eye candy for you

so, i've been pretty sick for a couple of weeks. very sick for a few days. it's messed with my make something every day goal, which is fine, because i do prioritize rest and self-care and don't want to pressure myself. i've done some doodles and some projects and it's been fun. but since i don't have a lot to show (you don't want to see my ugly doodles, promise!) i wanted to take the opportunity to share a couple of rad graphic treats i've been enjoying lately.

rodney and i were at the pub several weeks ago (which is connected to our favorite bookstore, Kalapuya Books) and i spotted this treasure in the window display. i had to have it! rodney scrawled a note on the back of a bar ticket for hal and betsey (they own the bookstore) imploring them to hold it for him, which, of course, they did. Three bucks and it was mine!

i love this style of kid-book illustration. i love that it is typeset in futura (my favorite typeface right now). and i love that it is pop-up (and that someone lovingly replaced the king's head by scrawling him a new face on the backside of a lunar calendar). the whole thing is awesome.

a while back i shared a link on facebook for this interesting hanging nest seat things. they're designed by DEDON, i believe they call them the restnest or something like that. i just thought they were so awesome. i signed up for their mailing list and promptly forgot all about them.

a couple days ago this amazing catalog arrived. over 300 pages, full color, beautiful heavy-weight matte paper. it's gorgeous. when i am wealthy enough to furnish my outdoor living spaces with their completely rad products, i will be a very happy girl.

i am grateful for:

movies

juice

design

cotton

palladio herbal cosmetics

a taste of the week's creations:

line drawings of art objects. doing these was great. i didn't get wound up with expectations, i just drew. and colored. i have a box of tiles i picked up at bring a couple of years ago and i cut out the drawings and pasted them to the tiles. i like to make coasters with them, modge-podging my images and then coating them with a layer of envirotex (which is a truely awesome product. i also use it for my bottle cap art).

jubal being a monkey in the bathroom. it was a long and busy day and the best i could do was make a memory photograph. i love this photograph because jubal is being jubal and i didn't stop to clean my bathroom counter off before i shot it. it reminds me of an arthur book.

the long road. i'm dealing with a lot of *stuff* right now and i took this photograph as way to honor what's going on. to acknowledge the reality of my life and the extent of my path. it's just a street in a neighborhood but it's my street, in my neighborhood, in my life. and there is beauty in the sky, and in the still-bare tree limbs against it. there is hope and potential, and there is a foundation.

i am grateful for:

art

packaging

my friend martin

sleep

netflix

made today: my logo

making comfort and peace

on the other side is my super-old recipe for pancakes, that sort of explains at least some of the grime. maybe. or i'm just gross.

last night i made comfort food. i've been craving cheese and onion scones like mad for days, so i decided to make them biscuit-style...with mashed potatoes and gravy, meatloaf, and steamed veg. i used my most-favored biscuit recipe, which i'm sharing a picture of because it's still on this grimy index card from way, waaaay back in the day. back when i was just this side of a hippie, living in a 120 square foot yurt with lorin and baby vesta, hauling my own water and making everything from scratch, probably from something we grew ourselves in long, long rows of green, amazing food. i keep thinking i really need to re-do my recipe cards--somewhere back in my brain i'm hatching a plan to put them all into a book using pen-and-ink and inDesign--but i just can't let go of my recipe card, because it reminds me of the old days, when time was slow and all my skin was brown from living and working in the sun all day. no schedules, and the demands on me were those necessitated by the seasons, the land, and my growing baby. ah, to be young and idealistic and off the grid...the biscuits were so good that there weren't any left for me to take for lunch. so i will have to make them again soon. and hide them.

i also made this kickass gravy with beef stock and beer, which had a super delicious, rustic flavor. i was going for a bit of the feel of morning glory cafe's old biscuits and gravy taste.

today i asked vesta to teach me how to make an origami crane. i was feeling exhausted from being sick and from just having so much to do lately. such a schedule and so many demands. no wonder i yearn for even the grimiest reminder of a slower time...anyways, i thought well, i want to make something, and i knew vesta has been teaching art class at her school once a week or so for the last 2 or 3 weeks and i wanted to see how she was at it, and give her some practice for the art class tomorrow, if she wanted it. plus just getting to spend a few minutes with her, uninterrupted. she was pretty good, i must say, and i managed to make this crane. not bad. is it 1,000 or 10,000 for peace? i can't remember. at my house it's just two. mine and hers.

