squirrel of snooze

squirrel of snooze has moved

2008-04-09T19:09:00.000-07:00

i decided to move from blogspot over to my own wordpress set-up, so from now you can find me at squirrelofsnooze.com.

crunk?

2008-04-05T17:41:00.000-07:00

i'm almost done getting the blog set up with wordpress. progress has been hampered by the combination of benelyn chest/cough/congestion formula and coffee. i imagine that this is what ADHD feels like.

moving

2008-04-04T15:56:00.000-07:00

i've decided to finally bite the bullet and migrate squirrel of snooze over to wordpress. i've used wordpress on a bunch of the site's i've designed and i love it. now that the lastest, amazing version has been released i don't want to put it off any longer. the timing could be better because i'm hacking my lungs out and am still partially brain dead.

in other news, i did manage to cut out the rest of the pieces for my first animal without drawing any more blood. i came close though! i really, truly injure myself almost daily. remember when you were little and you'd stub your toes and scrape your knees and fall and get bruised, but bounce right back up again? amazing how getting older and having a higher centre of gravity changes things, isn't it?

so... back to the great migration for me. see you tomorrow, maybe on the new set up?

fear of failure

2008-04-03T15:32:00.000-07:00

i am definitely feeling better today. my throat is still sore, and i'm coughing a lot, but i'm much less brain dead. for example, had i attempted to type "brain dead" yesterday it would have come out as "bread". nothing i tried to write made any sense unless re-read and revised 3-4 times. good thing i had no work emergencies and was able to spend my day reading and half-watching daytime television while crocheting a very fat sheep.

the photo above is of the materials i've picked out for my first sewn (not crocheted) animal. it is entirely likely that you will never see said animal because it might wind up a sad, botched creation. but i love the fabrics i've chosen: camel and cream cotton velvets, a pink cotton chambrey, and violet linen. i've sat on a tall stack of fabric afraid of the sewing machine for too long... wish me luck.

update: still brain dead. just cut open the tip of my index finger with the rotary cutter thingy. my first attempt at sewing an animal has been cut short. ha. that pun was not intended. wish me a lot more luck than i clearly thought i needed.

sick day

2008-04-02T11:49:00.000-07:00

jasper the lion

i am sick. i have a sore throat and what feels like a heavy weight on my chest. it could be worse and that's why i've decided to spend the day reading in bed, hoping that no one will need anything from me. last night i finished my first lion while watching american idol and hells kitchen. i had been sitting on this ball of gold and orange hand dyed icelandic wool for over a year, unsure what to do with it and convinced it would never be used. i had to learn a new stitch for the mane and tufted tail and am really happy with how he turned out. there's something very '70s scandinavian about him, don't you think?

back to bed with me. i'm reading the other boleyn girl. i always feel like a loser reading books that have been turned into movies after the movies have come out. it makes me feel like i'm the lowest common denominator. i'm so glad i read atonement and the time traveler's wife before they were optioned.

ps. can you believe that guy's food made gordon ramsey vomit? i don't think it was for dramatic effect either, because just the thought of having venison, raw quail egg, capers, white chocolate, caviar, and scallops in my mouth simultaneously is enough to give me the mouth sweats, too.

pss. remember how when E! and entertainment tonight and all those shows first started talking about the other boleyn girl they pronounced it "boleen"? how dumb was that?

tea party daydreams

2008-04-01T09:46:00.000-07:00

clockwise from left: creamer and sugar / cake stand / dessert plate

i love the simple and understated yet altogether original pieces created by ceramic artist whitney smith. her vases, bowls, and other creations would look equally amazing in a modern home as they would in a country cottage.

etsy is currently featuring an interview with whitney promoting her shop. i have been dreaming of the perfect tea party featuring her dogwood cake stand, creamer and sugar, and dessert plates in white. one day maybe she'll make a white dogwood tea pot. i've planted that seed in whitney's head and might have to annoyingly suggest it over and over again until she finally gives in.

you can read all about whitney's creative process and the trials and tribulations of setting up a wholesale business on her blog, this artist's life. but fist you have to see how beautiful her creamy vanilla dogwood flowers look on this vintage green. it's enough to make me give up my obsession with white ceramics.

wrong: duvets without covers

2008-03-31T10:49:00.000-07:00

suggestions for your sad, bare duvets (from left):
plover organic / anthropologie cirrus / west elm organic cotton

i waste a good hour (conservatively) every day reading design, cooking, and music blogs. not a week goes by that i don't find myself borderline enraged after stumbling upon a sneak peak on apartment therapy or design sponge featuring what has become a huge pet peeve of mine: duvets with no covers. for people to invite strangers into their homes like this suggests that they are very proud of their homes, and care about design. you never see unfinished projects, or dirty dishes in the sink in these well thought out, and perfectly staged slide shows, and yet here are these duvets screaming out to be covered. it's puzzling.

before i launch into why i am so bothered by bare duvets, let me provide you with a sneak peak into my mind: i have this problem with hotel rooms. i can't walk barefoot, or even sock-footed in carpeted rooms. remember when you'd go to the community pool as a kid in the summer and inevitably get planters warts? if you can get warts from bare surfaces covered in chlorine, what can you get from these filthy, stain-concealing carpets? i'm the same way with the blankets and disgusting coverlets; those things don't get washed you know. don't get me started on stray hairs in the bathrooms, or the cups next to sinks... see, i grew up in a very clean home. my mother should probably be medicated for her OCD, but thank god she wasn't because our house was clean. really clean! don't walk on the carpets and disturb the vacuum lines clean.

so it should come as no surprise that the reason i hate uncovered duvets is because i think it's filthy and vile. how often do you suppose these people launder their fluffy feathered bedding? put a cover on that duvet, and you can wash it weekly, or if you're rich like oprah every other day! you wouldn't not put pillowcases on your pillows would you? that would be dirty and gross. besides, duvet covers are pretty and would finish off these otherwise thoughtfully put together abodes so nicely.

i implore you design sponge and apartment therapy, for the love of god please stop featuring the homes of duvet coverless people. it's giving me a twitch.

ps. my mum now has terracotta, hardwood and wool berber to contend with and no longer yells at us to not disturb the lines in the carpet. we got her a shark steam mop for christmas and she was really disappointed that it didn't seem to pick any dirt up. this isn't a slight against the product, but a testament to her floors being so clean you can eat off them.

cat meet bird, spring meet snow

2008-03-29T16:21:00.000-07:00

olly and pip, the latest additions to my shop

the weather outside is frightful. i feel so badly for the parsley i planted on thursday, only to have it snow on friday. the weather man said not to worry, because it would be sunny all weekend. not so! it slushed a bit and then hailed and then slushed a bit more today. bowie and i have no interest in going out in this weather, so i finished up a little kitten i was working on, and named him olly. i also made my first bird (a budgie named pip) and am so happy with how he turned out. i like budgies a lot, and like pigeons i think they're under appreciated, but at least they don't have as bad a rap. so hermitting my saturday away, i am doing laundry, and working on a web site for one of my absolute favourite clients (cough cough destroyer) and am going to try to get my new sewing machine going. i love my little crocheted animals, but they take so long to make and i feel like such an ass charging so much for such small creations. if i can translate their cuteness in fabric it would save me a lot of time, and then i could feel good about the prices i charge.

dammit toronto, stop laughing at me

in other news, i'm thinking about trying to blog once a day every day in april, and am kicking myself for not doing it in february instead.

my afternoon expedition to hell and back

2008-03-24T15:19:00.000-07:00

clockwise from left:
tourists hanging around the gastown steamclock (my nemesis)
coal harbour: largely vacant investment properties of rich foreigners
no jaywalking on commercial drive. weird.

a few hours ago i decided to take a lazy sunny afternoon walk to coal harbour to pickup groceries. we live on the edge of chinatown and gastown in a part of town that's pretty awful (the poorest neighbourhood in the country in fact), but we're safely tucked away on a little oasis of a street inhabited by photographers and architects and the stars of locally filmed sci-fi television programs.

the least seedy route to coal harbour (the rich mans ghetto on the edge of stanley park) is water street, the heart of gastown. wow, i hate the heart of gastown! by the time i got to my final destination, got some nice goat cheeses and made it home i was actually twitching. my left hand is tremoring as i type. at first i thought to myself "good lord, am i showing symptoms of the early stages of MS? my pinky finger was numb earlier, wasn't it?" but then i realized i was just wound up by the following:

1. slow walking tourists. i know you have them where you live too. they're everywhere and they can't be avoided. they come to gastown for the "history" that vancouver boasts about that is really nothing to be proud of at all. they get let off in giant tour busses so they can mill around a fraud of a steam clock that's actually powered by electricity, so that they can get their camcorders out to record it tunelessly ring in the quarter-hour. i hate the damned clock, but mostly i hate that i just want to get somewhere but i can't because the sidewalks are all jammed up by gawkers wearing visors, fannypacks and gortex. when i say "excuse me" it means move.

