tea party daydreams

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.

more homemade for the holidays

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.

arctic front meet pineapple express

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.

fiep westendorp

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.

drug buddy

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. }

wanted (lost found canadian)

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

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?