a little story and a new blog

i accidentally stole my bathrobe from a japanese hotel in 2007. i know what you're thinking, "sure it was an accident, you're not fooling us." but really it was. they kept folding it up all perfectly at the foot of my bed and as i was trying to stuff fold carefully all the crap totally necessary items of clothing i bought in the gap into my suitcase, i accidentally scooped up the neatly folded bathrobe as well. i didn't even realize i had it 'til weeks later when i properly unpacked my suitcase at home. it's very simple and plain and really not me, but i love it anyway. it's made of this waffley-woven creamy cotton with a simple brown binding. it wears like iron and despite numerous washings, still has perfect creases down the sleeves, tho' i've never touched an iron to it. those japanese, they know what they're doing.

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i'd like to announce a new project. you can take a peek at it right here. 

my partner on forage: east and west  is amy. we worked together years ago at a newspaper. it was my part-time college job and she was the editorial editor. we had a lot of great times back then, but we lost touch over the years, but thanks to that old frenemy facebook, we got back in touch over the past year. we realized we had even more in common than ever and decided to start a blog together (you should know by now that's my answer to everything). amy lives in colorado and in addition to being a writer is also a chef, so you can expect lots of good recipes on the new blog. we're going to compare what's in season here and there, share recipes and inspiration and hopefully have a whole lot of guest posts/interviews with foragers more experienced than we are. i hope you'll stop by and check it out.

the soujournal project

ever since the fabulous stacey childs of disco underworld fame wrote "writing is the new praying," to me in an email, i began to spread it through the blogosphere like a sort of life philosophy. the phrase, which resonates with so many of us, seemed to be begging to have a project attached to it. and somehow, behind the scenes (in this case, via email) - which is where so much of the good stuff goes on - an idea was born. it was inspired a little bit by the 1000 journals project, somewhat by this,  a titch by a project at the brooklyn library, but mostly it was inspired by the notion that writing is the new praying. we got together with B from cuttings on a blog and the soujournal project was born.

the idea is this. we would each start a journal - written/art/whatever - and then exchange them amongst ourselves and continue writing/working in them - sending them off once a month. it is wide open what we want to write and how we want to approach it. eventually, the plan is to open it up and people can "apply" to receive one of the journals and be part of it. in so doing, they'll start a new one and put it into circulation with the group. it was a given that there would be a blog where we would share all of this.

originally, it was to be just the three of us. but the strangest thing happened to me as i was working on mine during the week between christmas and new year's. it kept popping into my head that i should pass mine on to polly. i tried to shake the thought, but it kept coming back, so we decided we had to loop polly into the initial phase of the project. you just can't ignore a feeling that strong, so i'm certain that there's some reason that polly needs to be the one i pass my journal along to. thankfully, when she came to blog camp a couple of weeks ago, she agreed and didn't (at least outwardly) find it too strange that i had this strong feeling about this.

we have all made our initial pages and are at the stage of sending our journals to the others. we have created the soujournal blog and we'll be sharing our pages and our thoughts over there. we have lots of plans for this, but we will reveal those as the journey unfolds. i hope you'll check in and see what we're up to. here's my first page as a teaser. it's also up over on soujournal.

weekend creativity

it has been a wonderful weekend of nonstop togetherness and creativity with sabin. we had signed up weeks ago to attend the stitch café at our local yarn shop so that sabin could learn how to knit using a knitting loom. and learn she did. she finished two beautiful scarves and has started on a third. so if you're related to us, you can guess what you'll be getting for christmas this year. and it won't be one of those presents that you wear for show when you know the child is going to be present. we bought gorgeous mohair yarn in jewel tones and it has been transformed into soft, luxurious, beautiful scarves by a child consumed by a new craft.

while sabin took breaks from her knitting loom work, we made invitations for her upcoming halloween party. we clipped and glued and stamped and drew spider webs and drank countless cups of sweet, milky tea. did i mention that husband was attending his quarterly port wine evening on saturday and so it was just me and sabin at home together? tho' we love having him around, it was quite wonderful to have time together, just the two of us.

#72 - halloween invitations

we also came up with a new idea for a plushie design (inspired by the fabric i got last week in panduro). i helped sabin cut it out, but she's making it all herself and he's gonna be cute. we couldn't finish because we had run out of stuffing, but here's a preview:

at the yarn shop (very dangerous kind of place for me, despite the fact that i can't knit - i adore yarn anyway and they also have all kinds of embroidery things and quilting stuff), i bought two Drops knitting pattern magazines. tons of beautiful, gorgeous patterns for only 10 kroner (that's under $2). apparently the patterns are available for free online, but it seemed worth it for the pretty photographs.

doesn't it look worth learning to knit or crochet to be able to make such beautiful things? that beautiful sweater on the left above is only a knit stitch and variegated stocking yarn. i could do that. i'm sure i could. so i came home and got out my crochet bible book that i bought in singapore and gave it a whirl once again. of course, with the idea of making a little outfit for a stone. this one of some fine silky gorgeous decidedly mermaidy blueish-green cord.

i didn't get far enough to assign it a number in the year of creativity scale countdown. but i'm going to go to the wednesday evening edition of the stitch café at the local shop and get some hands-on lessons.

and speaking of hands-on lessons, the other activity the weekend was taken up by was sabin's riding lessons. she rides on both saturday and sunday and she's doing brilliantly.  here, she waits her turn to go into the ring, holding onto felix, who is quite a big larger than she is (and i realize she's a bit out of focus, i managed to do that with a lot of horse-photos this weekend - i was playing with my settings a bit in an attempt to learn something. which worked, tho' it meant i got quite a few pictures that weren't as in focus as i may have liked).

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and starting today, my new project together with the divine bee. domestic sensualist. not your run-of-the-mill cooking blog. we hope you'll stop by and check it out, we've got some fun planned this week. and it's already been so inspiring to me that i just ordered three new cookbooks from amazon!

happy monday one and all!