2. quebecois street urchins. vancouver is a lot like san francisco in that we have vibrant gay communities and good seafood. but we're most alike in that our respective countries seem to have been turned on their sides and shaken until all the mentally ill and drug addicted from every state, province and territory fell loose and landed here. okay so maybe the continent wasn't literally turned on end. the marginalized are just gravitated by the mild climate and cheap heroin. vancouver is to junkies what arizona is to seniors in RVs. just to the east of gastown there's a place called commercial drive. the italian coffee shops that mark every street corner are broken up by shops selling ponchos and vibrators. this street is inhabited by a large number of obnoxiously loud and sadly homeless quebecois teenagers who look like early '80s punks, panhandling to feed their meth addictions and unneutered pit bulls. after braving the slow walking tourists of water street, i made it back to my oasis only to hear the loud drawl of joual of a group of french teens smoking crack on the sidewalk, and once again IN MY WAY. please quebecois street urchins, go back to the drive (or preferably to la belle province) and don't smoke crack in front of my building.

3. pee. being as the chinatown-gastown area is the poorest neighbourhood in all of canada, the toilet to person ratio is not very high. i hate that i can't walk anywhere without smelling urine. i hate it. but then, i have a toilet so who am i to complain?

know why i'm looking forward to the olympics? i love hockey, and skiing and yes, i even love curling... but the thing i'm hoping for a lot more than medals, is that maybe if the rest of the world sees that vancouver's not all pretty mountains and ridiculously overpriced 400 square foot condos, the city, province and country will actually be motivated to do something about the drug addiction and homelessness that's blighted this place for over 30 years. i'm sure the slow walking tourists who stumble off the beaten path will appreciate it.

i know that was a downer, but i really had to get it out. my hand has stopped twitching.

time to move, huh?

doing as the islanders do

2008-03-18T15:52:00.000-07:00

i've spent the past few days at my parents home on vancouver island enjoying the sunshine and quiet. the only downside of the peace and quiet is that it's hard to sleep when it's completely silent and you're used to falling asleep to the sound of trains slamming together. what a thing to complain about!

i've been trying to get hans to help me move the old clipper canoe down to the water because i'm not confident i could portage it down several flights of stairs without killing myself. i just want to go for a quick paddle, but he doesn't want me to go out alone. he doesn't care how good i am in the canoe, he just knows i am an awful swimmer. i'm one of those people who can't just sit and enjoy the sunshine though. i have to be doing something. so with no canoe or kayak, and not wanting to walk through the woods where i wouldn't be able to enjoy the sun, i tried to find something to busy myself with. so i dug a hole. i recommend you try it sometime, because it's really satisfying. it's crazy wild here on the island.

and when i'm not digging holes, i like to make homemade granola. i know, i'm out of control. clearly the reason i didn't go to sxsw this year is because i've turned into an old person. but this granola is so damn good that i'm glad i put down my crochet hook and got my bifocals out long enough to make it. it's much better than digging holes, so you should make it too.

best granola ever
6 cups rolled oats
2 cups whole almonds
1 1/2 cups shredded or flaked coconut
3/4 cup hazelnuts
1/2 cup sesame seeds (i used black)
1/2 cup sunflower seeds
1/2 cup pumpkin seeds
1/2 cup brown sugar
3 teaspoons ground allspice
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon fleur de sel
3/4 cup olive oil
6 tablespoons honey
2 cups pitted dates, each cut crosswise into quarters
3/4 cup dried cranberries

preheat oven to 300°F. mix first 12 ingredients in large bowl. melt honey into the olive oil in a saucepan over low heat, then pour it over the granola mixture and stir well. spread out mixture over 2 large baking sheets. bake about 20 minutes, stirring 2-3 times. stir in the dried fruit and then continue baking until golden brown. this can take between 15 and 40 minutes depending on how deep the pans are and how often you stir the mix. cool and store in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 2 weeks.

you can really use any dried fruit, i just happened to have dates and cranberries.

sxsw... le sigh...

2008-03-13T12:18:00.000-07:00

sxsw 2007: last night at 4am on the way to the airport for my very long and painful flight home

sxsw, the hajj of indie rock, is going on right now and i am not there. instead i am sitting at home working on web-related indie rock things while visions of texas-sized margaritas and driskill's gingerbread pancakes dance through my head. friend frank is in austin and spent the better part of the morning lining up for VIP wrist bands to get into day parties. meanwhile in vancouver, i've been hitting refresh repeatedly on the "official not at sxsw" beggars live blog. beggars adam posted the following video. i love hillary and think she should be president, but it's never going to happen with supporters like these:

who needs twill?

2008-02-27T14:21:00.000-08:00

i have 20 yards of fine chocolate brown cotton twill i'd like to swap or sell for $3/yard. i bought it last year thinking i'd redo my sofa with it, but have since decided i want off-white linen and more importantly a new sofa altogether with. any takers? email me at erinjoynicholson at gmail dot com.

also, i have 3 moroccan poufs and 4 hand woven berber cactus silk carpets i need to photograph and add to my shop. i'll post photos here first to see if anyone wants to call dibs. my mum brought them back from her trip last month and the last thing she needs is more rugs!

spring things

2008-02-27T12:21:00.000-08:00

those of you who are from vancouver and/or who went to the university of british columbia (i'm 2 for 2) know all about the 1 day music festival piss up that is (or rather was) arts county fair. on the last day of classes for the past 16 years thousands of students attended the on-campus concert where they got drunk and behaved very, very badly. so badly in fact that it's amazing the festival went on for as long as it did. this year some changes have been made. the new slightly better mannered answer to arts county fair is this years first ever ams block party. i was asked to brand the event and had a lot of fun with watercolours and ink, and was clearly inspired by steven harrington and ashley g's bearded men. the best thing about rebranding this event was getting to say goodbye to the ACF yellow and purple. check out the site i built here: amsblockparty.com

in other news, i've decided to help usher in spring by putting all the bunnies in my shop on sale for the next couple of weeks. doesn't someone you know need a bunny?

i have to just randomly bring up the christmas tree again... i know, it's been months and i have to get over it but one more reason to not ever get a potted tree again... bugs. specifically weevils. enough said.

my boyfriend is magic

2008-02-26T19:12:00.000-08:00

it was our 7 year anniversary on saturday and over a nice dinner at a very nice restaurant hans pulled out a ring box and said "i have a gift for you." i opened it and my jaw hit the floor. i honestly thought going to the very nice restaurant was the gift, and it blew me away that he got me exactly the ring i'd been coveting for an undisclosed, unhealthy length of time.

the best part of the night (other than the shiny, shiny ring) was that everyone in the restaurant thought he'd proposed and people were congratulating us and giving him high fives and his face could not have been redder. it was SO FUNNY. poor hans.

and then on sunday morning we got the news that we are the aunt and uncle of a beautiful little niece who i plan to spoil completely rotten.

best. weekend. ever.

écoutez-vous

2008-02-12T18:41:00.000-08:00

scott accusingly points at rob

for the past few years i've worked with 2 good friends, scott and rob. the gospel of paula speaketh the truth; like a rapping cat and a short, crazy cheerleader, scott and rob are as opposite as they come. but they're both stubborn band geeks and so it works. they started up the record label i've worked with because in the months surrounding the release of their last album their labels imploded, or simply disappeared as was the case with their japanese imprint. so they turned doing it themselves into a business, but the ironic consequence was that they found no time to make music themselves. they finally figured that one out and got their priorities sorted and have started making music again.

every month for the next year the salteens will make 2 songs available through their web site, salteens.com. it's like a 7" with an a-side and a b-side, and you get cover art (courtesy of my friend sasha) to boot. and it's free! you should go download yourself some power pop right now. or you can listen to the "a-side" here:

the new cat power site is live!