she is so not a baby anymore.

i am grateful for:

paper

beer

sleep

my awesome instructors

weekends

best laid plans

i've been sick for a few days, and unusually tired for several days. but i have managed, in my own way (read: stretching and massaging the definition of "make something") to make something pretty much every day. i might have missed one or two. i have not, however, been very good at photographically documenting my creations...many of them were food related and were eaten before i remembered. a couple of them were just private (read: logo design sketches and/or: ugly). i have for you today a representative photo of the last week-ish (well, 2 photos. anyways). it's my favorite project of late. here's why:

1. i did not think about it. or the time it involved. i just did it.

2. it totally reused stuff that i hoard (magazines, amazon delivery boxes)

3. it took stuff i hoard and made it into stuff to organize other stuff i hoard! rad.

4. jubal did it with me.

5. it used tape, which is an awesome invention.

6. it did not involve moving a lot, or getting in and out of "the zone". i didn't have to move further than 15 feet from where i was to get everything i needed to make it, from start to finish.

7. it has pictures on it.

i wanted something to organize my communication arts magazines, a subscription to which is a gift to myself to support my interest and career path in design. it's not a cheap magazine and i keep them all to reference for information and inspiration. i want them separate from all the other magazines so the kids don't accidentally cut them up, making a VERY EXPENSIVE collage. but. i have a thing against spending money on those fancy magazine holding box thingies that you can get at fancy places that i don't shop. the most money i will devote to organizing or holding the things that i pack-rat is the occasional purchase of a big clear plastic tub or a pine board to erect a shelf.

so i found a box. and i grabbed two national geographics. i was determined to use only 2 and not head back to the magazine stash. i also grabbed some packing tape, a utility knife, and some scissors.

the box was too deep to snugly hold the magazines, so i made a spacer out of the flaps of the box all taped together with some other random cardboard pieces i found. then i cut down the front. and i just found images i liked and taped them on. jubal joined me and he found stuff he liked and i taped that on. he made "books" out of stapled magazine pages for a while and then he wandered off and i just kept cutting and taping. when the box was all covered i put another solid layer of tape on it for sturdiness. THEN i had to leave the zone to find all my communication arts magazines scattered around the house. i didn't find them all, but when i do, i know where to put them.

another cool thing about this project was that before i started it i was checking some musical reference online for a discussion r. and i were having and noticed my e-music amount had re-booted, so i bought some new music and got to listen to it while i worked. my e-music account is almost exclusively for treating myself to stuff i wouldn't necessarily normally buy. it's like a "hey, try this" account. or for splurges on things i've always wanted but never gotten around to buying.

here's the set-list to my magazine box making:

the black keys: the big come up

beck: mutations

breathe owl breathe: the fall album

demons: scarcity rock

the maccabees: colour it in

*i didn't get all of those albums in one day, some of them were still un-listened to much from last month. i also got nina simone: nina simone sings the blues, but didn't listen to it in that session (i did later though and it was deeeeelicious.)

intentions

tuesday after school rodney made dinner and asked if i wanted to go to the pub for a while and play some pool. of course i did. we had fun and even one really good game, where i only had one ball left on the table when he beat me. i've never won, except when he somehow fouls hitting the 8 ball and i win by default, which does not count. i took my camera along to "make" a photograph. it's been a while since i fooled around with the manual settings and i thought i might get some interesting slow shutter speed shots. i'm not in love with them, but it was fun and i did get this nifty image with rodney's ghosty form playing billiards. i didn't notice until i dragged it into photoshop to put the B&W adjustment on it that my sweetheart wrote "megan rulz" on the scoreboard. rad. it was nice to bust out the camera and the tripod and photograph stuff with intention, rather than the ill-lit, tungstony, snap-shots i've been taking of late.

