth,
letting her stomach fill up with helium,
letting her arms go loose as kite tails,
getting ready to meet her lover
a mile down Apple Crest Road
in the Congregational Church parking lot.
Two seemingly respectable women
come up to an old Jenny
and show her an envelope
full of money
and promise to share the booty
if she'll give them ten thou
as an act of faith.
Her life savings are under the mattress
covered with rust stains
and counting.
They are as wrinkled as prunes
but negotiable.
The two women take the money and disappear.
Where is the moral?
Not all knives are for
stabbing the exposed belly.
Rock climbs on rock
and it only makes a seashore.
Old Jenny has lost her belief in mattresses
and now she has no wastebasket in which
to keep her youth.
The standup comic
on the "Tonight" show
who imitates the Vice President
and cracks up Johnny Carson
and delays sleep for millions
of bedfellows watching between their feet,
slits his wrist the next morning
in the Algonquin's old-fashioned bathroom,
the razor in his hand like a toothbrush,
wall as anonymous as a urinal,
the shower curtain his slack rubberman audience,
and then the slash
as simple as opening as a letter
and the warm blood breaking out like a rose
upon the bathtub with its claw and ball feet.
And I. I too.
Quite collected at cocktail parties,
meanwhile in my head
I'm undergoing open-heart surgery.
The heart, poor fellow,
pounding on his little tin drum
with a faint death beat,
The heart, that eyeless beetle,
running panicked through his maze,
never stopping one foot after the other
one hour after the other
until he gags on an apple
and it's all over.
And I. I too again.
I built a summer house on Cape Ann.
A simple A-frame and this too was
a deception -- nothing haunts a new house.
When I moved in with a bathing suit and tea bags
the ocean rumbled like a train backing up
and at each window secrets came in
like gas. My mother, that departed soul,
sat in my Eames chair and reproached me
for losing her keys to the old cottage.
Even in the electric kitchen there was
the smell of a journey. The ocean
was seeping through its frontiers
and laying me out on its wet rails.
The bed was stale with my childhood
and I could not move to another city
where the worthy make a new life.
Long ago
there was a strange deception:
a wolf dressed in frills,
a kind of transvestite.
But I get ahead of my story.
In the beginning
there was just little Red Riding Hood,
so called because her grandmother
made her a red cape and she was never without it.
It was her Linus blanket, besides
it was red, as red as the Swiss flag,
yes it was red, as red as chicken blood,
But more than she loved her riding hood
she loved her grandmother who lived
far from the city in the big wood.
This one day her mother gave her
a basket of wine and cake
to take to her grandmother
because she was ill.
Wine and cake?
Where's the aspirin? The penicillin?
Where's the fruit juice?
Peter Rabbit got camomile tea.
But wine and cake it was.
On her way in the big wood
Red Riding Hood met the wolf.
Good day, Mr. Wolf, she said,
thinking him no more dangerous
than a streetcar or a panhandler.
He asked where she was going
and she obligingly told him
There among the roots and trunks
with the mushrooms pulsing inside the moss
he planned how to eat them both,
the grandmother an old carrot
and the child a shy budkin
in a red red hood.
He bade her to look at the bloodroot,
the small bunchberry and the dogtooth
and pick some for her grandmother.
And this she did.
Meanwhile he scampered off
to Grandmother's house and ate her up
as quick as a slap.
Then he put on her nightdress and cap
and snuggled down in to bed.
A deceptive fellow.
Red Riding hood
knocked on the door and entered
with her flowers, her cake, her wine.
Grandmother looked strange,
a dark and hairy disease it seemed.
Oh Grandmother, what big ears you have,
ears, eyes, hands and then the teeth.
The better to eat you with my dear.
So the wolf gobbled Red Riding Hood down
like a gumdrop. Now he was fat.
He appeared to be in his ninth month
and Red Riding Hood and her grandmother
rode like two Jonahs up and down with
his every breath. One pigeon. One partridge.
He was fast asleep,
dreaming in his cap and gown,
wolfless.
Along came a huntsman who heard
the loud contented snores
and knew that was no grandmother.
He opened the door and said,
So it's you, old sinner.
He raised his gun to shoot him
when it occured to him that maybe
the wolf had eaten up the old lady.
So he took a knife and began cutting open
the sleeping wolf, a kind of caesarian section.
It was a carnal knife that let
Red Riding Hood out like a poppy,
quite alive from the kingdom of the belly.
And grandmother too
still waiting for cakes and wine.
The wolf, they decided, was too mean
to be simply shot so they filled his belly
with large stones and sewed him up.
He was as heavy as a cemetery
and when he woke up and tried to run off
he fell over dead. Killed by his own weight.
Many a deception ends on such a note.