2008-01-30T09:51:00.000-08:00

we just launched the cat power site this morning! yay! how lucky am i to get work like this? the cool thing about this site is that matador has teamed up with the hype machine to create a streaming audio player that will feature exclusive, unreleased songs with comments from chan about each one. that will come in the next week or so, but for now you can stream the whole album.

and now back to work with me.

busy busy busy

2008-01-23T20:17:00.000-08:00

what a busy month it's been... so, so busy! but busy good and busy exciting. the most exciting thing is that i'm almost finished the new cat power site. that's right, i'm designing the new cat power site! i also got to do the banner ads. fancy! the best thing about the new cat power site is the over-the-top use of animated gifs. that's right, the new cat power site is covered in animated gifs. i'll bet you can't wait to see it now!

over the holidays i made some little springtime bunnies and i just added them to my etsy shop. i'm getting ready to get packed up for another trip to my family's place on vancouver island and i figured i'd better get these bunnies up in the shop before i leave. my mum says there are sea otters all over the place lately and that one even dragged a flounder or sole onto the lawn where it tore the thing apart and hissed at onlookers. i really, really hope i see an otter!

what else... it was my birthday yesterday! i had some really great dinners out with friends and family over the weekend. i got the most unbelievably beautiful, over the top decadent french copper mixing bowl from hans' family. i love, love it and would never have splurged on one for myself. my sort of sister in law remembered me saying exactly that when we were at the gourmet warehouse together over the summer. she's the best, right? this bowl is begging for meringue.

i still hate you 3-notes

2008-01-12T18:23:00.000-08:00

i haven't written for weeks and it's really only because i'm very very busy. this post is really just an outlet for me to vent about my least favourite neighbour, 3-notes. back in november when i first wrote about 3-notes some of you responded with tales of far worse neighbours than mine, but i went to the building manager (for the umpteenth time) anyway and asked him to speak with the aspiring synth-play. miraculously 3-notes actualy stopped this time, or maybe just started wearing headphones. regardless, he really stopped playing his repetitive bassy music that i might like if only i were a glow-stick waving tooth-nasher (but alas, and alack i am not) and it was GLORIOUS! yay! it was like his christmas gift to me and it was perfect and i loved it. and then 2 hours ago he took my gift back and i was first sad, and then an hour later i was just angry. those are the first 2 steps in the bad neighbour grieving process which doesn't include denial because there's no denying how annoying bad neighbours can be. so i emailed the building manager again and will let you know what comes of it. maybe someday if you're lucky i'll tell you all about my other neighbour, juicebox.

more homemade for the holidays

2007-12-21T15:41:00.001-08:00

a butterfly for my sister, originally uploaded by squirrel_of_snooze.
the past two days have been spent frantically baking, wrapping, organizing, cleaning, running errands... it's been busy! i'm sure it's like that for everyone, and i'm sure everyone is wondering when the holiday part of this season will actually begin!

this is a little watercolour mounted butterfly i made for my little sister for christmas. i'm going to wrap it right now, but thought i'd take a photo first! she's 13 so she generally hates everything, so keep your fingers crossed that she hates this less than most things. and keep your fingers crossed that she doesn't know i have a blog, too okay?!

i got the most beautiful painting in the mail today from hadley hutton and i will take a photo of it when i get home and have decided where to hang it. now i'm off to do laundry, wrap some more, and pull my hair out. in that order.

here's what i baked yesterday:

clockwise from top left: les punitions / pine nut rosemary shortbread / chocolate shortbread with cocoa nibs and sea salt / buckwheat butter cookies with cocoa nibs / true spice cookies / world peace cookies

the spice cookies and the world peace cookies are my absolute favourites and i'll definitely make them again next year. and those little puniments, the punitions sablé, are the perfect simple cookie. i baked apricot-pistachio bars over the weekend too, and just pulled them out of the freezer.

i can haz new hooman?

2007-12-18T16:06:00.000-08:00

now i know this post is a little mean, and i don't like to be mean, but didn't someone once say "if we don't speak for those who cannot speak for themselves, who will?" it was probably bob barker. now that i've justified mocking someone, here goes... there's someone out there who's taken crazy cat lady to a whole new level. she likes to dress her cat up in wigs and hopes you do too. and all for the low price of $50? what a steal! for a cat wig... why should you pay $50 for a wig for your cat? here's why!

"Pink makes your kitty feel elegant, modern and quintessentially feline."
no, i'm pretty sure it doesn't.

"Blonde sets off your kitty’s eyes and makes your kitty look tan."
this begs the question, how a cat look tanned?

"Silver makes your kitty feel sexy and smart, like a cougar on the prowl."
oh, well that makes sense. that's how silver makes me feel anyway... how about you?

"Blue gives your kitty a sharp look -- jazzy and totally copacetic."
okay, this coupled with the use of the word "biznazz" on the home page makes me concerned that a certain someone might be eaten alive by a certain wig-wearing cat.

and now more lolcatz for your enjoyment:

handmade for the holidays

2007-12-13T11:56:00.000-08:00

1. porcelain dishes and trays by kg+ab
2. pattern gift tags by elfrida
3. matchbook jotters by freshly blended

the weather outside is frightful. grey, dark and nothing but sleet, it's days like today that make me awfully grateful to have a home office! so i got myself a cup of tea and started going through my bloglines, hard worker that i am.

it seems like every blog i read has been doing holiday gift guides the past couple of weeks, and i've been pretty pleased to see that many of the things i've bought have made those lists. i like to think that means i have good taste and made wise choices, rather than that i'm just unoriginal.

nicole from freshly blended was kind enough to feature my softies in her list today, along with some other beautiful gift ideas. yay! i completely fell in love with the work of another artist nicole profiled: kg+ab, maker of hand painted, handmade glazed porcelain pieces. i have added some of her work to my wishlist, and even if it's too late for christmas maybe i'll get one of her trays for my birthday next month. or maybe i'll just get one for myself!

nicole also featured some spirograph-patterned gift tags from elfrida, and if they can make it here in time i'm getting the multicoloured ones. they'll beat the neon post-it notes pictured in my post below!

now back to work!

doh! tannenbaum

2007-12-12T12:40:00.000-08:00

i left to visit my family for a few days on thursday morning, and so hans thought it would be nice to spend wednesday evening together decorating a tree. we'd agreed to get a small tree this year for many reasons, but i was still looking forward to going to pick out a nice noble fir together. hans decided to surprise me with a potted tree - a spruce! first off, i'm allergic to spruce. and then that it's potted...

i haven't gotten gift tags yet, please excuse the neon post-its!
1. our little tree / 2. tree close up / 3. alpaca soft trees / 4. pine gnomes

in my experience, potted trees kind of... die. they never really seem to recover from being ripped out of the ground and stuck in a pot, nevermind the trauma of spending a good fortnight in a warm, dry home covered in decorations. even if the tree makes it through its life indoors it then has to sit outside in a pot until the ground thaws enough so we can dig it a hole. poor little potted tree... hans of course said "poor potted tree? at least it's still alive. you think the one we'd have cut down would have had it better?" good thing trees aren't cognoscente.

so anyway, i am allergic to spruce. this was a problem in my dendrology classes at university where i was often laughed at while i'd sniffle and itch my way through tree identification labs. poor hans, how was he to know? needless to say, we did not spend wednesday night decorating said tree. what a bitch i am!

i went away for the weekend and made some crochet soft trees, and whittled myself some pine gnomes (not allergic to pine) pictured above and inspired by a swedish blog, but which i can't remember. then yesterday morning i broke down and tried to put lights on our little tree. the sad little thing couldn't support the weight of them though, but by the time i finally accepted our tree would have no lights i was covered from elbows to wrists in hives. i called my mum: "I HATE THIS TREE!" she was unsympathetic. they got a noble fir.

so no lights, no twinkle... why had hans gotten us this tree? he knows that i'm a control freak. i added the red wooden beaded garland, and the tinfoil chains a brother and i made years ago while spending christmas in york. i then discovered that 90% of our ornaments were too large and/or heavy for this sad little, hyper allergenic tree to support. i added some of the smallest vintage kugels we have, along with the eggs i bought at a market in prague a few years ago. but it was lacking, and the angel i'd purchased at an oxfam store in york looked ridiculous as a topper. don't even get me started on the god awful, black plastic pot this thing came in...

i used some left over cotton cinched with red rickrack to pretty up the pot, but it was still lacking. then i remembered how pretty i thought a tree i'd seen in domino looked and i knew exactly what to do. i used the turquoise satin ribbon i'd intended for gift wrapping to save our little, spindly, hive-inducing, lightless tree. and now i can't stop looking at it. it's still a bit of a "pathetic" charlie brown tree but i love it anyway.

it's so easy to get into the habit of picking out the same tree, and decorating it with the same ornaments year in and year out. it took a tree that had me yelling "I HATE IT! I HATE IT!" to break me out of that nostalgic comfort zone, and now that the rashy hives have gone i can honestly say that i love this awful little tree. so in the end everything worked out, but we will never again have a spruce in our home.

arctic front meet pineapple express

2007-12-03T16:05:00.000-08:00

alba and lavender

this past weekend it snowed and snowed, and since we still haven't managed to have our snow tires put on i stayed in. i ventured out on saturday afternoon to drag the dog around the park. she's not a fan of the cold, and i actually had to get behind her and shove her along for part of the walk. there were footprints everywhere, but my favourite tracks were the ones left by the long haired miniature dachshunds: two sets of two paws followed by a dash left where their little tails drag behind as they hop along. dachshund tracks look like morse code in the snow.

lavender

the rest of the weekend was spent stitching and stuffing. i finished this little rabbit as part of a swap with hadley hutton. she's stuffed with soft roving and is made of merino, and hand dyed icelandic wool. i spun lavender and cream yarns together to create the mottled detailing on her smock.