today i did all kinds of making stuff. i spent a good three hours finishing the format job on dad's book. one of those classic "this should take 30 mins tops" kind of scenes, where you're, you know, WRONG about that. it was a breathtaking experience, being responsible for it. he's printing through lulu and needed me to upload it for him for some reason i never understood, so when it came time to deliver the files i was confronted with this page of questions to navigate that seemed so very final and important and BIG. i called him and we sorted it out to the best of our abilities, but i must say, i don't think i would publish a book with them. their website is really hard to navigate if you need information, and their response time is sluggish. i'd much rather be face-to-face with a printer who can answer my questions just then and personally address my needs. regardless of my opinion of lulu, it was a really exciting experience for me. i'm so proud of dad. after i did all the formatting i just kept scrolling through the pages looking at how beautifully it looked like A REAL BOOK!!! and getting all butterfly-ey. we still need to upload the cover art, so i get to go through it all again in a few days. when i answered all the questions and uploaded my file and finally pushed "submit" the result was this little, silent, anticlimactic message.

if i ever run an online printhouse i hereby vow that when you submit your first-ever, beautifully formatted, blood and sweat covered manuscript some rad flash of steve martin playing the banjo at the head of the awesomest marching band EVER will scroll across the screen and george carlin will appear knocking at your door, delivering a celebratory cake.

i also made chili today with all the various chili-appropriate left overs in the fridge ( i think i am becoming famous for this ability to turn any kind of left over into some form of soup product ). i used the chilies from our friends bryan and kym's garden that have been drying in a bunch from the kitchen ceiling, accusing me of neglect. we are just about to eat it and i am so ready.

also, hazel and jubal wanted to make oatmeal raisin cookies and we needed brown sugar, so i made that too. you just drizzle some molasses into a running food processor full of sugar until the color suits you. i'd love to go into a whole thing about how much i love raw sugar over white sugar, and dazzle you with my nutritional and humanitarian rights factoids, but lately all i ever have on hand is white sugar, thanks to my southern-born hubface and his sweet-tea addiction. i just let it go. when i'm a rich and famous yippie designer, i promise to only buy organic fair trade raw sugar that was sustainably harvested and transported on the backs of lovingly tended burros. or something.

and speaking of intentions. smoking. so we had the january 1st inferno of cigarettes and cigarette packaging. and then rodney slipped. so i slipped. then we might have been on again and he slipped again. and then we were back on track and he got sick and was in bed for days and i had to do everything myself from morning til night and i cannot adequately express how lovely it was to smoke just a tiny bit while he was sleeping for days on end. and then he was smoking again and breaking a couple other resolutions, and i got fed up with the on again off again crap and delivered an eloquent speech that involved the notion of shitting or getting off the pot, except more refined and passionate sounding and he actually took it to heart and quit for reals. he did this while i was mid-pack, so i stretched it out, smoking a couple times a day, finishing my smokes early monday morning. today i bought another pack. he's been quit for reals for a week today and i'm the horrible one who bought another damn pack. the irony is killing me, since he's the one who was smoking like a pack a day and i'm the one who has painlessly quit smoking at the drop of a hat several times, easily and without fanfare. and now, NOW?! it becomes some stupid challenge that i'm sucking at? frustrating.

i am grateful for:

oranges. i haven't eaten one in, possibly, years, but my friend andrew eats them at school all the time and it inspired me to try one again. yum.

quiet. i'm sure i'll get some sometime and i know it will be lovely.

the new decemberists album, which is very mellow and americana. i'm partial to rox in the box. january hymn is sweet, too.

date night. we'll be seeing the fighter this weekend!

enduring love which sees past irritations, frustrations, disappointment, failures, mistakes, and all the other crap.

i (heart) inDesign

today i worked on formatting dad's book (find out more here) in inDesign, my most favored of the adobe creative suite programs. i don't get to design the interior of the book, dad ordered some kind of package from lulu to do that, but it still needed to be formatted before it was sent to lulu. i spent a nice chunk of time changing spacebar tabs into real tabs and putting in page breaks for the chapter ends, and a few other things, including some awesome "find and change" tasks that saved me, literally, hours, were i to have to do it myself (especially changing the double space after a period to the book-friendly single space after a period). dad's book is almost ready to send to the printer!

i am grateful for:

opportunity

kindness

pleasure

calm

joy