The huntsman and the grandmother and Red Riding Hood
sat down by his corpse and had a meal of wine and cake.
Those two remembering
nothing naked and brutal
from that little death,
that little birth,
from their going down
and their lifting up.
Roots, mushrooms, carrots--all imagery from the poem--were added to the assembled piece. Three thrifted napkins with embroidered mushrooms were chopped up and painted to match the graphics on the original piece. Lines from the poem chopped and added to the mix. Circular lines of a target quilted all of the pieces together.
Was our heroine satisfied with the finished piece? She agreed with her husband when he tentatively asked, "Is it a placemat?" Tim Gunn would have called it a hot mess--the simple geometry of the piecing at war with the odd placement of the carrot and mushroom mix-ins; the colors an unharmonious mix; sweetness jarring with edginess. At each addition, a little voice inside the heroine suggested, You could take it all apart and start over. Again--Nah. It will all come together if I just add this, paint this, or do that, she thought, thinking of Calamity Kim's textile collages or Danny Mansmith's textile art. Alas, it did not come together. So, no, not happy.
As our heroine sits here today in front of the completed piece--nicely sewn though it is--she wonders, dear readers, what moral can be drawn from this failed creative exercise? Quit while you're ahead? Don't quit the day job? To thine own self be true? Make up your own fairy tale?
I leave it to my gentle readers to decide.
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Vintage Children's Books Giveaway Winner
A big thank you to all commenters who shared their favorite illustrators on the "Where I Wish to Live" post! I have revisited some of my past favorites and discovered some new ones from the great variety of your wonderful suggestions.
Onegoldensun, of the Golden Sun Family blog, is the winner of the vintage children's books giveaway. Be sure to check out all of the lovely Waldorf-inspired creations shown on her blog; they are lovingly made by the whole family. Her beautiful photos capture an active, art-filled life knit closely to the rhythms of nature.
Felted sweater and felted sachets
Heart art
Felted mama with pumpkins
Wool angel
An acorn sisterThursday, November 13, 2008
With My Own Two Hands
I am so inspired by all the handmade holiday posts that I've been seeing. Check out maya*made's series of posts, which begins today with some scrumptious (and easy) baby blankets. Resurrection Fern's felted Russian Christmas is very inspiring as well. It clearly isn't just me feeling that this holiday season calls for a real clarity of purpose and connectedness that a handcrafted holiday brings.
Thanks Ellie, at Mint, for the link to Mono, the producers of the PBS promo. Check out her fall table and yo-yo posts for some more inspiring ideas. She has an impeccable eye!
What will you be making with your own two hands this holiday?
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Embellishing My World
I went out on a limb recently and suggested a swap with an artist I really admire. I promised a hand-knit scarf in exchange for Linda Crispell's beaded spiders. Linda has an amazing house full of vintage treasures, and she is also a party-planning and decorating genius. I spotted the spiders above in a photo of her Halloween decorations, and I just loved how inventive and fun they were.
Linda was generous enough to agree to the swap. Here are the spiders in action. As you can see, they are quite active critters.
My youngest has decided that they are perfect for playing itsy-bitsy spider with. Unfortunately they are mommy's toys, so they are now displayed in my office for my continuous viewing pleasure.
Linda went WAY above and beyond the terms of our swap and sent one of her amazing assemblages: "Seagrass" (2005). I am still so overwhelmed by her gesture and also by how perfectly the piece fits with everything that I love. 
I know I'm probably tacky to admit that a piece of art matches my decor, but this piece really does! The sea green of the box is one of my favorite colors, and it's the color of my living room (our dining room is a shade darker). 
I have a few pieces of seaglass and beach pebbles that I've collected from Victoria, British Columbia, and from along Lake Michigan. The seaglass that Linda incorporated into this piece is from Lake Michigan's Rosewood Beach, which is a perfect evocation of my memories of the three wonderful summers I spent living in Chicago. 
The vintage details that Linda assembled into this piece are so touching. The vintage chalkware bird is the focal point of the piece, and the vintage wallpaper in the background is its perfect complement. 
Thank you, Linda, for your generosity! I feel very blessed to have one of your originals to treasure!
Saturday, November 8, 2008
Where I Wish to Live--and a Giveaway
On this gray November Saturday, I am wishing that . . . I could live in a multicolored castle with bright turrets, windows of lace, and trims of embroidered ribbon. This place, as designed and sewn by Resurrection Fern, is called the "Castle of Forest Fern." And I think it could be set in Alice (1918- ) and Martin Provensen's (1916-1987) bright, whimsical world. 
The Provensens have lived one of those rare, richly creative and collaborative lives that many of us dream about.