it seems like hadley's been adding new work to her etsy shop everyday lately, and i love, love, love the spotted owls below:

new pieces from hadley hutton:
spotted owl // two blue // butterfly, did you take my spots, asked little bird

i also finished a camel for my mum over the snowy weekend. she collects camels. she collects a lot of things actually: baskets, kohl pots, opium pots, shadow puppets... mostly though, she collects camels. this one is made of super soft alpaca, and its little ruff collar is beaded. i'm thinking about adding little white or red french knots to make it look like a christmas wreath, but i'm still mulling over that one...

christmas camel

so i pretty well spent the entire weekend making stuff and staring out the window. i think that birds are always great to watch in the snow. there were a couple dozen crows on the railroad tracks pecking at things they found the the snow. i wonder if grain, jarred loose by the trains breaking and shunting, falls from the freight cars.

and then there were the pigeons, which took to the sky flying in formation like schools of fish every time the snow stopped.

pigeon flight

pigeon flight

i am randomly closing this post with the video to a terence trent d'arby song i was briefly obsessed with as a child, before i moved on to the more important task of memorizing every word of paul simon's rhythm of the saints. please note the shoulder pads, and wicked dance moves.

dear 3-notes, i hate you, sincerely me

2007-11-26T12:47:00.000-08:00

we live in between 2 other apartments. since living in this building, our neighbours to the right have generally been crazy. one of them had an honest to god schizophrenic break, and another was just nuts and thought she heard ghosts. there's been a new guy living there for the past year, and he's so quiet, and so perfect you'd never even know he was there.

the guy who moved into the apartment to the left a couple of years ago is another story altogether. i work from home a lot, and not this past summer but the one before, while i was working on a huge project and pulling long hours, our neighbour decided to take up music. he's into heavy industrial, and i think he must do a lot of drugs because during the months following his synthesizer purchase he played 3 descending notes, repeatedly for hours and hours, days and days on end. weeks, and months went by and i'd spend my days losing my mind while he'd play these same 3 descending notes over, and over, and over, and over... i knocked on his door and asked him to keep it down, i banged on the walls, i finally asked the building manager to talk to him. he improved moderately, in that he'd only jam on those 3 notes once a week or so, instead of all day everyday.

it's been over a year now, and i must say that he's improved. he knows more than 3 notes now, but i still find myself knocking at his door, banging on his walls, and reporting him to the building manager. my furniture is still vibrating, and i still feel like i'm going to have a psychotic break like our old neighbours to the right.

so the question is this: what do i do? i can't blast my music in retaliation because i actually like my other neighbours, and don't want to make them suffer. should i give him some headphones for christmas and hope that he figures it out?

as a funny side note, the woman who used to live above 3-notes was a classical pianist, and he drove her completely mental. she used to sit and play the same 3 notes back to him over and over to see if he'd get the drift. he did not.

snowy mountains, mushrooms and mistletoe

2007-11-20T15:52:00.000-08:00

good morning snowy mountains
one of the best things about vancouver in november is waking up to that morning when the snow line reaches the north shore mountains. the first week or so it melts by noon, but eventually it sticks and that's when it's really winter. people always point to the northwest and say "how can you live with all the rain in the winter? isn't it depressing? i think i'd kill myself." to which i reply "but we have colour, and you have grey and brown, dirty snow and trees covered in burlap." some people get seasonal affective disorder from short winter days. i have seasonal aesthetic disorder. in vancouver the snow's rarely around long enough to get dirty, and the snow that sticks stays up in the mountains where it belongs. everything's green and blue and crisp and clean and shiny. i have the added bonus of all the red of my view across the port. it's very christmassy don't you think? that said, it rained all weekend and i was a shut-in. a very productive shut-in, but a shut in nonetheless. here's what i did:

mushrooms and mistletoe
the past week has been an assembly line of holiday ornaments for the swap, (and gifts for family). i originally wanted to do bunnies because i love bunnies, and to top that off design sponge recently declared that rabbits are the new birds. i told a friend of mine about that and she said that's totally wrong, because mushrooms are the new birds. first i made the wool crochet mushrooms, then i felted some white berries, and then i made crochet alpaca leaves which were embroidered and beaded. and THEN i embroidered and beaded the mushroom tops and used a candy cane striped bamboo blended string to tie it all together. it's a lot of work, and i have a lot more to do.

fiep westendorp

2007-11-13T12:06:00.000-08:00

a couple nights ago i was on ichat with a friend who was in the midst of a manic online shopping episode. i told her i'd just been to vancouver's new japanese dollar store supreme where i bought a ton of cute stuff including a spirograph (i've been looking for one for years). she informed me that dutch is the new japanese of cute, and when she sent me a link to the fiep westendorp site i couldn't disagree.

while dutch might be the new japanese of cute, fiep westendorp is far from new. the dutch illustrator who i think would have been great friends with mary blair, began her career in illustration in the '40s. her most famous characters, the mischievous jip and janneke pictured above, are 55 years old but have managed to stay part of dutch popular culture through the decades. like mary blair's work on peter pan and alice in wonderland, and unlike some of disney's other work (sorry mickey, you're out), fiep's characters are timeless.

anyway, said friend was in desperate search of a fiep puzzle for her daughter's upcoming first birthday. no luck on the fiep site, and while there were no puzzles on ebay she did manage to buy an amazing j&j tea set, which i think is quite possibly the coolest tea set any child could ever wish for.

i decided to scour the internet some more today and came across a post about feip westendorp at wee wonderfuls. in the comments i read about the huge j&j line dutch superstore HEMA carries. puzzles! not just puzzles but everything jip and janneke you could imagine, including candies, shampoo, lunch boxes, sparkling ciders, bandages, bubbles, stickers, stamps, dried fruit, juice boxes, sketchbooks - you name it, HEMA has it! AND... they ship internationally.

holiday ornament swap, group 4

2007-11-12T18:55:00.000-08:00

holiday ornament swap, group 4:
1. swap packs by nicole, freshly blended / 2. brown flowers by jennifer, swallowfield / 3. elizabeth dye
4. mattie le oobee by leslie, onegirl designwrks / 5. wood walnut evergreen tree from janet, three potato four
6. dachshund combat by caitlin keegan / 7. jessica williams / 8. shoulder bag by emma, showpony / 9. ulrika nilsson

during last week's holiday ornament swap sign up leslie and i decided to make an extra ornament to send to each other. what are the odds that of the 600+ taking part in the swap, we'd wind up in the same group? pretty slim, but it happened. when i got the list of people in my swap group i did a little dance. they'll be glad to know that i've almost figured out what to make them.

buzz bombs, jets and flak

2007-11-11T10:47:00.001-08:00

my grandpa had a couple of old cigar boxes on the top shelf of his closet. sometimes when he wasn't in his room we'd sneak in to steal toffees or chocolate mints out of one of the boxes, while looking through the medals he kept tucked away in the other. grandpa was a spitfire pilot in the RCAF, and it was impossible to forget this because the basement was full of books, model airplanes, and prints of the single seat fighters. he never talked about the war, and never told us what the medals hidden away in his closet were for. truth be told, grandpa didn't talk much at all and spent most of his days napping, walking the dog, or watching golf in the back room. when i was a very little girl he used to smoke cigars and pipes in the basement, and to this day i think the scent of pipe tobacco is one of the best, and most comforting in the world. while my grandma and her 9 children and their dozens of grandchildren visited, rough housed, and sometimes sang in the front room, grandpa hid out in the back. he was a recovering alcoholic, and i remember that on the rare occasions he would have a drink he became the most belligerent and bigoted old man i'd ever met. he was a product of his generation after all.

one year we were all gathered around celebrating his birthday - there must have been at least 50 of us there because that's how modern day scottish clans roll. everyone gave him spitfire models and sweaters, but one aunt gave him a book of canadian spitfire pilots of the second world war. she stumbled upon it in costco and while leafing through the pages she came across an interview with my grandpa - one none of us knew about, and that he'd forgotten ever even having given. the long and short of the interview was that he'd "shot a lot of those buggers down" and that he'd once been shot down himself, taking shrapnel to the derrière.

like most of the men who fought during the war, my grandpa was a flawed hero. be that as it may, as a man who kept his medals in a box at the back of his closet, he'd never have admitted he was a hero at all anyway.

today is the day we set aside each year to remember. meanwhile the men and women who remain have for the most part spent the decades since the wars trying to suppress the most vivid memories of their lives. fraught with anguish and mourning, more often than pride and honour, these are the memories that have left our heroes scarred and flawed survivors, but our sometimes belligerent, and oftentimes silent family nonetheless. and we thank them.

lucky soul

2007-11-09T15:46:00.000-08:00

at my friend frank's insistence i bought every lucky soul single and b-side through emusic a couple of days ago. i bought the 9 songs without ever having heard them before, but i'm glad i trusted in frank's good taste. he first became infatuated with lucky soul last spring, but subsequently fell in love as evidenced by his gushing post hailing their album the great unwanted as the best british debut of the year. sadly, their album is only available for purchase through itunes (boo), which is why i got only the singles and b-sides. nevermind whiskers on kittens and warm woolen mittens, i'll take motown and spector girls. and look how nicely they would coordinate with my trunkt finds below!

lucky soul - "add your light to mine, baby" from add your light to mine, baby

stream: lucky soul, the great unwanted
watch: lips are unhappy / my brittle heart / add your light to mine, baby

i'm on trunkt!

2007-11-09T13:45:00.000-08:00

1. moop / 2. colorado art studio / 3. elisa shere jewelry / 4. akasha / 5. inleaf / 6. anne maa designs / 7. heidi burton / 8. j d wolfe pottery / 9. raydel photography / 10. blissful / 11. lurearts / 12. hadley hutton

seeing as i have crippling wrist pain today i shouldn't be typing this, but i had to write this little note to say that i've been accepted as a member of trunkt! as you can see from the images above, i'm in some pretty amazingly talented company. if you sign up as a reader at trunkt.org, and create a wishlist before november 15th you might be the winner of a shiny shiny $500 trunkt shopping spree, so go do that!

but back to my wrists, the weird thing is that the left one hurts more than the right (the mouser). any suggestions other than ibuprofen? i know you're supposed to stretch and strengthen, blah blah blah, but that's easier said than done when stretching and strengthening only aggravate the problem further! oh well. i will just drink tea and wait the pain away.

i read the news today, oh boy

2007-11-07T10:34:00.000-08:00

toys that won't send your children to hospital:
1. squirrel pull toy by matsutaki / 2. elephant by tiny warbler / 3. peony le oobee by one girl
4. choco bunny by girl savage / 5. polly by hop skip jump / 6. felt play food by katie made goods
7. kokeshi doll by run amok / 8. alba the bunny by squirrel of snooze / 9. perry the penguin by cynic the lamb

i leave CBC newsworld on in the background while i work, and the headlines today have been fantastic. first off, that tetrapod girl survived having her parasitic vestigial twin limbs removed after a surgery that took a full day less than anticipated. when i'd first heard about the story i couldn't imagine putting my child through a 48 hour surgery that had a 75% chance of mortality. can you imagine being born with 8 limbs in india of all places? her neighbouring villagers actually believed she was the reincarnated deity of wealth, but strangely were still hoping to sell her to the circus. hopefully this little girl will have a chance at a normal life now. isn't it amazing what modern medicine is capable of?

next up, the canadian dollar hit $1.10 USD today. that's nuts! should i believe the projections that it will go as high as $1.25 and get my paypal money out while i can, or should i leave it in hock until it eventually comes back down? i might have to wait until bush leaves the white house for that to happen. what a drag!

but the real story that blew me away is just one more compelling reason to buy handmade this christmas. i didn't think it would be possible to trump leaded paint in toys, but china managed to do it! aqua dots (or bindeez in australia) have been pulled off the market after being found to contain GHB. that's right, china is trying to date rape the children of the world. so this holiday season, buy handmade, because when you buy from a crafter you get linen and merino, not heavy metals and hallucinogens.

the holiday craft disaster that is soon to be my living room

2007-11-06T16:45:00.001-08:00

lily the pug, originally uploaded by squirrel_of_snooze.

i finished my first custom order this morning, and i think it might be the best thing i've done! when i was asked if i'd be able to do a pug, i knew what i wanted it to look like but wasn't sure that i'd be able to make it exactly how i was imagining it. i picked out some very puggy colours in very soft merino wool, and it turned out even better than i'd hoped! i think there are more pugs and bostons and frenchies in my future...

the next few weeks are going to be busy! yesterday morning i signed up for the holiday ornament swap organized by freshly blended and cake and pie. i just missed the sign up last year and have been looking forward to this ever since seeing the beautiful, amazing, and original decorations everyone made. i rarely get things in the mail so this is something i'm really excited about! take a look at some of the ornaments made for last years swap and you'll see why. now i just need to figure out what i should make...

from top left:
1. liquid paper - home sweet home / 2. emikw - felt ornaments / 3. gasup the zamboni - swaptopus
4. emiee - a pack of monkeys / 5. creative kismet - little birds / 6. fluff life - robin nests / 7. sara - hannah the hen
8. lula louise - hanging strawberry ornament / 9. chat du rouge - pinkville / 10. yukimo - crochet bobbles
11. sarah van wijck - trees / 12. jenn knits a lot - penguins

i also finally pledged to buy (or make) handmade this christmas at buyhandmade.org. it was something i'd been meaning to do the past couple of weeks, but i just have a problem filling out forms and coming up with quotes. what was i supposed to say? "i can't wait!" or "this year it's all handmade for me!" attempts at witty quotes aside, i am looking forward to it, though this means poor hans will have to live with a messy apartment the next few weeks with yarn and batting and god knows what else all over the place. now that i've made it sound so great, would you care to join me? or perhaps you'd like avoid the mess and work in favour of buying something of the crochet persuasion?

LED christmas lights don't have soul

2007-10-28T14:15:00.000-07:00

garlands and bobbles, originally uploaded by squirrel_of_snooze.

now that the holiday season is almost upon us, i've noticed a few blogs posting about how important it is to use LED christmas lights this year. before i dive into everything wrong with the LED christmas light, i should first point out that i consider myself a pretty environmentally aware person. i studied conservation in university, and when i was 6, during a family outing to a christmas tree farm, i yelled at a little boy for throwing his styrofoam cup into the wiener roasting fire because it was going to "release CFCs into the atmosphere and destroy the ozone layer." i was precocious. so even though in vancouver we're blessed with a seemingly never ending source of relatively clean(ish) energy in the form of hydroelectricity, i still know that it's important to cut down on energy consumption. i don't leave things pluggled in, i live in the dark, etc... but christmas lights... i just can't go there!

the trouble with LED christmas lights is that they have no soul. unless you want to go super old-world, and risk burning your house down with candles, only tungsten lights twinkle. i don't know about you but i don't see the point of putting lights on my tree if they're going to look dead and cold. LED manufacturers try to cute them up with cheesy snowflake or icicle "festive" shapes or ice-like detailing, but they still look like the holiday lights from a brave new world.

LED lights might get programmed to flicker in the vain attempt to mimic a twinkle, but all that programming is tacky, and so very '80s suburbia in a bad way. in a tasteful world, these lights would be left to teenagers decorating their family rec rooms for their days of drug experimentation and all-weekend video game tournaments.

1. oversized, dull, and blahhhh
2. decorations for a holiday rave
3. soulless and cold

i understand that LED lights cut back on energy bills by 90%, and it's pretty amazing just how significant that is really. it's one of those things you can easily do to affect actual change and i'm sure these things make al and leo all warm and fuzzy inside. the problem is that they look like crap. so this year i will decorate my tree with tungsten lights, but only turn them on 10% of the time. will that concession get me any green karma this holiday season?

woah is me

2007-10-25T18:09:00.000-07:00

i have a recurring nightmare about losing all my teeth. they just get wobbly and loose and start falling out and i try to put them back into place but keep losing them, and no matter how tightly i try to keep my mouth shut, i can't keep them from falling out because since they're all wobbly, i can't actually bite down properly. i actually wake up in a cold sweat whenever i have this dream. i had a lot of orthodontic work done as a child. head gear, neck gear, you name it i had it. people say that this is a dream about losing control of your life, but i assure you that in my case it's all about losing my teeth.

a couple of weeks ago i noticed (after one of my tooth dreams) that my bite was a little off. because this was right after one of my tooth dreams i dismissed it. then a couple of days ago i decided to actually take a look, and i noticed that one of my 2 fillings was missing. the fact that i'm almost 29 and only have 2 fillings is something i'm strangely proud of. today i went in to have it replaced, and they found 2 more cavities. it was a bad start to the day. they even told me i could stand to floss better. did you know that daily flossing is not enough? you need to floss until it squeaks, or you're failing your mouth.

my dentist is just down the street from ikea so after the appointment as a pick me up i went to buy candles and things. as i pulled out of the parking lot i got a call from hans letting me know our hot water heater had burst. i got home to discover that all of our winter jackets and extra bedding (pillows and duvets included) were sopping wet. we won't have hot water until tomorrow sometime in the late afternoon. maybe while the plumber is here i'll go to visit the dry cleaner.

that was my day. now that it's gone 6 i think that i can pour myself a glass of red wine without feeling guilty for using alcohol as an unhealthy coping mechanism. tea can only get you so far. cheers!

colour quiz via how about orange

2007-10-24T09:20:00.000-07:00

going through my bloglines this morning i came across the colour quiz jessica wrote about on how about orange. this is one of those "check the adjectives that best describe you" quizzes that you probably took in high school, but instead of telling you what you should grow up to be, this one gives you an HTML hex code. that's my kind of test! god i'm a geek... anyway, i'm cadet blue. i always thought this colour was teal, but apparently i was wrong. jessica got pale turquoise and at least the first paragraph about her colour and mine are exactly the same. in any case, i've definitely used this colour in my work before, and i'm pretty sure i'm bound to again. here's what the quiz says about me:

Your dominant hues are green and blue. You're smart and you know it, and want to use your power to help people and relate to others. Even though you tend to battle with yourself, you solve other people's conflicts well.