The two illustrators--Martin worked in the Story Department at Disney; Alice was an animator with the Walter Lantz Studio (home of Woody Woodpecker)--met in Los Angeles during World War II, while Martin was working on a war film. They married in 1944 and later moved to upstate New York, where they lived on Maple Hill Farm, the background for many of their books. Their studio was in a converted barn on the farm.
The illustrations of a fairy-tale world shown here are from Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses (Simon and Schuster, 1951). But no doubt you recognize their style from any number of classics they illustrated: Nancy Willard's William Blake's Inn, A Peaceable Kingdom, The Golden Treasury of Myths and Legends, and so many more. The illustrators' work has delighted many generations of children, from the 1950s to today, and they are so beloved and inspiring that there are several Flickr sets devoted to their work. (Generations of kids have also enjoyed Kellogg's mascot Tony the Tiger, which Martin designed in 1952.)
Reviewer Virginia Johnson described the talented duo as "two illustrators and writers working so closely together that their styles were indistinguishable. It was the same style really, gentle drawings so delightful in their clarity that they subtly underscored the text of the dozens of children's books they illustrated." 
Before Martin's death in 1987, the two author-illustrators collaborated on more than 40 books. They include tales of farm life in A Year at Maple Hill Farm and Our Animal Friends at Maple Hill Farm, and the Caldecott Award-winning The Glorious Flight. For Glorious Flight, the book on aviation pioneer Louis Bleriot, Alice explained: "We both worked on most of the drawings and paintings, sometimes with one of us doing the background and the other doing the costumes and figures."
"We were a true collaboration," explained Alice, "Martin and I really were one artist."
What strikes me most about seeing their illustrations today is how gentle and playful their images are. There is so much joy in the lines and colors and in the expressions of the children and animals. They expressed the best of what was happening in the 60's and 70's, both culturally and graphically.
I am keenly aware that my 100th blog post passed without my promised giveaway. But if you are interested in receiving a copy of the Provensens' Child's Garden of Verses and a few other vintage children's books (all gently used and from our Friends of the Library sale), please leave a comment about an illustrator that leaves you dreaming of fairy-tale lands that you wished existed. I'll randomly draw a name on Sunday, November 16, to determine the winner.
Friday, November 7, 2008
Happy Designs
"Theme from the Fables of Hans Christian Anderson,"
by nine-year-old Italian art student Iride Berardi,
from the cover of Everyday Art, Volume 36,
Fall Issue 1957 (The American Crayon Company).
by nine-year-old Italian art student Iride Berardi,
from the cover of Everyday Art, Volume 36,
Fall Issue 1957 (The American Crayon Company).
I just wanted to wish everyone a very Happy Friday, after what was for me a terrifically hopeful, wonderful week. I'm still in the midst of all my changes, and I'm trying to take them day by day. I'm going to sleep at a decent hour every night (some might say obscenely early) and trying lots of new recipes, with a real emphasis on greens and veggies of all kinds. Who knew that tofu kan tastes so great in a salad? Last night's dinner--grilled portabella mushrooms over spinach with sweet potatoes on the side--was not a huge hit with the kids, but I loved it. The portabella mushrooms taste so meaty! And I've made pumpkin everything so far--fritters, pancakes, puree, muffins, and a pie (my husband made that one; he's the pastry king). I've even managed to get in a few walks this week to enjoy the warm weather.
I also wanted to share some of the graphics from the vintage art education textbooks and magazines that I have collected over the last few months. The art books and magazines from the 1910s through the pre-war years contain wonderful examples of Arts and Crafts design.
End paper for Industrial and Applied Art Books, No. 2, Edited by Walter Scott Perry, Florence H. Fitch, Walter Sargent, and Frederick G. Bonser, Mentzer Bush & Co., 1926.
The Industrial Arts Magazine, March 1917, The Bruce Publishing Company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
The exuberant, colorful designs from the postwar years really make me happy.
Brayer Print by Norman Laliberte, cover of Everyday Art, Volume 38, Fall Issue 1959 (The American Crayon Company).
I also wanted to share a little trick that a therapist taught me a decade ago. She pointed out that in our daily lives we establish habits (eating buttered popcorn while we watch a movie, eating when we're stressed or bored, watching TV every night, voting for Republicans, etc.) that get ingrained and wear such a familiar little groove in our neural pathways that we automatically do them even when they no longer serve us. To get me unstuck from my unhealthy eating habits, she urged me to try to take a familiar, benign habit and completely change it. So, for example, I usually take the same familiar route to drop off my son at school. It's easy and I don't have to think about it. But in the last week I have figured out several new routes to take. One goes through the arboretum and along a lovely creek, so it was a bonus that I found this lightly traveled and scenic route. It seems silly, but a little change like that can open you up for making other changes in your life and forge some new neural pathways to boot. End of sermon!
Have a great weekend!
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