Your saturation level is lower than average - You don't stress out over things and don't understand people who do. Finishing projects may sometimes be a challenge, but you schedule time as you see fit and the important things all happen in the end, even if not everyone sees your grand master plan.

Your outlook on life can be bright or dark, depending on the situation. You are flexible and see things objectively.

fountains, gowns and ships are here...

2007-10-20T16:58:00.000-07:00

i sold my first kitten through my etsy shop last week. yay! thank you carrie for ordering clover and i hope you've found a good spot for her in your home! my first sale gave me a good excuse to make another little kitten to fill the spot on my shelf left empty once i sent clover packing. this is francesca and she's a leggy kitten, standing a good inch taller than the others i've made. she's super soft, and i'm really enjoying working with these muted colours. i think it's because it's so grey outside these days that all i want is soup and a crochet hook.

special needs - "francesca"

over the summer i oooooh-ed and ahhhhh-ed over abigail glassenberg's softies. while her two daughters are napping she makes the most amazing creatures. she makes toys and works of art in those 2 hours a day she has to herself, and they are all so whimsical and original and inspiring. i have posted a bunch about birds lately, and here i go again.

abigail has a few pieces available through her etsy shop right now, and is preparing a number of others for some upcoming shows. you can see them all by visiting her flickr page, and you can read all about them by visiting her blog, while she naps.

this past year everyone has gone to the birds. almost 2 years ago now i started work on album art for a boompa artist named lullaby baxter. she did a really cool photo shoot with taxidermy birds -- whiskyjacks to be exact, which are among my top 5 favourite birds, so i was understandably anxious to get to work on them. i begged, pleaded, connived, argued and prayed to use a certain bird photo for the cover, but lullaby was not having it. there was no way she was going to let me put this bird on the cover. she wanted it to be text only. then why taunt me with such a great photo? i lost the battle. a chronic personality flaw of mine means that i still think i am right, an affliction compounded by how prevalent birds have been ever since that album came out. here are the 2 covers, and regardless of getting my way or not, it's still a beautiful record so here's a song you might like, too. and if you do like it you can visit lullabybaxter.com to stream the entire album.

lullaby baxter - "rattled little clam" from garden cities of to-morrow

august again

2007-10-14T15:54:00.000-07:00

i've always liked the name august. i imagine an august would be steady, thoughtful, contemplative and kind. when i finished this bunny and thought to myself "and what will i name you?" his sleepy face, and muted colours said "august." and so here is august the bunny, a very soft rabbit made with wool, mohair, alpaca, and linen blends. i've just added him to my etsy shop. i love this colour combination so much i'm going to get started on a grey kitten right now.

last night hans and i went to a party at his mother's house. it was a great excuse for me to splurge on a new black dress. i found the most perfect silk cacharel cocktail dress, and i would wear it every day if i could. there's something to be said about clothing so beautifully made, of such gorgeous fabrics. i'm not sure what specifically that something is, but it sure looks and feels good! i am in the middle of a lazy and sleepy sunday, which is just as well because it's cold out and my throat is sore from talking over music last night. i'm not complaining because it's the perfect excuse to make soup, and cozy up on the sofa with this kitten that needs to be made.

thanksgiving

2007-10-09T14:57:00.000-07:00

i spent the past couple of weeks dreading thanksgiving. i just find the whole ordeal so daunting and stressful, and i always go into these things thinking i'm going to hate every moment. thankfully, that wasn't the case at all this year. while i did stay up way too late sunday night working on a way too time consuming but delicious sour cream pumpkin pie (my first attempt at the crust went horribly wrong) that could have been an ominous preview of things to come, yesterday's dinner came together almost without a hitch.

the day started with draining the apple cider brine off the turkey (free range, organic, non medicated, and hopefully happy until the bitter end) and giving it a good wash and dry, while i made the stuffing and hans' mother made the cranberry sauce. once the turkey was done we prepared all the vegetables so that as soon as the turkey came out of the oven, they'd be ready to go in. we roasted brussel's sprouts, yellow and red carrots, baby potatoes, and golden and chiogia beets. and while people took turns carving and sampling the turkey, hans' mom made a delicious gravy with chanterelle mushrooms, and i sautéed green beans with butter and slivered almonds and kept my eye on the roasting veggies.

everything went really smoothly, with the exception of the turkey taking about 2 hours longer than we'd anticipated. good thing we stuck the thermometer in the other thigh, or we'd have all been in trouble! there was a 20 degree difference between sides, and the bird looked dry as king tut. i panicked a little inside, but tried to play it cool. a couple of hours later, the other side was done and thankfully it turned out to be the perfect, juicy, tender turkey thanks to the cider brining. i don't think it's possible to make a bad turkey if you brine it. brine brine brine. if i ever wanted to become an ordained minister so i could officiate a wedding, i'd be the leader of the holy church of cider brining.

by the time i went to sleep last night i felt pretty ill, and i woke up with a cold. blah. today i'm working in my pajamas and making turkey soup. holidays can be draining, even when they turn out better than you could have hoped.

drug buddy

2007-10-05T13:07:00.000-07:00

when tucson-based artist sasha lewis isn't busy watching old nsync performances on youtube, she's working on finishing her BFA. sasha's illustrations are generally kept under wraps, but i harass her daily in hopes that she might put a few of her prints up on etsy. she's been working on a series of animals doing drugs (heroin hyena, binging bull, rhino on a rodeo) and there's something so obviously absurd about these images, that you can't help but wonder why humans do it.

on the lighter side, she's also working on another series that will eventually become an illustrated book about a llama meeting other animal friends.

and since sasha and i both love juliana hatfield, here are a few of her drug-related songs:

evan dando and julianna hatfield - "my drug buddy" live at kcrw

juliana hatfield - "choose drugs" from beautiful creature

blake babies - "brain damage" from god bless the blake babies

{ it turns out that i chose one of sasha's favourite nsync bootlegs, and she told me that her favourite thing (other than just the idea of nsync bootlegs) is the dance move at the 25 second mark. how can you choose just one move? i think the best part is their not so spontaneous scripted stage banter. }

spilt milk and sparrows

2007-10-04T13:28:00.000-07:00

over the summer my friend natalie, along with her neighbour lindsay, came up with the idea of making baby clothes they'd wear themselves if they were only big enough. under the name spilt milk, they silkscreen limited edition tees, tanks, and onesies, and sew and hand paint beautiful dresses using eco friendly fabrics. i love the twee little sparrow image on the tee above, and i also love their little pinafores which you can find through their etsy shop.

while on the subject of twee little sparrows, here are some bird-related songs, and an assortment of feathered etsy buys...

1. betsey walton / 2. nancy's view / 3. ashley g / 4. paper love / 5. geninne
6. cindy jaswal / 7. onegirl / 8. restless things / 9. fern animals
10. oh my cavalier / 11. littlest flower / 12. my folk lover

sparrow - "the quiet revelation" from the new pastoral

the boo radleys - "sparrow" from everything's alright forever

architecture in helsinki - "the owls go" from fingers crossed

the hylozoists - "red bird wishes" from la nouvelle gauche

josé gonzález - "sensing owls" from stay in the shade

blushing bride

2007-10-02T14:53:00.001-07:00

last week i posted a photo of a flower called blushing bride that i'd stumbled across on gracia louise's blog. i had never seen it before, loved it immediately, and had a pretty hard time getting the results i was after by googling "blushing bride" and "flower".

i didn't check back at gracia's blog to see that she'd posted some info about the flowers. we turned up the same stuff:

blushing bride is serruria florida, from the protea family.

the common name for the genus serruria is spiderhead

there are over 50 species native to south africa

they grow as small evergreen shrubs in dry, nutrient poor soil

they make great potted plants, and even better cut flowers -- they last 7-10 days, and dry well.

housemartin told me that the blushing brides she'd seen are a lot more pale and less pink than the ones gracia louise posted. turns out that gracia's are actually a variety called sugar and spice, and i think they're the prettiest.

i found nurseries that carry them in england, and australia, but no luck for canada so far...

peonies

2007-10-02T11:17:00.000-07:00

garden rooms just posted about how to make peony scented linen spray, and it made me dig up this photo, and wonder "what is this peony?" peonies are one of my top 3 favourite flowers, and this is the best time of year to plant them. and in case you were wondering, tulips and freesias. last may, while in germany visiting hans' family, a guest brought over the most beautiful peonies i'd ever seen. this photo doesn't do them justice at all. they were luminous, and delicate, and looked like a sunset.

since peonies are my mum's favourite too, one of these would be such a nice gift, so i did some digging and it looks like coral sunset. americans can buy them here, and canadians can buy them from this quebec-based nursery. peonies make me wish to someday have a huge, deer-free garden.

wanted (lost found canadian)

2007-10-02T09:49:00.001-07:00

trying to find things to write about that others might find interesting on a daily basis is new to me, and a little daunting, not to mention hard to get into the habit of! so this is a photo i took not too long ago. there's my alyson fox drawing, and a jill bliss gocco print, and the little pot is a thrifted find (one of 2) i got for 25 cents, and i got the little plant from great shop in chinatown. it's called wanted (lost found canadian), and i think the owners are real pioneers. they opened shop in about as bad a vancouver location as they could possibly find -- tucked down a side street, one shop in from an alley where junkies shoot up without any effort to conceal their illegal activities, and a half block from the bottle depot, where bottle pickers and bike thieves congregate. that's my neighbourhood, and as depressing as it can often be, it's neighbours like the plant shop owners who make me love it here.

their shop is beautiful, and they carry some pretty unique house plants including fiddlehead figs. i need a bigger home before i can buy one of those. i have to limit my visits there as it is because i already have too many plants. i am going to have to donate some to charity - you can actually do that! the cool thing about these shop owners is that they've really become part of the neighbourhood. their clientèle ranges from people such as myself, to nice old ladies from chinatown, to tenants of single room occupancy hotels. and the bottle pickers will bring them treasures like vintage sleighs, and ploughs and all sorts of weird things you wouldn't expect to find in downtown back alley dumpsters. one of the owners (susan) makes super cute pointy kitties, and other softies, and beautiful pillows made out of recycled wool blankets. it's a great store, so if you're in vancouver and find yourself in chinatown, turn north on columbia off pender and you'll find one of the best shops in town!

pinch punch, first of the month

2007-10-01T14:12:00.000-07:00

the beautiful new design sponge is online today. seriously, the new design sponge is beautiful, and grace seems to be updating it hourly! she launched the new site by offering a tour of her brooklyn home, and i am completely in love with that weinrib rug. coupled with the john robshaw quilt? i am so jealous...

and... poppytalk handmade is also online today! jan is acting as the curator of this virtual flea market / craft sale, where each vendor pays for a "booth" where their work is profiled, and then the visitors can buy directly from each artist, designer, or seller of vintage things. it should definitely help to promote their wares, and it's a great business for jan to have started up. in fact, i'm kicking myself for not thinking up that idea myself!! there are really some beautiful things featured, so you should check it out. i love the print featured here by olivia jeffries. you can read her blog sweet as a loon, or just go straight to her etsy shop, restless things. are loons sweet?

thrifted finds

2007-09-25T19:07:00.000-07:00

i had such a busy weekend that i didn't get a chance to do much thrifting, and if you noticed the photo of my very sad, stark, and empty white hutch in the post below, you'll understand why this is a priority. so when i had a bit of an afternoon lull yesterday, i snuck out to the two closest charity shops. i didn't find anything for my bare cabinet, but i did find the balls of yarn pictured above. there are two alpaca-mohair blends, and I think the camel brown yarn is linen with some alpaca. they're so soft and they coordinate so well together that i started another little rabbit. you can see its head and ears and the beginning of its body above.

despite the busy weekend, i did manage to make it to the 21st century flea market on sunday. it was so cram packed full of people (and random collectibles) that i couldn't really pull my camera out without either getting trampled or shoved. there were loads of knick-knacky collectible sort of things i suppose i could have bought, but the prices just weren't great. i like a good deal, and there just weren't many to be found. i did find a really cool, old boomerang for hans though. he's scared to use it because this one looks like it's killed a few kangaroos in its time, and he's already almost scalped one person this year with his little kids boomerang. i didn't want to leave without a little something for myself, so i picked up a small paperweight for $4. i'm sure i can find some loose paper to stack on my desk, so it will be put to use even if only decoratively.

ceci n'est pas une souris

2007-09-21T14:13:00.000-07:00

i just finished another dachshund, and have added her to my etsy shop if you're interested. her name is mouse and for a little grey dachshund, she looks an awful lot like my black whippet-mix, bowie. bowie looks just like a fruit bat when her ears pop up greyhound-style.

i was reading gracia louise's blog the other day and found a polaroid she'd posted of a strange, but beautiful flower called blushing brides. i had never seen them, or heard of them before, and i'm sure you can imagine that googling "blushing bride" and "flowers" did not yield the results i was hoping for. does anyone have any idea if they're known by another name? i'm usually really good with knowing my plants, but this one has me stumped. i might have to go hunting for them this weekend.

i've been working from home all summer, and while mostly everything about it is great, i've been suffering a bit from cabin fever lately. so yesterday morning i had a meeting with a client at the local coffee shop. i was pretty happy to be out of the house, and got there a little early - just in time to witness a huge fist fight! it was actually more of a clumsy cat fight between 2 slurring drunks. i think that being staggeringly drunk by 9am shows a great deal of commitment. or something... tables were knocked over, faces were scratched, and i retreated into the kitchen to stay out of the way, until finally one guy agreed to give the other guy back the $5 he'd stolen. i didn't think it was possible, but it looks like gastown is taking a turn for the worse(r).

fly away peter, fly away paul

2007-09-19T18:45:00.000-07:00

i am just finishing up another little dachshund, and will post photos tomorrow. i plan to finish this one while watching the first episode of america's next top model, cycle 18. it's very exciting and something that will be made all the more enjoyable by a nice glass of red wine. since each of of these little creatures take so long to make, it's always exciting when they're done. that said, sometimes i wish that i could just whip one off really quickly as inspiration strikes.

i've seen ashley's little fern animals featured on decor8 before, but today's post was a nice reminder, especially since she has an etsy shop up and running now. you should definitely go check out her creations, which include funny little lions with crazy manes, and like so many other crafters this year, she has made some very sweet wire legged birdies. pictured above are fern animals, little birds, and ann wood.

i just looked at my ical and realized that the 21st century flea market is this sunday! i honestly didn't even know about it until a few months ago when i was looking at the flea market links over at sfgirlbybay, and i have been waiting for this weekend ever since. the timing couldn't be better, as evidenced by my very bare buffet and hutch pictured in the post below.

make work projects

2007-09-18T12:34:00.000-07:00

poppy posted about an ironing board that got powdercoated a shiny new red finish. my first reaction was "oh my god, i wish i had a band that i played keys for so i could use that as a stand." and my second reaction was to look around the loft to try to find something i could powdercoat. sadly, i don't have a thing. but we've recently inherited a secretary desk that i think needs an airy and light wire or metal share, or maybe brightly painted bentwood number, and after seeing the pretty red ironing board i'm thinking metal.

we also recently inherited the white lacquered cabinet in the photo on the left. it was my boyfriend's mother's and i think she bought it back in the late '60s. the trouble with the cabinet is two-fold... 1. i don't yet have enough to fill it so it looks rather bare. this isn't really a problem because it gives me a pretty good excuse to shop. 2. all of our dishes are white, and almost all of our glasses are, well... glass, and so it looks pretty severe and uninspired. i'm debating papering or canvasing the back in a bright colour like the gorgeous teal shown in the cabinet on the right that was featured over at design sponge. i'm not sure what to do... thoughts?

a couple of months ago i was visiting with my mum on vancouver island, and we ran into the local thrift shop where i spotted this mirror and wanted it immediately. that said, they wanted $40 for it, and i am never willing to buy something unless it's a good deal, and i just didn't think that was a deal. a month later it still hadn't sold so the shop dropped the price to $8 and my mum scooped it up for me! i love the embroidery, but the frame itself is just hideous. so what do you think -- shall i paint it a dark burnt orange pulled from the embroidery thread colours, or should it be black? i'd do super dark chocolate brown, but brown and orange are way too A&W root bear for my liking. i'm not so sure straight up black is the best way to go, but maybe i'm wrong. what do i do?

do you know one girl?

2007-09-17T13:59:00.001-07:00

leslie keating and her creations have been a huge inspiration for me. under the name one girl she combines colours beautifully, using all natural materials and mostly vintage finds, to create some of the sweetest toys i've ever seen. i love this new windsee named phoebe she just posted in her etsy shop the other day. the colours and corduroy remind me of back to school clothing so much they make me want to bust out a pair of knee socks!

i read leslie's beautiful blog regularly, and today she was sweet enough to feature my work! leslie has been so supportive and helpful and i can't say how much i appreciate it. i only wish we'd known each other when she was living in vancouver!

a long story, long

2007-09-16T16:38:00.000-07:00

when i was a little girl my maternal grandmother tried to teach me to knit by giving me her scraps to knit squares from. knitting squares is not so fun for a 7 year old, and i decided that knitting was tedious and added it to the list of reasons for hating visits to grandma's. that said, the thing that i learned from visits with my grandparents is how to make things. this grandma married a wonderful man who came from kenya, by way of kashmir. he grew up fairly poor and any toys he and his siblings played with, they'd learned to make themselves. he once bought me an old, red and chrome, non-functioning tape recorder at a garage sale for 10 cents, and fixed it in under a minute. so i believed him when he told me he knew how to make a helicopter from a tin can that would actually fly. now that he's not around any longer i wish that i'd asked him to teach me how to make one of those helicopters! i also wish that i'd let my grandma teach me how to knit more than squares, because to this day my knitting repertoire begins and ends with the scarf.

on my dad's side of the family i have around 33 cousins. i think... you get to lose track after 20! you'd think that with all these grandchildren running around my grandparents would have had some toys kicking about to keep us busy, but they didn't. nevertheless, the house was always full of noisy, but happy kids and that's where i learned to pluck out songs on the piano, play ping pong and darts, and how to make crepe paper flowers, but most importantly how to sew. my grandma had a closet full of scrap fabric and jars of buttons and other things that she'd collected from decades of mending the jackets and darning the socks of her 9 children. this is where i learned how to make sock puppets, and how to sew rag dolls from the old burp cloths left behind by my many, many baby cousins. this is also the house where my uncles would cleverly get me to wrap all their christmas and birthday gifts. gift wrapping appealed to the obsessive compulsiveness that was starting to take shape in my 8 year old soul.

my dad died when i was 8, but before he did he taught me how to draw. all the rainy weekends when he'd stay at home with me and my brothers while my mum worked, he taught me how to use shapes to make people and animals. drawing, gardening, and a love of this old house, star trek, aquariums, and the smell of lumberyards are all things i have my father to thank for. it's amazing how much he was able to influence me in the few short years we had together!

so, fast forward 2 decades later... when i finally decided i could no longer watch bad television without feeling the guilt that i'd also learned from that gigantic catholic paternal side of the family, i decided that rather than cancel my cable subscription i would do something while watching TV. i tried doing jumping jacks, but you can't do those through an entire hour of america's next top model without developing serious charlie horses in both calves. you just can't do it! so inspired by the intense guilt i felt as a result of watching ANTM, i decided to teach myself to crochet so i could start making things like my grandmothers taught me, but in a new way.

and that dear reader, is the long story behind my new etsy shop.

blueberry banana bread and the riley park farm market

2007-08-22T18:11:00.001-07:00

today i went to the riley park farm market at main and 30th. i'd been to the trout lake farm market off a few times and it felt like i'd been transported to europe. the trout lake market is smaller than the average european ones, and sadly this means that it boasts much less in the way of cheese. despite the cheese deficiency, i love the trout lake market and it's something i look forward to each week.

i didn't make it out there this weekend because of our blueberry mission in the valley, so i decided to take a half-day from work and head up main street today instead. while blueberries are on the mind... the town i grew up in was either literally, or very near close to the blueberry capital of canada, if not the world. since moving to vancouver 10 years ago i haven't been able to stomach the insane cost of my very favourite fruit. i have not once in a decade bought blueberries without making the trek to the valley. blueberries in the city cost 4 times as much as if you just drive a half-hour into the suburbs.

back to the market... i got a 3 pound mix of every kind and colour and stripe of tomato i could find, some fennel, arugula, a medley of beans, beets, summer squash, zucchini, and gigantic similkameen peaches. i've never actually made anything with fennel before, so that will be interesting. i got halibut cheeks too, and i've never tried those. i don't know what to do with any of it so i decided to work my way through the 8 lbs of berries that remain in my fridge. i froze a ton and then made a blueberry banana bread adapted from this recipe i found through orangette. i've use this as a base quickbread recipe all the time, but i always use spelt flour and add ground flax and rolled oats to mine, and cut the sugar by 1/3. this time instead of adding chocolate chips, i added a cup of blueberries.

know your pear

2005-09-24T16:29:00.000-07:00

we used to have loose themes in the boompa office, like "pirate" and "beer".

on wednesday i stopped by t&t, the asian supermarket, on my way home from work. we were out of fruit and last week was all about apples for me (with peanut butter), so i was trying to find something different. i discovered that that one produce department had about 6 varieties of pears! yes, i was legitimately excited about the pears. they're pretty, smell nice and come in a variety of shapes and sizes. that said, i've never really been much of a pear fan, but i decided that i should become one so i bought almost $20 worth. i decided that i'd get to know my pears and i'd get the boompa office and my boyfriend in on it.

the following day i had a bosc with breakfast. it was lovely, but i had had boscs before. it was perfectly ripe, not overripe and mushy at all and it tasted like a real pear but had that coarse skin i hate in pears. a bosc is a bosc... not horribly interesting but always good, especially poached, or sometimes with blue cheese. hans and i agreed it was very good.

i brought four other pears with me to the boompa den: sun moon and shinseiki (both japanese) and then yali and golden from china. i ran the idea of "know your pear" by rob and david, our new intern. david, being new, was really interested and talked about t&t and how it's a great place to bring dates because you can eat, watch the fish swimming in tanks, etc.

back to the pears, the sun moon and shinseiko pears are both japanese and are therefore "nashi", (nashi being "pear" japanese), whereas the bartlett or bosc, being english are known as yonashi. awesome, right?

so we tried the sun moon first. this pear was crunchier than your average apple, even a granny smith, but it wasn't at all gritty. it was as juicy as a peach and had a light flowery pear flavour. the skin wasn't terribly tough, as can often be the case, and it was a really beautiful dappled rosy brown colour. pretty, juicy and crunchy - david, rob and i agreed the shinseiko is a very good pear.

we had to leave the office early because it was car free day and sparrow and catlow were playing a huge outdoor stage down the street so we had to cut the pear thing short. i told shannon about it on the way to the show and she didn't get it. i said "you know, like know your onion?" and she said "oh, like spanish, walla walla, red, white, yellow, sweet..." to which i replied "no, like the shins ep."

the next morning (friday) i cut up a yali pear and the chinese golden to have with breakfast. i could tell right away when i cut into the yali that it was going to be trouble. this pear was tough, dry and gritty. it actually looked like it was made up of tiny glistening grains of white sand aggregated together. on top of the texture issue, the yali pear was, thick-skinned and honestly pretty flavourless. according to my research the yali was supposed to be more aromatic and sweet than japanese pears but i found this wasn't the case at all. apparently asian pears don't rippen once they've been picked so i guess it's possible that the yali is really a great pear that was picked to soon. i may never know... the dog wouldn't even eat it. the golden pear looked really nice with it's fine, white skin, but tasted like peas. no offense to china, but my faith in the selective breeding techniques of their horticulture experts over the ages isn't great. these were some bad pears that looks nice.

friday afternoons at the boompa office are really more about building office moral than work. companies on the east coast stop calling at about 2pm our time and we are left to our own devices. so we drink. jen fritz came with beer, patrick breeley came with his whit, and torq campbell came with his snazzy purple velvet jacket. our other intern rachel was there along with david, rob, shannon and scott, and anyone who's been to the boompa office will appreciate that 9 people in that tiny room would make work impossible. so i told patrick all about "know your pear" while sitting on a stack of my project: blue posters, as there were no chairs left in the office. patrick liked it. i told him about how the golden pear tastes like peas and he was down. he agreed that the golden pear tastes like peas and added that the flavour gets stronger as you get closer to the centre. scott was really excited about "know your pear" because he had packed an bartlett with his lunch. the bartlett is the most popular pear around the world. if you've ever bought a can of pears they were probably bartlett. scott's was overripe and dripped all over the place but he said it was excellent, and his favourite variety of pear.

so i've gotten to know my pears and i still don't like them as much as apples. my favourite is the homely looking bosc, followed by the shinseiko. my least favourite was the yali. i like peas, but don't like my fruit to taste like them so i'd never buy the chinese golden again no matter how pretty it is.

i still haven't tried a slough of asian pears and i haven't had butter, comice, forelle, red, packam or seckle. i have a d'anjou waiting for me though so i will leave this rivetting blog entry at that.

ps. "pirate" and "beer" are still alive and well.

spaghetti squash

2005-08-23T16:31:00.000-07:00

i made spaghetti squash for the first time tonight. it was delicious and i ate a ton of it and now i feel a little squashed-out. everything tastes so squashy...

you know those words that you say or type and then sit and think about for a while because they just seem really wrong? squash is one of them. what an odd word.

scott does this thing in the office where he will say a random word and then i'll tell a story about it and i know that it's one of the things he does to make fun of me, and me knowing that is all part of the joke, but i really love it because i'm a huge fan of stream of consciousness and self-deprecation. hence that run-on sentence. anyway, now i have a story about squash to go with my story about cantaloup. seriously, ask me about cantaloup sometime.